It’s been years since I journeyed from Massachusetts to West Virginia. Before that, it was North Carolina to Rhode Island. And before that, from Maryland to North Carolina. Each time I set out it was with the great expectation that when I got where I was going, I’d find something better than what I was leaving. Something brighter, a little easier. Each time, though, what I found was more of what I’d left. Packaged a little differently, perhaps, but very much the same at the center. Do you know this story? Have you roamed, figuratively or literally, without, when all the while what was really needed was to roam a little deeper inward?
I have spent much of my life seduced by claims of the wonder of moving on, and not only from my physical surroundings. Recently I dug out an essay called “Homeplace” by Scott Russell Sanders that I used to teach during my time as a college English teacher. He writes, “If you are not yourself placed, then you wander the world like a sightseer, a collector of sensations, with no gauge for measuring what you see… ‘The man who is often thinking that it is better to be somewhere else than where he is excommunicates himself,’ we are cautioned by Thoreau…The metaphor is religious: To withhold yourself from where you are is to be cut off from communion with the source.” I have grown, after nearly half a lifetime, to see the value of being placed geographically, but that really isn’t the true gift at all of what I’ve learned about this idea. I am learning the great need to be placed, rooted in my body deeply, and that when I am I get to know the terrain—the easy to travel places and the shadowy, harder to navigate ones—that are all part of me. I am learning to be placed in my body, to let it be my home, and to make the fierce journey inward that is required in getting to know myself with great compassion. This isn’t important for me alone: coming home to these places in me, gives me the ability then to recognize and connect to the shadowy, difficult places in others.
“Yoga is anything but fluffy,” I heard Seane Corn say in an On Being podcast interview with Krista Tippet. The journey in yoga is a fierce one, one that requires that we “embrace the light and shadow equally” as Corn says. Coming into our body requires deep attention and a willingness to see what really is in every moment. Sometimes, seeing what really is, quite frankly, is a real bummer. Often times, I don’t want to be rooted in this body, with all of its scars—physical and emotional. But there is no separation between mind and body, so everything I don’t face or try to run away from is everything I can’t move through or let go of; and everything I can’t let go of gets stored on a cellular level and is just as toxic for my body as eating lousy or staying physically inert.
When I first heard Corn teach on the mat she said, “Breathe and everything changes.” I really got this—got that if anxiety comes up during a pose because of deep sensations, or because the pose was releasing something I’d long held in my body or because of fear or anxiety around my performance, if I can breathe and stay present, I can learn to trust that the anxiety and sensation will eventually change. And this is where the fierceness is required, because trusting in that change, staying present during the sucky part of it, can be anything but fun. My practice has taught me this. Sometimes it’s the long held yin pose and sometimes it’s the too-challenging arm balance. The way I react and talk to myself is far more often with the language or reactions of moving away—often running away as fast as I can. But then what? That pain, frustration, tension just seems to move along with me in every encounter on the mat and off. Talk about a bummer. I can’t move away from my body even if I divorce my mind from the situation any more than I can move away from fears and anxieties by changing geography.
I’ve had to learn to be fierce in my commitment to staying. I do not want to merely collect sensations or be a sightseer in this lifetime, moving from experience to experience without allowing any of it to reshape me. Life happens, and sometimes life is really unpleasant, but how I react has the ability to not only empower my life, but to unite me to the experience of everyone else who crosses my path. Getting rooted in my body and learning to stay, to trust that I can breathe and get to know whatever comes up, is teaching me that change comes when I get closer, move in and watch compassionately all that comes at me and up from within me, not when I pinch my eyes shut and run away. This isn’t easy. Every time I think I’ve learned to do this, something happens and I have to learn it again. Sometimes this lesson is easier in the controlled environment I call my yoga practice, but it’s in the fierceness of this practice that clarity begins. And from this clarity I’ve come to see that this isn’t a practice that I do; rather the practice has become a journey that is very much undoing me.
