My wonderful teacher Katrina Gustafson-Broyles, owner of Karma Yoga Center, invited Saul David Raye to Denver to teach a weekend immersion. It took me all of two seconds to decide to attend several sessions because Katrina is wonderful and like attracts like.
And boy does it.
We practiced in a local elementary school gymnasium, stuffed with primary colors, Food Pyramid posters and Shiva on an altar at the front of the room. While I only “practiced” with Saul David Raye for a total six hours and 45 minutes, the whole weekend I was living yoga in my heart.
In my four years of practicing yoga, this sustained peace has deeply occurred a handful of times. One, during my yoga teacher training two years ago; two, at the Yoga Journal conference in Estes Park last year; and now Aug. 12 to 14, 2011.
This feeling that I’m still riding is single-handedly why I do yoga. Or as Saul would say, why I make yoga.
Stop doing yoga – start making it
Yoga is not about achieving awesome asanas. It’s about connecting to the heart, your greater Self and gaining the knowledge that everything is going to be OK. It’s about knowing that the Universe is in love with you and every minute conspires to provide everything you need.
Between classes, this weekend my friend Abbey (who was in the midst of an Anusara immersion) and I were talking about this concept while walking back from dinner in Golden. Both raised Catholic, we know what it means to feel limited and guilty and how asking God for something as silly as a front-door parking space when you’re late will definitely not get you into heaven. But her teacher, just like mine, both came to the same conclusion: Ask, and you shall receive. Set the intention and things will come to you.
So I’m setting my intention now and I’m breaking away from several months of self doubt.
I’m committing to love.
During the weekend I wrote down several gems Saul effortlessly kept dropping like so many sesame seeds sprinkled onto kale. I chose a notebook I haven’t touched since 2007 when I confronted depression head on for the second time in my life. In it, I kept several line drawings of an X and Y axis and various scribbles between the two. I drew for 93 days from February to May, seven days after I began taking Zoloft. (I’ve since been medication free.)
Some days the lines were wavy, but mostly, especially toward the end, they shot up the Y axis. Beside the graphs I wrote bullet points – major things that had happened that day, or how I felt about my recent breakup (which had spiraled the depression deeper). At the time, I was horribly clingy and horribly rejected without explanation from my former love, which caused peaks and valleys in the lines. But whenever the bullet point “yoga” appeared next to the graph, the line was almost always straighter than the rest — and trending upward.
Saul spoke of yoga as not what you do, but what you make. When you step onto your mat, you’re transforming yourself through mind and body alchemy. The body creates some three trillion new cells each day, and you better believe that what you think and how you feel has an effect.
Four years ago when I began creating who I am today, I took responsibility for myself. “Forgiveness is not holding anyone responsible for your reality,” Saul said. I was holding a lot of blame and pointing a lot of fingers, only to realize that all the fingers pointed back at me when I stepped on my yoga mat.
How is it that we can come so far and still feel as if we’ve just begun? It’s like a first kiss and a favorite song you’ve had on repeat for years. At once exciting, inevitable and familiar.
It’s a return to Aum.
