The story of one man’s emotional healing and personal transformation through the power of yoga—his bending, rising, and breathing—is connected to a unifying “yoke” and the intention for a common humanity.
A day after moving into my Hawiian apartment, I was on my back, in pain, lying on a hard wooden floor. Out of desperation – in an attempt to fix my back – I found myself in a hot yoga room. With no formal background and very little knowledge of yoga, I walked in searching for something to make me strong in my broken places. I hoped I wouldn’t collapse but was also confident about the challenge before me.
I planned to try yoga for thirty days, hoping the hawaiian landscape and transformation would remake me. At the end of 30, I’d evaluate how my back felt and decide if I should continue. I made it through twenty-four classes that month and found my will galvanized. My conclusion was clear: Yoga is the way to go for healing back pain. “It’s so simple,” I wrote, “why don’t more people do it?” Yoga worked, but the transformation goes deeper.
Writing and Yoga
I decided to keep attending and keep writing about it because I thought my practice in a heated room would benefit me in other ways too, and I was eager to discover them. But notes about yoga were not my only subject. I started writing about everything that came to me during that beautiful hour: I numbered the sessions, made notes about the teachers, chronicled my thoughts about the class and penned other insights.
In a short time, I had constructed a personal literature of self-recrimination and absolution formed out of perspiration and inspiration. The arc of my story was like a rainbow and I sensed my treasure would be at the end of a long struggle. Every moment of trial and endurance reflected my gratitude for my improving back, and I moved steadily into new emotional and physical ground.
Before long, I noticed a sign at the studio:
“First it will become harder, then it will become easier, then it will get different, then way different.”
My experience on the mat ratified this truth. I began to hurt more, but it was not physical; my crucible was mental and emotional. I thought I had done enough personal work over the course of a career teaching and counseling, but I realized it was not true. I was entering undiscovered ground deep in my soul.
When my writing turned into a daily practice, hours at a time, I started with my living circumstances and feelings about Hawaii and the people I met there. I was far from home; I felt distanced and isolated from most of what I knew and loved.
My writing turned to family and the truth of my failures with them, with alcohol use, and mistakes in the career path I had lived. It took nearly a year, and when I was emptied, I changed my focus to writing entirely about yoga and my practice.
Meditation, reading, and asana (yoga postures) became my go-to for self-nurture. I noted some changes and began to explore what yoga’s dynamic healing energy exchange meant for the core of my being.
Diving Deeper into Yoga
Hawaiian Landscape and Transformation
Yoga had become an augury of my changing life, and as I dove into the innermost kernel of asana and its revelatory tension, I started writing with the intent of finishing a book. I wanted to articulate a common yoga journey that cracked open my heart and spine. I wanted to understand how it paved the way for personal transformation.
I discovered yoga met me in generative engagement. It taught me in what felt like a reductive mathematical and Gandhian discipline while offering a shamanistic life-strategy. Through the breath-centric heart of this core, I began to mine yoga’s treasures and translate them into a refined biology of belief. I peeled away superficial layers, placing both identity and destiny under a microscope, to reveal a corpus of self-discovery.
The sign I had read was true. My practice became harder, then easier, then different and then way different. My heart hurt more, not less. I yearned to be closer to my children and ached for their compassion. I pined, at the very least, for the acknowledgment of my extended family or affirmation that I was okay. Alone on my mat, I realized that was not their duty, it was my work.
I was reminded of the traditional American gospel folk song, first recorded in 1927, Lonesome Valley, and its haunting lyric:
You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley
Well you gotta go by yourself
Well there ain’t nobody else gonna go there for you
You gotta go there by yourself
The Great Collapse
I never practiced at midnight, but to me, yoga felt like the midnight hour. The midnight hour has been described by the great mystics as a dark night of the soul. But to me, it was a Great Collapse and it happened when I faced up to the truth of my illusions that fed on superficiality.
