Yoga, Self-Control, and Choosing How to Live

I spent two days working on an entry about how yoga has helped me to gain some capacity for self-control, and how it led me to develop a new sense of self, and then to end my marriage with my now ex-husband.  It was a useful exercise to write this down and to process the ideas but I've decided that the stuff I included about my ex-husband and our relationship was too personal, that it was an invasion of his privacy, so I'm not going to publish the entry.

I will say, though, that while yoga didn't help me with short-term pain management, which was my initial purpose of taking yoga classes, it very much helped me to control my reactions to situations, particularly situations that would provoke anger, irritation, negativity, and a sense of loss of control.  Yoga also helped me gain a sense of distance from my usual reactions and the environment around me so that I could observe them and decide how to behave instead of just reacting spontaneously.

This isn't to say that I have perfect self control and no longer experience anger, irritation, negativity.  I have periods of those things and can't seem to pull myself out of them.  But I do now realize that they are reactions to things and my interpretations of the world, rather than the world itself.  This has transformed my self- and world-view, and led me to make major transformations in both how I react to the world, and the circumstances I chose (and continue to choose) to surround myself with.

I read Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty about a year after I had these realizations and had already started to re-shape my life.  His arguments and the experiences of the people he has counseled over the years aligned with and confirmed what I had learned.

Once I learn something, what I used to think and feel seems shallow and ignorant, and what I've learned seems glaringly obvious and self-evident.  This makes it difficult for me to share both what I used to think and feel, and what I've learned.  I have a hard time convincing myself that not everyone already knows that I've learned, and I feel some embarrassment about what I think of as the obvious shallowness and ignorance of my former views.   These feelings often paralyze me and keep me from revealing things about myself.