Flexibility is something we can all use in this life, and I don’t mean being a super-pretzel with the ability to touch your nose to your toes.
When I talk about flexibility, what I am touching on is this; how flexible are you with the events that happen in your life? Especially the ones you don’t expect or the ones that cause pain and suffering.
Overcoming Adversity
If you’ve read The Big Picture, you know I share some gnarly stories about people overcoming major obstacles in the face of adversity. Flexibility is what helped them. Choosing to look at or deal with a certain situation in a flexible way provided growth, healing and forward movement.
It’s easy to go through life with our rock-solid beliefs and specifics systems in place, but that doesn’t always allow for growth and learning now does it? What if some unknown monkey wrench was thrown your way, how would you handle it?
I ask this because I have seen small things derail people, and I have seen others make a massive pitcher of lemonade out of a mountain of lemons. Flexibility is the key here.
How Flexible Are You?
How do you look at life? Are you open to seeing or learning something new? Do you view the world with curiosity or do you stick to your stodgy old beliefs because they work? Can you have beginners mind? Can you be a scientist in your life and experiment with different ways of handling the things that get thrown at you?
These are all awesome things to think about. Being flexible will allow you to seek out new tools that could support you in a time of trauma or uncertainty. Or, it could support you in opening your eyes to new ways of relating to a certain situation.
Look, we all know the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. FAIL! You can’t ever solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. You need to open your mind to a new way of looking at things and find meaning in that.
How I Became More Flexible
One way that I started to become more flexible in my life, was to open my mind to things I had never done before, like Yoga. Now, I bring yoga up, because it’s the one P90X DVD that people seem to avoid the most, yet brings the most benefit.
What yoga has done for me, is not only make me more flexible in my body, but in my mind as well. Yoga has provided a foundation for me to learn how to look at things differently. It’s nothing like lifting weights, which I am so damn good at (har har). It takes a different focus, a different mindset, and it takes being open to moving your body in ways you may never have thought possible.
Although, I must say this, yoga IS the foundation of my fitness that helps to keep my body injury free. I would never have known this if I didn’t have a flexible enough mind to walk into a yoga class in the first place. And I have to say, it’s HARD!
Whether you do yoga or not, I encourage you to start practicing more flexibility in your life and see how that serves you, specifically if you’ve been consistently struggling in certain areas.
All it takes is bending...just a little.