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Life is short and so is this column. What
does yoga mean to me? I’ll cut right to the chase!
I grew up in a Southern fundamentalist family in which spiritual
questions were conveniently pre-asked and answered by the church.
Life’s rules were simple and concrete. All one had to do
was believe and obey.
However, even as a child I never could quite believe. When I hit
adolescence in the early 70’s, I stopped obeying as well.
I ran away from home and had a son at age 16. In crisis, I was
desperate to make some sense out of this mess I called my life.
Looking to my childhood religion for answers, I felt condemned
and hopeless. So, I began searching.
I went to my first yoga class in 1974 –age 18. At that point,
I was bulimic and so disconnected from my body (which I’d
learned was dangerous and untrustworthy) that the invitation to
unite body and spirit was more than I could fathom. Yet, some
part of me got it. I felt the spark right away –a deep quiet
inside, a craved-for seed of peacefulness.
For the next 15 years, this yogic seed germinated slowly as I
began the arduous process of removing various obstacles left in
the wake of my troubled adolescence. I married, went to school,
worked, and raised my son. I got into therapy (think many years
and many kinds), studied Jungian psychology, and became very interested
in women’s spirituality.
In 1991, during another life crisis (a divorce) I went to Kripalu
Yoga Center for retreat. It was then that I really "got"
how our bodies are not impediments to our psycho-spiritual development,
as I’d always believed, but are integral to wholeness. As
Marilyn Sewell put it, "The body has its own way of knowing,
a knowing that has little to do with logic and much to do with
truth, little to do with control and much to do with acceptance,
little to do with division and analysis and much to do with union."
Since then, studying and practicing yoga have become the center
of my life.
Yogic philosophy offers two complementary paths: Viyoga: analyzing
and freeing oneself from obstacles to illumination, and Samyoga:
cultivating the Light within. We need to follow both for our wholeness.
I spent the first part of my adult life practicing viyoga; self
analysis, looking at what had gone so wrong and working to rectify
it. For the last 13 years I’ve blended in increasing doses
of samyoga. In 1996, to my amazement, I became a YogaRhythmics®
teacher (and promptly quit my job as a management consultant)
because I’d never found anything that nourished my inner
light as generously as sacred dance. Two years ago I began teaching
Anusara yoga and I walk out of class most days feeling so lit
up and lucky I have to pinch myself.
Yoga has offered me a way to integrate all of who I am -- light
and dark, wise and clueless, rigid and resilient, faith-filled
and questioning. It teaches me to treat myself and others with
greater compassion. And as I learn ways to connect with the Light
within me, I have more and more fun!
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