Osoji is the annual Japanese ritual of spring cleaning. This spring cleaning happens in January so it’s a little different from ours. This is how I understand it's done...
Part one: You have a house. You take everything out of the house and put it outside the house. In January. Then you clean the house. Every nook and every cranny.
Part two: Go back outside. Look at everything you took out of the house. What is there? What is left from the last osoji? What has been accumulated since before then? What is new? What will be cleaned and placed back in the house?
There was the “aha!” moment. What goes back into the house? It seemed like a perfect metaphor for what we do in our yoga and meditation practices. While we don’t actually empty our bodies or minds while practicing, we do make an effort to cleanse or still them. When we leave the mat, the studio or wherever we practice, we have to decide what what to bring into our “homes”. How will we interact and react to our surroundings? What relationships, interactions, thoughts and actions will we allow into our minds and into our lives? We can choose. Every single time.
It is the daily opportunity to decide how to better our lives through our choices. A daily and ongoing personal osoji.