OM YOGA MAGAZINE, Yoga, the Sailing Forth

A day after moving into my apartment in Hawaii, I was on the floor with back pain. I had endured many injuries: at 10, I bounced off a trampoline and landed on the ground, a second back injury I endured while weightlifting, and yet again in my 40’s when I fell from a high roof.

In Hawaii, I noticed signs for yoga studios everywhere and I started thinking about claims I had heard regarding yoga and healing for back pain. One day, in a desperate attempt to fix my damaged back and with no background or knowledge of yoga, I decided to try it and hoped to find something to make me strong in my broken places. I feared collapsing in the hot yoga room, but was also confident that if my back held up I would too.

I planned to try yoga for 30 days and then decide if I would continue. I made it through 24 classes that month. My resolve was galvanized and my hope for healing ignited. In my journal entry I wrote, Yoga is the way to go for healing back pain. It’s so simple, why don’t more people do it?  But my transformation from injury to healing went beyond my back as yoga steered me into deep waters.

“Sail forth – steer for the deep waters only

Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me”

American poet Walt Whitman in, “Passage to India,” from Leaves of Grass

I continued with yoga and wrote about my experience because I thought my practice in a heated room would also benefit me in other ways. Soon, I was writing on everything that came to me during my classes: I numbered the sessions, made notes about the teachers and their style, chronicled my thoughts about the class experience, and penned other insights that arrived when I was on my mat.

I kept track of the people I met and put their names on a list. After a year I had collected the names of 200 people that I considered friends and allies even if I didn’t know them. We shared something together and I respected each of my classmates for their courage, persistence, and will. I also watched them grow and marveled at what I saw. The more I talked with them, the more often I heard stories like mine and I learned some of them took up yoga spurred on by a desire to heal unseen emotional wounds.

After a year, I had constructed a personal story of self-recrimination balanced by absolution and inspiration. The arc of my story lifted like a rainbow and I sensed my discovery of yoga’s treasures would be at the end of a long struggle. Every moment of trial and endurance formed in me a stronger gratitude and the person I was turning into took me steadily into deeper waters and deeper emotions. I started to care deeply about the important things and less about the peripheral.

Early on, yoga was only a small part of the writing I was doing. Most of it was on family memories, alcohol, education, and the vocational path I had lived. I continued doing yoga and writing, and then after a year I felt emptied by my personal project and spent of agitation. Then my attention turned to understanding the dynamic healing energy exchange of yoga and what it meant for my being.

Diving deeper, I discovered yoga had become an augury of new life and perhaps a bringer of miracles. Day by day, centimeter by centimeter, my spine was flexed and strengthened; I welcomed yoga to meet me in a generative engagement and over time it taught me a reductive mathematic as I learned less is more. Yoga offered to me a beneficent covenant and I gave back everything I could.

In the breath-centric expression of my practice, I began mining yoga’s treasures and translated them into my redefined biology of belief. My emotional body was in union with my physical body as I peeled away superficial layers and put my life’s vocation and destiny under a microscope. Leaning further into yoga, I experienced its work on me as a timeless process of self-discovery and redemption.  Yoga became my transformational container where the inner fire of self-purification (tapas) delivered me to the deeper currents of its curriculum.

The yoga mat became my turf of tears, washing, and regeneration. This was my baptism in fire where I confronted my own life of selfishness and layers of hurt. At the end of class, I kneeled in puddles as sweat fell from my eyebrows dripping onto the towel. Every tear was made of pain and sorrow for someone I have known and for my sorrow and suffering. I gave to yoga the joys and celebrations of my community; I gave my pain, I gave my heart, and yoga gave me what I needed for healing and redemption.

Yoga turned me inward to face a new day. I gave to yoga and it cracked me open to new emotion. My dream life changed, and a man I had not thought of or seen in 40 years appeared in a dream and said, “Something has changed.” It had, and while I was releasing layers of sorrow and failure, I had more to learn; especially how to love myself and my life with my burden of unfulfilled expectations.

Do you want to practice yoga? Think twice, dear reader, because you may find yourself embracing an excavation into the deeper ground of your soul. It’s a foray into the unknown and nobody can predict or plan what will be discovered.

When doing yoga, we are on the way to earning a degree in self-awareness. Silence and heightened attention to self in yoga reveals both the vulnerabilities and jagged edges of our lives, but it’s also where we come into awareness that we are magnificent in every way.

Yoga is a steady wind and it will push against your sail sending you into deeper waters. You will dance on a road leading to your own soul and this dance with an inner spirit-wind (vayus) will lead you to your inmost self, to the authentic you that will challenge the investments you’ve made.

I never practiced at midnight, but yoga delivered me to something that felt like the midnight hour; the term midnight hour has been used by theologians, seers, and mystics to describe a deep personal encounter where we face up to our inner shadow. It’s also sometimes called the dark night of the soul.

I think of the midnight hour as the great collapse. The great collapse happens when we come face to face with the knowledge that many of our accomplishments are driven by illusions and fed by self-centeredness. I now realize I was only ignorant. I did what I thought I should be doing and while I was at it, I was like a man pounding a square peg into a round universe.

In your mind’s eye, visualize how someone starting yoga is like a graduate at a commencement address in which the speaker is offering advice for the next steps in the journey. They say congratulations for getting this far. They go on to say that, your life after graduation will be harder, and then it will get easier, then it will become different, and then become way different.  You also hear the speaker say there will be partners to help in your journey after graduation.

Helping partners are those who stand with us and are perched upon the same precipice on which we stand. They are friends that join us looking to the horizon with gratitude for what has passed and in hope for what will be. Your partner is yoga, and it will accompany you right back to yourself just as mine accompanied me and led me to crack open new emotions and memories.

Yoga led me to recall and celebrate who I was and from where I came. I learned how to accept myself for my mistakes, to celebrate my history, and to give thanks for it. When yoga took me to the midnight hour I sincerely felt my sorrow in broken family ties and the anger of my children.

I had been much harder on myself than they were, but as yoga led me past the midnight hour, and into newness found through relinquishment, I came to a different place. It was the journey after graduation and it was way different; but I was at peace with the unfulfilled expectations of my own life.

My yoga journey is not obsessive but I’m traveling deep in the waterline. It’s a discipline that I enjoy and I move through it with ease. I find sitting in meditation a regular part of life, and I work to be true to my word. When it comes to resting in yoga, I am completely at peace and in those moments of peace and relinquishment, there is nowhere I’d rather be.

Yoga opened my heart. I listened and realized that I only want to serve. This is the great gift my yoga partner has given as it accompanied me through practice in the morning, in the afternoon, and through the midnight hour.

Be brave and dive deep yogis. The revolution of soul that we willingly embody takes us to compassion, which leads us to transform the world and ourselves. Your yoga partner invites you to continue the journey where it becomes, in time, way different. I fold my hands at my heart and salute you.

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