Rainbows and Unicorns

Lately I’ve been getting more calls from people who are looking for some way out of their stress and depression. They read my bio on-line about how yoga helped me feel better, and they want to come in and see if it will help them. In some cases, local doctors and psychologists are recommending yoga. Even though they don’t practice themselves, they’ve heard it is a good thing. Although I’m excited that yoga is getting more attention and respect, I’ve been struggling with new students’ expectations of how yoga will help them and how fast. After all, they’ve seen the marketing, and their health care professional has recommended it – so they are hoping for a quick transformation.

The current deluge of transformational marketing from various schools of yoga creates this expectation that after a few sessions the student will be taken to some dreamy happy world with rainbows and unicorns. Yoga is not some kind of magic pill. It’s a practice, which goes beyond the mat – and it’s not easy. Practice means doing something over and over again for a long time, until whatever you are practicing becomes easier and more natural. It becomes a habit. When the mind does calm down from the practice, and the student begins to move deeper into their heart, what they find will not be a magical world of happiness. Within our hearts we experience everything, good and bad.

Yoga often does help people with depression; in my own experience it was a combination of doing the exercises, which have been shown as very effective in countering depression, and the internal spiritual change. It’s the second part, the spiritual “part 2” of the practice, which is the hardest part to describe. In the end, all I have is my story of what happened inside my head over the last 10 years. I’ll do my best to describe it, in the hopes that those who decide to take the time to read it, and suffer from some kind of depression, might see yoga as a process of self inquiry to be added to their counseling and medication. Yes, I’ve seen people get off depression medications after doing yoga for a few years, but that doesn’t have to be the goal. Here is a different goal I like to suggest to students working with depression symptoms: feel good about myself, be good to people around me, and be healthy enough to do my dharma or calling!

In January of 2002 I was having a rough time and barely holding it together. I decided to call around and get a massage; I thought this might help me to relax. For no reason at all I picked this place called, The Massage Center, and a woman named Susan answered. Before long Susan had me talking, and I reached out to her for help. She convinced me to come on in and get a massage right away, and I did. After my massage she said to me, “You’re like a ship floating on the ocean with no anchor. I think you are supposed to do yoga.” Susan was right.

I find myself now working on my tenth year of practicing yoga. Looking back, it is hard to believe where I was at in 2002. Susan is still helping people, as many massage therapist do, and now I’m also taking phone calls. In fact, I spend a lot of time listening to people I don’t know and then trying to convince them to come on in and take a yoga class. Sometimes I get a little weary taking these calls; it’s often the same conversation over and over again, and only some of the callers actually show up at the studio. It’s especially hard if I’m under stress myself and I’m not practicing or sitting enough. I always come to the same conclusion, though, when I struggle with this aspect of studio ownership. There is no better person than me to take those calls. After all, I was there in 2002 on the other end of the phone.

Something happened to me when I started doing yoga, and it happened pretty quickly. I struggle to find the words to explain it, only that I felt better. My window to the world was cloudy, and after I started practicing, the window became clearer, and everything seemed brighter and more colorful. I began seeing people more clearly too. But this was just the beginning of the process. I had a lot of work to do, and I continue to practice and work at it to this day. Yoga is not magic. It’s not a quick fix pill.

I think people do have internal transformations with the practice, and even sometimes an external one too. But I hesitate to promise this to people when they call me, because I have no control over what will happen if they show up and practice. Sometimes people find their breath in a yoga class, and then their mind calms down to a slow spin, and that is when it happens ─ a moment of divine grace, the witness awakens. The students find a place within themselves to witness their own thoughts. They wake up, and from there they start living with a different outlook. Although students sometimes want to credit their teacher for this awakening, it has absolutely nothing to do with the teacher. As a teacher, I just show the student the practice and try to teach her shavasana, and if anything transformational is going to happen, well that is between her and God. If she doesn’t believe in God, then it is between her and her own breath.

I went through, and am still going through, a process of becoming more aware of myself, my mind, my reactions, and my stuff. After I initially found my breath and began to truly relax my body, my first teacher Martita announced that she was leaving for the summer and wouldn’t be back until September. I started to freak out on the inside, afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep myself on an even keel without her classes. It was that summer I realized that what I was looking for was inside me, and that I needed to develop my own practice and not be dependent on anyone else to walk me through it every week. I was still quite glad when she arrived back in September! I spent the summer with Erich Schiffman’s book, The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness, trying to do triangle like Erich’s picture (rather unsuccessfully, I might add). I had a lot of fear that I would hurt myself. At that time, I was afraid to even do shoulderstand. Martita had to coax me into a shoulderstand over a period of a few months.

As I started attending yoga workshops in OKC and Dallas and started learning to sit and meditate along with the asana, the process became more intense. After doing pranayama and meditation for a couple hours one afternoon at the Art of Yoga in OKC, I became so aware of my own truth that I felt like I was just going to lose it crying or have some kind of a meltdown. I went outside to the back parking lot where my car was and just sat there. The truth, my truth, was there, and I had to look at the sadness I was feeling and not ignore it ─ not pretend that now that I was doing yoga everything was perfect. Something happened that day, and I saw myself more clearly, both the good stuff and the bad stuff. It was some kind of deeper awareness of my own behavior and reactions that I had previously not recognized. I looked up, and my friend Thomas was crouched next to the car checking on me. No words could explain to him why I was sitting outside in my car instead of inside enjoying the party.

Some students who are suffering from depression get to this point in the practice, and it scares them. They just can’t face whatever truth they’ve uncovered. Maybe they need to make a major life change, like a new job, new city, new lifestyle, or a different spouse. They’ve been staying busy and lying to themselves, and once they find a silent mind, they just can’t keep the truth from coming to the forefront any longer. It’s at this point, when the initial “high” of the practice wanes and the student’s reality breaks through, that I sometimes see people bolt. They are just gone. They quit coming to classes. They cannot deal with what they are feeling. When I got to this point in the practice, I had to accept the fact that my brain, left to its own devices, likes to make chemicals that make me feel sad, hopeless, and alone. It was my chemical reality, even if it wasn’t my actual reality. What yoga helped me do was to create and maintain a system for managing my brain. I had to learn to eat right, get enough sunlight, exercise a lot, and meditate on my breath. If I don’t do these things, my brain goes back to its old tricks. For quite awhile I thought the most important piece of my practice was the exercise, but I’ve come to believe that all four of the above lessons are needed, most especially the following of the breath.

Meditating on my breath leads me to find a place within myself that is constant and calm and unaffected by the chemicals that my brain might be dumping out. This place is like a fireplace in a warm living room. It holds the divine spark within me, and it’s this spark that keeps my internal flame burning. When I sit and meditate, I can find this place of the divine within me, even when I’m struggling, and I am able to get up and walk through my lows to the other side. I hope my practice can help others find the other side, but please don’t believe the spin-doctors of yoga. There are no rainbows or unicorns here. I have found love, laughter, and gratitude. This beautiful practice of yoga does works on us, gradually, in between the breaths, one day at a time.