Have I written about doing a Yoga Teacher Training here? I got an opportunity to do a sort of trade because the training is at the studio where I now teach Peony Somatic Dance and the owner very much believes in staff development.
And I knew when the opportunity came that it was the right thing for me, not even necessarily as a teacher but as a human. I needed something to help with the rut I was in.
I have, over my life, gone through many cycles of depression and a good number of those come along with a friend named atheism and a side buddy called cynicism. Not even just skepticism, which is okay in my book and healthy, but the toxic cousin cynicism which shuts down our capacities for awe and curiosity and wonder.
This last cycle, someone wise pointed out, really started with the death of Peony. At that point, something in me just froze.
And then the atheism just stuck around. I’ve never had it last over a year. This time, it was probably about 3 years.
So I started to think, Okay, this is it. This is me now and forward.
I dove into it like I do anything. I studied and read and thought and wrote.
Atheist eventually became an identity that I was even somewhat comfortable with.
Then I started this YTT. Months before, I had started with a really excellent therapist, and I was also finally back to journaling thanks to this app.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but I left a weekend of YTT (and I’m just over halfway through now) and I knew I had to start chanting again. Specifically to Ganesh. This chant.
Within days of starting that, I don’t know… a big old iceberg in the center of my being started to melt.
And out popped belief. ((ha))
It was that sudden. But not sudden at all, right? Since I had been carrying that iceberg around for almost 3 years.
And it’s melting faster by the day. Every few days, I get this butterfly feeling in the pit of me and I can tell there’s been another layer released, and with that, more emerging of the parts of me that I thought were just gone..
I thought that Ganesh and some tantric philosophy would be it. I assumed that would be enough.
But we are born into certain cultures and those cultures run in our very blood.
I found myself ordering some Thomas Merton. Then another. I just did it… didn’t stop to question it… followed the impulse that was definitely coming from a body level.
So I’m reading Merton outside in our wee backyard every morning with the birds.
I’m as stunned as maybe you are (or aren’t).
(I’m thinking a lot of us are in need of that Camus quote on my photo right there…)