I collapsed into receptivity and surrender when my practice took me to that place. Then, I was finally ready when the discipline of yoga leveled me into acceptance. I saw clearly that all the work of ego, the personal marketing machine, and misplaced ambition is a square construct imposed on a round universe.
My hot yoga room was a transformative container where the tapas (inner self-purification) brought me into the realm of timeless humility where my yoga mat became my turf of tears, washing, and regeneration. If it sounds like the liturgical language of baptism, it’s because it is.
I was confronted with my own life of selfishness and layers of hurt. At the end of class, I knelt in puddles of sweat; the drops continued falling from my eyebrows to the towel. This was my baptism. Every tear was made of pain and sorrow for people I’d hurt, for people I’d known and judged, and for my harsh judgment of myself and my sorrow and suffering. I gave to yoga the joys and celebrations of my community, and I gave it mine.
But I was cracking open new emotions and found exhilaration in lost memories. In those memories, I recalled who I was and from where I came. I sincerely felt the sorrow of human brokenness, but also took solace in the courage and strength of my children as I accepted the unfulfilled expectations of my own life.
How Can I Not Tell You about the Midnight Hour?
My yoga journey today is not obsessive, but disciplined. I listened to my heart and realized that I only want to serve. This is the great gift I’ve been given by yoga as it brought me to and through the midnight hour with a deeper understanding of my life’s mission.
Do you want to practice yoga? Think twice, dear reader, because you may find yourself embracing a hurt you have not planned for — yoga is a partner that will take you down a road to your own soul. Your yoga will turn you to your inmost self, it’s an authentic companion that will challenge your investment in superficiality, poke you with the truth of your narrow expressions of love and service, and ridicule your obsession with image management. Yes, for your transformation you must practice yoga in the morning, but you must also do it in the afternoon, and in the midnight hour.
If you start yoga, think of this as a commencement address in which the speaker is telling you – as a new graduate – that your life after college will be harder, then it will get easier, then become different and then way different. But in that advice you will also hear that you have partners in your yoga journey, partners that will stand on the same precipice you are on, looking to the horizon with gratitude for what has passed and in hope for what will be. My hope is not just for your yoga practice or mine, but for our lives and well-being.
In Hawaii, yoga and fire flamed in me a new learning and water calmed my reach. This reaching has led to our meeting and shared yoga journey, one that’s opened me to understand the depth of Black Elk’s rune.
“My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life, I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?” Black Elk spoken to John Neidhardt in 1930.
The world’s answer is that one man bent from the years is just one man; but the soul coal of yoga teaches that one man is everyman, and the story of Black Elk’s life is not just the story of one man but of every man.
This is why your asana is my asana; your bending, shaping, yoga doing and not doing is my bending and shaping, my doing and not doing, and why your bowing is my bowing, my discovery is yours and yours is mine. I am connected to you; you are connected to me . . . this is yoga’s yoke.
Every day in Hawaii the fire of Pele (the Hawaiian religion’s Fire Goddess) pours out her passion in hand to hand combat with the Pacific’s great waves and the island is continually reborn in the flowing conflict between lava and water, the hatha of soft and hard.
My reformation is your reformation. Slowly, I twist into my unique shape. My lumbar, thorax and cervical spine rotates, flexes, and extends. I collapse, breathe, and rest. My resting is your resting. I breathe. You breathe.
Then I rise, and my gaze moves from ground to horizon to sky. An ascent takes place. Energy is exchanged within the body, and I am transformed. Your transformation is my transformation with each of us commencing to echo ancient movements.
I learn to breathe, you learn to breathe. Our breath moves to sweet release, and the longing is fulfilled. My evolving is your evolving; your Child’s Pose is my Child’s Pose, and we are back to the beginning once again.
We come on up together for the journey where your rising is my rising in the morning, in the evening, and in the midnight hour.
Come on up for the rising
Come on up lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight.
— Bruce Springsteen
What did you notice here? I welcome your thoughts.