What is Yoga? I can only speak for myself.
What is yoga? I can only speak for myself.
* * *
It’s summertime by the beach, somewhere up north. I’m ten or eleven. The women have walked over the sand dunes - me, mum, aunty and cousin - to a small community hall. Mum invited me, I said Okay. There are quiet, welcoming smiles as we enter the wooden building, and sandalwood incense burning. The teacher wears colourful tights - I watch her bare feet as she visits me often - helping me to make each slow shape, encouraging deep and even breathing. She gives me a smile and says Thank you for joining us.
We walk back to our campsite in evening sunshine.
* * *
In my clinic, my hand rests on her sacrum, curled over a bolster in balasana. This woman has had 7 miscarriages, and is pregnant again. 28 weeks. I book out time in my diary, before our weekly sessions. Just 5 minutes to set my intention, breathe steadiness and compassion into my bodymind. Then I can be alongside her, hold the space for her grief and fear. I can see clearly what we can try today for whatever she’s immersed in this week: pain at the pubic symphysis, an achey back, sore hips turning in bed. In a gentle supine twist, she is bolstered and held by blankets. We are both delighted to feel the baby move.
* * *
I’m 18 and training to be an Actor. There is definitely a capital ‘A’. At NIDA each Saturday morning we have 2 hours of Ashtanga yoga practice, led by a teacher whose spirit is playful, warm-hearted, and forceful. I learn that sometimes discomfort is a warning, sometimes an invitation. There is a new internal discipline here. I’m alone with this practice, without the insidious comparative atmosphere of Drama School, worrying that I’ll never work or be any good. With fewer choices - follow the series, breathe - I feel free. Maybe there’s something else, beyond making art, that could satisfy this longing for contact.
* * *
In my early 20’s, I’m a passionate expression of Yang. Two kinds of football, sprint triathlon, 100km trails, ocean swimming at 6am, basketball, bootcamp… Over-achieving at uni, student theatre, working for rent, falling in love and wrestling with painful/joyful universal truths at every turn. Like carrying on with my life, knowing that my mother has breast cancer.
In the Anusara studio near my share-house, I make spirals instead of straight lines. Lean back from trying all the time. I learn to allow the body, the breath, to do the work I always thought was mine to perform. Singing mantra in a room of strangers - Om Namah Shivaya - makes me at first awkward, then grateful, then happy, then nothing - and blissfully so.
* * *
Breathe in - smell the flower! Breathe out - blow out the candles! My two year-old daughter loves yoga. She teaches it to her preschool friends, shows me the poses she has invented, tells everyone Mummy is a yoga teacher! - though really I’m just a physiotherapist.
She lies on the ground, hands wide on her belly as it fills and empties. It’s anything but savasana, or ‘corpse pose’. Fully alive in this moment, the ripples of sensation are visible on her open little face. She’s my guru, leading by example as she drops into her body with such ease, feels no sense of urgency, or waste, or failure.
* * *
My friend, Shona, is a ‘real’ yoga teacher. An all-round amazing human. While I’m studying for my 200HR yoga teacher training, I tell Shona that I think I understand her better after spending more time with the philosophy of yoga. I notice how she seeks to embody the five Yamas - Ahimsa (non-violence), Satya (truthfulness), Asteya (non-stealing), Brahmacharya (right use of energy), Aparigraha (non-grasping) - as a way of life. I can see her embrace of these guiding principles for ethical, soulful living in the way she is with people and decisions. Shona smiles in her habitual way - with love, warmth, and a twinkle in her eyes - and says, It’s a practice.
* * *
My baby son and I are in hospital. Again. Sandwiched between his bed and the wall covered by medical fittings, I am a mountain. A warrior. Crescent moon. Rag doll. I flow. My mind churns. My breath and body process. I soften the corners of my eyes. Like magnets my feet reach through layers of concrete to the clay and rock beneath. My crown floats towards the heavens. My spine is a column of healing white light.
Every time, I bring my yoga practice into this space of uncertainty. I wonder, How do the other parents in here survive without yoga? How do they manage the time spent sitting? The physical tension and discomfort, the sleeping on horrible beds with the constant interruption of nursing checks or beeping machines? How do they find the courage to be soft and steady for their child for the next injection, or cannula, or scan? How do they encounter each new medico with compassion, with understanding that they too may be in pain, and trying to help? How do they find peace with what is, what is out of our control, what is too terrible to imagine?
