“Yoga does not remove us from the reality or responsibilities of everyday life but rather places our feet firmly and resolutely in the practical ground of experience. We don’t transcend our lives; we return to the life we left behind in the hopes of something better.”
Dear Yogini,
Hindsight, it turns out, offers a different reality than the one that is our present. There are tableaus from my life that reveal themselves to me now as irrefutable truths I could not claim to see then. I was too close to be able to focus on what needed to be seen, too blind to their inner workings, too young to do anything about it, too naïve to recognize a dynamic that was hurtful or cruel, too unwise or uncertain to change course. But I have sought my eternal verity for as long as I can remember. The Yogic Wisdom and practices have provided me with the tools to bridge the divide between my false cognition of reality, and the one that is reflected to me in truth.
At age seven, I made myself scarce, retreating to the beloved kingdom of my bedroom. There, my collection of dolls from far-off lands—each a gift from my father upon his return from mysterious travels to mysterious lands—transported me to a place of my own imagining. My bed with its yellow-and-white-plaid spread would call me in divine sleep where, instead of counting sheep, I would make up stories in my head to send me off into sweet slumber. There, I gazed out my bay windows from my nook at the color of rain spilling over the terrace and shrubs to pool at my new-planted acorn, soon to become an Oak. Someday, when I am gone from here, I will be honored by this mighty presence.
I lost myself in search of some understanding of something akin to God in the landscapes of Robert Frost and prayers to the divine. My mother appeared to not be inclined towards religion at all, and my father was a self-proclaimed atheist—though I have always doubted that, for he was far too adventurous by nature, a cat with nine lives in his lifetime, to not have had some faith in something. My home, as lovely as I remember it being, lacked in prayers of gratitude and blessings.
My first passion, besides the ethereal specter of God, was horseback riding. I have come to believe that perhaps it wasn’t so much the riding of horses that I was most passionate about but rather that the horses saw me for who I am far more than I could see myself. I was a painfully shy child, so the truth of the matter is I had no need to be anyone other than myself around these intuitive creatures. My second romance was ballet, or classical dance which I pursued until I was nineteen. The rigor and discipline of the practice suited my personality. More than anything, I loved this embodied expression of how I felt. To this day, dance is still a direct path to my heart.
Dance fell by the wayside as I lost my sense of self to a curated idea of what I believed my life should be. I wanted to be a doctor, or so I thought. It turns out, my father hadn’t the stomach to become a physician—he hated the sight of blood!—but wanted a medical professional of high standing in the family. And of course, I wanted to please my dad so I applied to medical school—three times (without fully committing to the process). During that period (of six years) my mother was diagnosed with T-cell non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and I fell into yoga hard because of that diagnosis. On my mat I found respite from the churning of emotional turmoil and imagined outcomes around my mother’s cancer. In yoga practice I stepped away from my weary attempts to get into medical school. Through yoga, I discovered a language that touched my soul.
In the face of my mother’s disease, yoga offered me ground when everything else felt so fickle and ephemeral, each sun salutation a humble offering of my ego and a bow to the uncertainty of “what next?” Up until now, I had taken my life quite for granted without any conscious awareness of this. I just didn’t know any better, this privilege of a ‘me-myself-and-I’ existence. Then my mother was declared ‘in remission’, marriage and children entered stage right, and life was great for a while.
My world contracted again as September 11, 2001 sent shockwaves of grief and anger through each and every heart. At this point I was teaching yoga full-time. I walked into my first post-9/11 yoga class, locking eyes with a yoga practitioner and friend who had been out of the country at the time. Nothing had to be said to know her life had been tragically impacted. I later learned her brother was missing. He worked in one of the towers and would never be found. A singular image of that tower faltering, floundering, and crashing is engraved as tautness and tears and darkness in my somatic memory. On the first anniversary of 9/11, my friend was in attendance at the memorial service at Ground Zero. She told me she saw the spirit of her brother in a multitude of dragonflies that seemed to embrace her. Years later, one early summer’s day, I sat on a rock looking out over the crystalline blue of a reservoir, sort of meditating, being content. I became absorbed in a swarm of huge dragonflies flitting to and fro, right there in front of me. I was struck by their grandeur and the gossamer-like fabric of their wings reflecting the sun’s brilliance, blinding diamond sparkles. I never carry my phone with me when I seek out nature for the purpose of being with myself for a while. But on this day I had, and the urge to reach out to my friend to let her know about the dragonflies was so compelling I texted her to say, I am thinking of you my friend. I’ll never forget her reply: Today is my brother’s birthday.
