Reflections on my 4th and 5th week

Reflections on my fourth and fifth week of not teaching

This has been the week of a “good cry ”for me. Totally unexpected –yet it makes sense. Totally unexpected, I have found myself crying in my yoga practice. I am comforted by knowing that I am not the only one who is crying. In some ways, our whole nation is crying. Crying for the victims of Katrina. Crying for the devastation and power of Mother Nature. Crying for the unfairness of poverty and the distrust of those who are our leaders. Many are still crying for 9/11 and the painful losses of loved ones that still hurts and leaves holes and gaps in their every day lives.

As a country, I felt we are all tired this week. I felt it when I looked at the prices on the gas pumps, when I happened to catch the news, when I looked around at all of our yoga students and saw the tight shoulders and necks and jaws. I felt as if we are all feeling vulnerability and rawness.

To me, crying is not comfortable territory. I know that it is a wonderful release and even benefit from the releases that my infrequent crying jags can bring on, but still, I don’t cry often or easily. I almost never cry at a movie or cry because someone else is sad even though I might feel their sadness. As a child, I remember wanting to cry a lot but I never would. Instead I would suffocate the cries deep in my throat. It is surely not a coincidence that during my childhood, I many times came down with strep throat.

As an adult, I don’t usually cry but, this week I did and I attribute it to the amount of really good yoga I have been doing on my time off . I not only attribute the conditions for me to cry to come from the yoga but also from being tired and vulnerable and uncertain about our world. I attribute the conditions for crying to come from being brought outside of my comfortable box.

For the past 5 weeks I have been doing a lot of yoga. Every day. On great days, I practice more than once. I have been allowing myself to sink into my practice, not think about any thing other than the moment and the breath I am taking in that moment. My yoga time has become sacred and uniquely mine again. I feel open and truthful to myself.

When the tears came this week in a very gentle seated wide angle forward fold, I knew they were tears of release. As a yogi and a yoga teacher, I am no stranger to the benefits of tears in a yoga practice. But even with that first hand knowledge, I still wanted to push them away and shut them off and I knew in that moment that I had the power to do so. Fortunately I resisted that first urge and actually had a brief conversation with my “witness”, that part of me that observes myself with out judgement. The witness was very direct. She told me, “Go with the crying. See where it brings you. Do not go into fear or on automatic pilot.”

So I did just that. I cried and did yoga and cried some more. I felt waves of sadness and disappointment so intensely. At some point I realized that I was also crying for the girl that I was and the woman that I am who won’t let her feelings out and feels overly responsible for having to have the appearance of holding it all together. I cried for the girl and woman who does not allow others to comfort her. I felt sadness and an understanding of my self all in the same moment.

After I was done crying, I felt great. I had the best yoga practice I could remember and even got into some postures in a way that I had never experienced before. Following this practice of crying and yoga, I wiped my tears off and immediately taught a 2 hour hot sweaty yoga class to the Yoga Teacher Training(YTT) Students. Teaching felt so right and so clean and easy.

I look out at the world and I see how beautiful the mornings are this time of year in New England. How grateful I am for my morning walks and yoga. My morning practice begins in darkness and ends in the most glorious light of the day. For that I am truly blessed.