Have you ever arrived at work and realised you don’t actually remember the drive there? Or found yourself halfway through a bag of snacks without really tasting a single bite?
This is Auto-Pilot.
Most of our lives are run by habitual patterns – the way we brush our teeth, the way we react to a stressful text, even the way we stand in line. While habits save us energy, they also keep us asleep. In Week 2 of our Tools for Living series, we are waking up using the tool of Svadhyaya (Self-Study).
The Soul Logic – Svadhyaya
The Yoga Sutras teach us that the first step to freedom is self-observation. Svadhyaya is the act of turning your attention inward to look at your “default settings.”
On the mat, this looks like noticing which leg you always lead with or whether you hold your breath when a pose gets challenging. Off the mat, it’s noticing the grooves in your personality – like rushing to finish tasks or perhaps a negative thought loop or a pattern that keeps repeating thats causing harm.
Soul Logic says: You cannot change what you do not notice. The moment you see the habit, the habit no longer owns you.
On the Mat – Mindful Movement Patterns
To help us see our habits clearly, our physical practice this week will feature a Mandala Flow. Instead of staying on the linear, front-to-back path of the mat, we will move in a circle – rotating 360 degrees.
When we change the orientation of the room, your auto-pilot gets confused. It searches for the familiar, and in that moment of confusion, you wake up. We use these mindful movement patterns to turn our mat into a mirror. We will be thinking about these questions during our flow:
Do you rush through the transitions to get to the pose?
Do you judge yourself when you lose your sense of direction?
How you move on the mat is a direct reflection of how you move through your life.
Off the Mat
How do we take this Soul Logic into the world? This week, your homework is to interrupt the auto-pilot. Pick one simple task – brushing your teeth, holding your phone, or putting on your shoes – and do it with your non-dominant hand or lead with the other foot.
The Goal: That feeling of clunkiness or weirdness you feel? That is the sound of your brain waking up. In that space, ask yourself:
“Where else am I moving on auto-pilot today? Where am I reacting out of habit instead of choosing with intention?”
Join us
Join us this week as we hold up the mirror. Let’s see what we find when we take ourselves out of auto pilot and slow down enough to look.
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