Last night, my eyes started to drizzle shut around 7:45 pm. This after a dispute with my partner – these have been happening frequently lately. Little spits and spats, over and done in 5 or 10 minutes, often of my own making. The exhaustion set in and I fell asleep feeling half empty, not half full.
I woke up in the middle of the night, thoughts poking me like a needy child. My partner wrapped his arm and leg around me and held me close until my thoughts calmed down a little – just a little. My partner’s hugs are like home. They are tight without being too tight and radiate with love. His kindness is by far his very best quality.
In the course of my waking hours last night, those fitful hours between midnight and 330 am, I thought about dharma. About connection. And about that way overused story about putting your own oxygen mask on before you can put on the mask of someone else.
Saturday of yoga teacher training almost always contains a section on chakras and this was no exception. The focus was on the heart chakra. Sunday, then corresponded with intense work on back bending poses, our token 18 year old bending like putty, the rest of us getting there in our own way to varying degrees. At Saturday’s end, we had a special section on bhakti yoga, or devotional yoga. In essence, it was a weekend all about the heart, yet when I surveyed the room for much of it, we were all grumpy at some point or another, our energy just a little off, our face looking as though someone had just given us a spoonful of cough medicine. Does love not taste good? I was no exception. Perhaps it’s the recognition that our love is not unconditional, not yet, or perhaps it’s the exhaustion of another full weekend of yoga school training, or perhaps it’s something else.
As we talked about the heart on Saturday we also talked about dharma – about finding one’s divine purpose in life. Doesn’t that sound amazing? Divine purpose? I’d been excited the week before because I’d had some ideas for myself that I thought might align with such a divine purpose, but then last night, as I went to start doing the groundwork to put these into play, I picked a fight and went to sleep instead. Do we not want ourselves to find this divine purpose? Or better put, to pursue it?
Last year, when I was going through what I might call a dark night of the soul – in fact I did call it that in my journal – I picked up a book called Designing your Life, which was about using design thinking to create a life that’s meaningful and joyful. At the time, I had left a job that I part-loved and part-hated, that latter part coming from simply being burned out and not seeing an end to it, for a job that had a lot of prestige and much better pay, but that was absolutely toxic and rested on the other end of the spectrum – it was downright boring. I had also untethered myself as had become my remote working pandemic custom and was house sitting and air bnb-ing across the West, and I was at my first stop at a small town in Washington state that just didn’t feel right to me in any way that I could explain. On paper it was great – beautiful and in the mountains with a loving dog and easy lifestyle. But it just felt wrong.
This untethering of mine is probably a topic for another blog post. But in any case, one of the exercises in the Designing Your Life book was to think about the times in your life when what you were doing brought you into a state they called “flow.” Being in flow, according to them means: “total involvement in an activity, combined with a sense of euphoria, clarity, peace and the disappearance of time.” This sounds similar to a state we are trying to achieve in yoga, minus that heart chakra message about love. I was thinking about this, because I think there are times I’ve been in “flow” doing activities – but I’m not always in flow doing that same activity. And often it’s because there are too many things going on, too many distractions – that’s what I would say – but perhaps it’s my brain creating them. Perhaps it’s me resisting change, being comfortable in this same old place of disgruntled searching and overwhelm that I often find myself.
In yoga, this flow should also include love – whatever our dharma is – we might recognize it if it’s motivated by love – and not the transactional kind – and if it involves more than just one self, the individual, in some way. The Designing your Life folks would say there are multiple paths and that might just be true. I don’t know if we have multiple dharmas, I’m a newbie, but even if we just have one, maybe there is more than one way to get there.
It occurred to me – not for the first time – that while other people must factor into what I do in life that they often prevent me – or I use them as a reason to prevent myself – from doing the hard work of changing habits and pursuing that which speaks to my heart. They are attachments, relationships are attachments. How do I love people but also love myself?
That’s where the tired old story of the oxygen mask came to mind. Duh. This answer had been given to me so many times.
My last thought while I should have been sleeping was about connection. During our Saturday talk we discussed – along with a Brene Brown Ted Talk – how true connection could only come through vulnerability. But I live in the midwest, I protest internally, and I’ve learned the hard way that making myself vulnerable doesn’t lead to connection but rather to shunning. And so I’ve learned to bury and suppress, to say the right things, to share less and less and less of myself as I get older. So I don’t find myself isolated. Yet, I still am.
And then I had what I call a mini-fannie. Or a small epiphany. The little a-ha moments that are probably obvious but we either cannot see them or forget them. And I promised myself in writing this blog, I’d write them down – to mitigate that forgetting thing we do. I realized that I stopped sharing mostly because I don’t want to feel foolish, mostly out of fear, not out of love. The intention was to protect my very fragile self. But the thing is, you can still only connect by being vulnerable. And even if the reaction is shunning – you weren’t going to connect with that person anyhow then – and it’s about that person, not you. Duh, right. Surface acceptance isn’t the same as deep connection.
Too many words. I apologize, my friends. I hope there was something here you found useful.
The Yoga Chronicles 
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