Momentum Yoga: The Blog

The words of an acquaintance, recently going through the ups and downs of her life, have taught me something today. Every day, we have a host of experiences. Some are good, some are bad, and the rest are somewhere in between. Some are big things, some are little tiny things, and the rest are – again – somewhere in between. And they all just exist, independent of each other, but influencing our take on each and every one of those experiences.

When those crazy bad things happen, our lives sometimes seem to stop for a while. And they need to, most of the time, so we can process whatever happened, allowing the mind to put it in the perspective of our lives, and help us understand what is means to us. But we’re still living, still having experiences, and some of them are good things. In the context of a recent negative experience, though, those good things, little or small, seem so out of place. After all, this big bad thing just happened; how can we find the space for good?

But these experiences are just there, for our taking, for our evaluating, and for our incorporation into our lives. The bad experiences don’t make the good ones any less, and the good ones don’t make the bad ones any better. If we can honor that duality – that good and bad will occur simultaneously, and inexplicably – we won’t lessen the impact of the bad, but can move forward with both good and bad, big and small, happy and unhappy all at the same time. Respecting the breadth of our experiences, we can at least see middle, even when we can’t quite live in that space at the time.