This is my love letter to yoga. Gosh, I don’t even know where to start with my praises. You’ve carried me through life. You pulled me out of dark places and enlightend my day, my path, my spirit. Yoga filled up the last ten years of my life. It shaped every day, every decision I’ve made, with every step I’ve considered my practice. When I walk into a room I measure it’s size by yoga mats. When I see a nice deck, I imagine teaching people on there immediately. When I enter a hotel room, I scan it for usable yoga props. Yoga has been my life. Not just a physical practice I’ve pursued, but rather whatever also comes with it. The discipline, the hardship, the compromises, the increased sensibility, but also body aches and inner liberation. There’s no higher truth I’ve yet pursued to reach my ultimate potential as a human. This is the path. I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it, I’ve walked it…until now.
And even though or maybe because of the valleys you have to cross in every joruney, I’m at a point, where I look back and I’m not sure how to continue. I’m very close to giving up, yet can I give something up that I started to truly embody? Isn’t the truth already deeply entangled with my soul? Which reminds me of Baba Ram Dass saying that you’ll have to eventually give up any tool in order to not turn from mastery to slavery. I do feel like giving up the identity of being a yoga practioner and teacher. Not because it’s not giving anymore, but more because I have this inner soul pull to strip any identity and known ground in order to transform into whatever wants to come next. And though I don’t know what will come next, I feel like I’m asked to hold the void. This space in between “stripping off” and “becoming”. The great unknown.
Being a yoga teacher was an identity, that I borrowed. That never truly felt like my own, yet I truly was enjoying it. But the part i love, which is making other people move their body, dropp into their body awareness and their being, I will take along for sure. Holding space to connect with oneself is what I’m taking with me. And it’s the part of teaching yoga which might be fairly substantial, but can be passed on and evolve with me as a person.
The identity of being a yogi, I’ve never even touched. Since these are words that I haven’t lived up to ever in my life. Yoga might be a lifestyle, but it’s even more than that. It’s transcending knowledge that I’ve touched superficially, knowing it would change my life forever. And as a yoga practioner that hasn’t fully embodied that aspect, I tend to look at my practice as mastering the first steps of Patanjalis Ashtanga path before going further.
Going to India now, is a quest to find out what yoga still means to me. How I actually want to keep shaping my life around my practice. What parts are not helping me anymore to evolve, where the tool gets in the way of the intention? And which parts of this path I can reshape for my highest evolution. Am I saying goodbye to my practice and to teaching? What am I inviting into my life?
