How Yoga Saved My Life

The great Jupiter Saturn conjunction of 2020 that both completed a 20 year cycle and started a new one propelled me into a reflection of the last 20 years. I began to teach yoga and meditation full time and also embark on a purposeful, structured and conscious spiritual journey of a lifetime that continues to this very day 20 years ago.

If you struggle with astrology being significant, remember the fact that the planets were in certain positions at the time of your birth. It would be good to also consider the role of the sun and moon in our existence. If the sun doesn’t come up tomorrow, we’ve got about 18 hours to live. Never forget that. The moon isn’t too powerful it’s just directly affecting the water on the planet. So the possibility that other planets in our solar system can impact our experience really isn’t that far fetched.

Yoga and meditation invite us to take a cold, hard look at ourselves and who we are. For me, it felt more like a mandate to look and I took it quite seriously. I was used to being hard on myself and never allowing myself to measure up to the over the top standards I set for myself and others so true to form, when I started practicing I was very hard on myself, even unforgiving. I put myself through rigorous fasting and detox practices for 5 years as both penance and to clean my temple I had polluted for many years. Every week, without fail, over a 5 year period, I fasted for a minimum of 36 hours. Most of the time it was 54 hours because 36 became super easy and I enjoyed challenging myself and being intense was all I really knew. I’ll share more about that experience in another blog. As I cleansed my body and mind my energy soared. My asana practice was a beautiful thing to behold as my body cleared our excesses it had been collecting for years. There were some very real benefits from my detox practices no doubt and I’m grateful to have had that experience. I learned to fast at the ashram where it is done weekly by some people. But the harshness and austerity I intended to put myself through that was also a part of it, was not yoga at all. It was a reflection of what I thought I deserved. And my sadness with my life and some of the choices I had made. It has taken many years for me to soften and create a more loving compassionate relationship with myself and to know that I deserve to be loved, honored and respected, and to love, honor, and respect myself more. I also know that it has taken everything that has happened up to this point for me to be where I am so I acknowledge my soul’s wisdom in what it planned for me. I am closer to being free and whole than I have ever been so I know I’m moving in the right direction. And anyone can make the same choices I made.

I very quickly became a well known teacher in my community. I taught and was part of the teacher training program at the premier yoga studio in the area at that time. My classes were full and I was asked to run the yoga program at a local health club. I seemed to be able to manifest classes with very little effort until I was teaching 26 classes weekly and loving every minute of it. I wasn’t afraid to talk about things other teachers didn’t mention and I definitely got a little too big for my britches as they say. After 5 or 6 years, I left the yoga studio mostly because I felt micromanaged and told I was too much. I didn’t feel I could truly grow if I had to follow the owner's ideas about yoga and how to teach it and live it.  And I was very impulsive and made my decision without thinking it through thoroughly. Shortly after that, the health clubs went belly up and I was scrambling to figure out how to make a living. I was now a single mom with two young boys and no monetary support from my ex-husband. 

Lemme backtrack a minute because I haven’t talked about my 25 year relationship with my ex-husband that ended  shortly after my yoga certification. 

I shared yesterday that I knew things had to change when I decided to become a yoga teacher. And one of the primary areas that was crying for change was my marriage. I craved intimacy, depth, and touch and was not fulfilled with that aspect of our relationship. I thought I needed more attention than I got so I found ways to get attention that really didn’t serve me. And teacher training drastically changed me. Once I started to purify my body, I was no longer interested in polluting myself every weekend which was our normal pattern. I’m sure that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We grew more and more apart. I arranged a counseling session with a therapist I knew from the yoga community but was ultimately unhappy with that experience. Days before our 20 year wedding anniversary, my husband told me he didn’t want to be married any more. He said it had to end so we could still be friends. I really didn’t understand what that meant but I had more or less been expecting this to happen and in reality had held space for it to happen just as it did. We had not been truly happy for a number of years but we didn't have the finances to separate. I believed that once his father passed, the money would be there for him to leave me and that’s exactly what happened. We do not realize how powerful the mind is. Certainly that was not what I wanted to happen but I had resigned myself to it and so it could be no other way. I remember going to the yoga studio the night he told me and just sitting in there in the dark wondering how I was going to do this. I decided that yoga was now my family and my support. And to this day it has been. It has always been there for me, patiently waiting for me to get quiet and still and get right with myself and the universe. Over and over again it has saved my life. But there have been countless lessons, some of which were not pleasant at all. I always reminded myself after a particularly unpleasant lesson that Swami Satchidananda said that we learn far more from pain than from pleasure. Man was I learning a lot. 

Back to my impulsive decision to leave the yoga studio. That put me in a tight spot in terms of the means to support my very moderate lifestyle. I buttoned down all unnecessary spending and showed the universe I would do whatever it took to support myself and my family. I called on the Goddess Lakshmi a lot during that time. She is the Goddess of wealth, beauty, abundance and prosperity. One of my teachers taught a chant called the Sri Suktam from one of the oldest texts on the planet called the Rig Veda. I like sanskrit chanting and think it's a beautiful way to raise your vibration. Sanskrit is a vibrational language and I like the devotional aspect of singing to the light or source or goddess or whatever word you would like to insert here. I had a mentor at the time who was very good at chanting so I copied what she did to learn. It's a very melodic chant where you are asking Lakshmi to come and live with you. I have chanted it so much that I know it by heart! And it has served me well. I have lots of ideas on abundance I’ll share in an upcoming blog so please stay tuned. 

Slowly but surely, my finances stabilized. I made a point to align myself with what I wanted and focused on what I had rather than what I didn’t have. This is a key practice. We must understand that whatever we focus on expands. So I focused on all the ways I felt abundant that had nothing to do with money. I know many people may be experiencing a change in their finances. And the practice I just shared of focussing on what you have and wanting what you have is a good place to start. 

20 years ago, I made a decision that I am thankful for every day of my life that has served me in countless ways. Anyone can make a choice like that! I decided to more or less reinvent myself and my life. It has been a beautiful, hard, rewarding, compelling, challenging, disruptive, exhilarating, incredibly expansive journey so far. And I choose to continue to know myself better and tap into the infinite potential my soul has for evolution and growth. I see this new cycle as a perfect opportunity to share what I have learned and am learning to support others in their personal journeys to more freedom, more love, more joy and more magic.