Are you good at keeping promises? Keeping our promises is a demonstration of our ability to be faithful. Maintaining a healthy commitment to our diet, to our family, to our friends, to our job, takes effort. This daily discipline is known as sadhana, our dedicated practice to our core promises.
This promise is from You to You.
Everything can be sadhana. The way you eat, the way you sit, the way you stand, the way you breathe, the way you move your body, direct your mind and manage your energies and emotions – this is sadhana. Sadhana does not mean any specific kind of activity like a yoga pose, sadhana means you are using everything as a tool for your wellbeing. This dedication is the manifestation of your every day promise to yourself to live from your highest good for the benefit of serving the highest good.
For me, it’s about living with metta (lovingkindness), mindfully aware of how my actions contribute to the happiness, health, peace and freedom for all – starting with myself.
It begins with us making a commitment to love ourselves, look after ourselves in big and small ways such as using our diet to promote health and good self-care, talking to ourselves in a kind way through our inner dialogue, conscious of how we show up in the world.
One of the main things that Yoga has taught me is that you can’t just stop when the pose gets hard. In life there’s plenty of difficult poses. It’s easy to keep a promise when everything around you is going well. The real test of dedication is when things are challenging. Can you keep your promise when there are problems to be faced such as illness, or job loss, or romantic upheaval?
Design Your Sadhana: Create Your Personal Manifesto – a List of Your Self-Promises
• Start where you are
• Make it realistic
• Choose things important to you, not based on what you “should” do
• Find the right motivation so it will be sustainable
In Kundalini yoga Yogi Bhajan suggests these specific length of times for sadhana practice.
“It takes 40 days to break a habit; 90 days to gain the new habit; 120 days and you are the habit; 1,000 days you are Master of it.”
Rituals and ceremonies are important parts of our sadhana. They help us initiate a promise to ourselves like setting an intention with the moon cycles or calling in abundance. They also recognize milestone achievements of promises kept for a period of time.
Love yourself, love your day, love your life!
Silvia