In almost every part of the world, the dragonfly symbolizes a transformative shift, adaptability and self-realization. This transformative shift has its source, says yoga, in mental and emotional clarity and maturity which in turn lends understanding to the deeper meaning of life. While I embrace the symbolism, the larger lesson is this: Pay attention. There is extraordinary eloquence in these ephemeral moments too easily missed because our focus is not-present.
The community yoga studio I co-founded with my friend Sarah Church opened up on the heels of 9/11. Those first years of the studio were turbulent as I navigated the newness of motherhood and the death of my beloved father who lived in Switzerland at the time. Have you ever looked back at a time in your life, dear yogini, and wondered how you made it through? This experience bred a certain fierceness in me that extended onto my mat and into my yoga. I would push through the moments that got hard and let anger steal my grief as I’d grind through my daily primary series practice, one posture superimposed upon another.
With my yoga, I have weathered the joys and sorrows of my life and navigated too dramatic changes in the yoga industry as a whole that reflect yoga’s soaring popularity. My yoga studio and its community of yoga practitioners have been the one constant through all of it. My most heartfelt realization is that I have not done any of the hard stuff alone. I just kept showing up, one foot in front of the other, forward motion. In this community I found solace when I was in pain. In this practice I found ground beneath my feet. In the friends I have made through my yoga, I sought wisdom when I felt confused, or worthless, or insecure, or categorically insane. No time more than when I went through my divorce.
A family weekend getaway to Montreal as a surprise for my fortieth birthday—a Labor Day weekend—brought everything in my married relationship to a head. The weekend itself was fine at the level of platitudes, but I have never felt more alone, rejected, or deceived in my entire life. Kids asleep in their queen-sized bed, I joined my husband at the hotel bar in the lobby.
“What’s going on?” I prompt. He is already onto his second or third drink, whatever it is. He is drowning any attempt at self-expression in alcohol. I am still stuck in benign non-understanding. All I feel is this huge disconnect between us, a massive ravine, and always his discomfort. He is slouched over the bar, squirming on his stool.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“What’s with you and these events you have to travel to and projects you have to complete, on weekends, during planned holidays? And now, you want to leave Montreal early? It’s my birthday and YOU brought me here… I need you to explain this to me. Are you having an affair with a woman at work? I need to know.”
He shrugs his shoulders, “Have you seen the women I work with?”
What’s that supposed to mean? The thought is fleeting and passes me by before I can tether it in my consciousness. Getting him to participate in this painful one-sided inquisition is like trying to pull teeth. Way to throw my forty years in my face. I am left with trying to fill in the blanks to a picture I don’t even see. Now I’m angry. And I have no idea how to express this feeling that is simmering inside of me in words or in action so adept have I become at harboring resentment.
My questions feel so ridiculous in hindsight, fixated as I was on resolving a problem I had no clear image of. The pressing issue was far more a product of my then-husband’s behaviors than anything that had to do with me although you might argue our dance of anger and anguish had been brewing for years. I sometimes wonder if my passion for yoga might have felt threatening to my then-husband. Or if, after my father passed away, I looked to him for something he wasn’t capable of giving me, like validation or appreciation. Granted, my scorn and insults at that point did little to help my case. In the end, I found what I needed deeply imbedded within myself, excavated through years of showing up on my yoga mat working diligently to marry my mind and my body, and understanding with intuition.
