Tulā - Balance

One thing I really resent about yoga is that it highlights all the ways I lack balance.

There are the really obvious ways, like the fact that I can't stand on one foot without falling over (looking at you, Natarajasana).

There are the subtler ways, like how the left side of my body flexes so much more deeply than the right, making all correctly-aligned poses feel completely lopsided.

And there are the stupid ways, such as my inability to do anything in moderation.

This last one is what I'm most concerned with right now.

I decided a year or two ago that if I were to ever pursue advanced yoga training, it would be a "go big or go home" situation. Mostly I decided this because it had not occured to me when I was 18 that I could apply to Oxford for university and go big or go home that way. It would have been a magnificent opportunity, and yet I could not think bigger than Chicago, USA. 

I would not make the same mistake twice!

So if I were going to enroll in a 300-hr program, I would not go to Phoenix to learn from the YO crew, although they're fkking awesome. I would not train virtually to learn from Jason Crandell, although he's SO incredible, too. No, this would mean me moving 10,000 miles away and gaining exposure to a different culture. Because fkkk it, why not!? I have no partner. I have no children. THE WORLD IS MY OYSTER.

As I said, nothing in moderation.

"Oh my God, you have to do it!!" Abbie squealed the first few weeks after I'd shown her the materials. I had narrowed it down to four schools. "I mean, you don't have to, I can't make you. BUT ALSO, YOU HAVE TO!"

I love Abbie. 

So I did my due diligence. I emailed my shala of choice at least 20 times (Sorry, Mehgna. You too, Em). I read the Yoga Alliance reviews (there were over 300). I reached out to several former students. I set up a Zoom conference with an instructor in Indonesia to gain further clarity on some of the finer points.

But really, no matter how well you prepare for possible risks, at some point, you have to just jump. 

More often than not, I fall flat on my face. I vow that I AM NEVER PUTTING MYSELF OUT THERE AGAIN. EVER.

And then, inevitably, I do.

LaLa, who used to teach yoga with me on Sunday mornings, once said, "I admire you, Elle. You just keep going for it, no matter how many times things go horribly wrong." (It sounded less insulting when she said it than it does here when you're reading it).

Of course, she was speaking about dating. And things have gone horribly, horribly wrong several times now. (By horribly wrong, I mean that the guy goes from interested to "Oh gee, my aunt in Tanzania died just now and I need to leave the country!" in the space of like, a few dates. I would love it if one of them just leveled with me about what it is, exactly, that is causing all of these aunts to die, but so far, none of them have. So I continue banging my head against a brick wall.)

And that, kids, is how I decided, hardship be damned, I'm going to Indonesia!!

The yoga school sent me 300 hours of preparatory videos in advance of my journey and told me I needed to make it through half of them. By the end of week one, I had watched 22 hours of videos and taken 30+ pages of notes.

"I knew you would love it!" shouted Abbie.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that watching 22 hours of Anatomy lessons was less about me loving human anatomy and more about the fact that I had been given a goal, a deadline, and a directive; and that the archangel Michael himself could not stop me from forcing the twain to meet.

NO ONE WAS GOING TO KNOW MORE ABOUT HUMAN ANATOMY THAN ME.

"You guys, maybe I don't even like yoga?" I tentatively asked my students after class when we went out for coffee one day. 

"You do. You like yoga," they responded. I acknowledged this.

So what was it I was not liking?

It's the lack of balance in my own life. I don't know how to do things by halfsies. 

I dug deeper and deeper into the anatomy, finished the anatomy and moved onto the philosophy, finished the Bhagavad Gita and moved onto the history...

I came home to myself and remembered that yoga is so much more than physical movements. My crew were right when they said I like yoga. It was just a deeper yoga.

I remember the first time Yoga Elsa showed all of us teachers-in-training a stick figure in Tree Pose and asked us: what is the shape?

Ya'll, trust and believe. We were so fkking confident when we shouted "IT'S A TRIANGLE!!!!"

She was completely non-plussed.

"What do you mean 'it's a triangle?' No. No, what????? No, what is the shape?" She emphasized the word like we would suddenly get it, Jade nodding enthusiastically in the background.

"Diamond?"

"Arrow?"

"Other kind of triangle?"

We cycled through about 5 more of these before a couple quiet people in the back offered the correct answer. Then the rest of us learned that a shape is not an actual mathematical shape, it means the basic position of all the body parts in relation to each other and the mat.

That feels like a million years ago, although it was only two.

Since then, I have practiced many hours of yoga. The main thing I have learned is that yoga is not a series of shapes.

Yoga is the position of one's mind.

It is stepping outside of the immediate, emotional NOW.

It is the pause between action and reaction.

The physical postures, the sweat and being forced to engage in 7 straight minutes of core work (sorry, Linda, Christine, and Gwen) --- all of that is a means to an end.

The ultimate goal is to get to the final 4 or 5 minutes of a yoga class -- savasana. The grueling reality of holding poses until your muscles shake is to exhaust the physical body until the mind finds stillness.

I know samadhi is supposed to be a lotus. But #southern # magnoliasforever

THAT is why I love yoga.

There are some yogis who have never practiced vrksasana in their lives. They're still practitioners of yoga because they abide by the end goal: stillness of the mind.

Me and Abbie in Vrksasana

The reason I love yoga is because it helps me maintain some modicum of distance from my emotions... and that is hard when you live in my brain.

Tomorrow I have to attend the Celebration of Life for my friend and her four children. I don't know how to get through it.

It literally makes me sick to see the outpouring of grief for her exes, their own memorial services at churches I knew and loved, despite the fact that they drove her to it.

I have been dreading this event for weeks, but I was asked to come. I have to face the music. I have to face the music more than I did last week when I sat outside her charred home.

Yoga creates the space between action and reaction.

I am probably one in a billion, but I know in my heart that Birdie existed in that space. Her actions were not automatic, not reflexive, not unbalanced. You don't just get to be a Missouri Teacher of the Year. You don't just stumble upon doctoral studies. She was magnificent, and she was haunted, and she was trapped.

Be that as it may, I don't want to follow in her footsteps. I want the unbalanced-ness, the fluctuations, of my own mind to become smaller and further between.

I want to stay longer in the pause between action and reaction.

Yoga.