October 9, 2018

For many years, my yoga practice was marked by a clear set of expectations: two hours of practice, six days a week with one day of rest. This ideal was constructed from expectations communicated by my teachers, from reading how master yogis developed their craft and from my internalized idea of what it meant to be a yogi, do yoga and teach. 

In the early years of practice, discipline and dedication served me. They transformed a haphazard at-home practice that consisted of mostly hip-openers into a more well-rounded one. Over time, I cultivated a strength of will that encouraged the doing of poses I didn’t like and ones that I found difficult. These hours on the mat brought me many gains: I understood myself  better and I advanced in my capacity to do more complex asana. I also read sacred texts and the writings of modern yogis, engaged in contemplation and self-inquiry; my yoga was not limited to just what was happening on the mat. However, moments of not doing asana created a murky inner environment of guilt, recrimination, and worthlessness. Internal judgements like I am not a real yogi, I am not good enough, I am not doing enough and so on rose repeatedly like waves on the surface of the ocean — and I believed them. This did spur me toward practice but with a harsh critical voice inside pushing me. 

Practice built around such harsh lines has the unfortunate consequence of hardening an identity that the practice of yoga is ultimately attempting to dissolve. My sense of self was built on the foundational identity of being a yogi. All of my practice reinforced my self-construct: I am a yoga teacher, I am a yogi. This is me. I articulated to myself that yoga was a practice for my lifetime and I got the tattoo to prove it. 

A year and a half ago, the constructed identify started to crumble. I went through a time of questioning whether I wanted to teach. Then, the next layer of inquiry was whether I wanted to practice. This was deeply uncomfortable. I had planned on being a lifer. I would like to say that I sat with all this with equanimity, but I didn’t. I struggled; I railed against it. I got angry, I got disappointed, I wallowed in self-pity. I argued with myself and those around me: should I practice, should I not, should I teach, what was I going to do if I didn’t…and so on. I am sure I was quite intolerable and it was certainly a disorienting time. Stripping away identity is never a comfortable process.

Thankfully, this period didn’t last long. As I let go of yoga, both practice and teaching, the layers of rigid identity around it all started dissolving. Something inside freed up. In the emerging space, I felt the pull back. Yoga called me back.

Coming back to the mat, to personal practice and then to teaching, I felt different. The discipline, founded on judgments and wrapped up tightly in identity, that had held me was gone. In its place was the sweet, subtle pull of pure love. I came to my practice (asana, meditation, contemplation, writing) from a deep desire to be, to be myself and to be with myself. My practice now is less demanding, I do fewer advanced asana. I do more restorative poses and I do longer Savasanas. I sit longer and more regularly in meditation. I “do” less and my practice feels more and more and more. And the best part, on the days when there is no practice or less practice than I desire, I am kind, gentle and tender with myself. I allow the sadness and longing to be there and to pull me back into the arms of practice at the next available opportunity. I let myself love myself in and out of the space of practice. I hold devotion and longing in the place of criticism and judgment.