A cold, hard truth – sometimes life gets really, really hard. This is, of course, a truth that yoga helps us observe unflinchingly. And yet, sometimes we still flinch. No matter if we have a loved one dying of cancer, our daughter has just failed grade three, we’re enduring a divorce, we’re stuck in a career we hate, or we’re simply caught in a spiral of depression, there are times when things just plain get too tough, and we feel very, very low.
So we just solve all our problems with yoga, right?
Of course the thing to do here would be to practice as if our hair was on fire, to paraphrase the venerable Pema Chodron. Often, however, we find these are the times we do anything but! Watching nine hours of TV, drinking a whole bottle of wine, eating a whole bag of chips…whatever our vice happens to be, we indulge it. And the next day we indulge it again, even though we swore that was the last time, the next morning we would for sure get up at six, practice an hour before work, sit for an hour before bed, be mindful and present all day long and eat only whole foods with chia seeds on top. But we didn’t. Again.
Sometimes we just don’t. Sometimes it really feels like we just can’t.
Those times are especially hard, because we know by then, as seasoned practitioners, how good we can feel if we just commit. Because we have been there. We have been on track. We have seen the light that yoga can lend to our lives.
Why can’t we pull it together and practice our yoga when it absolutely matters most?
This, of course, is the million dollar question. And of course there is no easy answer. Of course it has to do with all the sludgy webby weird stuff about being human and alive and in the world that we deal with every time we come to the mat.
But even if practice itself seems virtually impossible, is it perhaps fair to say it is absolutely amazing to even be aware of its existence? That, even in these garbage times of mindless Frito-eating and Buzzfeed-surfing, we are aware there is a space of connection and calm, and we know the tools to get us there? Even if it’s not currently within reach, even if today it is only a source of guilt because we can’t get off our butts and get there, perhaps this knowledge can serve as a source of comfort. If connection and calm were accessible once, we can know that they will be again.
If you can, allow this knowledge to cheer you. If you can’t, that’s okay too. Let it all be. And see. Chances are, one day, light will break through, your bum will rise up into its first downward dog of the week or month or year, and you will begin again.