Awake Inside the Ordinary

There was a time when I believed that if I followed the right yoga practices, stayed disciplined, and kept my life in order, I’d eventually arrive at the version of myself I was supposed to be. I didn’t question that way of living much. I was sure it was the right way for me. It felt noble to strive, to be devoted to growth and self-improvement. But what I couldn’t see then was how much of my life was being lived inside that seriousness.

In these last couple of years, my curiosity about the mind has only grown more. During this time away from social media and the yoga world I’ve been reading and learning more about the brain, perception, and consciousness. The biggest learning for me has been that the brain doesn’t just take in the world as it is, but actually constructs it moment by moment from fragments of sensory information.

Understanding this explains why two people could live through the same experience and remember it completely differently or why some memories stay really vivid while others dissolve and why I can feel like such a different person over the years, yet still recognise myself.

Because I understand this I’ve been able to let go of the need to find some grand meaning behind everything. I stopped believing that there had to be a spiritual lesson hidden inside every difficulty. I stopped looking for signs, or waiting for the universe to speak through coincidence. Instead, I started to see that the wonder I had been chasing had always been here, not beyond the ordinary world, but within it, in how my brain was making sense of everything all along!

When I think about what feels closest to awe now, it isn’t mysticism or faith. It’s the fact that we have a brain capable of creating consciousness at all. That this small, living organ, made of tissue and electricity, somehow generates everything we see, feel, and love. Every colour, sound, and emotion that shapes my life, all of it born from the brain. That, to me, is miraculous enough.

These days I find myself drawn to anything that reminds me of that mystery: documentaries about the universe and time, books that explore the edges of human perception and the strange ways our minds interpret reality.

Life As An Ongoing Improvisation

Once you begin to understand that who you are isn’t fixed, that your sense of self is more like an ongoing improvisation between body, memory, and context, life starts to feel lighter. I used to cling so tightly to who I thought I was supposed to be, to a version of myself that made sense and stayed consistent. Now I see that the beauty lies in the shifting. I’m not the person I was at twenty or thirty, and that’s not a loss, it’s just normal adjustment to the phase of life I’m in and who I’m choosing to be within it. I love imagining who I might become at seventy, how differently I might see the world and what new things I’ll care about then.

That openness and willingness to change is what’s been making life feel more joyful now. I do think joy isn’t just about happiness. It’s also about availability: being open to the full range of what life offers. I used to think happiness and pain took turns, as if one would follow the other like seasons. But I see now that they often overlap if you allow them to. You can be grieving and still laugh, or exhausted and still notice beauty. That, to me, is the real texture of being alive.

Noticing The Small Moments

What’s changed in this last year of my life is that I’ve learned to make more space for those small, good moments, and really enjoy them. I notice them and I nurture them, and what fascinates me is how physical that process is. It lives in the body before it reaches the mind. I pay attention to what I touch, what I see, what I smell and hear.

The music I play in the morning, the scent of the soap in my bathroom, the softness of my duvet, the tea I drink when I need comfort. These tiny choices form the language of the senses. They speak directly to the brain. They train it to recognise pleasure, to expect it, to find it even on ordinary days.

Reframing The past

When I look back on the years I spent being so disciplined, I don’t regret them. But I see them differently now. I think about all those early mornings alone on my mat, chasing a higher state of being, and realise that maybe that wasn’t what I was really looking for.

At the end of my life, the memories that will matter most won’t be about progress or achievement of a higher state. They’ll be the simple ones:

• the mornings I stayed in bed to cuddle my daughter and husband

• the indulgent meals I shared with friends

• the days I allowed myself to rest

Those are the moments that make a life.

Letting Go Of Purpose

Letting go of the idea that everything needs to have a purpose or fit into some spiritual framework has been deeply freeing. What I want now is to live in a way that feels mostly good. I want to stay in awe of the ordinary world. I want to participate in it fully, not analyse it from afar, or transcend it, but live it.

Since understanding how the brain works, the way I move through my days has changed. It’s not that life has become easy or that hard moments have disappeared, I still have them. I still get tired, still have days where I feel flat or uninspired. But there’s more space inside those moments now. I can see them for what they are: temporary states passing through.

Before, I would fight them. Or try to find deeper meaning in all of them. Now, I just let them exist. And I can be feeling down and still find something small that makes me feel good (watch a nice show, go for a walk, buy something nice for myself).

Another thing that fascinates me since being present for these moments is how the brain responds to them. The more I’ve been giving my brain simple, pleasant experiences, the more it has started to recognise them on its own. The difficult parts of life don’t disappear, but the balance shifts. I start noticing small, nice moments, even good ones, scattered through the day.

The Realisation

I think this was what I’d been missing all along: the understanding that feeling good isn’t something that just happens to us. It can also be something we help the brain notice. We can do that through the body, through the senses. The more often we register what feels good, the more available those feelings become, even when life is hard.

That realisation has made me less afraid of hard days. Because they don’t define the whole story anymore. They’re just one part of it. There’s always room for something else: a bit of excitement, a touch of humour, or a brief moment of calm.