Change Maven Musings: Disrupt the Drift

Real people. Real stories. Real change.

Even after multiple decades of yoga practice and hearing a myriad of shit yoga teachers say in class, it never fails to amaze me how that self-same shit can be so relevant and spot-on sometimes. A few weeks ago, as I was moving through my usual routine of sun salutations and ujjayi breathing, the teacher asked a question that took instant root in my brain:

How can we disrupt the drift?

She was referring to how we often move through postures we’ve done a thousand times in a “drift state,” where we go to our default pose and hang there until it’s time to go to the other side and do the same thing. She encouraged us to find subtle shifts that could make the pose new again, bringing our attention and focus to it in a different way.

Her words got me thinking about how/where we can disrupt the mental drift that we float along on most days. The irrational thoughts, the unexamined reactions, the unedited stories we tell ourselves without considering where they came from, or what they could actually be useful for once they, much like a piece of driftwood, come to settle on the shores of our psyche.

Change often requires us to reassemble aspects of our lives with new parts that are uncomfortable or unfamiliar. And try as we might, we can’t create a new life with old parts. I know. I’ve tried (am still trying?). It’s so fucking hard to set aside some of the old parts because we know how they work and no manual is required to keep them working. We’ve built and reinforced our workarounds and are committed to them, no matter how painful or falling apart they are in reality.

We don’t want to sit down on the floor with the new manual, hardware and materials strewn about us, and figure out how the new parts work. There’s so much cursing and hair pulling, trying to find the right tool for the job. The numerous trips to the local hardware store to explain to the kind store clerk, with our limited knowledge, vocabulary, and patience, the project we have underway. To which, in response to our borderline hysteria, they calmly lead us to the back wall, replete with screws, washers, and widgets of all kinds and select the perfect size/shape/widget we need, sending us home with a tiny, brown paper bag, the contents of which cost us less than three dollars, and an immense sense of gratitude and humility about how random people can do non-random things for us that we needed in that exact moment.

The rebuilding process is a momentum game, and it needs us to pay attention to the drift so we select parts that make sense for who we are and what is true for us today. An act of courage, if ever there was one. Otherwise, the opportunity change offers us is missed, construction ceases, and we end up laboring mightily to keep the old parts intact and in their “rightful” spots instead of the rebuild we know is necessary. A new “us” needs new parts.