Why Yoga is Essential.

For a couple of months last spring my yoga practice was feeling terrible. Like unpeeling a layer of an onion that was rotten and worn out, my breaking point was when I went to a hot yoga class in Charlotte and could barely do the postures. Knowing that if I stayed in the room, stayed present to what was happening in my body, that these feelings of letting go would all melt into the floor, was all that kept me going. Now I know I was simply avoiding…

This weekend I am taking a yin and yang workshop with Heather Tiddens. In the yin postures we hold them for over five minutes at a time, working deep into the body. Like most challenging postures, I go into the habit of breathing into them, trying to pull out some piece of comfort from the pose. But Heather is asking us to simply feel where we are. To not avoid those feelings or transfer the stress of the posture where we usually do (the shoulders and neck).

Ever since mid-August I feel like everything has been on autopilot. I drive around town from yoga to teaching to career counseling without blinking, maybe stopping for a smoothie for lunch on the way. The only real escape is my music and the mountains, as usual. And it’s not even about there being something wrong with how I am balancing my busy schedule, but there’s a sense that I am not being true to the integrity of the moment. Even now I feel like I’m not getting this written down the way I want it to be. But that’s the struggle.

After that class I got into my car to drive back to my then boyfriend’s house. And for some reason I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stop thinking about how tired I was of feeling terrible and working through my yoga practice in this way. I wanted to give up. The muscles remember pain and pleasure; they remember car accidents and frightening experiences we had as children. Who knows what I was working through that evening, but I knew right then I was letting go.

I was house sitting this week for some friends who were in San Francisco. On my drive into work I took my eyes off of the winding road and stared up at the trees. It was one of the only breaks in rain we had had in the past week and it was amazing. The way the leaves spread open across the sky and then broke; I was shoved into the present moment.

When I was out in Las Vegas in June visiting my friends, we went on a moonlight hike in the desert. We spent the night in the Valley of Fire, sleeping on red rocks that used to be under the ocean. There are certain ideas associated with expanding or exploring your mind, and in my opinion, it’s avoidance of truly dealing with your authentic self. Bull shit, crap, selfishness, grace, determination and all. All of it.

I don’t know where the balance between dealing with and working with the past truly helps us to be in the present moment, but I do believe that without it, we simply avoid things. Instead of dealing with a nagging injury at the beginning of its pain, we push until it breaks. Without stepping back and healing, scar tissue continues to build and build until we have nothing to work with.

I find myself during this break in the workshop writing in my blog, even now clinging to the idea of my dear friend from Las Vegas being here to practice beside me. To talk to about all this yoga bull shit. But the clinging to the idea is not the problem, because really sitting with those thoughts can assist in discovering why those thoughts come up in the first place. For me, I just miss my friend.

I knew then like I’d known when we first starting dating. I stood there in his kitchen, crying uncontrollably; thinking about how to explain it to him. And I knew he knew, too. But we both wouldn’t pay attention to that nagging and then it broke, again. When you keep retracing an injury it takes time away from it in order to heal. But there’s no point in avoiding the scar tissue created over time. We’ll both have to work through that on our own.

I watch the videos on the DC Tea Party with signs about Burying Obamacare with Kennedy and pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache (ironically next to a sign about Socialism), and then I hear the commentary about how FoxNews has planted the idea in these folks that we all need to “wake up.” That somehow politics have suddenly all gone wrong. Rarely does a country truly step back and reevaluate the mistakes it’s made, especially when it relies on its ego to control the world. I find myself feeling so angry and ashamed at the country I live in today. We are beyond repair in some ways, but mostly we need healing. And yes, FoxNews, we all have a moral obligation to “wake up,” indeed.

Not to say I live a perfect life. Not to say that I am completely authentic in my everyday actions. I sit here now, finishing up this blog I wrote on Saturday, at work, sick, and feeling the need to stay and complete a responsibility rather than go home and heal. Sitting here, to me, is less of a hassle than telling my boss that I am overwhelmed and overloaded with to dos in my life right now. But instead of feeling bad about it, I’m going to explore it and see what comes up.

It will take a lifetime to explore it all.

I and You and Love

Whenever I’m not counseling students at my part-time office job, I’m diligently trying not to play facebook scrabble, gchat my best friend in LA about every detail of my life, or flirt with friends online. Yes, it has come to this. Avoiding the unavoidable which I should be able to avoid but don’t. A series of habits upon habits.

My friend sent me a link to a new Avett Brother’s song. I and love and you. I stare at it in my inbox, thinking back to that romantic love I’d feel swimming in my heart when any of my past boyfriends sent me something. That openness.

It’s a fall kind of song because we are getting to that time of year when my alarm goes off on my cell phone and I feel like it’s really a lot earlier than it seems to be. Some mornings are different than others, but I know that that consistency and time is part of the process. Just getting up and moving on.

There are some relationships that keep evolving long after they seem finished. During a break up you generally don’t hear about what’s going on with the person who used to know everything about you. And for right now I’m keeping it that way. And, unfortunately, it won’t be able to stay that way forever.

Sometimes love is misplaced or misguided, sometimes it was never really there, and sometimes you leave it in little spaces among the wreckage. Rarely does it make any sense to pick those pieces back up again.

I guess there’s a current to it all. I’ve been wading, watching, moving in my day today with ease and humor. But when I woke up this morning I felt part of that wreckage move with me, refusing to let go. Each day a new layer unfolds and I see how well things have fallen into place here in Asheville. Build, build, build, break…build again.

And then it all falls away and there’s a stillness to it. A sense of peace that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s always been there it was just muddled...

New!! YES!! New Post!!

It’s already getting to be fall in Asheville (although people keep swearing to me it’s going to get hot again-so don’t get too excited, Alex) and more and more I feel like change is still an amazing thing.

I find myself driving through downtown Asheville excited at the gap in terrible tourist drivers, cutting through the beer trucks and food delivery vans to get from teaching grammar to yoga to counseling. There’s a beat and a thought to it all.

Finding myself wrapped up in the buildings, in the mountains that surround the buildings, in the idea of Asheville and its constant reinvention. I almost forget about this pulse until I cut through downtown and remember why I live here. Why I’ve stayed here even when the city seems to shrink with acquaintances and the inevitable conversation at GreenLife.

One of my favorite parts about Asheville is there are no real shortcuts. Growing up my family always sought out the most efficient way of doing things. It was celebrated, in fact. The building of the Toll Road to replace the Leesburg Pike was a welcomed change to my dad’s daily commute into D.C. Up there, efficiency was drawn out into perfect turns onto back roads, new shortcuts around the ever-growing town, and an urgency of getting exactly where you needed to be when you needed to be there.

For a long time, even while I was regularly practicing yoga, I would reflect on the past as if it was the meaning of the present. As if it represented how I should be feeling in the moment.

I teach yoga three times a week at a local gym. While training many people warned me that there were NO teaching gigs left in Asheville and that teaching at a gym wasn’t nearly as “yogic” as teaching at a studio. This was of course contradicted by my fellow yoga instructor trainees and the director at the studio. Because if you put anything out into the universe it will, in some form, return back to you. But at some point you’ve even got to let go of that philosophy.

Any philosophy is a trap, really. Just the idea of living a certain way because of past experience is limiting. I often talk about suspending any ideas of what happened on their yoga mat the day or hour or even minute before. Because once we assign all these ideas we are forced to live by them.

There are layers gone just in time for the fall. Just in time for leaves and cool nights and mosquitoes disappearing.