Saving the World

12 Aug 09
10:57 am
My legs are different sizes. Yes, true, most people have different leg sizes. Mine are over ½” different and you will not notice it when I walk. But, because of this, my body developed differently than it should have. My pelvis twisted to compensate and therefore I do not have a limp. Instead, I have developed bulging discs (two of them) and have had several bouts with sciatica in my mid-teens that has left me with permanent hypersensitivity in my right leg.

Okay, so why do I feel this need to overshare? Well, because my legs are different sizes, I practice yoga.

I read this article today on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-cahn/five-words-that-do-emnote_b_250065.html and at first it made me angry. Especially reading about it on other blogs made me angry. But what I was angry about was the thought that this woman could be so critical of a practice that has brought me, and millions of others, so much benefit and joy. This is a closed minded thought, and once I realized that, I took a closer look at her words.

She is not saying that yoga is terrible. She is not saying that yoga itself is closed-minded and regimental to army extremes, or imprisoning or limiting. She is saying that she began to feel that way with that particular method of practicing. Yes, yoga has hundreds of hundred-paged books telling you exactly how to live. There is also the Bible of the Western world, the Tao of the Far East. These are all regimental scriptures designed to be guidebooks for life in a specific culture, a reference journal for survival in a specific climate and a specific territory with other specific cultures surrounding you. These journals have often aided in the preservation of the beauty and rituals of the people they were designed to help.

Yoga is not a part of our culture in America, it is an element of our growing interest in whole-body health. America has no guidebook for its culture because we designed ourselves to be incapable of cultivating one, needless to say incapable of following one. America does not tolerate specificities. But people can, and many people thrive on it. Many people crave and flourish with a specific diet and rules about exercise and with the permission and drive that many things provide. Many practices involve these things, like team sports, or race training, or hyper-competitive graduate degrees, or physical ailments, or advanced corporate culture, or ashtanga yoga. It is not alone in its specificity. And those who prescribe to it are not animals.

I have been experiencing a lot of internal conversation about my opinions on yoga recently, as I have gone through several difficult weeks relating to my self esteem, my goals in life, my outlook on my current life. I cleared up many of them yesterday both in my yoga practice and in my conversation with Lauren, and I would not have the understanding of myself right now at 11:24 am that I would have had if either of those had not happened the way they did (Thank you Lauren).

Yoga seems to be a method of teaching yourself, both body and mind, how to best align yourself with the way the world is. I will elaborate. Physically, the asanas give you an opportunity to strengthen muscles and lengthen ligaments. The benefits to this have to do with our specific circumstance of gravity – your body is strengthened into an optimal relationship to itself to best move around from place to place in our specific atmosphere. Mentally you have an opportunity to place yourself as the only vessel in your life, to understand yourself as the cause of movement, to choose to not think. This is especially beneficial in a world that demands our thoughts be on everything else all the time. And spiritually, the culture of yoga provides a way to guide your self through the world in a particularly diplomatic and varying array of relatively neutral and kind beliefs through the practice of intention and care.

Ultimately, the practice of placing all of these benefits into the same movements highlights the fundamental integration of our mind, body and spirit in everything we do. By performing the asanas with all three aspects of self we can see how I was grumpy all day because my hips were tight – by opening them I release that tension physically and prevent injury and pain, I release the tension mentally because all of my anxiety had been caught there all day through some manner of distraction, and I release the tension spiritually because I am no longer upset at everyone who crosses my path for no reason other than I had tight hips. This happened last night – when I went in to class I did not want to go, I was upset at the world and every person I saw, and I was walking funny without realizing it. When I left, I could not stop smiling, I made way for every car on the road, and my body felt great. This is why I love yoga – because it makes us better people in our own world.

These are broad statements, and there are many many types of yoga and many people who need many different things from it. My yoga is positively critical, pushing my body when I need to, being kind to my spirit on a bad day, gentle on my self. This is often hard – my twisted pelvis puts serious limitations in about a third of the poses, but on the flip side it offers me a tremendous advantage on about a third of the others. The last third I just have to move through with the same challenges as everyone else. I have been practicing at least once a week for over four years and feel the strength I have gained. I am by no means an advanced student, but am moving there. I am noticing recently my desire to practice more often, which is a desire I have waited for, having been impatient with practicing for several years. There was a full year when I could not stop thinking about becoming a teacher, but the drive was based on the feeling of being in a club that yoga teachers give off, the advantage the knowledge of training would give me in class, the thought that all the yoga I would be doing would automatically make me a more advanced student. None of this is true. As I grow deeper into my yoga practice I am finding more patience with myself as a competitive person, I am more accepting of the challenges I face, and I see the depths to which I must learn to move forward.


The past few weeks have been harbor to many challenges regarding my acceptance of my relationship, my job, my routine. This is where I need to be in my life, but why? Never have I been satisfied with just one job, but here I am unable to acquire another one because of the time commitment. There is extra time in my life again. How do I fill it up? I don’t. This extra time is time to think, to slow down, to sink into the areas that are causing problems, or to relish the areas that aren’t. Just like I am learning that I cannot rush through an vinyasa, I cannot rush through life. Every piece can be perfected, every transition an opportunity for grace and thought, not just to benefit yourself but to enrich the lives of others.

This is the conclusion from yesterday. I need no “new project” because life itself is a project enough. What right do I have to demand another diversion when I cannot ensure that I am communicating my love for my friends and family enough? Why do I want something else to do when I cannot yet save the world?