It was a gloomy morning. The gym’s regulars were clanging their weights and walking their endless miles on their treadmills. I made my way to the back of the gym to the darkened studio space. Despite the yoga class starting in only a few minutes, I was alone. I unrolled my budget friendly Five Below mat in the corner and took a seat.
I closed my eyes and waited in the relative silence, the whir of the heater and the occasional clang of free weights bringing my attention back into the room. My thoughts weighed heavy on my mind and my body as they rounded my shoulders forward, curling in on myself like a broken doll. For that’s what I was in that moment, broken.
The door behind me swung open in a fury. A young woman with jet black hair and a long, panicked stride came bursting into the studio. “I am so sorry I am late!” she apologized as she unrolled her mat at the front of the class.
She selected a playlist and we got started. Just the two of us in the darkened gym studio.
My head was swirling with my own madness, lost in twisted thoughts of my husband’s treatment, the medications I needed to pick up after this, I wondered if he was still asleep, and what kind of appetite he’d have today. We had just finished his second round of chemotherapy. We had some idea of what to expect now after the first round, but things were getting worse. His fatigue was insurmountable most days. When he was awake, he was so exhausted he wasn’t really present. And the drugs were a hell all their own. He needed them to not be in pain, but they made him so sick that we needed other medications just to deal with the side effects.
“I bet you can do crow,” a voice interrupted my thoughts. I hadn’t really been paying attention to what Mia was saying or how we had been moving. My body was on autopilot and I was a million miles away.
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked.
“Have you ever done crow pose before?”
“Not in a very long time.” In truth, I had done crow years ago. But I was not in that body anymore. I was injured emotionally, and I had turned to emotional eating to survive and now I weighed 40 pounds more than I had only two months ago. There was no f@#king way I was getting into an arm balance.
“Let’s give it a try, I bet you can,” she repeated.
Shortly after I found myself out in the car, staring at my hands, crying harder than I had in a very long time. Something very deep inside me cracked wide open and there was no closing it back up. I cried until I was hollow and numb.
I went back to class the next day. And the next. And the next. A year after my husband was cancer free, I graduated from yoga teacher training.
That day in class, I was looking for something more than a physical practice. I was looking to heal very broken pieces of myself, even if I didn’t know it yet. I had tried yoga before and never felt a deep connection to it. But this time my heart was finally in it, and there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t gotten on my mat.
Every day that I step onto the mat and get to share this practice with others, I am sharing this part of myself with my students, even if I never speak the words out loud. The Japanese have a practice, Kintsugi or “golden joinery,” which takes once broken pieces of vessels and puts them back together with a lacquer and paints them with gold or silver. It takes those once broken pieces and makes them beautiful and unique. For me this isn’t just about sharing a physical practice, it’s about welcoming and embracing those broken pieces of ourselves so that we can begin to heal and see the beauty within once again.
With Love and Compassion,
Mandy
