Finding My Way Back

“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.”

Gandhi

Today is a new day. A different day. I will not post a sutra, relate it to the moment and then go on to analyze what Satchidananda and my brain have to say about it.

I lost that habit. I lost touch with that which inspired me to do yoga teacher training, to try church, to engage with the local refugee organization, to dream of travel to distant lands, to scrawl poems in spiral bound notebooks as a small child, to dance, to find myself lost in nature or even in a city, preferably one very different from what I normally encounter, marveling at the vastness of creation and ingenuity and wondering at the world’s diversity and my place in it.

I have lost my spirit. My seeker.

Misplaced.

Sometimes my encounters with yogis and yoga teachers feel isolating. They feel performative. I yearn for authenticity. In the church I also found this to be the case.

The thing is, all spiritual and philosophical belief systems and all people are flawed, so if I dismiss that which has brought value in my life due to the flaws, then it’s going to be a pretty empty life.

And yoga is a practice. Part of my yoga practice was an examination of the sutras. I’ve not been practicing.

I’ve lost my sense of wonder at the world. I’ve lost my ability to let go of the noise and find myself present. I have a lot of excuses and reasons for that. And they are even understandable. The worries and concerns that marks my days have a grounding in something. But giving them the power to destroy my sense of wonder and distract from my practices of connecting to my spirit is giving them unnecessary power.

Thoughts matter.

On a recent road trip through the rolling green hills of West Virginia, my partner’s car churned and chugged a little, shuddering as it tried to crest a hill. We stopped.

It’s happened before, he admitted, but not since like a year. We just need to turn it off and start it again. (my partner is about as unbothered by anxiety as a human can be)

This didn’t work. So, there we were, going 45 mph up the hills in a 65 mph zone.

Turn the music back on, he suggested, knowing that music is one way I relax and have fun.

No, I told him, I have to spend my mental energy on this right now.

This is telling. Somewhere inside of me I thought that if I kept thinking about the car’s issue, the power of my mind would some how save the car? Because I wanted it to be okay? That I needed to keep focusing on getting where we needed to go and then we would?

Except it wasn’t a calm focus, it was a worried one. I wasn’t wrong that music would distract. And maybe for the better! usually my escapism comes when I need to focus, but perhaps this wasn’t one of those times.

But also telling to me was that somewhere deep inside, I must believe that my mind, my prayers, my energy, truly does have the potential to make real change.

So how to shake the negativity when the world seems so overwhelming? How to shake the overwhelming when everything feels so important? How to shake the anxiety when aging makes one feel as though the time for wonder and hope has run out, and that one has spent one’s life searching, but never landing long enough to build a life that may include rest?

How to find rest anyway?

I don’t know the answer to these questions.

But I do know I want to find my way back to myself. And I’m going to start with one moment at a time. One breath at a time. One thought at a time. One day at a time. And one sutra day.