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If it weren’t for yoga, I would be dead. I don’t mean I would have committed suicide; I’m too much a coward for that, although the thought did cross my mind at one time. What I do mean is, if it weren’t for yoga, I would be dead in other ways. I would be one of the living dead. My energy and vitality would have been lost. I would never have learned to love my body and allow it to be so healthy. My creativity would have never soared, expanding into recording, drawing, creative writing, and teaching. I would never have learned to relax, breathe, and find a quiet place within myself to rest from all the hectic craziness of life. I would not have found a way to soothe, comfort, and love myself. I would never have found my soulmate, and I would not have a fabulous love life. I would never have taught yoga, and I would not have been able to bring this soothing peace to others. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually, I would be dead. I have always been by nature an antsy, restless, impatient person. Never sat down, always had to be producing something, always had to be on top of things. I once bragged that I did more in a day then most people do in a week. I had no idea what it meant to relax. My mother’s role model was one of anxiety, impatience, and guilt. So I was not only hyper, but I also worried and felt guilty that I was never doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. I went around for thirty years with a hard knot in my heart and a lump in my throat. Finally, in the mid-90s, during the time of my divorce, I hit rock bottom. I knew I needed to take a new direction in my life. I had read that meditation was good for a Type A personality, but when I tried it, I discovered I couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes without going batty. I had started reading about the popularity of yoga, when out of the blue, someone recommended a great yoga teacher to me, and I knew it was something I had to try. So there I was in my first yoga class, nervous as hell. We immediately began moving in strange ways I had never moved before. You want me to put my foot where? My body did not want to go where the instructor told me to put it. I felt awkward, uncomfortable, and out of my element. But I persevered. By the second class, I already began to notice how wonderful my body felt during and after the postures. I was stretching out muscles and relieving tension that I didn’t even know I had. I felt like I was waking up from a bad dream. A kind of soothing healing energy started to flow into the tight, achy, anxious places in my body, places that had felt dead. They started to open up. Lymph, blood, nerve impulses, energy all flowing and creating a soft, smooth, balanced euphoria. I didn’t know it at the time, but since then, I have discovered that our bodies carry the memory of past traumas, painful accidents, and injuries — both physical and emotional — deep in our muscles and organs, long after the episode has occurred. When I started doing yoga, I began to move deeply into these hidden places where I had buried my pain, and I began to release it. I first learned how to just feel the ache and simply be aware of it, without avoiding it. As I learned to breathe more deeply, I started being able to let go of the tension consciously. My stretches naturally deepened without even trying. I learned to exhale out the tightness, to give it away. I was releasing my own neuroses. I had begun to heal myself. And the breathing — that was even more amazing than the poses! About the third class, the instructor told us we were going to learn how to breathe. How silly, I thought, I already know how to breathe! She asked me to simply sit there with my eyes closed and do nothing but become aware of my breath. Without changing it, just become aware — letting it be what it was and just following it in and out. I had never done that before. I was startled to notice that my breath was ragged, that I was gasping at the end of the inhale and cutting it short. Then she told me to consciously slow down and smooth out the breath, deepening it. Slowly I began to draw in a breath that was much deeper than anything I had ever experienced. I filled my entire lungs with air from top to bottom, opening up my torso, straightening out my posture, and it felt wonderful. Then she asked me to breathe with my belly, inhaling and letting the belly gently expand as it filled with air. She said it worked automatically to calm you, just the way a baby naturally breathes. Perhaps I had done it as a baby, but never in my adult life had I breathed that way. I had gone around my whole life trying to suck in my belly. But now she was telling me to let my belly softly rise like a balloon when I inhaled and then let it fall on the exhale. After doing this for only three breaths, I felt so relaxed and euphoric, I was floating. Until then, I didn’t know that all my life, my breathing had been shallow. It was like a miracle for me. Another miracle was learning to balance. In the fourth or fifth class, my yogi had us do Tree pose. I was embarrassed to discover that I couldn’t balance on one leg. Not only were my muscles too weak, but my mind was too scattered. I was too inside my head. I let my wobbly classmates affect my balance and I kept wondering how I looked (which made me fall). I couldn’t stop the flood of thoughts. I didn’t know how to focus, to come back to the present, to the here and now. It took two years before I could balance. One day, I just went up on one leg and stood there for many long, slow breaths, as steady as a tree rooted deeply in the ground. I have been able to do it ever since. Since that time, I have made it my life’s work to study, practice, and teach others the wonders of yoga. I have begun to see that yoga is much more than a superb form of exercise that can heal your physical body — it is actually a deeply spiritual practice. I have found that yoga is an excellent metaphor for life. Yoga is completely and unabashedly revealing. Whatever problems I have in my life, they will show up on my yoga mat. My practice directly mirrors and reflects all aspects of my life. When my life is out of balance, I fall out of Tree pose. When I am too busy and I am a human doing instead of a human being, I am unable to sit still in Easy pose. When my mind is overactive, I can’t breathe slowly and deeply in Mountain pose. When I am acting the coward and unable to cope, I am weak and wobbly in Warrior pose. When I am impatient, I hate staying in Butterfly pose. When I am being stubborn and inflexible in my life, I can’t release deeply into Earth pose. The work I do on my yoga mat is like practicing for dealing with real life but in a safe, secure, comforting environment. Here I can learn to be patient and just sit quietly with my awkwardness and discomfort — to have that be okay, to just really feel it. I can develop strength and flexibility when I need it, quiet focus of thought, and an ability to balance many things at once. I can learn to work hard, play at my edge, and relax deeply. I can learn to not try too hard and yet to challenge myself. I can learn the subtleties and nuances of the mind-body-spirit connection, to see how focusing the mind on the movement and on the breath make the work so much more effective and beneficial. Yoga can heal the suffering I have experienced from the self-estrangement that pervades society, leading me to a new sense of purpose and a more satisfying life. In the second century BCE, over four thousand years ago, the great Indian sage Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras, an ancient codification of the path of liberation through yoga. In it, he emphasized the quieting and stilling of the mind through three steps: concentration (focus), mediation, and contemplation. Through these steps, true insight can occur in a process of positive awareness, leading to the ultimate goal of yoga — union with the greater Oneness, the supreme spirit, of which we are all a part. In Hinduism, this state of unified bliss is called samadhi, and in Zen Buddhism, satori. The realization of this state is possible by practicing hatha yoga, right now, today, even in the midst of our crazy-making culture. The practice of yoga is ultimately about finding the true self, seeing it as it really is, and accepting it fully. Loving yourself enough to allow it all to be revealed and then forgiving yourself for past wrongs. It is about the liberation of the self. It occurs through direct experience by honoring and following your own experience of things rather than what someone else tells you, having the courage to go deeply inside and see the truth, and letting the truth set you free. This is why yoga is so sacred to me, why it is so precious. It has brought back my life. And I love all my students for having the courage to come back to the mat over and over again to work. I honor them for the strength it takes to reveal themselves and to see reality as it truly is. Kathy Walker is a hatha yoga instructor, creative freelance writer, and fledgling artist. She teaches yoga at The Integrated Being Wellness Center (in Lynnwood), Tukwila Community Center, and Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church, where she established the first Adult Education program in yoga. Kathy is also producing a recording of her guided relaxations, soon to be available. For more information, contact <kannwalker@aol.com>. |