My yoga journey began in 1997 and this in and of itself was not a marker in my life. The situation in which I discovered yoga was although now has been gently erased off my table of contents. There in lies the brilliance of yoga. Don't you find it interesting how sometimes we work through something only to discover what seems like decades (literally and figuratively) later, there it is.......served up differently yet uniquely the same.
So there I am facing the wall in Warrior 2 last week. Pressing the darn foam block into the wall with my front shin. My heel is ever so slightly lifted so that I can slip a piece of paper under it. This ensures my arches are enlivened, I am connected to pelvic floor and yes, folks, even my hamstrings are invited to this unalluring yoga party......and then there is my left psoas. Yep my left psoas. I believe this sucker has not been released since the early 70's but who am I to know exactly when it got bundled up in knots?? Well there it was....releasing while the rest of my physicality was raging in some sort of emotional tirade. You know the kind........the 'when-are-my-muscles-gonna-burst-into-flames-or-give-out-and-you-over there-come-here-so-I-can-kick-you-in-the-face-just-because' kind of way. Some of you call this 'tapping out'. Yet there is the psoas....releasing. Releasing a toxicity I have not had in years.....ok.....not ever. I felt the healing blood flow toss its life preserver as the undercurrent of my experience while the swirling emotions created a multi-colored mirage of chaos much like gasoline leaking from a boat's outboard engine on lake water. (I know, I know....y'all are excited to drop down and execute the psoas wake-up. Not sure where or what your psoas is? Allow me to introduce to you where it resides when you come to my class. It will be invigorating. Promise. Anyway.....back to the gasoline swirl)
I could feel the muscle grasping for the tightness it once held yet yearning more for the release it was now experiencing. It was a yes-no-yes-no tug of war on grasping for the old compensatory pattern and clinging to its new found freedom of existence. You could hear this experience all the way up in my throat as it strangulated my speech while I tried to articulate all this to my yoga partner who ever so calmly and lovingly told me to just sit with the emotion. Even though all I was describing was the elation of the physical release--it was the first time my thigh bone was allowed to drop and the front of my left hip to feel joyous freedom--the emotional wapatoolie party was catching in my throat trying to find a new place to cling to.
I spent the next few hours in a car.....alone.....driving in the dark......feeling this ultimate cage fight of should I hold on or let go? My left psoas, on its own emotional path yet apart of mine, was still wrestling with grasping tight or living in what now appears to be freedom. I have been told that all trauma is stored in the posas. I will have to agree. I used to think the hips. Let me tell you, the potential cesspool of the hips have NOTHING on the psoas. I've worked through many dramas and traumas of the hips and found it to be cheap therapy: mind, body and soul able to release and heal. In order to heal we need to feel. Well the psoas, your largest hop flexor, is the gold medal champ at FEELING.
Well there I was on my drive home......feeling......yep, just feeling. It was as if my life book of bullet points....all those defining moments.....the good, the bad, the ugly and the brilliant were all happening all over again......both individually and all at once in a cacophony of deafening and liberating thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Feeling the inner depths of stagnation of the dark and the ugly defining moments and at the same time experiencing the exhilaration of my life's victories. What was intriguing was discovering how deeply rooted the traumas were. They still could level me and take my breath away. They still had the power to invoke sights and smells and even recreate the inner turmoil like I was in the thick of it.
I am thankful for all that has happened in my life. It has made me uniquely me. I am grateful for developing a meditation practice that has taught me to sit with things in such a still, loving and profound way. I was able to hold this experience and create space for it. Space that lasted several days and still lingers. I feel freer knowing that I am aware and choosing to let it go; being brave enough to let it heal. It is a scary place to re-encounter your inner demons, especially those you believed to have already been dismissed. To meander through the forest of whether or not you invited them back or perhaps excused yourself too early from their company because you were simply too exhausted to stay in their presence to achieve reconciliation.... or.......maybe you left early because everyone around told you it's time so they would no longer feel uncomfortable with your pain or perhaps, they had their own timeline they persuaded you to follow.
Yoga allows that space and that time whether you decide to take advantage of it or not. It gives you permission to work through it or celebrate it and hopefully one day both. It is a forever timeline. When you are ready, there it is....offering you the opportunity. Yoga provides us all the tools to gently begin to erase the deep and the dark moments so that one day they eventually become just a gray smear on our page of contents.....only recognizable to us. These tools allow us to see just how much we are trusting God or not trusting Him to handle our stuff and love us unconditionally. It is our own process, yet also a collective community moving through life together.
Yoga is not about being bendy. It’s about showing up to your mat consistently not knowing what is going to happen and being ok with that. It’s about rehabilitating yourself and not believing the ‘experts’ when they say you are too injured or too old, or it's about time you moved on. It’s about believing that you can do anything, even if its the most scariest, impossible thing you could ever dream of. It's about uncovering who you really are. It’s about connecting to God so you can be kind to yourself in order to then be kind to others. Yoga is about discovering that most of the crazy thoughts in your head are not true. It’s about being healthy without pushing yourself to your limit. It’s about slowing down to get strong. It's about breathing and moving and smiling on the inside. It’s the hardest thing I have ever done, but also the best. It is the journey that continues for a lifetime.
Namaste.
Onward.
Trish
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