The Most Myself I've Ever Felt

Last April I decided to go on a solo trip to the Dominican Republic to attend a surf camp and get some relaxation.

The surf trip included daily yoga classes.

“How nice,” I thought.  “That will be a good complement to the REAL reason I want to go to the tropics (surfing).

A little background:  I had done yoga before.  It was actually my mother who got me started with a teacher in Connecticut (who was also a massage therapist and craniosacral therapist).  I remember thinking how cool it was that this woman made a living from her home, healing others and teaching others how to heal themselves.

I really liked doing yoga.  It was a nice way to stretch and get calm.

I kept doing yoga after college, in gym classes and yoga studios.  I bought videos to do yoga at home.  About once a week or so I would take in a yoga class.  You know, the usual yoga consumer activity.

In my twenties and thirties, I tried hot yoga, and while I really enjoyed the intensity (it is super intense and for that reason both awful and wonderful), I found myself repeatedly injured from over-stretching.  I decided that I preferred non-hot yoga.

When I was in grad school for my master’s in education, I was classmates with a friendly yogini who had completed her certification for teaching children’s yoga and was in the process of becoming certified as an adult yoga teacher.  “How cool,” I thought.  “I think maybe I would like to become a yoga teacher one day.”

But like so many things I thought I would like to do with my life, I decided it was frivolous (I have a lot of guilt surrounding doing what I want—especially anything creative.  Literally every career decision I’ve made has been someone else’s idea and based on fear.  If you’d like to unpack that with me further, feel free to message me privately, but that’s a Whole Nuther Story.)

I moved to Long Island to continue working in my ‘chosen career’ as a Regular Teacher in a Regular School and found a little yoga studio with amazing instructors and North Shore Long Island yoginis who spent the time before and after class whispering cruel gossip to one another, often about the phenomenal teacher who had just spent the hour helping them move through lovely asanas.

I decided I didn’t want to do yoga at that studio any more.

In fact, I stopped doing it altogether.  I don’t even really know why.

I missed it.  I was eager to get back to the mat.  So when it was part of my surfing package, I was pleased.  I hadn’t done yoga in several years when I found myself at a little outdoor studio in Cabarete, DR, called “The Yoga Loft”.  It was a tiny sheltered platform overlooking the ocean, and I was scheduled for 6 consecutive evening yoga classes in addition to my 6 consecutive morning surfing classes.

That first evening, I showed up to a very small group (it was Easter Sunday) and I was horrified to learn that what little flexibility I had possessed in the years prior was gone.  I could barely lean over, much less touch my toes.  I laughed and shrugged when the teacher suggested that maybe our heads would touch our knees in seated forward fold.  I used about thirteen blocks and straps for everything.  At the end of the hour, I lay breathing in savasana, listening to the ocean crash against the beach, feeling the tropical breeze on my skin.  I meditated for several minutes and felt my spirit transcend my body in a way I’ve never experienced before.  Upon rising and seeing that night had slowly fallen over us, I thought to myself, “oh, THIS is what yoga is supposed to feel like.”

Over the course of my week on this solo trip, a few things unfurled.

Firstly, I got more physically flexible (duh).  My pop-ups on the surfboard got better, and I could finally consistently catch and ride waves.

Secondly, I did what I wanted.  For the first time in my entire life, I did exactly what I wanted whenever I wanted.  It was the most myself I’ve ever felt.

Thirdly, the day after my first class at The Yoga Loft, I met an entire group of yoga teachers in training at the studio, through the Vermont-based Yoga studio "Grateful Yoga", and I began slowly telling my story of illness and injury to them and their master teacher, as they told me their stories of how and why they had chosen this path to yoga teacher-hood.  Particularly, I befriended a woman from France who was dealing with the challenge of learning this craft in her non-dominant language.  One night, I sat down with her to help her translate parts of her training manual, and I stopped repeatedly to process my mini-epiphanies regarding the studio's philosophy surrounding yoga and how much it resonated with my own journey to wellness.  She and I shared a few tears and laughter together.

I always knew yoga was a moving meditation.  That’s what drew me to it in the first place.  I knew it was stretching.  I knew it was spiritual.  But I believed that, for me, it was a practice you did once a week to keep your hamstrings loose and your mind centered.  

Something happens when you practice yoga every day.  Yoga starts to permeate your every action.  It slows your breathing when you’re scuba diving.  It helps you read the waves and calm yourself when you’re tumbling under your board.  It gives you a grounded spirit when you’re jumping from waterfalls and untangles your mind when you’re flipping between French, Spanish and English.  It keeps you from losing your cool when the teenagers are in the heat of spring fever in the weeks before summer break.

Yoga connects you to heaven and earth and reminds you that you are a small part of the big picture, and that part is just as beautiful and deserving of love and kindness as every other small part of this universe.

On my last night in Cabarete, during our last class before I would fly home, a rainstorm came rolling across the sea as we practiced.  We lowered the shades and practiced on as the water sprayed through the shades into the loft, dampening our mats and lifting our spirits. Our final pose before savasana was happy baby, and my mat had become completely drenched.  The instructor invited us to try rotating in the pose and we rocked around, laughing.  My yoga mat folded itself into origami under my back as I splashed back and forth into the puddles, completely bathing in the last of the rain as the storm passed on to its next destination.  We all gasped together as a rainbow spread across the last of the light sky before night fell completely, and we lay as many bodies, one spirit, on our wet mats, rainbow in our hearts and minds, moon rising above the Cabarete coast.

When the universe sends you a message, man, it does not fool around.

Since this is the internet, and Instagram exists, here are some pictures of me doing yoga.  

You'll notice they're not very impressive.  I can't put any feet behind my head or fold myself backward in half, nor do I ever plan to try.  You'll notice I really don't care, and neither should you.  Yoga is not contortionism.  Being "good at yoga" is NOT A THING.  Yoga is a tool for being good at life.  Anyone who does yoga is good at yoga BECAUSE THEY ARE DOING IT.   

  

So here I am at Omega Institute for Holistic Studies (in Rhinebeck, NY), taking a week-long intensive training course for children’s yoga and mindfulness with Little Flower Yoga, which I am looking forward to implementing in my current work as a chorus and drama teacher.  Next summer I plan to take the 200 hour training for adult yoga instruction.  I'm still in my current job, at least for a few years, and I still like it quite a bit, but I'm ready to start planning for a more 'me' work life (after 20 years of following everyone else's advice).

These are steps.  This is me learning, for the first time, to really actually listen to my heart.  It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and the unfolding of this process has been nothing short of emotionally tumultuous.  I don’t know exactly where it's leading, or how long it will take (probably forever), but I’m on the invisible bridge to who knows where.  I’m taking the leap of faith, and it is the most myself I’ve ever felt.

I asked one my fellow student teachers today, “When a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, do you think it hurts?”

We sat and pondered what it must be like, all gooey inside the chrysalis.  Is it scary?  Is it exciting?  Because I’m scared.  I’m excited.  And pain has definitely been part of the process.

Later, he found a caterpillar on his mat and showed it to me.  I told him I had found another one on my mat as well.

The universe is so freaking literal sometimes.

"Be yourself.  Everyone else is already taken." (Oscar Wilde)