A Beautiful Moment

It is harder to chronicle the yoga teacher training experience than I anticipated.  My initial plan was to post after each weekend session – or at least at the end of the weekend. However, all technical difficulties aside, there is a resistance in my mind to doing this – or much of anything, when the day or the weekend is complete. This morning, I am still resistant.

We just finished weekend three, if you count the very first one with the visiting guest teacher, a deep dive into the sutras, that was out of place as an introductory session. The sessions seem to sap my mind and at the end I have a feeling of exhaustion, like I have nothing left. Instead, last night, I ate dinner and watched a Swedish movie about a woman who takes control of her out of control life by signing up for and completing (barely) a 90 km cross country ski race. I relate to this. In my 20s, after breaking up with my first boyfriend I did something similar – perhaps not quite as extreme, but still in the same vein.

I was a late bloomer, you see, shy in high school, less shy in college by virtue of alcohol, but still not the friend with the boyfriends, just the friend. I met my first boyfriend at 24 and I felt like a complete freak of nature. The funny thing was – I wasn’t really all that into him. There were men that came later where the pull was real.  But you can grow to love a person.  And I grew to love him. And when I broke up with him two years later because our relationship – long distance and I wasn’t willing to move for him – had become unsustainable, I was broken hearted. I was also sure no one would ever love me again. 

I went on a few dates with a tall skinny guy I met in some grad school classes I was taking, balding, a guy who liked chic flicks, drove a shiny car and liked nice things. He wasn’t really “it” either. But he definitely rejected me anyhow for the taller girl, the thinner girl, the prettier girl. (Who also rejected him).  He told me he had tried to run a marathon and had to drop out around mile 20.  So I did the only logical thing a heavy drinking, sometimes smoking, angsty, gen x-ey 20something could do. I signed up to run a marathon. And I did it. Finished that thing in 4:20 or so feeling proud as anything. I was the girl who had done anything, and I mean anything to get out of gym class. 

But I digress. Fast forward to yoga weekend. Twenty-two years later. 

I’m going to go over the highlights that I jotted down last night through the mush in my brain and see if anything sticks.

Each morning we have an hour and half yoga class with one of the main instructors. One is tall and thin, around 60, with longish gray hair, flowy, drippy yoga clothes, blue eyes, a sweet voice and a sense of light and air. The other is a short powerful man, with a resonant voice, sharp humor, and classes that tell a story – if you can follow along. He is closer to the ground, she swims in the clouds, and together they form a strange balance. 

Saturdays are with her. The focus this weekend was on water and on flowing and her class moved us through a dance-like sequence. At one point, in the middle of class, we stopped, she played James Brown’s I Feel Good, and we all danced on our mats. It erupted and calmed back into class as natural as anything, but for a moment, I closed my eyes, I felt the music inside me and I moved. The joy was palpable. Later she said, something like “Let us all have gratitude for this moment, for this beautiful, wild, joy-filled moment.” 

And I thought, YES. Whatever happens today, happens next week, happens whenever, I have the beautiful, wild, joy-filled moment. A moment so simple and so pure.  

We went on to talk that day about the cycles in our lives and about the pelvic chakra. I’m going to have to revisit the pelvic chakra information, but the cycles resonated. Essentially we were talking about how most people don’t have a ton of problems, but rather they have predicaments. Essentially the same challenge / conundrum that returns over and over again in our lives. The example might be if you always are faced with the same type of romantic partner, just in a different form. The key is to do that internal work to meet the predicament each time as a different person until finally you can work through it. I think I talked about this in my first post – this is the essence of YTT for me.  I have changed jobs, careers, locations, hair, weight, whatever, but I don’t know that I’ve seriously changed my inside in a major way since I dug deep and trained for that marathon 22 years ago. Maybe I’m exaggerating, certainly I’ve been through very challenging internal moments of depression and I think some of the external shifts I’ve made have required real internal work – but it’s always temporary. 

There are moments in my life where all of the sudden, everything makes sense and I feel like I can let go of all the things that I grasp so tightly to – the perceived failures, the what-ifs, the fears, the future – but inevitably this all disintegrates and that feeling floats away like a balloon until when I find it, it’s just a dirty shell of itself, lying lost on the ground somewhere.  I’m hoping that YTT provides some tools for doing that internal work, for making some of those internal changes in a way that lasts. Because, as noted, it’s a practice and by practicing perhaps I can come back and be reminded of these mini-epiphanies, these mini-fannies.