This morning I cheated. On my yoga practice.

I felt bad about it, as I always do. You see, for many years yoga has been as close to a primary relationship as my own spouse. You might say I’ve been practicing polyamory with my husband and yoga. With whom did I cheat on my beloved yoga practice, you might ask? Today it was a Barre class. Some days it’s step aerobics, or pilates. In the early years of my practice, when I was committed to one yoga style — first Bikram, then later Ashtanga — I would actually feel guilty when I took a class in a different style. If I went to an Ashtanga class one morning, I would feel as if I were betraying my Bikram practice, and vice versa.

We often talk about Jewish guilt, or Catholic guilt, and I have plenty of both in my “interfaith” family. So you might say I am programmed for it. And once yoga got its claws in me, the guilt trip began. Not only did I feel guilty when practicing a different style of yoga, but I felt guilty when I ate meat; guilty when I drank wine; guilty when I slept in; guilty guilty guilty.

When I became a mother I experienced an entirely new brand of guilt. I felt guilty if I went to work, and guilty if I stayed home with my daughter instead of working.

Guilt is a highly negative emotion that serves the purpose of making us aware that we have done something WRONG, as in ethically, morally, or legally, wrong. Essentially it makes us feel like crap. But what purpose does guilt serve when we have not, in fact, done anything wrong? Or when we are merely being human beings trying to get through the day, and possibly to enjoy ourselves while doing it?

In the beginning yoga was fitness for me, but I loved that it was “spiritual” too. It made me feel like I was killing two birds with one stone, in one 90 minute class per day. Voila! Thin AND enlightened, that’s me! But as the years went by and yoga really did become spiritual for me, I was suprised to find that what my early teachers had said was true. That hatha yoga was preparation for meditation. These days meditation is the most important part of my yoga practice. The asana really is secondary. But meditation does not burn calories. So this year I went to step class for the first time in 12 years, and it was FUN. I had been under the impression for years that the only exercise I liked was yoga. It was truly an awakening to thoroughly enjoy sweat for sweat’s sake, and for the hope that it would bring not an elevated state of consciousness, but an elevated backside.

I have worked hard to come to the place where I accept that everything happens exactly as it’s supposed to in order for the soul to tranform (I heard Seane Corn say that in a workshop once and it always stuck with me). But when I feel guilty about my choices, I am negating the perfection of my experience.

When I entertain guilt as an emotion, or a state of being, I am essentially cheating on myself.

The theme for resolutions, or “intentions” as we all say now, for the 2012 new year seems to be abandoning fear and stepping fully into being one’s true self. This, at least, is the message the universe has been sending me (no, not in a flash of lightning or a sudden insight while meditating, but in the form of the blogs I read, the facebook posts I peruse, the yoga classes I’ve taken, etc.)  Resolutions used to be about self-criticism of the way I had been, setting goals to become better or different in the coming year. But with the cultural switch to intention-setting, or better yet, manifesting, it seems we are all focused on becoming more of ourselves as we were meant to be.

I often suggest to my yoga students that yoga is not designed as “self-improvement” , but rather as “self-revealing”. It shows us that beneath the layers of limiting beliefs, roles, identities, and guilt, is the perfection that we already are.

Feeling guilty about my choices suggests that I regret those choices, and that I have not learned something valuable from them. That I’m living in the past rather than embracing my true self in the moment. So I’ve made my 2012 intention to forgive myself completely for the past, to accept the choices I am making in the present, and move boldly and guilt-free toward the goals I’ve set for my future. This year I will be faithful to me.

children doing yoga in an ideal world

For some reason people love kids yoga. I think they have this image of perfectly behaved yogi children all actually following instructions and doing the same thing at the same time.

But my experience has been that children are mostly unable to follow simple instructions such as “stand still” or “bend your knee”, and what might be a tranquil and enriching experience quickly degenerates into utter chaos.

I once agreed to teach a group of kindergarteners. I was dreading it, and I really should have said “no thanks, I don’t teach kids yoga”. But I did it for the money (which I needed) and I hoped I would be pleasantly surprised by how much I loved teaching 5 year-olds to move and breathe (which I wasn’t). I was encouraged to sing songs, tell stories, and have the kids make up their own poses. Ick. I had a set of Baron Baptiste’s My Daddy is a Pretzel yoga cards that were sort of cute and fun to use. But when one of the kids puked directly on the cards, I swore off kids yoga forever.

actual children doing yoga

Maybe kids yoga is really about playing games and telling stories, and I’m all for games and stories. But for me yoga involves bringing minds and bodies into balance, or practicing acceptance of who we really are in the present moment, and kids already do this.

I often teach my students about santosha, or contentment, acceptance of what is. This includes being okay with who you are and what you are good at. I am pretty good at teaching yoga to adults, but teaching kids is just not for me.

From the moment I announced my pregnancy four years ago people began sweetly asking the question, “Will you do yoga with your baby?” And I would respond “Oh yes, of course,” while thinking to myself, “Sheesh, I hope someone else will watch this baby so I can go to yoga.” Then once the tender young thing was born, blue in the face and screaming, people would inquire with a sparkle in their eye “Does she do yoga with you?” And I would say with a knowing smile, “She’s a natural!” while cringing inwardly and thinking, “God forbid this succubus should claim my yoga mat, as she has every other area of my physical, mental, and emotional life.”

I love my daughter. With all my heart. But my yoga practice is mine. It may be the only corner of my being that is private, quiet, personal, and mine all mine. No kids allowed.

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.