People ask why I am so intense about my yoga practice.

Well honestly, it’s a freekin mental spiritual and physical workout for some of us to be here, on this planet, in a body. I am one of those people.

The effort on my mat directly translates to the presence of my daily life. The thing is, I experience God every time I practice. Even if its a little glimmer of starlight for a second or two. I have to go into my body to experience the star from where I came. Which frankly, is a whole lot safer for everybody than me astral projecting somewhere else to find that connection. The strange paradox is that the more I am in my body--the more I am in my physical practice--the more I see god around me when I walk down the street. I see the other realms of being dancing about in plain site. When I do not practice, I miss it. I do not see.

The mystical is there, right inside.  

Many of us are longing to be reconnected to our star. This cosmic diaspora is an epidemic--its hole being filled by drugs, raves, false teachings of manipulative self-proclaimed gurus and the belief that we must leave our body to feel that connection.

I am so uninterested in transcendence nowadays. I am only interested in descendence. What I can see touch and feel in my body is the truth. It is real. I am real. I am only interested in being in THIS house of a body. And when the time comes, I will give back this body to the earth. I will send her back to the mountains, valleys and oceans.

Practice makes me live as if my insides were my outsides--my sensitivities alert and in plain site. But with physical sadhana I have the body strength to support this way of walking on the earth.

There is just no other way for me. 

My beloved plants his teachings when we are hiking.

He often speaks stream of consciousness as he skips down the trail, kicking rocks of intelligence and wisdom up into my face as I, with tremendous effort, suck-wind to maintain his brisk pace on all accounts.

Recently on a backpacking trip that included weather fluctuations of sunny to cloudy to rainy to sleeting to hot to cold to thunder to lighting, Elliot confessed he finds hiking in the wilderness more interesting as the stakes grow higher (meaning the weather deteriorates and the trail goes away).  He tells me he likes rough weather and prefers to make his own trail than follow one.

Hearing this come out of his mouth, I stop dead in my tracks, only to realize I am being sleeted upon as I trudge up a mountain with no trail.

Me? I like a trail. I love a roadmap. I value a guide. I especially love these when the weather is poor in the middle of nowhere.

Elliot? He likes to be the guide.

I like to know what the forecast will be, especially when I do not know where I am.

Elliot likes to be the forecaster.

Quite the pair we make eh?

So here I stand freezing, being pelted by ice, thinking about how this no-trail tricky-circumstance bullshit Elliot is into on our hike, which is supposed to be my vacation, is exactly how I do yoga asana.

Ah yes, the way Elliot likes to hike is the way I like to yoga.

I am the kind of outdoor gal that can handle a little drizzle or a hint of thunder but all in all I am fair weather hiker. This is in stark contrast to how I do yoga.

I am not a fair weather yogi. In fact, I, like Elliot on the mountain range, find that the more extreme the circumstances of the asana in shape and action, the more interesting the pose and practice.  Some people call this kind of practice ‘advanced’.  Meh, I do not think it is that so much actually.

Some days I call it idiotic, some days I call it neurotic, and some days I call it psychotic. Much like, I must say, I find it a little stupid to hike up an enormously steep climb in sleet even when I know the view of the glacial lake will be stunning. Much like how I stand in awe watching Elliot shamelessly and meticulously in his completely obsessive way pack all the items into our bags just so, double-checking the knots and straps. And much like how I simply can’t understand why this man would rather sleep outside alone in a sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere when he could sleep in a bed with a 200 thread count and a naked wife. That sounds cray cray to me. But you know, mama nature is calling.

All these silly pokes and jokes aside I get it.

Elliot hikes the way I yoga.

It’s a special breed of yogi who commits to practicing asana two hours a day. It’s a certain kind of pleasure-in-pain mentality when you go after poses, for the sake of the challenge of the pose and the potential vista or valley of beauty in our internal wilderness. Not many people go out for a hike and think, “Well that was a waist of time”. Likewise, I have never done a yoga practice where I thought: “Ugh that was a waist”. (Ok maybe once or twice when I attended a class I really disliked but even then, it really was not a waste of my time. Down dog just never seems wasteful to me.) To do all this inside body-hiking and somatic-mapping into the potentially uncharted and unseen territory internally while being willing to experience the changing weather patterns of one’s psyche and heart, is simply no small feat.

Sometimes when I practice, it is emotionally sleeting in my heart--my insides being pounded from some life experience. But I keep going amidst the freezing cold particles of soul-dust whipping up against my furrowed brow. Why? Well, because, the view is amazing. From the angle of the finished pose the view from inside is magnificent, even if it is emotionally overcast.  

Of course there are times when I have to turn back. The circumstances of the pose mixed with my weather will on occasion combine in such a way that it is actually unsafe to go any further up the mountain of the pose. I have to turn back to camp. (Camp usually being down dog or child’s pose or, a heap on the floor).  Even Elliot would agree that despite his love of inclement hiking weather, some days you do not get to summit.

The lighting gods stop for no one. The mountain does not get less steep.

The pose stops for no one. The pose always stands as it is.

And just like when the weather outside is what we might deem as perfect, not too hot, sunny with a bluebell sky, there are days I practice when my mood is bright, my heart full, and my practice like a steep but very doable uphill climb to the rewarding alpine lake.

My teacher and mentor will say: “we have to get lost to get found”. Well she is right.

