April 21, 2014

Savasana: In My Yoga. ~ Elly Zhilyak

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I lost myself in Savasana the other day.

Every negative thought that I have worked to overcome for the past year came flooding back at me. I was still on the beach, but my mind was in some dark hole.

I let it go there—a few tears rolled down underneath the mask.

So this is what was meant to sit with the pain. I wanted to get up and walk out of the room, but that would mean that I was giving up. That I couldn’t handle the pain—to give it control over me.

That also meant that I had to sit through it. It meant that it was exactly what I was supposed to experience. To lie with it. Walk with it. Be with it. On that remote beach in some heavenly world. I had to let the thoughts flood my mind, like the waves flood the shore at high tide.

Once the teacher stopped talking, I tried to bring my mind back to that magical place, somewhere between the heavens and the earth, deep into the colors of the Universe.

I couldn’t.

I had left Savasana prematurely. I couldn’t concentrate and I had enough of the thoughts.

Still lost in my head when I got home that day, unwillingly, I allowed myself to marinate in it some more.

The whys will come and go and abandonment and rejection are always going to be my sore spots. They are the wounds that life has dealt me and I think they are my saving grace.

In the video, Yoga is, Seane Corn says to look to your wounds to find your calling.

So I look onto the them, into them. They teach me patience with others and grace with myself. They turn me to God. They make me ponder life. They also remind me of the love I so desperately sought and found—the core that I can always look to in moments of despair. The sort of love that warms your heart, circulating through your blood, penetrating your bones.

This love is eternal, and is not affected by time nor space.

This love I can share with others, and it is love I can reach into when I feel in lack of it.

I don’t think my wounds will ever go away…and maybe they are not meant to. But I am grateful to have found the tools to deal with them, to have found a core that can sustain me in my darkest and loneliest of times. The core that gives me courage to ask for help and gives me strength while I wait.

(p.s. The video mentioned here is about a woman who was losing her mother to cancer, and who went out to search for peace through her yoga practice. She mentions at one point, that what yoga taught her was to “sit through the pain”. Hence my mentioning of that here. At the moment that I felt the negative emotions flooding my brain, I also remembered this—and why I forced myself to experience it.)

I think part of the reason we are able to experience great joy, gratefulness and thankfulness, is because we have actually felt pain, and know the opposite of those wonderful fruits of love.

When we are able to sit with the pain—not fighting or resisting it—we can then let it go.

Effortlessly.

Because we have let it run its course, we can actually move on, or in some cases revisit what it is trying to tell us—to deal with whatever issues we are having. It is a practice of the mind and the heart, a will power, a strength, if you will, that must be practiced and cultivated. It is a strength of love that comes from being gentle with your heart, and a strength of will power in your mind.