Paddleboard vs Raft
Right at the start I will tell you that I learned this metaphor from one of the teachers in the Foundations of Ayruveda course I am taking at Kripalu. Her name is Rachel de Simone and she is a consummate yogi and beautiful soul who is also a fantastic teacher to boot. I am grateful for the wisdom she and the other teachers share. I will talk about them a lot for sure.
One of the biggest impressions this last week at Kripalu made on me is that we need to be building rafts instead of paddle boards to traverse this ocean of life. Rachel asked us to imagine what it would be like if we were on an ocean on a paddleboard. When the ocean is calm it is easy to be standing on a paddleboard, but imagine how that goes when the ocean starts wavy…ok…so, I just need to say first, that you will NEVER see me on the ocean on a paddleboard no matter how calm. Maybe the shallows of a warm, shallow, tropical body of water that you can see the bottom…but not the middle of the ocean. YIKES! My skin is crawling just thinking about it and now I might not sleep tonight for fear of having dreams I’m lost at sea.
But back to the metaphor…Now imagine you had a raft. Or even better…a nice big floating dock. The waves will be less disruptive, right?
The paddleboard represents a life with few resources. Maybe life is a little precarious. And this doesn’t mean financially only. Maybe you built your floatation device with lots of cheap materials or defective materials. Maybe you are relying simply on your inheritance…financial inheritance, gene inheritance, career inheritance. It’s a fancy paddleboard, but it’s only a paddleboard.
Every time you add a vegetable; every time you choose not to engage in stress inducing situations; every time you go for a walk on your break instead of sitting with coworkers at the lunch table; every time you get your coworkers to go on that walk with you; every time you brush your teeth, use lotion, make the better for you choice in you food, sleep, media consumption, conversations, thoughts…you are building your raft with better materials and more skill.
These things are simple. They are so simple that we forget. Sometimes it is simply exchanging one thought for another. Sometimes it is actually getting up an hour earlier to do a full yoga practice before you go to work. Anytime you make one simple little change in the direction that you want to go in you potentially can change the whole trajectory of your life.