Do I dare say that I have stopped practicing yoga? Deep down I knew this day would come. I knew that it would be like just about everything else in my life; that I would get really excited about it, become very passionate about it and then I would stop. Look how long it has been since the last blog post if you don't believe me.
When did I stop? I think it was in March after coming back home from spring break when I became pretty ill with some sort of upper respiratory infection that lasted about a month. Finally, I broke down and took some medication for it and the illness left. But, after a trip for a conference, I came down with something similar again. A relapse. Not only did I feel ill, but my lungs and head felt stuffed with gunk and the last thing I wanted to do was to get into downward dog. Practice seemed to make it worse. In fact, I went to an ashtanga class when I started feeling a little ill the first time and then the illness came on full blast.
But, I'm well now so there is no excuse for not practicing. Yet, I can't seem to put in more than one day in a row. This is really odd, because when I do practice, I always say, "wow that felt good. Why don't I do it more often?". Deep down I see how this is a reflection of other things in my life. I see how I have a superficial knowledge of many things, but I've never really delved into one thing and really learned it. In the past year this is the thing that has been coming back to me about my life that has bothered me the most: that I have a half knowledge about things, but I lack depth in everything. So it is interesting that this would happen in my practice as well; that I would give up just when things started to become too deep.
Yes. Now that I'm thinking about this I know exactly when I stopped practice or at least when I backed away from it. It was in late December when I had been practicing ashtanga daily for about one year. I had also been reading a lot about yoga and other philosophy related to that area. Something happened one day in the studio or perhaps it was the accumulation of things happening in the studio over time and I realized that I am not really part of this community. I saw myself as an outsider. I felt like I had no business being here. Why? Well, part of the reason is my age. At 52 I am a late comer to ashtanga to say the least. The other is my gender. How many guys do you see in your yoga classes? Generally, we are the 1%. The other is the fact that I am not that flexible. After years of sitting in a chair along with heavy weight lifting and running with little or no stretching, I'm about as far from the wet noodle like flexibility that you see in most students. So here I am in a room filled with young, super-flexible women. I couldn't be more different from them.
The job I have is pretty isolating and time consuming. Basically, I have no free time. I had hoped for some sort of community or sense of community to develop from the little bit of time I devoted to activities away from work. But, after some attempts to open up, I realized that this just wasn't going to happen. So. That was one reason.
The other is probably the real reason. In December I felt like I was on a precipice. I felt the pull of yoga and the pull of a life devoted to meditation and burnishing my soul. And, I could feel how this was pulling me away from my job. As I said, my job requires a lot of time. I got to the point where I saw that yoga and my study of it, was just absorbing too much time and interest. It was detracting from my work in other areas. I was on the point of just making the leap into yoga and forgetting the rest. Then I realized that maybe I was having a mid-life crisis. I read in the
Bhagvad Gita that service is something we all have to do and I decided that my service was my life, my profession. So I dropped all inquiries into spirituality and went back to work. I asked several teachers about this before making the decision and they all said that we can balance things, that yoga is about finding the balance, that all we can do in this type of situation is practice as best we can. Maybe I have allowed the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction and once again I am out of balance.
