Yoga and sorrow

My first clue was the title of the opening lecture: "Turning Poison into Nectar."

Sigh.

I wrote here that I intended to leave my sorrow at home when I left for the mountains. I can sort of laugh at that intention now because I knew better.  Of course I did.  But I couldn't admit that then. That's not how life works, and it's not what yoga is about. 

My first class was with Seane Corn.  Anyone who's even minimally studied yoga in America knows the name, but I had no personal experience with her.  The class was about establishing a firm foundation in vinyasa flow - a technical class with no emotional content hinted at in the brochure. (Read: nice and safe.)  Instead we simply gathered at the front of the room for the first half of class, listening to our teacher speak.

"The pose is not the yoga; yoga is the inner state the pose creates."

"We are attracted to our deepest wounds...and those people, who bring us to our knees, become our greatest teachers."

*gulp*  Ok.  I am listening.

She participated in a panel discussion the next afternoon, "The Yoga of Relationship" with David Swenson and Gary Kraftsow. I couldn't write fast enough, but from my scribbles and scratches I decipher this:

"Some relationships we choose, and some choose us."

"We can't know acceptance without devastation...compassion unless we know loss."

"What you are seeking is already inside you."

Their words in those moments led me to run to the registration desk and pay $10 to change my very next session to Seane's class titled, "Yoga for a Broken Heart."  I'd come close to registering for it to begin with but I'll be honest: to think of what that class would bring up for me was something I didn't want to deal with.  My heart was pounding and I was already blinking back tears as I walked to the classroom, but I knew I had done my heart's bidding.

A group of strangers moved off their mats and gathered again around our teacher at the front of the room. A teacher, who only wears black tanks, black cotton pants and no makeup, the epitome of simplicity and unpretentiousness, is an almost unbearably fierce and powerful presence.  A teacher who sat and talked about lying in bed with her father as he died from cancer, having the goodbye conversation a total of nine times. She said, "By the ninth conversation I was 100% present.  It was normalized.  There was no more fear, shame, or uncomfortableness surrounding the realities of living, of suffering, and of dying."  Her father, also a yoga teacher, told her she would teach this class after he died, gifting to her students a safe space to have these conversations.  She told him to fuck off; he laughed.  (Yes, our yoga teacher drops the f-bomb.)  One year out from her father's death, she now teaches the class. 

I felt my heart entering into the suffering of my brothers and sisters on the path as they spoke of their deepest wounds.  I recognized their immersion in that raw and vast newness of grief, which I moved through so many years ago but remember so nearly.  As I breathed and as I moved my body through the asanas, I found myself dedicating my practice to the heartaches of those in the room, to the friend I said goodbye to, to the men who loved and then stopped loving me, toward the man I married and divorced, to Derek who died, to God Himself.  A long and varied flash of faces ran through my mind as I conversed with my heart through the practice.  This was exactly what both my joy and my sorrow needed. An open and ecstatic space to experience love and gratitude for those who bless my existence today. A safe and welcome space to enter my sorrow, to be 100% present with my body and all the places within where she was holding on, at a cellular level, to these sadnesses. And then, to enter a place of forgiveness.  For them.  For me.  For God.  For all of it.


The single line that I managed to write down through my tears was, "The fact that I hurt so bad meant that I got to love that big." 

Imagine raising your hands to the sky at the beginning of a sun salutation.  Bringing your palms together in prayer.  Drawing them down through the third eye (ajna chakra, the intuition or wisdom center at your brow), down through your heart, and folding to the ground.  Your teacher walks among you as she speaks through her own tears:

"We must process our pain...we don't withhold from it.  We bring our pain fully into this moment.  We bring it thus far - no further.  And we release it into the earth."