In November 2007 we were teaching a Prana Power Yoga ✨🙏🏻✨ Teacher Training at Prana Power Yoga ✨🙏🏻✨ Cambridge and we didn’t have a babysitter to watch our 3 Chickens 🐣🐣🐣 (Dakota and Montana were born in 2010) so we flew our niece Elizabeth in from Hamilton College to watch her cousins.
I was nursing Curly bear🐻❤️ (aka Phoenix who was 10 months at the time) and already have a fast metabolism and big appetite so watch out if I was hungry LOL 😂😂. Once we were eating take out in the Prana Van with our Prana Power Yoga ✨🙏🏻✨ Brooklyn manager, Ossi, and Philippe smiled as he watched me scarf down “Fofu Benedict” from Quintessence on the East Side of NYC and explained to Ossi in two words: “Nursing Mom!”
This all as background to explain that when we got home from teaching several hours of TT I was really hungry and went straight to the fridge and made a ginormous salad with tons of avocado, hemp seeds, cashews, almonds, seaweed and …basically the kitchen sink (we were raw vegan at the time) and then happily munched as we got the report from Elizabeth about how the night had gone.
Fast forward: October 2010. Seattle, Washington. Our niece Chelsea’s wedding. Elizabeth was there as a guest and I apologized to her. “I’m so sorry that that night after Teacher Training I made a big salad and didn’t offer to make you one, or offer you a bite of mine.”
Blank stare.
I repeated myself.
Blank stare.
I asked, “Do you remember this?”
“No,” she laughed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I had felt badly about this for over a year! My inner critic had to grab hold of SOMETHING to make me feel like **** (that’s your inner critic’s job, that’s what she/he feeds off of) so this is what he’d chosen since, well, things were going the Best ever!💫🌟✨
Gestalt of this story: when your inner critic is beating the **** out of you for something, smile or laugh and think of “The Elizabeth Salad” and let it go. 99.99999% of the time the thing you are feeling badly about is not even a reality. The other person isn’t thinking about it and/or never even noticed it. Remember, reality is an illusion. It’s a projection of what you believe. And you get to choose what you believe. A belief is just a thought you keep thinking.
Don’t be a sloppy lazy thinker and don’t let your inner critic rule the show! Take your inner being off the bench. Ask yourself, “What would my inner being say instead? What does my inner being think about this?” Or even better, refocus. Focus on something else and let whatever that “Elizabeth salad” topic is peter out from lack of attention.
You get what you think about. Choose wisely.