So much has happened since I first started this project. At first a study of habit, yoga ended up transforming into a core aspect of my life. I want to say that I “feel” like I am a completely different person and that somehow came about as a result of yoga, but it’s oh, so much deeper than that.
Naturally, I was a completely different person when I first came to the practice. I was younger and in a lot of pain. I carried so much of my past with me. My sense of self wasn’t lost nor was it waning. It was entirely nonexistent. If I could use two words to describe who I was, they’d be heartbroken and lost. Not even heartbroken in a romantic sense, though that was part of it. I’ve lost so much along my journey and endured so much pain that my heart began to fracture at the mere idea of knowing happiness. Eventually, it became who I was.
I shied away from all my relationships and the true treasures of life. It felt like I needed to start over. A new beginning was needed. But after so many years of traveling, moving, being on the road and living in one place or another, it seemed like there was nowhere left to start over. My back was against the wall, and I was running out of emotional places to go. Maybe it truly was time to reconcile my endless thoughts and deepest feelings.
Even now, it’s extremely difficult to convey to friends and family just how important the practice is to me. Just like everything else I do in life, I dove into yoga headfirst. For a person like me, full immersion is always the best way. As a beginner, I often wondered: Is it a philosophy? A shape? A discipline, a practice, a theory, or just a common denominator which people use to say they’re cut from the same cloth? Then, the more I learned from and encountered other people who practiced yoga, the truth came to me almost surreptitiously. Nobody has a damned clue what they’re doing. A disappointing and hard lesson for me to learn that yoga is not a singular lens.
Ultimately, I settled on a much simpler interpretation. Yoga is simply my way of observing myself and my place in the world. It has become wholly personal. The deeper I sunk into the practice, the more I realized I could never be a teacher. Maybe my curse is that I can only ever know what it means to me. And so I quickly grew out of the expectation that others would hold certain aspects of the practice equally.
I’m not here for the superficial or to behold others. I’m here to explore. To move deep into the very fiber of what it means to be present for a journey. I’ve always seen the world as something much larger than myself.
I would classify yoga as an art more than anything else. Art has a way of capturing the very essence of the human condition. What it means to exist. And try as we might, we cannot entirely abandon the ego, because once we do we cease to be sudden. We put our karmic creditors on notice that we intend to skip town. There is no breaking free from wheel of karma. So if we cannot escape, the solution to me then, is that we must acclimate and adapt to the nature of nature. This is the true presence.
I’m not here to undermine the teachings of sages and gurus. But my lived experience is the highest truth I know. And if anybody reading this knows me, I don’t put anyone on a pedestal. Nobody walked on water. Nor have they levitated above the Earth higher than the rest of us. Gravity is inevitable. I was built to perceive. This is why the practice is so compatible with who I am. When I’m on my mat, it transports me to a liminal space where I can commune with evident awareness. This is what it means to transform into a witness.
As a consequence of discipline, yoga has given me access to the tools to manage my many sufferings. Not circumvent them, but to greet them the same as I do my blessings. My journey lead me to realize that things don’t happen to me. Or anyone else for that matter. Things just happen. Anticlimactic and boring, I know. But maybe a rock is just a rock. And life is just life. In this vein, I think it’s important not to take things like love, death, or even friendship personal. All beginnings have an end. Both good and bad. I don’t want the world defined to me. The universe is its own definition.
Lately, I’ve engaged way more meaningfully with my mental and emotional health. Learned more about myself. To keep it all together definitely takes work. Yoga is also a lot of that. But through this constant work, I’ve almost completely recovered from a life-changing injury. I am constantly becoming better than who I was. I’m beginning to know peace. I’ve accepted that things won’t be the same. And when I inevitably fail in my endeavors, I’m no longer afraid to start over.
Notwithstanding the lessons learned and many benefits, there’s always so much more room for improvement and discovery. This is theyogicastronaut. Here we are experts at losing everything. We’re not exploring the universe. We are exploring the self.
Worry is the state we conquer.