This is where you start

Night of November 18, 2010. Manhattan.

I’m not a yoga teacher, but am an on-again-off-again student of yoga – mostly based on how much money I have to spend on classes.

Last night, I dreamt that I was doing an intensive yoga program, and that while I was doing the asanas, I was not really doing them. I was shaking in postures, and not giving 100% effort. I was coasting, following along, barely being a student, much less a future teacher (which, to be in that class, I should have been trying for). There was an old man, a retired guru-status teacher, who was not teaching the class but was observing it. His stare was fierce and sharp. He had a wide face, with high cheekbones, and was ruddy like Tibetans, but was also pale. Really, he was so old that it seemed nationality and ethnicity and been stripped from him. Thin, with white hair in the few tufts that it grew on his head. He was a bare soul, and scared me because of it.

He rarely talked and rarely did anything out of the ordinary. But at the end of the class, he pulled me aside and asked me what I was doing there. I was found-out. He knew that I didn’t belong. I wanted to explain myself. I felt that rush of grasping at straws. I told him I had been doing yoga my whole life, on-and-off. And as I was saying “on-and-off” I realized how he would see my lack of discipline and perseverance. I knew I had given myself away, and he saw the realization as it dawned on me. “Yes,” he said. “That is why.”

He meant, that lack of discipline is why you now find your practice and yourself hiding from life, going along, coasting,  shaking, weakened.

NYPL Photography Collection. 1908-1909.

I was trying to hold it back tears because there were so many people around and I didn’t want to broadcast this intense shame I felt. An image of the sheer rock face of the Hudson palisades went through my mind, as though that was the image-equivalent of my life and myself.

I told him that I couldn’t feel the asanas. That they felt hollow. That my spirit was gone and I had no idea how to get it back.

“This is where you start,” he said.

I couldn’t stop crying. He meant, if you’re hollow, start from there. Do the asana from there. Don’t do it from an inauthentic place of pretending to be from where you are not. As I started to understand this, he watched me and said, “Yes. Yes.” And I felt the return to myself, and cried and cried. More than most dreams, it felt like a message.