30 Day Challenge Bloggers: Joanna, Post #7

The most valuable thing I’ve gleaned from the Source Yoga 30 Day Challenge is this: Yoga calls us to be present in the midst of ALL that life brings—including struggle, failure, and frustration.

So I was particularly drawn to the article Amy Petty posted a few days ago by yoga teacher Jay Fields, entitled What They Don’t Tell You Before You Sign Up For Yoga Teacher Training. The article talks about yoga as a means of self-discovery. I don’t mean some ethereal, pie-in-the sky sort of self-discovery. I mean true, embodied, gritty self-discovery. Fields writes,

“You have to trust that your practice is big enough to hold your rage, despair and confusion as well as your love, bliss and purpose. You also have to trust that your practice has given you the tools to be with the full spectrum of who you are.”

A huge blessing of the 30-Day Challenge has been the gift of surrendering to the reality of what is—rather than always trying to reshape myself (and my practice) into what I think I should be. Fields ends her article with this poem by Rumi:

Very little grows on jagged rock,
Be ground, be crumbled
So wildflowers will come up where you are.
You’ve been stoney for too many years
Try something different
Surrender.

I must confess, I’m not particularly good at it—that surrender-thing. But the Challenge has given me permission to be more flexible in the expectations I have for my practice, and myself. I’m hoping I’ll develop some creative ways of practicing as my foot heals after surgery next week, as well.

When I was in South Dakota at my in-laws’ farm, there was a lot of talk about the severe drought in the Midwest. The corn crops are suffering, and a lot of my husband’s farmer-relatives are pretty nervous about it. It’s hard to tell—the cornstalks were tall and green as I ran by them on the gravel country roads. They looked healthy from a distance. But then I noticed the parched, dried mud along the edge of the road.

Actually, I fell in love with that dried mud on the side of a South Dakota gravel road. No, I really did! The patterns, the geometry, the small green weeds poking through the wide cracks. And I noticed that, in places, small patches of green were pushing through, some no-name, but hardy little weed that found a way toward life, in spite of a drought that was devastating the mighty cornstalks!

I think that image fits for our yoga practices too. We all live with the simultaneous amazingness and fragility of living in human bodies. Sometimes our bodies can do amazing things. And sometimes our bodies fail us. Or maybe they’re not really “failing” us, but rather calling us toward another form of living in the present, with what is instead of what we think should be, whether it’s weeds or wildflowers coming up through those cracks.

Namaste!