There are times in life when our feet are firmly planted on the ground, our course is charted, our plans are made and our lives are flowing in sync with some larger, unidentifiable natural rythym.
And then there are those moments in life when we can't find socks that match, the hours seem to fly by every day, we forget to wash our hair and choosing a life direction or solidly establishing ourselves in any form seems too daunting to even consider.
My life has been filled with more moments of the latter. My highly vata self always seems to be swirling around in a world of worries, ideas, adventures, distractions, concerns and new directions. It was during one of these particuarly vata moments in my life that I took my first yoga class. I didn't want to go. I remember feeling strange in tight pants around people who looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. I have been habitually inflexible my entire life and I have about as much natural inner peace as a roller coaster.
But I went anyway, because sometimes you just know when you need to do something. I couldn’t touch my toes, my shoulders were tight, my belly was weak and my thighs burned beyond what I thought I could handle. But lying there that Saturday morning in savasana, I had the certain, unquestionable knowledge that I was exactly where I was supposed to be in the world. As a twenty-four year old who had found herself back in the town she grew up in, living at home with her parents and attending community college, I spent most of my time feeling exactly the opposite – that my self and my life were ALL wrong and that I had royally screwed up to have found myself in this position.
But lying in a pool a sweat on my yoga mat, I was overwhelmed with a sense of arriving home. At home in my body, in my mind, in the room, with these people, in Frederick, MD, in my own life. The feeling was so profoundly comforting and calming that I showed up the next Saturday, and the next, and then every, Saturday morning for a year.
Over time, yoga has become my navigational tool. My compass, my periscope, my channel to my gut instinct and my GPS unit. I believe that I will always be prone to whirling and worrying, but I also know that the power of a simple tadasana or a warrior pose can take me out of my head and plant my feet firmly on the ground so that I can deal with what is actually going on in my world.
Of the many tools I have learned from my ongoing yoga practice, three main ones have helped to steer me through the last year of my life:
1. Focus on your driste
Pick a point, connect with your breath, focus on that point and fly. This is how I learned how to balance in crow, half moon, handstand and headstand. This simple act requires you to put the doubts in your mind aside, to bring all of your attention to one point and to just take a leap without overthinking it. Often when we have a focal point, a driste or a goal in sight, it can help to push all of the doubts, hesitations and negative thoughts that often hold us back into the background. A driste creates a sort of instant meditation and in that meditative state I often find myself more powerful and capable than I imagined.
2. Come back to your breath
Life is complicated, crazy, stressful and overstimulating. When a million different choices are laid out in front of me I tend to begin a process of rapid implosion. The breath- simple, steady and neccessary - helps not only to temper some of my more dramatic, "the world will end if I don't get this perfect" reactions, but it also reminds me that at the end of the day all that which brings us so much stress and worry is impermanent and often unimportant. We have, flowing in and out of our lungs, much of what we need to live. The rest is icing on the cake and should only take so much of our concern and attention.
3. Listen to what your body needs
I have formed an obnoxious habit of doing exactly what I want in yoga class and ignoring the teacher's instruction. While I am sure this is infuriating for some instructors, for me, one who has always followed directions to a fault, it has helped me to get in touch with my own natural instincts and urges. It is easy to live our lives blindly doing what we are told, it is frightening and more difficult to listen to ourselves and to follow our own inner voice above all others. Yoga has helped me to excercise that 'gut instinct' muscle.
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