“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung

When I got back from Spain this week, I went more or less straight from walking the Camino into a cancer education half-day.  Re-entry to reality.

The first talk was about sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. The speaker opened with this:

“When you hear hoofbeats, think horses.”

In medicine, we are taught to look first for the common explanations for things. Usually, that’s the right thing to do. Common things are common.  But he added something important:

“…but don’t forget the zebras.”

The second lecture was on a condition called bile acid malabsorption — something surprisingly common, but frequently missed or misdiagnosed. The surgeon admitted that for years, it simply hadn’t really been on his radar as a post-operative complication. It was only once he learned more about it that he started recognising it everywhere.

What he said stuck with me:

“It wasn’t on my radar.  But now it is, I’ve changed my practice.”

Because I apparently now relate almost everything back to yoga, self-awareness and consciousness (yoga teacher occupational hazard!), I found myself thinking how true this is outside medicine too.

Sometimes, we don’t even know zebras exist.  

Or if we do, we often forget about them.

We all have blind spots.  I’ve been wondering about my own lately - not just in my medical knowledge but in how I teach, how I relate, how I live, and even in recognising what matters most right now.

Travel, experience and life itself inevitably show us things we could not previously see. Sometimes other people help reveal our blind spots - teachers, mentors, friends, even ‘enemies’!  People who lovingly or not so lovingly reflect us back to ourselves. 

Our yoga practice, too, can become an exercise in self-study - an opportunity to become aware of what was once hidden. 

Sometimes what comes into awareness is physical: the breath we keep holding, the jaw we never unclench, the subtle way we brace ourselves against life. 

Sometimes it is emotional: our striving, our inner criticism, our inability to rest.  

These patterns can shape our whole lives whilst remaining strangely invisible to us.

Until suddenly… they’re on the radar.

And once we see them, we cannot unsee them.  

This is one of the reasons yoga as a practice continues to fascinate me so much.  At its heart, it’s an awareness practice.

Yes, it helps strengthen the body, mobilise joints, calm the nervous system and improve balance. But beneath all of that, it is also a practice of learning to see more clearly. 

Not to shame ourselves for what we didn’t know before.  Not to berate ourselves for having a monkey mind. Not to regret the decisions we made when we were different people.  

But simply to become a little more aware of the patterns we are living inside today.

Let’s practice.