Inner Change (The Story So Far, Part 1)

I completed the first four day immersion in our yoga teacher training program. I’d intended about three posts to this point, but I’m clearly wordpress challenged and couldn’t figure out how to make the technology work.  This morning, I thought I might toss this old laptop across the room. So, clearly I have a long way to go on the yoga thing.  I’ve let it go for now – the format is not close to what I wanted it to be – in the name of writing. 

So, let me get you, hypothetical reader, up to speed.  The three posts might have described the first weekend; what has so far inspired me; and our immersion weekend. A fourth might have talked about how I feel right now – not ready to return to a job that is more mundane now after four days than it was before I left. But I digress. I’ll do this in two posts instead. 

We began our YTT with a weekend with Nischala Joy Devi who wrote the Secret Power of Yoga, which is as she describes it “a heart centered approach” to the yoga sutras. There was a lot of talk about heart, about interpretations done by men over the years, about humility, about reframing language to the positive.  

It was the first time we were all in a room together, our motley crew of new yoga teacher trainees and we surreptitiously checked each other out, chatter tentative, then flowing among some, less among others. Some were observers, some were the cool kids, some were none of the above. It was a mostly middle aged Breakfast Club. We have one I’ll call The Kid. I have to work on my patience with The Kid. And we have one in her twenties, a barista with an edge. I like her. I think I might have been friends with her back then. Or she might have been too cool. She can be Too Cool for School – TCS. 

At any rate, I was relieved because nowhere in the group did there appear to be what I might call a Lululemon princess. It seemed to be an assortment of women of various ages all coming to this from a place in their life of wanting to deepen, fill, learn something. As we progress there are some I like more, some I like less, etc.  

Nischala herself, was a tiny woman, dressed head to toe in purple. She even dyed her graying hair purple. Her face is narrow and her eyes slightly larger, brown in appearance. She reminds me of a sparrow. She has a dry humor, sarcasm that sneaks in when you don’t expect it.  I expected to like her less, to find it woo woo. I’d started reading the sutra’s of Patanjali in preparation and I thought what I was reading made sense. I wasn’t sure I needed someone to say them differently. 

Here’s what I wrote to myself after starting those. I didn’t get far yet, mostly because every time I go back, I do a review of what I’ve read before moving further. 

There are four books, the first is contemplation. I am no further than this. Fundamentally we are dealing with lassoing in our minds.  There are five mental constructions and they are either painful or painless, or, otherwise put selfish or selfless. Thoughts and desires and actions that come from a selfish place result in pain and those that come from selflessness might have pain at first, so if you are angry for selfless grounds, but not in the long run and so you are supposed to monitor your motivations.  

This made me think.

If I’m to be honest and authentic, one motivation for YTT was to surround myself with completely different people. The people in my life often bring me pain. 

So, I sat with this fact for a moment and with what I’d just read. I realized that when I love people, I am motivated by a fear of being alone and a fear that I can’t be loved. I’m looking to assuage my own fear. And that fear isn’t about the other person, it’s something deep inside me that I need to work on.

This yoga period, this YTT, is about working on what’s going on inside of me. For the longest time in life I’ve tried to find a way to change my life to change my circumstances by changing what’s on the outside. Change my job, change my body, change my clothes, change my hair, whatever it is. Change the constellations of friends even. Isn’t this what social media is all about? What’s on the outside?

But inside the same struggles cycle over and over. 

I didn’t get this from Nischala. I got this from the Sri Swami Satchidananda version of the sutras. 

From Nischala, my biggest lesson was that you can go through all of this enlightenment, truth seeking, yoga training, whatever, but you don’t lose your personality, you don’t become a saint, and there will always be contradictions within.  From Nischala, although I learned a lot, I heard so many contradictions in what she told us. BUT, I believed in her authenticity. Authenticity matters to me. And so, I’ll try to learn more from what she told us. Still, as I heard her become impatient with the woman in the room with a traumatic brain injury, I thought to myself, she still has a ways to go on the journey. And that’s probably okay.