Hopelessly Dedicated to You

Whenever I go home to North Carolina I get to attend yoga at Triangle Yoga, a great studio in Chapel Hill. The year I lived at home in between my Telluride epoch and the Maui era, I practiced yoga here but had not yet discovered Anusara, so I just went to a bunch of really fun and challenging flow classes. Now, however, Paul and Sommer Sobin of Thousand Petals Yoga several Anusara classes there and I love it! They do a few classes individually and one together, which is really fun. Check out the gallery of photos on their website, there are some class photos and a few of them individually. I like them, as people, and love their classes because they are always challenging and they teach lots of poses that were not part of our regular repertoire on Maui, and they also have a different approach to teaching poses that I am familiar with. So I always learn something new, whether it is a new asana or a new way to do an old asana.

They just spent a month in India, and returned with that starry-eyed jet lag culture shock that is (I find) deliciously indulgent because you are so opened up to another people and culture and WAY of being and doing, and suddenly you find yourself deposited back into your shockingly small world, feeling out of place and disordered. In a good way. You wait a bit and after the dust settles you go about your life again but slightly differently this time. I guess they had an incredible time, no surprise, and brought that inspiration back to share with us.

The first class I had with Sommer last week coincided with The Election, Tuesday evening, which felt kind of like a holiday, especially here in the swing state of North Carolina (it turns out Obama beat McCain by only 12,000 votes). The theme for class that night was to think about surrender, which they had to fully embrace on their travels, especially in a place like India, where the concept of linear time and predictable events and personal safety, are literally thrown to the winds. So she asked us to think of something that we surrender to and what that feels like. And I thought about my yoga practice and how surrendering to it feels like devotion. How I always come back to my practice, even when I have been away from it for a few days or, rarely (and somewhat disastrously I find) a few weeks. I tend to be cyclical or a bit of a binger, the pessimist might say, but either way I am good at starting and stopping and not so great at maintaining, which a whole 'nother blog post in itself, but suffice it to say that I was contemplating this sense of devotion, how I always come back to yoga. Because it is always there for me, sort of waiting where I left off. Class ended and I wandered off into the night with a self-satsifying smugness about me, reaching around every few minutes and patting myself on my back because I am so deVOTed to my PRACtice. That's how it rang in my little brain.

So that night (no lie) I dreamt Ella was my daughter, not my niece. And I get it now, the mother thing. I literally felt like a part of me was existing external to myself, that cells of mine, emotions of mine, thoughts of mine were a part of someone else, and I was living my life but also breathing and feeling and thinking the life of Ella. And I felt it on a such a deep, primal level, literally felt her experience of life that it was almost like we were one creature, one organism, that had agreed (insanely enough) to be cleaved apart superficially, yet remain conjoined with a depth I had not ever experienced before. And it was love, pure and simple.

I looked up "devoted" in the dictionary:
To give or apply (one's time, attention, or self) entirely to a particular activity, pursuit, cause, or person.
And the word entirely was what stood out to me. That is what I felt in my dream. Every part of me was given to Ella. And that's not what I feel towards my yoga practice. Dedicated? Absolutely. Committed? Yep. But devotion is unwavering, there is no leaving and coming back when I am ready or when I feel like it or when it is convenient. Will I ever be that devoted to my yoga practice? Not sure. But that's what I am trying to figure out with this time off and this money well spent. So, thanks, subconscious, for keeping me honest. Thanks, dreamtime, for reaching in and taking my hand off my back. Now I'm off to Hollywood, Florida for the weekend to study with one of my favorite instructors, Desiree Rumbaugh. I've got some work to do!