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.