Without a doubt my yoga has changed me. Not who I am, but rather, yoga has freed me up to be more myself. And this person I am now may well not have been the one my former husband thought he had married. Maybe I played small so that his light might shine brighter, but when it didn’t I felt the worse for it and resentment seeped in. Maybe I played the victim to his villain, the enabler to his addictions, a defender of the very actions he took that stabbed me right in the back of my heart. Maybe it is just that my insecurities and primal fears played out their parts to perfection on the stage of our apocalyptic marriage. At the end of the day, all of this is incidental. All I needed now was to remember my own truth. Eight years after 9/11 to the day, in a muddle of confusion and anger and fear and pain, I begged out of our marriage. This was my valiant effort to reclaim myself.
This date was no accident. It was symbolic: The suffering of change and impermanence. There was the familiar tautness of my body as if to arm myself with strength and courage, accompanied by the concurrent tears of something loosening within me; and that heaviness in my heart of not wanting to let go of everything I knew. I didn’t want to be charged with this decision to undo my marriage—the stakes were too high, children involved, and doing something other than everything else I had already tried meant tearing their world apart at the seams. But I dove. I dove into the unknowable and total uncertainty of ‘what next?’ Tears streaming, I repeated, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t play this charade.”
I had held onto this sinking ship of our marriage long enough. Now I had to let go. I had to make way for something else—uncertain, scary, and unknown. I had undermined myself time and time again by focusing my energies on my deficiencies (and his too, no doubt), rather than embracing everything I now have come to know and appreciate about myself including all the stuff that isn’t so perfect. I forgive the past and all the moments that have passed knowing that I did my best at the time. Our imperfections, it turns out, make the perfect substrate for yoga practice.
We all have these truths that stare us down. Our yoga capitalizes on the way we feel to reveal our ‘blind spots’ to us, those dynamics we can’t see because we are habituated to them. Through yoga, I can explore my breath when it catches in my throat, the sensation of throbbing in my chest, that feeling of ants crawling on my skin to gain a more profound understanding of how I embody stress. By the same token I learn to become more familiar and less fearful of its manifest presence in my body and to observe the ways in which my thoughts spin out into chaos so that I may, gently, corral them back to some modicum of order.
I can’t mislead you now, dear yogini, and claim I was looking to live a more honest and authentic version of myself even though my soul was clamoring for it. The truth is I could no longer bear the feeling of disconnect within me that reflected itself wholeheartedly in my marital relationship under the burden of pretense and the veneer of “life is good.” Here I will give my practice credit for giving me permission to feel what needed to be felt, although the clarity of “samadhi,” the all-elusive ‘True Self’, had yet to reveal itself to me.
Faced with this overwhelming reality of my marriage and family falling apart at the seams I set out on the path of trying to recover who I believed myself to be. It was as if I were two separate people, this grown-up me with all the awareness of myself I have gleaned through my yoga, taking in this far younger and naïve me, dazed and confused and uncomprehending and insecure and unloved and unlovable. I could feel the bewilderment within myself and didn’t know how to reconcile the knowing and empathic me with this dear, sweet, broken exiled self.
In ignorance, I continued to seek out benign assurances and validation from my former spouse, the very person who would never give it to me. During this time an angel walked into my life. Her name was Mary, a neuropsychologist by training. We connected like the two wings of a bird. Too many times I would find myself on the receiving end of that weary look of hers that read, with the utmost compassion, You poor soul, you still don’t see it do you? Out loud in her Texan twang, “Why do you keep looking for water in the same old well honey? It‘s dry. If you want water, you’ve got to go find yourself another well, preferably one with water in it.” The best advice I ever got mind you.
Practice by practice, I’d cultivate my handstand as a way to shift my perspective. Translated from the Sanskrit, handstand literally means ‘upside-down-tree’. One morning I showed up on my mat, and there, lying in supta padangustasana, tears softly surrendered themselves, an atmospheric expression of my grief and sadness and loneliness. Yoga has this unique capacity to wear down the strata upon which our lives have been built to see ourselves more clearly. We are merely diamonds in the rough craving a good polish. As we begin to “polish” ourselves through yoga we move towards the truth of who we are, the brilliant diamond of the Self: Not the “Who?” But the “I-Am.”
