Spending a weekend with my yoga guru, Baron Baptiste, was an amazing experience. Twelve hours a day of power vinyasa yoga has a way of cleansing the body and mind of many distractions and helps clear away the cobwebs.
I’d been feeling a little stuck in my practice lately. There was some unseen and unnamed obstacle blocking my energy, and keeping me from progressing. I always tell my students to let go of something, anything, and while I had the preaching of this principle down, I was stalled in the practice. I was holding on to something intangible.
Somehow, over this weekend in Boston, I finally let go, and it was truly an invigorating experience. On Sunday, after a physically exhausting four-hour practice, we laid out for savasana, or final relaxation. I listened to my guru’s voice telling me to let go. As I closed my eyes, placing my towel over them, I felt myself sinking into that stillness I have been chasing. The quiet settled around me and I felt nothing but my breath and the earth beneath me.
Into this quiet, the haunting sounds of the harmonium reached my ears. This enchanting sound pulled me forward, back to the moment, and though I became more aware of my surroundings, the stillness remained. It took a few minutes to realize that the sounds of the harmonium and the haunting voice accompanying it were live, and not a recording. Krishna Das, the Kirtan master himself, was singing to us.
In this moment of waking from the peaceful repose of savasana, something moved inside of my heart, and I really let go. The floodgates opened and the tears flowed, seemingly without stop. My first thought was that I was having a breakdown, but I quickly realized that I was experiencing a breakthrough. The line may seem thin, but the results are vastly different. The breakthrough occurs when you let go of control, extend your boundaries, and allow yourself to establish new possibilities. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
If you need to get out of a rut, lay your expectations and inhibitions aside and resolve to be a yes. Welcome adventure, surprise, and yes, even change, because shift happens, whether you swim against the tide or flow gracefully with it. You can transform yourself and your life on the path to true happiness if you get out of the way. The answer to “How?” is “Yes!”
