On Obstacles and Aphorisms

I often tell my yoga students that the obstacles are not what is IN our way, but they ARE our way. I may have stolen this from Lao-Tsu, and probably misquoted it as well, but what the heck. I never claimed to be original. What I do claim to be is honest, and if I am going to truly practice what I preach then it is time to face the fear and do it anyway.

The obstacle for me has been starting this blog. I have wanted to express myself on the page for an embarrassingly long time now. I say embarrassing because as I just noted, I am forever admonishing my students to embrace the yogic ideal of abhyasa, or practice. I know in my head, but not always in my heart, that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step (yep, Lao-Tsu again, I think.) What I tell them when they scoff at the prospect of say, swinging their legs over their shoulders, shifting onto both hands, and balancing in tithibasana/firefly, is that they don’t have to know how to do the pose to begin to practice it.

Practice in the Yoga Sutras refers to the constant effort toward the pursuit of a goal. You have to start somewhere.

And that somewhere is generally the first obstacle you encounter, say the tightness in your hamstrings. Your hamstrings feel tight when you try to swing your leg behind your shoulder, right? So you stay there and work that part and breathe and exercise patience, acceptance, and compassion for yourself and your poor hamstrings. Then one day as you work your arms behind your legs you realize you can put your hands on the floor. But alas! You can’t seem to transfer the weight out of your feet without falling on your behind. Now this is where about half the students vow never to come back to this class. They are much more comfortable in the basic class, so that’s where they’ll stay. These folks are attached to the idea of successfully attaining the posture and this obstacle has kicked their butt right back to their comfort zone.

In Kate Holcombe’s article “Making space” in this month’s Yoga Journal, she points out that practice (abyasa) and detachment (vairagyam) are two sides of the same coin — the first is moving in the direction of your goal, and the second is clearing the path of obstacles.

It doesn’t matter how many times I fell on my butt when I learned the pose. I picked myself up and tried it again because I was determined to get it. Now I can pretty much “do” the pose. It isn’t perfect and I will likely never adorn the cover of Yoga Journal in this particular pose, but I can live with that.

When it comes to yoga poses, I have a particular stick-to-itiveness (yeah, I hate that one too). But unfortunately in other areas of my life I suffer from a seriously debilitating case of I-can’t-stand-it-itis (this one I like, and it comes from REBT, or Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and it refers to thinking that if a certain event happened then you wouldn’t be able to experience any happiness at all, ever.) What I wouldn’t be able to stand is if I wrote something and no one liked it, or even read it. So instead of taking the first step (you know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with …. ) I did my laundry, enrolled in graduate school, made a black bean casserole, cleaned the kitchen, surfed the internet, and made all sorts of other excuses, for like two years.

And there are other obstacles too — I’m afraid my writing will be too earnest. Or that it will be too irreverent. Or that it will contain too many contractions. Or too many fragments. Or too many runon sentences that annoy people with all their semicolons; or that try to say too much in too little space; or that don’t end up making any sense to anyone but me– or where I forget the wise words my brother once imparted to me, “Say more, talk less.” So you can see what I was up against, in my own mind, of course.

But then there came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Anais Nin said that one. You might think it’s cheesy. You might think it’s a cliche. But I have to say that in my opinion, cliches have become cliches because they are so often true. So here I am, making my first blog post. The journey has begun.