The Self, as a diamond, gains brilliance from three things: reflection, refraction and dispersion. Reflection is the light of consciousness that hits the ‘diamond’ and bounces back up, giving insight into its very nature—I call these instances “moments of samādhi”– instantaneous shine. This glimmer is only the very tip of the true radiance the diamond of the True Self displays. In these instances, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing, “I am enlightened.” But only a portion of the light hitting our diamond is reflected; the rest travels right through it.
Refraction then is the light that moves through the diamond, scattered and fractured by tiny, complicated prisms—all the ‘angles’ and complexities of our being—that create the ‘sparkle’ that diamonds are known for. This in turn creates a dispersive rainbow effect which adds to the shine. I think of refraction and dispersion as temperament and personality, and then what we do with that is behavior. What is interesting is that, depending on where the light hits along the surface planes of the diamond, refraction and dispersion create natural areas of light and dark in the refracted light (the light that isn’t reflected, or ‘bounced back’). In the same vein, different stimuli affect each of us differently depending upon the angle of ‘entry’ engendering a positive or negative reaction with the potential to show us something that needs to be seen (reflection).
While the shadows in the shine seem counter to the brilliance we seek, really they are the magic needed to access our innate “shininess.” The dark magnifies the intensity of the light; it is the candle’s flame which appears brighter in the dark of night than it does in a sunlit room. Yoga boils down to contrast, to evoking the yin and the yang. Without contrast you might still shine just as bright, but then your light would be lacking the characteristic of tapas, the fire of transformation required so that the True Self may shine with radiance. Without this fire, we end up getting in our own way because of our resistance to what is–the proverbial mid-life crisis, or, in my case, the dissolution of a marriage in which I was blind to its inherent flaws.
Atha yogānuśāsanam. And now begins the practice of yoga.
After many years now of practice, I have become more adept at recognizing how my body reflects back to me the ease of flow and the stickiness of my resistance, and how my mind recognizes the refracted dispersion of light and the lurking shadows for what they are. Yoga is not a thinking process. It is an unfoldment of our innate somatic intelligence and the knowing of intuition, the shining of all facets of our diamond-Self so that the light of consciousness may show us more clearly to ourselves.
I see a far more discerning reflection of myself in the face of the hardships and pivotal moments that showed up in my life. As painful as it has been at times, the path through my resistance is leading me towards greater personal freedom. In the fourth book of his yoga sutras, Patañjali calls this liberation of our consciousness from the incessant and often very creative narratives of the mind, kaivalya. Yoga provides the tools to evaluate the assumptions we make, the expectations we impose upon ourselves, and all the other stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our own state of being, our relationships to others and the world at large. The work of yoga is not a given. You do have to show up for the practice and be willing to walk the path. Is the promise of a state of being undisturbed by life’s dualities and iterations not a compelling argument to show up for oneself?
Yesterday, dear yogini, I awoke with thoughts of the past, of my regrets and chagrins, of my failure at finding happiness in the places I so desperately wanted it most, of the buried feelings that have been rising, lethargically, to the surface, to meet all those desires and dreams yet to be fulfilled…
Tomorrow I shall awake with positive imaginings for all the future holds, for a world wide open to possibility, for the potential that exists within each and every human being, for the love that buoys all of humanity…
And Today, I awake to the chirping of sunrise. I awake to the scent of Spring on the breeze of dawn. I awake to the laughter of children playing as only children can. I awake to the touch of radiance from the rising sun. I awake to the insight that everything is as it ought to be, that my questions will receive answers on the time-space continuum, and that, at this very moment, all I have to do is be present. Today I do not harbor anger or resentment. Today I do not worry—worry is but a contraption of the mind thinking about tomorrow. Today I assume personal responsibility for my life and show up with integrity for my practice. Today I shall treat all beings with kindness and respect. Today I am grateful for everyone and everything, that each may shine their unique brilliance, in shadow and in light.
Sincerely yours,
Nicole