It's Okay. I'm Back. :-)

I know it's been a long hiatus, and I thought it was going to be permanent for a while. But, like Slim Shady, I'm back again.

I was going to say that I've been dealing with some struggles when it comes to yoga and its place in my life, but that's misleading. And anyway, more recently I've been doing a lot of thinking about my place in yoga. It's a tricky series of thoughts, but I'll try to get it out in a way that is at least partially comprehensible.

Without going into details, a monstrously hurtful thing ended in November. And I have a tendency to want to, in situations like this, throw out the baby with the bathwater- so when a relationship ends, I want to throw out everything that came from the relationship, or was a byproduct of it, or that I associate with it in any way, or even that happened around the same time. And so I looked at yoga in my life, for a little bit, and really scrutinized it. Is this really me, or did I just get into it to make others happy? When I started teacher training, was I finding myself or obscuring myself? Are the yogic beliefs my beliefs, or did I lose my beliefs somewhere back along the path? Do I need to do some serious re-tracing to pick them back up?

But I kept practicing and teaching through the whole thing, because I figured, what the heck. I'll just back off the mental thing for a bit and see what happens. And then somewhere between learning how to touch people in a healing way in a workshop at Back Bay Yoga and practicing on my bedroom floor, I had this realization.

This practice and lifestyle isn't a cover-up of me. It's actually helping me to uncover me.

I'm nobody to be talking about yoga. My practice isn't the most perfect or steady. I have random and sporadic issues with my right hip flexor and I have a tendency to collapse into and injure my lower back (my lower back is an allegory for a lot of things in life: it seems to be very flexible, but really it's just weak). Money is tight right now and I don't go to as many classes as I'd like to. I sometimes eat junk food. I beat myself up about everything (and violate ahimsa [non-violence] in the process).

But.

I'm happy. I'm deeply fulfilled. I'm less prone to attack myself than I've ever been in my life (although I have good days and bad days). I'm playing my flute with an intention that hasn't been present in years. I'm listening to my body in a new way. And there's still that little voice in my head that whispers "your headstands suck. And you need to lose ten pounds." But I figure, I'll just keep reminding that voice that practicing yoga has never been about the asana practice for me. It's been about learning to love myself and the people around me more fully, and about opening myself up to what the universe has to offer me. And that even if I'm never, ever perfect, I can't keep up my life-long pattern of directing violence and hatred against myself for every mistake.

So. Yoga and I are friends, and I think this is going to be one of those beneficial friendships that last a whole, long, imperfect, mistake-ridden, beautiful lifetime, for better or worse.