My name is Daniel and recently I lost everything. One moment I was running along a beach on vacation enjoying a sunset, and the next I received a text message telling me that I couldn’t go home. Like so many expats who had made their homes overseas, different international events uprooted my entire life. I lost my home, my community, my belongings, and eventually my job. Hence, I was left wandering around the US seeking answers, connections, and a new beginning. At that point I didn’t know anything about yoga nor how it would help me.
I felt lost as I had no more bookmarks or signposts in this bustling country that I had not lived in for nearly a decade. I was out of place and struggling to connect with people who did not understand the culture shock of returning to America. Also, I feared getting lost in the rat race and getting stuck somewhere ‘in the middle’. Being 36 years old and starting everything over terrified me.
I found myself sitting in my parked breathing away anxiety and panic attacks or taking long walks in the woods crying my eyes out fighting off thoughts of suicide. I lost my identity as I was removed from a community that knew me. All the hard work and effort I put to build a reputation was suddenly erased. Nobody knew me here. Everything was foreign. I was nobody and I felt like nobody. I felt invisible. And I didn’t know what to do.
I was in virtual therapy (and still am). I tried focusing on finding new work in hopes that that would help me find stability and provide some kind of railing to hold onto. But the endless job application process only exasperated my distress and anxiety. I had very few call-backs and a quickly diminishing savings account. As a results, I felt worse. I felt unworthy, unaccomplished, and unwanted. I fired off email after email or saved dozens of tabs for opportunities, none of which every really manifested into real progress or growth. To improve things, I visited old friends in different cities across the country in hopes that an environment would help me find belonging. But the endless moving around only made me feel more estranged and adrift. There were so many beautiful areas but nowhere that felt like ‘home’.
The problem, of course, was that I didn’t know what I wanted or who I was.
One day, while on a hike in the Adirondacks (I often return to nature when seeking answers) crying my eyes out and feeling lost, I felt a voice whispering inside me. “Find your breath, find your form, find your flow.” Again and again this message rang in my head on a loop like a mantra. My breath was my peace, my form was my work and my flow was my growth. It was telling me to return to Yoga. I needed to find my grounding. I needed to feel and hear my heart, to pick up the pieces of what was broken and reassemble myself from the inside out. In other words, if I skipped this process all my efforts would continue to disappoint.
A week later I was enrolled in a 200-hr Yoga Teacher Training. This started an ongoing chapter of rebuilding, one that focused on listening to my deep self and building healthy patterns, habits, and behaviors that supported a vision of what I wanted for myself, not what others wanted for me.
The real work of Yoga is not easy. While there are many physical benefits of Yoga, it is at its core a deeply spiritual practice—one that puts you in touch with your pain and hardship and asks you to push through them with love and forgiveness and grace. At many points during the course I found myself laying on my back shedding tears for pain and hurt that had no names. It taught me to sit and be with my grief and to listen to it. The grief was telling me something. The struggles I had in my life were akin to the struggles I had getting into specific postures.
I needed to expand while also let go. I needed to sit in my discomfort and breath through it and learn that the pain was not permanent. Tomorrow I could go deeper or stay right where I was. And that was okay. I needed to release the ideas of where I thought I should be and love myself for where I am. Yoga reminds you of this daily. It asks you to focus on your core using your breath and to learn from the practitioners around you, not measure yourself against them. Yoga provides help in teaching you to forgive yourself and find joy in the moment. That regret of the past and fear of the future are the paths to self-destruction and abandonment of the heart. In this sense, Yoga can help restore that sacred connection with your soul that oftentimes is lost.
When people ask me about yoga today, I tell them, “Yoga won’t save your life but it will help you. It will give you the tools to save your own life.” It is empowering that way. It asks you to take responsibility for your own happiness and health and salvation and to work with yourself to find those things. Through that it gives you freedom. Everyone’s yoga is different. You can find your solid ground anywhere you are if you return to your practice. It is not dependent on a community or environment or version of success. Therefore, it is yours and yours alone.
I am still in yoga training. And I am still rebuilding my life. And this will probably be a lifelong quest. But I’m okay with that now. I’m happy with that now. In fact, I see the beauty in its ever-changing nature, and I feel strength in myself to flow through it with love and forgiveness.
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