A Pause to Look Back

by nona on October 15, 2011

Yesterday, I spent the morning at the hospital.

IV drip, sedation, and a thin tube and camera down my throat, looking at a tiny spot in my lower stomach.  This saga with my body began in 2007, as we prepared to leave for Italy.

Almost five years ago, I was not a coach.  I had turned my back on having any kind of “real” work in the world beside being a wife and a mother.  I had spent my life largely trying to escape painful emotions, so, even though I was already a yoga teacher, my body and I were not on the best of terms.

The perfect storm arrived.

Moving twice in 10 months with a small child, lack of sleep from said child, an obsession with running a marathon, and my growing fear about our move to Italy coupled with my penchant to try and get away from painful emotions was a perfect storm.  I got sick.  Very sick – and no one could find anything ‘seriously’ wrong with me. Which made my fear grow by leaps and bounds. I desperately looked outside of myself for an answer and some relief. My husband was baffled.  I was grief-stricken and afraid.

There was no escape, no external solution.  No matter what I did, my body hurt, my heart ached, and my thoughts raced.  No one and nothing could fix it. As much as I fought it, yoga and meditation and years of therapy had readied me for this.

I collapsed inward. 

My yoga mat developed well-worn grooves as I breathed and cried and sat meditation. I breathed into and around the pain in my body and the emotions that crashed on my internal shore, willing my mind to stay – to let the pain be, to make friends with the emotions that felt like they would drown me. Miraculously, the emotional swell began to subside – feelings didn’t kill me (I was surprised). Some days my body would feel so good.  Other days, the pain would be awful.

I forged a tentative truce with my body. 

The pain started to subside when I could let go.  My body became the teacher and I the student.  The pain in my body was asking me to unlock and heal the past – the desire to escape and distract myself from what is true, the trauma, the dysfunction, my love/hate relationship to money and the business world, the abuse I suffered at my own hands….  A call to make peace with the many-faceted diamond of my life, outward and inward, past and present.

In five short years, I’ve come so far.

In Italy, I went through multiple procedures and hospitalizations.  I continued to work at the root cause of the pain and suffering in my body and my life.  I’m still working on it, but today, I’m mostly pain-free.  This work of healing continues to bring me to a peaceful and happy relationship with myself and my life.  Five years ago, I could not have imagined the happiness, success, love, and peace there would be in my life today.

My heart is grateful for the storms.

Yesterday, the doctors pronounced my gut healed.  No more follow-ups necessary, no signs of cancerous tissue or inflammation.  Truly a miracle.  But not.

Life, in all of it’s beauty and chaos, happens for me, not to me.

It all happens exactly as it’s supposed to.  This moment, and my body and emotions, will continue to teach me.  Will continue to help me polish the diamond of my life.

Namasté, yoginis.

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Staying On My Mat

by nona on October 13, 2011

Do you ever find yourself mentally getting on someone else’s yoga mat?

Comparing yourself to others.  Judging others bodies, postures, or how much someone is talking with the teacher. Thinking about what other people should or shouldn’t do.  In those moments, you aren’t even really present for your practice.

I certainly do.

It’s no surprise that it shows up in life, as well. 

We recently got a puppy, and I am all over my husband’s yoga mat about this.  He doesn’t do it the way I do, he isn’t taking enough time to connect with the puppy, he will never have a relationship with the puppy if it goes on like this…

I have been spending a tremendous amount of mental energy trying to manage a relationship I fundamentally have nothing to do with.

Really, it’s none of my business.

If I stay on my yoga mat, I learn how to deal with MY business. I connect to my divinity and I honor yours. When I don’t stay on my mat, it’s almost always because there is something going on inside me that I don’t want to experience – tears close to the surface, anger moving through my belly, an insight that I am uncomfortable with.

Getting into another’s business is just a distraction.

Just a way our minds have devised to avoid pain.  But in the avoidance of pain, we often create suffering for ourselves (and sometimes for others). If I’m not fully present and engaged with my own experience, I’m resisting it, pushing it away, and what I find is that whatever is happening gets louder and more insistent.

This cycle leaves me with the work of unwinding the suffering I’ve created by being up in someone else’s business, and I’ve still got the original (now amplified) emotion.

With the puppy?  I feel like I made a unilateral decision about getting a dog and I’m uncomfortable with that.  I’m trying to make my husband connect with the puppy, so I feel better about my decision to get the dog.  I want to fix the relationship between Erick and the dog so I don’t have to deal with the feeling that I may have made a mistake. My focus on him? Just a distraction.  A way to escape my taking responsibility for the decision I made.

Getting on everyone else’s yoga mat is a zen bell.

When I notice that I’m on someone else’s mat (again), I know now it’s a call to come back to my mat and check in. Years of yoga practice have taught me this. I can now bow to my resistant mind for being such a consistent teacher and showing me that there is something that I am trying to escape and distract myself from.

So maybe it was a mistake, and now we have this dog.  I adore this dog – I really do and yet it’s WAY more work than I thought it would be. There are moments I’m totally frustrated.  Moments of pure joy and delight. Moments I want to cry.  And when I stayed on my own mat and felt the emotions rush up, I did cry.

Then I talked with my husband – funny, while we talked, the dog came up and put her head in his lap.

Things tend to shift when we stay on our mat.

When I take care of my own emotions and responses in the present moment, situations tend to take care of themselves.  I know instinctively what my work is and I can let other’s take care of their work.

Namasté, yoginis.

 

 

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