A change is gonna come. I see it now. ~ A Change I Gonna Come, Seal.
At first, I fit
yoga into my life. Now, I fit my life into yoga.
And once upon a time, I never
even did yoga.
That time is hard to imagine now.
What did I do before? I fill so much of my time with yoga that there’s hardly
any room left in a day, and I wonder how I filled it before.
Change is challenging for me, and
so taking up something like yoga, and doing it as frequently as I do, is something
I would never have anticipated. I usually like to do the same thing I’ve always
done, even if now I can’t remember what exactly that was.
I am a creature of habit,
as my son likes to point out. I find a restaurant I love, and it’s the only
place I want to go. I’m at a job where lots of people come and go, but I tease
everyone that I will be the last one standing. I’m the only one of my siblings
who has remained local and, in fact, I raised my children right down the street
from where I grew up.
Nothing stays the same, Mom, my daughter tells me.
This
is something she already knows as a young adult, but it’s something I’ve only
come to recognize at a much later date. And I’m not sure how this is so, because
not much has been status quo.
At
yoga, I’ve learned that we have a front body and a back body. I never knew this
until I was instructed to breathe into my back body. I didn’t know I even had a
back body and, even though I might have been asking the obvious, I had to be
shown where it was. The part I breathe into is behind my heart, and when I
breathe in this direction, I can expand the area on my back between my
shoulders. I can do the opposite, too, and breathe into my front body, filling
my lungs and lifting my heart.
I
just have to know in which direction, and then all I have to do is breathe.
How
else to adapt to change? None of us can remain the same, and I don’t think
we’re supposed to, either. I used to think the goal was to get settled into
whatever the most settled place would be, but now I know differently. Even my
practice changes, from where I practice, to how I practice, to when I practice.
Change happens
and, I think, even though it’s not always easy, it’s best to do as I do in the
practice, and that’s to go with the flow. It’s the only way to stay in the
game.
It’s
the only way forward.
So
now what I do is return my daughter’s wisdom, and when she wants to know what’s
next, I reassure her with my own experience that it’s not always necessary to
know. All that’s needed to know is that something is next,
and what it is can be discovered upon arrival.
We
were in Pigeon pose the other day, and I lay there in a heap after an hour of
practice. I welcomed the rest, and I breathed into my back body. This is a pose
in which we are encouraged to let go and, if the instructor says something at
this point, it’s usually along these lines.
Let go of something, he said. Only you know what that is.
Then
he made a few suggestions, one of which caused me to raise my head from my
heap.
Maybe you have a 40-year-plan that you have to
let go, even if you don’t know what’s next.
I
think he was talking to me! Just becoming a yogi was a big change in itself
and, if I think about it, that transformation should prove to me that I’m able
to adapt to other changes, too. It just takes me a little while to settle into
something new as I have a tendency to look more backward than forward.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it
must be lived forwards.
These
are not the words of the yoga instructor; instead, they belong to the Danish
philosopher and theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. It’s my guess that he knew he
had a front and back body, too. He wrote these words in the 1800s, but I find them
to be true today as I do my best to move my practice forward and move myself
forward, too.
