Misled

I’m a child of the ’80s.

I learned about love from John Hughes movies where the emotionally melodramatic, tortured teen girl agonizes over the boy who ignores her until the last scene when he finally realizes there is so much more to her than funky clothes and attitude. The (male) best friend watches from a distance, his heart breaking because he has loved her since the second grade, but still he smiles because he loves her enough to let her go.

I loved these movies.

I felt her anxiety as she watched the wealthy prepster flirt with other girls. My own heart raced when he finally chased her to the parking lot and kissed her in the pouring rain.

I lived for these emotional highs and lows.

I looked for them in my own life because this is what true love looked like and I wanted it. Desperately.

Who doesn’t want love, true love, with all that it entails? Heart racing-can’t sleep-can’t eat-can’t think-emotions on edge so much you can hardly stand it-love.

In another situation, these same responses of elevated heart rate, faster respiration and heightened alertness would indicate that something was wrong.

These are the same physiological signals that would also kick in if you were to suddenly find yourself face to face with a man-eating lion.

“So,” argues my left brain, “What if we’ve got it all wrong about love?”

What if this anxiety that we have been attributing to the rush of true love is really a warning from our subconscious mind telling us in clear and uncertain terms to run away!?

The heightened emotion is exciting for a short time in the way that jumping out of an airplane is exciting, but in the end we eventually find ourselves back on the ground. We land in the middle of nowhere, alone and shaking with the rush of adrenaline. We’ve got an exciting story to tell but…then what?

“So,” entices left brain, “what if the one who makes us feel crazy and leaves us biting our nails and tearing our hair out is not the one? What if the one is actually the one we talk to when our heart is broken because it didn’t work out… again? What if the one is not the one whose arms we run and jump into wildly, hoping we’ll be caught, but instead the one whose arms we sink into when we’re exhausted because he/she has been standing next to us the whole time?”

What if?

Tracy Johnson has been exploring movement in its many forms since she began dancing at age 15. Her career as a dancer and choreographer led her to the study of Martial Arts, Massage Therapy and finally Yoga. As a Yoga Instructor she combines an understanding of anatomy and kinesiology with creative Vinyasa sequences rooted in the Ashtanga style and influenced by her many wonderful teachers. Tracy teaches yoga to kids and grown-ups in Western WI. She is the creator of Little Lotus Kids Yoga Cards and teacher training program www.littlelotuskidsyoga.com. She blogs about yoga, life and love at www.yogainthevalley.blogspot.com.

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Editor: Elysha Anderson

 

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