Life is a journey. Whether we cultivate deep roots to stand firm, strategically maneuver in orchestrated campaigns, or carelessly cavort on the whim of impulse, forces greater than our paltry schemes compel us to drift with the current. We can try to hold on, or at least steer, or float along fully aware of not only the futility of other options, but steadily anticipating the multitude of blessings which will infuse us if we welcome them along with the hardships we cannot control.
When you live life in this way you develop a sense of where you are being taken before you arrive. I have had that feeling many times in my life. I knew I’d take thousands upon thousands of photos the first time a camera was literally dropped into my lap at eighteen at a wedding, even though I didn’t take another picture or buy a camera for another seven years. I knew I’d be an engineer in the seventh grade, the first time I heard there was such a thing, even though I didn’t know what it was. I knew I’d take years and years of jump shots the first time a basketball was placed in my hands as a toddler, even though I was too small to conceive of how strong I’d need to be to throw it that high. I knew from so far back I can’t recall I’d eventually practice yoga.
I was delivered to RB Yoga in late 2014. After seeing the marquee for the umpteenth time, it spoke to me. I had recently retired from full time employment, partially because my job for the last twenty years involved torturously long plane rides and sitting for hours in meetings, which had left me with poor circulation in my calves and pre-arthritic hips. A trip to help one of my daughters move into an apartment revealed how stiff my shoulders were. After two days of Ikea furniture assembling, I couldn’t lift my arms above them! Add my feet, which are completely flat and were never flexible even when I was young, and three bicycle rides a week to help knot every muscle from the waist down, and I saw someone in supreme need of yoga.
So, when I started taking a beginner’s class with Lori Cota, the purpose was to increase my flexibility. I thought so little of yoga as a workout, I would ride my bike before class, to make sure I wasn’t losing fitness substituting one for the other. That lasted a couple of months, until I realized yoga was the perfect companion to biking, both were moving meditations which synergized each other. And what led to that conclusion was Lori was not as concerned about the quality of the stretching I was doing as the quality of the breathing I was doing.
Yoga, after the first few sessions, was revealed to be the attainment of controlled, relaxed breathing more than flexibility, and the greatest gains in flexibility would come only after the breathing was deepened, mastered, glorified. Poses were learned, balance was explored, muscles were toned, but all was meaningless without the breath. The awareness of the breath, where it goes on the inhale, what it does as it dissolves into the lungs, what it releases from the body and mind on the exhale. It is the breath that cleanses, the breath that strengthens, the breath that informs. After practicing more than a year in her class, Lori suggested I take Jeanne Stone’s Wednesday morning All Levels class. My body still felt like a beginner’s, but at least I had reached the point where I knew what I was trying to do, even if I still couldn’t do it. As with the beginner’s class, I felt the atmosphere was welcoming and my class mates were helpful, and after a few sessions yoga began to mean something else to me entirely. It was no longer about better breathing or greater flexibility, those were just the side effects.
The purpose of yoga is to help foster compassion. Compassion for myself and the fragile shell in which I am housed; compassion for my fellow travelers, as all of us are suffering from the same limitations that comprise being human; compassion for all things in the universe, living or dead or yet to live. The compassion to share. Compassion as defined by sympathy, empathy, concern, kindness, consideration, care, and benevolence. Compassion is the antidote to suffering and lights the way to true joyfulness.
A compassionate person is more flexible. A compassionate person remembers to breathe. A compassionate person can rejoice in their successes and laugh at their failures equally, aware both are blessings to be experienced and not obstacles to be avoided. It does not matter if I can stand on my head, or on one leg with my arms stretched out, or do the splits like a cheerleader. I can try and fail, try and succeed, or not try at all; with compassion. I can be strong when I fall and accept my rewards with humility. I can use the gift of yoga to help keep me buoyant as the current churns.
I do not plan to stop attending a beginner’s class, no matter how skilled I become in yoga. I will always consider myself an initiate, needing the instruction given to a novice, and needing the humility only a novice can harness, to propel me along the path I have not set for myself, but the one which will lead me to my best future self. It is not a competition. No one who has ever been born or will ever be born can be on this course and fare better or worse. It is my journey and mine alone, and I am grateful for any compassion I acquire along the way.
Thank you, RB Yoga, all the teachers and students, for helping to provide it.
