Sometimes what you think is a huge disaster, is actually almost nothing at all. As an example, I taught one of my Fabulous Fridays! recently. For about a week before the class I was putting together a 2-hour playlist for the class. I put the playlist on my phone, and the morning of the class I taught another class at 7am. Before the morning class I took out my phone that had my music on it, found a playlist that would work for the morning class, and went to plug in the phone…that’s when disaster struck!
I put the the headphone plug in the headphone jack on my phone, like I’ve done thousands of times before, and it wouldn’t connect. The plug just feel out. I looked at it in disbelief and tried it a few more times. Every time the plug wouldn’t stay in the jack; I couldn’t believe it – the jack would just fall back out. Well…I was freaking out! I had this playlist for the evening class on the phone, and I wanted to play music for the class coming up in a few minutes. I couldn’t believe my phone had broke on a day where I really, really needed the phone to work.
I decided that the phone was obviously broken and I had to have a phone to play my playlist for the later class. What I figured I would do is go the the phone store after class, spend $200 for a new phone, transfer the music, and hopefully be able to do that before the Fabulous Fridays! class started. Definitely not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my day.
Then I remembered reading somewhere that there actually might be lint in the jack, and that could be the problem. That seemed extremely implausible to me, since it seemed to clearly be the phone that was broke. But, I still had time before the morning class, so I found a small hairpin and started digging around in the phone jack – I found some lint! Then, more and more and more and more! I really couldn’t even believe all the lint that was in the phone jack. When I got as much out as I could, I put the stereo plug in the phone jack and it worked! No problem at all. The problem was never the phone. It was just a little bit of lint.
Sometimes problems come up in our lives and we think it’s a disaster, but really, it’s just a little bit of “lint” we need to get rid of. It’s something that makes it hard to see our True Self. The yoga practice is all about getting rid of lint. Removing “lint” from our minds, hearts and bodies. It’s important to remember that we are always the same — always innately good underneath the changing world…we just need to do a bit of lint removal to see it clearly, and connect to the hi-fi signal that’s always singing out from our True Self.