Drinking the Kool-Aid
Let me tell you a little secret. I have not rolled out my yoga mat since July. Three months without yoga. I could not be arsed about asana. I’ve meditated when I’ve needed to (i.e., sporadically and as much to assuage my tight right psoas as to still my mind) and I’ve thought about it – mainly why I feel so disinclined to get on a mat again – and that’s it.
“You didn’t drink the Kool-aid, then?” said a smug friend when hearing of my dilemma. I wasn’t proud of the fact that after a year of intense yoga training, the magic had disappeared and I was now adrift.
Mr. Jules went to class, by himself, and would come back and say things like, “You should come. You were happy after a yoga class, it was good for you.” With a side-ways glance.
I looked at timetables of different yoga centres, often, almost daily, but there was always something more pressing to do or I would literally feel depleted of energy when it was time to leave and would take a nap instead.
Yoga is often described as a path. This has absolutely no relation to my experience. My yoga *journey” is a torturous drive around Spaghetti Junction or akin to getting lost in a very overgrown labyrinth with an unusual amount of dead ends. But if it is indeed a path, it twists and turns, sometimes taking me off on a lovely long stretch where I can get up to top speed, feel the wind in my hair and then cruelly and usually just as I think I am getting somewhere, I am right back where I started.
For the past three months every run in the park has left me utterly perplexed as to why I now disliked yoga. I even went over to the other side (now their Kool Aid is nasty stuff), joined another tribe for a while and tried to fit in, kissing a few frogs, but they were wary of me from the start and so I ran off before they could eat me for breakfast.
So practically three months to the day since I stepped off my mat I stepped back on. What inspired me? One sentence in the below clip:
“When women come together, when they let go of the judgement and just breathe together as women, our truths come out, ritual happens and connection forms.”
I’ve so missed that.
