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I had an interesting realization the other day that I can’t stop thinking about.
First, in prep for our Yoga + Jesus workshop in February, I reread some old favorite books that helped me on my faith journey, including the book Mary Magdalene Revealed.
As I was reading this book, I kept coming upon passages that I had forgotten about, and I would inevitably exclaim, “Ah, I forgot about that!” in my mind.
Then the last couple of weeks, I’ve been preparing for our Reiki Level 2 training that we’re hosting this weekend. I reread my own training materials from when I was learning Reiki years ago, I read a couple books that I already own on Reiki, and I’ve watched some YouTube videos as well. I’ve been brushing up on my knowledge and working to make our training workbook as comprehensive as possible.
While reviewing and studying Reiki, I had a similar experience to rereading some of those books again. I kept running into things I knew already knew, just had forgotten about. There were even some Reiki techniques that I had learned about in my training but hadn’t really ever practiced in real life. This is not uncommon really, there’s infinite ways you can use Reiki, but there are some I knew about but hadn’t tried. So I practiced some of these techniques over the last week or two and have had some amazing results.
This all got me to thinking: How much knowledge or 'know how' do we already know that we just aren’t practicing?
I’ve read hundreds of books and spent thousands and thousands of dollars on courses and workshops and cohorts and so on and so forth. None of these is bad of course. I do think though that I have the tendency to always be looking to the next thing that is going to make me a better, smarter, healthier, wiser, kinder... human and wife and mother and yogi and friend.
What if I stopped the searching for a second and asked myself, “What do you already know?” Or more pointed, “What have you already learned but haven’t implemented into your life?” Ugh, no. Stop.
You probably already know how to be a good partner and friend.
You probably already know how to live a healthy lifestyle.
You probably know that your self care practices pay dividends in your life: yoga and meditation and therapy and mindfulness and so on.
Maybe we pause the searching for the next thing that is going to fix us or make us better, and instead we lean into what we already know to be right and true in our lives.