Maybe I’m just ‘sensitive’. But every time we spend time in here I think, I must find a way to bring yoga to the carers in hospital. When I have the space, I will try. For this practice is my solace, recovery, and humility in this place. A dance of gratitude for mercies small and great, for the beauty that may arise even in the darkest night.
* * *
I’m back at work a year after my daughter arrives. A roomful of expectant mothers have just done a prenatal pilates class with me, and I want to try something for the first time. Is it ok if we do some breathwork and meditation together to finish up? They nod - some smiles, some a bit worried.
I invite them to find an easy seat, cross-legged on a bolster. To close their eyes, to feel the sit-bones sink, the crown float, the heartspace soften. With a strange confidence that I wasn’t expecting, I offer a simple meditation on the breath. An exercise to locate the bandhas, with a focus on pelvic floor/mula bandha and deep abdominals/uddiyana bandha. They are all smiling and soft as they leave, and suggest that we do More yoga, please next week.
I realise, carefully rolling each mat, that I’ve been withholding - even lying, in a way - by not bringing more yoga practices into my work with women. Through knowledges both embodied and intellectual, I know the pivotal role of mindfulness, breath control, and body awareness for pregnant, birthing and postpartum women. I know how we long to feel held by something greater, in times of change and vulnerability. I know that weakness and tension get overlooked for too long, causing injury and pain, when we don’t have a regular physical practice that moves the material and energetic body in all planes. I know that meditation builds emotional resilience, compassion, and patience.
So what am I waiting for? Do I think someone - someone else - owns this knowledge that was passed so reverently and generously to me through the voices, hands and eyes of innumerable teachers, from somewhere as distant as 10 thousand years in the past?
If I am waiting for permission to pay it forward, how much opportunity to do good may be lost?
* * *
Grief for my mother builds up in me again. It’s coming up nine years since she died, and there’s a familiar pattern now. A couple of months out from the anniversary of her dying, I will start intermittently to disconnect. I wander uselessly through What If’s and my temper is short. My body - mostly the left, the Yin side - seems to ache for no reason, and I feel a tugging urgency to make changes, any changes. To expel - something.
Grief begins as a grey sludgy amorphous creature, lurking in the corner of my eye, draped around my shoulders. When I finally turn and lift it tenderly into my arms, all the colour rushes back - and I’m in a different kind of pain as I have to learn again the blinding, searing beauty and truth of how deeply she loved us, how deeply we love and miss her, how we all have only one chance to be this particular person in this particular life. And once again, I want to feel it all.
I breathe in deeply over my kids’ hair, my lover’s neck, the salty beach air, crushed gum leaves in my hand. I bring my palms together and set my sankalpa. I want to live in celebration of being alive, to let my light shine, to be of service and embody love. If my mother were still alive, we would have taken our mats to class together, and Dad would still call it “Bend and Stretch”. Maybe she would even have joined my classes. This idea brings a smile.
* * *
I begin to weave yoga philosophy and practices more and more into my work. I invoke the bandhas to rebuild the deep core muscles beyond being able to ‘squeeze and lift’. Supported Bridge becomes a favourite for resting the pelvic ligaments in women with prolapse. Women with pelvic pain are able to find deep rest and radical self-acceptance though restorative yoga and mantra. I use tactile feedback over the ribcage during pranayama, to release stuck diaphragms. I offer nadi shodhana for overwrought nervous systems, and small yoga flows for stiff-bodied athletes. I begin treatments with a guided mindfulness practice. I introduce chakras for women who feel this will serve them in healing birth trauma or facing the changes of menopause. And so on. As my trust in the practices and the systems of thinking that underly yoga grows, so too do I feel more able to pass on more of these riches.
* * *
Sometimes, I leave my personal practice for too long. I get de-railed by domestic life, work, avoidance, or laziness. But always at these times, I notice the loss of something.
Maybe something material like length in my right hamstring as I bend down. Or a certain softness in my voice as I answer my toddler’s question for the third time… Or a deep sense of trust that I am on a path of love and abundance. That I’m everything, and nothing. That I’m tiny and short-lived and powerless - and at once so divine, so beautiful, so braided together with others, in ways beyond my imagining.
But I can always find that lost thing again, with sufficient dedication to my yoga. And not by talking about it. It’s a practice, after all.