Elliot is the master of loosing himself in the vast external nature of this gorgeous planet. And when he returns after these trips, he is ever more himself.  I in compliment relish getting lost within the vast internal forests, valleys, and mountains of my inner wild. When I come back out, I too am ever more fully myself.

It is important to say here as well, that the reason Elliot can go off trail is that he is the master of reading a map and he wields his compass well. When he learns a lesson to help him guide himself (and others) into the wild he takes note and remembers it. He can go into the backcountry but he goes prepared.

Herein lies the next layer of this lesson.

I love being in the backcountry of my yoga practice. In fact I love looking at a pose and figuring out how to do it. But make no mistake; I also spend time researching the pose. I look at the routes other people took. I compare. I consider. All the lessons of the actions I learned in the less steep poses that came before and that are similar to the one I want to climb now, I carry in my mental backpack.

I do not go into the inner wild and leave my senses behind.

Elliot would be the first person to tell you that nature always wins.

Well, guess what? The pose always wins.

Mountains are unapologetic.

So is scorpion.

So sure, I love going where there is no trail. I love being the guide. And I especially thrive when the inner weather is ‘poor’.  And see that’s just the thing. Elliot will never say the weather for outside is poor, he will just say the stakes are more intense. I too would never deem an emotional weather pattern poor. I just think it makes circumstances more potentially challenging. I also always carry a big pack of knowledge and tools with me into the depths. That way I can always find my way back to camp regardless of the weather. The inner compass never left behind.

So with that, what shall we say?

Onward and upward my friends…

Our lives are a constant interweaving of the wounds and the resources, the sufferings and victories that when strung together with devotion to ones esteemed path becomes a work of art to be prayed with, beautified with and through which we adorn ourselves and the lives of whom our work touches.  It is easy, too easy really, in cultures priding or privileging the wounded healer to focus too entirely on the moments in which we were missed, abused, hurt, or dealt an unlucky hand of sorts.  Looking to these places of scathing helps to cultivate interest in how to heal both ourselves and others which is an invaluable contribution. The shadow of this searching for healing out of our wound is that too much time focusing on all the painful beads stringing our lives together is simply only half the picture. We can become fixated in how much we have overcome. I can assure you it is not a contest. The person fixated on how much hurt their family bestowed is as much an emotional sinner as the person in complete denial of any madness they encountered.

Sitting at dinner the other night, my husband said to me “Well your parents must have done plenty of somethings right because you turned out really fine.” Well in fact, my beloved is correct. If I reflect, if I really look back at the truth, I can see not only the bloody gore of emotional upheaval, but I see many beads of both matter-of-fact rightness and easy rhythm as well as sparkling moments of positivity. My parents did a whole lot of things right actually. They took me to the opera from the time I was a little girl. I was raised going to theater and museums. The first snow of every winter my mother and I baked chocolate chip cookies. My father played catch with me in our yard. We had a garden. My mother read to me every night. My dad proofread my papers. I was allowed to apply to any college I wanted. We ate dinner together almost every night.

There are of course plenty of memories that lay in mind far from ideal that have left scar marks on my heart. But lest I forget the many more moments of health and true love my parents bestowed to me in my life. In the face of our very human family flaws there were many more moments of family rhythm, normalcy, congruency, and freedom and love. Enough of these moments got strung together like beads to create a space in which frankly, I really ended up totally fine.

I did not leave unscathed, but then again who does. Frankly, leaving home not hurt is unlikely and I might even guess unnecessary even. For how else do we then feel the call to make things better? How else do we learn to tolerate the pain of being hurt by the things and people we love? The way in which we learn this and the how in which we continue on from those places becomes our medicine, our teachings, our lessons for other down the road. No bead on the string of our life is arbitrarily placed--not when you are endowed to a life of devotion.

Think of a string of mala beads. All one hundred and seven of them plus the last one making one hundred and eight, are strung together with a prayer.  Each bead is unto itself individual, but it is connected to all the others for the entirety of the strand. Each bead is momentarily focused on during meditation to keep pace and rhythm, which focuses our attentional muscle toward greater awareness of both higher and deeper states of consciousness. If each bead on the mala of your life is a moment or memory then how will you choose the beads that make the strand? For me, coming out of a school where the culture is to privilege the wound, it is easy to string a slew of disfigured beads together. I could ruminate on those all day. This however feels inaccurate, and it focuses my awareness to encapsulate an energy only in the pattern of get wounded, get healed, repeat. A strand of only the most glamorous memory beads feels equally as inauthentic. It skips some of the essence of why I am meditating and praying anyway.  It skips the cuts and scrapes that inspired me to sit down in the first place. The most accurate mala I can fashion from the memory beads of my life are a rich and diverse combination. I must fashion a mala that holds within it beads of memory filled with inherent resource, health, comedy and love.

These strands of beads hold tremendous power for focusing and broadening our awareness. So why then should we focus our life work only out of the instances and memories of the times there was less than (fill in the blank). Let us weave bead after bead with prayer and devotion in such a way that all the health of the things that went just right and all the things that went good enough and all the things that went better than expected are woven into the fabric of our consciousness. The wounded healer has tremendous power--I know this to be true. But the compassionate sees the goodness and wellness right in front of their eyes. If we do not hold this for ourselves the people with whom we work will not learn to hold those moments either. 

The mala is the garland of a life we wear made memory-by-memory, moment-by-moment, that is strung together with a devotion to the privileging of life in all its forms. Its beauty does not rest on the glow of each bead individually, but rather the potency of the collected pieces strung together. This is good enough.