The day I finished my yoga teacher training, I drove over to my mom's house to raid her fridge, pick up some food and in between mouthfuls of veg lasagne, tell her the good news.
The first words out her mouth were "Oh, thank god, it's over!"
I kept chewing, a quizzical look on my face as she stared back at me with eyes of relief and exhaustion. "Hmm.." was all I could manage as I went in for another giant bite.
"You really exhausted me with this teacher training stuff, you know." I rolled my eyes and managed to get out something that sounded like 'why' as I forked cheese into my mouth. "Well, you just seemed to hate every minute of it! I didn't know what to do with you?!"
There really wasn't a convincing retort to answer her with and she certainly deserved some sort of explanation after paying for it. I had definitely seemed to hate every minute of it even though it was the furthest thing from the truth. Being asked to deal with your demons head on while new ones surface on a daily basis is no easy task and it had left me a complaining puddle of tears on too many occasions for her liking.
As part of our training we had worked on healing ourselves and learning tools to continue surviving the rollercoaster of life. However, as with any therapy, what we may see as the problem is usually just a response to a deeper underlying issue and boy did those surface by the truckload.
Our training opened up scars from our pasts and I was beginning to see how situations in my very early childhood had manifested themselves in me as an adult and in my ability to form and maintain relationships. What was surfacing traced back over twenty years and had never occurred to me as being a problem.
After an incredibly trying weekend, one spent discovering how my parents divorce at the age of 3 had possibly been more relevant to my development than I had ever stopped to consider - yeah, deep, I know - Anyway. My best friend and I engaged in what would normally have been a meaningless fight but which quickly escalated into five weeks of silence as we butted heads over who would concede first. I've always been quick to fight and quick to forget because my need for affection and acceptance has outweighed any trickle of self worth that I had, so after finding some a couple weeks into my training it became clear to me that a few of my relationships were about to take strain.
Improved communication installed (thanks training!), I reached out a few times to express my feelings. Apologising for what I knew I should but not for feeling what I did. And as I waited for a response that would never come, I finally began to understand that feelings are meant to be felt, that they are worthy of connection and they are not weak or less than someone else's just because they perceive yours as 'wrong'.
As the silence continued to ring out, I decided to step away from the situation, a first for me, and even though the pain of losing their contact was immense, what I was beginning to gain fascinated me more.
The silence became an answer in itself which was "I'm not able to deal with this, you or myself. So instead of apologising, I'm going to ignore this until it goes away". In short, "here, hold my baggage".
What I realised, was that while I may have been a wreck of a human for eight weeks, I was in a safe and controlled environment in which to tackle anything and everything that came up... everyone else was not. While I wanted to (most days) work through my issues during training, up until that point I had been blissfully unaware of the extent of them so why would anyone else have been? It's so much easier to remain ignorant, to move away from pain and challenge than to sit and lean into it.
How could I expect so much of others when my own journey was a daily struggle? How could I expect them to understand how exquisitely happy I was in my own misery simply because I had misery that I finally understood?! How could I expect them to meet me where I was when to get there they would need to face themselves head on? To offer an apology when saying sorry was something they wrestled with?
And how could they understand that my sadness and struggle were because of newly unlocked doors that I hadn't known existed, yet was willingly standing on the threshold of, peering into the abyss of my mind and all that it wanted to show me.
Who in their right mind wants to step into that?
How do you explain that to your poor mother?
As is human nature, we don't even want stop to open and unpack the baggage that we already carry around with us let alone go looking for more to deal with. Instead we look to anyone else to carry it for us. We stand doe eyed, bags piled up around us until some poor passer-by mistakenly looks in our direction and receives a bag to the face. "Here, hold this bag containing my parents divorce, you bastard!"
We do this of course not with literal bags to the face (even if some people deserve it) but rather through our reactions towards others. Imagine walking through a busy coffee shop with your freshly made orange mocha frappacino and someone turns sharply, hitting you in the side with their bag of bricks, spilling your coffee down your jeans. This jolts your nervous system and the pent up aggression you'd been bottling in - you know, the one from your friend's new found success being flaunted on social media while you buy coffee you can't afford and now can't even drink - explodes, unleashing you into a complete lunatic at this 'moron with no spatial awareness', because why? Because, there are underlying issues swirling around your own self worth, perceived lack of success and possibly some unresolved love interest issues (?). But I'm just guessing.
Some of my fellow yoga trainees struggled with this. On multiple occasions, as someone teetered on the edge of a difficult issue, safe as they were within the confines of the studio, you could visibly watch them step back from the edge and toss their bag over to someone else. "Here, I don't want to handle this right now, you hold it."
One yogi did this by aggressively telling another off for not paying enough attention to her as she sat sharing her feelings and then suddenly refused to speak about her problems all together. The attention she lacked from one person but had from three others was the excuse she needed to step back from the edge and throw her bag of self worth issues at someone else to avoid facing them head on.
We're all guilty of it.
For a number of years, I've had a ton of surface dwelling aggression just waiting for any appropriate or more especially inappropriate moment to jump out and rage. It's always been this uncontrollable force that retreats as quickly as it appears and has actively tried to ruin a number of relationships for me. It filters out through my mouth while my insides stare on, horrified and unable to stop it. Through my training, I was finally able to see why it existed and how, for the most part, to deal with it - it's an on going practice.
I still expect to hand my baggage over when the opportunities arise because that's just human nature, but I know now that I can bare its weight far better than ever before and that the more work I put in, the lighter it'll become.
So, to answer you my dearest, most wonderful mother, who has always willingly carried my bags without hesitation, no I did not enjoy having a mirror put up to my face which showed the swirling contents of my head begging to be dealt with but it is still the most incredible and worth while thing I have ever done. And while there is still so much work calling out to be addressed, I know that there is growth and relief on the other side of the mine field that is my brain and that knowledge is worth more than I could ever express my gratitude for.
Thank you for that gift and thank you for absolutely everything else you've ever done (and let's face it, will do).
Be kind. Be Curious. Be You.
Tags: #yoga #yogateacher #yogateachertraining #baggage #selfdoubt #selfdiscovery #journey #help #therapy #yogalife #yogajournal #selfhelp #understanding #blogpost