We Are One

Today, we return to the yoga teacher training after breaking for the holiday season.  Happy 2023 everyone! This is our final month, which seems unfathomable. Will we really have 200 hours on January 28th? Impossible. Also, I know nothing. I have scratched the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Me, teach?

To be fair, I started this endeavor thinking that teaching was out of reach for me. I’m not particularly bendy, I’m moderately strong, but not as strong as I once was. I’m not a lithe, little lululemon model and in fact, most of my yoga clothes double or triple as climbing or running clothes and are a few years old at this point.  This would have bothered me once, the 20 something me would have NEEDED new clothes, fashion that represented who I am on the inside to the outside in some way.  And I’m not saying that still wouldn’t give me a moment of pleasure. But it’s not a need. And it’s an effort that feels like it could be put elsewhere. 

No, I started this endeavor to work on the inside (And to learn some skills – let’s be honest. Yoga has made my body feel better over time and I wanted to dig in on that) But, I also recognized that I was and am in a period of deep spiritual searching.

Somehow that expression – deep spiritual searching – makes me feel like a fraud. Who am I to claim spirituality? Isn’t that for people less fearful, less jealous, less easily triggered than me? But I do yearn for faith, for meaning, for authenticity. My heart cries out for connection to something bigger.  

In the past few weeks, the universe, God, or random chance have thrown a few challenges my way. Nothing major in the scheme of things, and for that I should be grateful. I call them, with my newish dilettante-like knowledge, “opportunities to work on my karma.” It reminds me of the workplace expression, “opportunity to excel,” that management would use when assigning an unpleasant task. 

And I will say, nothing in this world challenges me more than other humans. Two days ago, I was anticipating a particularly challenging day as I knew that I needed to have dialogue with multiple humans that weren’t understanding me, and to be fair I wasn’t understanding them either. I was dreading it, I was annoyed, I was struggling with thinking loving thoughts. I would breathe and tell myself to approach the conversations with kindness and love, and then I would picture them – the conversations – but even as I pictured them, I’d find myself prompted to “say” something I shouldn’t. Damn ego.

Trying to filter your actions and intentions through love is, well, a ‘lovely’ idea, but my ego was not really on board. How to love these people? They were making me crazy.

Then I remembered that other irritating cliche – the people that most annoy you probably annoy you because there’s something about yourself that you don’t particularly like that they are displaying.  Who wants to cop to that? 

But it’s true. If I think about the philosophy of yoga – at least as I understand it – we are all one, we are all part of the same source, we are all connected. And while we all look different, and manifest differently in different earth-suits with different earth-thoughts and feelings and traits – we really aren’t. Fundamentally our suits have the same elements – skin, organs, muscles, bone, fundamentally we have the same thought filters, feelings, and traits, we just each manifest them in greater or lesser proportions and they interact in ways the make them show up differently.

Fundamentally, I am the same as those annoying people and they are the same as me. We are one. 

And in thinking about this, I thought about how they might think the same things about me that I was thinking about them and I approached my conversations differently. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a whole lot better. And it became a lot easier to wash the annoyance in something resembling love. I’m not saying self-love is easy either. It’s not. But it’s not really self-love in the ego sense when we are all one anymore than it’s being annoyed at an individual, other ego human.

Whatever I’m thinking or feeling, whatever I’m acting or displaying – it’s towards everyone because we are all one. It’s a trait – and a shared trait at that – that I’m annoyed at, not a person. I’d rather just love us, the unified one and do my part to work on bringing us together again.

Maybe this makes no sense at all. But I’m sure yoga has something to help me make sense of it. Good thing I’m going back today. 🙂