Unison

Is our competitiveness innate or taught? It's something I've been wondering about for quite awhile. We're all taught from a young age to be the best, try our hardest, succeed in all we do. Each year that passes, I see parents push their children more, and I find myself-despite my best efforts- bristling at perceived advantages or favoritism, all while trying to push my own children ahead.

Being overly competitive inflates the ego and breeds selfishness. You begin to look inward only, at the smallest picture of life, under the guise of looking out for your own best interests. Yoga is all about rejecting the ego. But do all of us yogis actually practice what we preach? I know I have struggled with it. As the year drew to a close, I decided to try an experiment. I decided to put my ego aside and view all - ALL- my fellow yogis, teachers, and teachers in training as my friends, comrades, partners. I decided to put good out there, to be helpful and kind.

It's tricky navigating a business world that is built on ethics, karma, and good will. We all want to make a living at this and be successful. I have, sadly, seen this success come at the price of relationships disintegrating and ill will. People, even enlightened yogis, can become possessive of abstract concepts that nobody actually owns. I think I can sequence a pretty good class. I can come up with interesting concepts. But is it mine? Did I create it? No. It is not mine to horde. I want unity, and want openness. I don't want to achieve success at the price of hurting someone else.

Since I have begun my experiment of rejecting competing with my fellow yogis, I have found something interesting. For each time I have consciously opened my heart to someone, I have felt that goodwill karmically boomerang back to me in an absurdly short amount of time. Good things have happened. Opportunities have opened up. Possibilities seem endless. Friendships have blossomed. It has been enlightening, joyful, and humbling. I highly recommend it.

Turn away from ego. Let your heart shine open.

What Are You Afraid Of?

Change is hard.
Ruts are easy.

Routines can be good, they have a definite purpose in life. We can't all dwell in chaos. We have jobs, homework, appointments, family commitments, and must manage time accordingly and keep up on time management. But change, real, personal, spiritual change can be necessary, as well as scary. We all harbor secret dreams and hopes of who we'd like to be. What would you change? What do you want to be? What will it take to break free of unhealthy patterns and toxic relationships, to embrace the limitless possibilities of who you're meant to be?

What are you afraid of?

Afraid of failure. Afraid of mockery and ridicule. Afraid of being wrong, being selfish, being short-sighted. Afraid of not loving enough. Afraid of not being loved. Stepping off the ledge and into the uncertain and cavernous unknown is terrifying. Will I fall? Will I sink like a stone?

We can all fly if we choose to. The key is not in a 100% success rate in all you do. The key is in relying on those around you who truly love you and believe in you to walk it with you. If you take a leap of faith, you will find supportive, loving hands under you to catch you when you fall, to lift you up when you're sad and unsure. Trust yourself. Trust that you are loved.

And fly.

What does forgiveness and compassion look like?  In the yoga community, we all talk a good game. But having compassion sometimes means caring about and looking out for the unlovable, the mean types of people who are selfish and cruel. It can test even the most seasoned yogi. We begin to question why we should waste our cosmic goodwill and karmic brownie points on someone who beats us up emotionally. It's easier to care about those who are grateful and kind. It feels far better for our ego.

So why? It's a slippery slope of not caring and shutting down our hearts. It only take a few times of turning our backs for that heart chakra to begin to close and harden. We tell ourselves it's about protection, about not giving energy and love where it's not deserved. I have heard the term 'stealing energy' a lot lately. It seems to be the latest and greatest catch phrase, and it seems to be an excuse to shut down emotionally. It's become a spiritual catchphrase to justify turning away from what is right. And what is right? Love. Friendship. Healing. Protection.

No one steals my energy. I give it freely. And sometimes, I get hurt. Sometimes I do what is right and good, knowing full well that it will hurt. But a hurt heart is better that a cold, hard, closed off one. We take a lot of hits in life, and so our armor goes up. Max Strom says yoga is the process of taking our armor off - and so we do, and asana at a time, a breath at a time. But our yogic life is not limited to asana. It's hard to walk the walk, when sometimes it's so much easier to do our daily practice and have that be the beginning and ending of our yoga.

I strive for more. I want more out of my spiritual life, because I know, at the end of the day, helping is always going to feel better than hurting, and turning my wide open heart towards love and forgiveness will heal my own hurt. Sometimes you have to be your own candle in the darkness.

I walked into my first yoga class in the summer of 1997. These were the days before Lululemon and a studio on every corner. I believe I wore a tank top and a sarong, having no idea what to expect (I later determined the sarong was an unwise choice). It was in the un-air conditioned old Westport Allen building, with stinky communal mats, and a teacher with crazy curls and an irreverent sense of humor like me. Patricia Gray taught my first class, and many more after that. I was hooked.

There would be many ebbs and flows over the years. The years of having babies saw the tide of my practice recede, but as children grew, so did my practice. I began to discover other teachers- Lisa Uhl, Mara Colbert, Jennifer Birch- as well as a multitude of styles. Ashtanga. Vinyasa. Hatha. Restorative. I practiced regularly, at studios and at home, until 2008. That's when the bottom dropped out.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer in April of 2008. I deemed yoga a selfish un-necessity. My world became one of caregiver and nurse, as I teetered the line between mother and daughter. I cooked meals, drove him to appointments, sat and kept him company through chemo, and let myself quietly come undone. This is when I encountered the white knuckling through a night of true insomnia, as the rest of the world slept, and I had waking dreams of death, decay, and loss.

The end came as the first leaves started to turn on October 1, 2009. Like many caregivers before me, I was left with a gaping hole in my life, and a sense of 'well, now what?' I closed up my heart and attempted to simply soldier on- but we all know that never works. I decided that I needed to revisit yoga.

In the beginning weeks of revisiting practice, it was a process of getting to know my body all over again. Remembering strengths and weaknesses, working out the kinks, finding my groove. I stayed in the back of the class at first, mat in the corner, quietly observing, taking it in. I sampled new teachers and old, trying each style on like an old pair of jeans. Some styles fit better than they had a few years prior. Some I had outgrown, as we all do with age and experience. But up to this point, my yoga was mostly physical. I would om and do the occasional chant, I half heartedly listened to retellings from the Bhagavad Gita, but I didn't connect with any of it.

In class on day, a teacher told a very personal story of her own loss in life. As we laid in our restorative savasana, she compared God's plan for as as being like a beautiful needlepoint. When we look at the tapestry from the right side, it's beautiful. We can see the picture perfectly. But have you ever looked at the underside of a needlepoint project? It's all tangled threads, it makes no sense. We are all stuck on the underside of the big picture, and sometimes terrible things happen that make absolutely no sense. We rage and curse God and decide life is meaningless. But there is a purpose to all of it. There is a plan. There is still beauty.

As she spoke these words, I could feel my heart ache. Tears slid silently under my eye pillow. I broke down. In public. In the middle of yoga. It was mortifying and cathartic all at once. I began to make the connection between was going on in my body with what was going on in my deepest of soul. This was when true healing could begin for me. My yoga practice changed vastly after that. I worked on healing my fractured heart, and I began to feel a pull, a call, a longing. I entered teacher training in the fall of 2012 at the School of Therapeutics, and with each special focus class I assist in, with each workshop and class I take, I find myself more connected with true grace and joy. As Suzette Scholtes would say 'This is my dharma. This is what I was put on this earth to do.' I look forward to helping others heal with love and grace, through the therapy of yoga.