What if Yoga is Just for You?

A Psychological Journey of Separating Self and Service

I was having a particularly rough time around Christmas last year — a self-imposed isolation period coming off of 9 months of traveling. I wasn’t particularly lonely for the company of others, but I was lonely. In my actions I took a leap of faith with the decision to make traveling my lifestyle. The moving around, seeing new places, having new experiences shook something within my subconscious that was ready to emerge when the time came to find stillness.

Within the company of myself, rooted in the spaciousness of desert living in Joshua Tree, CA, stillness came, or rather, the confusion within my mind became so loud that stillness was the only thing I craved.

I took to roaming, a lot. Roaming aimlessly through the brush of chaparral and yuccas, seeking, pleading for this pounding of old and new ways to have their dance and allow me rest. I cried, I screamed, the involuntary releases moving this tango through me. Integrating 9 month’s worth of experience is not an overnight thing, and yet my impatience proved just how much denial I was giving to the process of human experience.

I can’t recall a time prior ever feeling this level of embodied confusion. Pluto was rounding out his time with Capricorn and the last 12 years came rushing in as well. The person I was 12 years prior and who I’ve grown into being was up for discussion between my human safety functioning and the spirit of my higher being. A battle for center stage, which voice, which presence, safety and familiar or curiosity and the unknown — which would prove my guiding force for years to come?

In these times of inner battle, when the lower self and higher self have their quarrel for dominance, I seek only the company of myself to resolve. Call it self-sufficiency, call it independence, whatever the label I usually am met with a felt sense of personal effectiveness that boosts inner confidence each time I choose myself to problem solve. And yet I couldn’t seek myself in this moment. This particular moment felt so large and so beyond any grasping of a personal understanding that I needed to see myself through the eyes of another human being. To place my experience in the hands of someone who knows me when I can’t see clearly. To let words flood out of me and string themselves onto a thread for me to weave into a tapestry of understanding. To feel for the essence that vibrates between two connecting hearts and know the truth of what is.

In other words, talk with someone who can help me get out of my own damn way.

The blood that runs between the veins of a mother and her child are undeniably powerful. It’s magic, really. And within the span of that hour-long conversation I had my answer. Well, within the span of a single phrase, the last 12 years dialed into focus.

“What is medicine for you might not be the medicine you share with others.”

The specific phrase was, “what if yoga is just for you?”

Something that is just for me? I was thrown back centuries. When, honestly, when was the last time that something was just for me? When in my 35 years of this lifetime had the single thought crossed my mind that something could belong to me? Never.

In the story I had written for myself, the selfless martyr always painted as priority. I am not an I but rather I belonged to other. I belonged to the service of healing, whatever was asked of me I did so perfectly. Wrapped my pride around the finger of meeting everyone else’s expectations, and never once established an expectation for myself.

I attended my first yoga class in 2016, and it was the first time in 27 years I actually had a joy-filled relationship with my body. I was one in a sea of a hundred practicing that day outside on the grassy bluff overlooking Long Beach harbor, and in that moment of Namaste, I knew I belonged. Clear headed and vibrant, I found the path I didn’t know I was lost from.

Teaching all but felt natural, as someone who places the needs of others before her own. My personal practice quickly became a preparatory routine for upcoming classes. I was thinking about how I could best serve the needs of my students, and every pose became an inner analysis on teaching myself how to explain what I am doing and translate it for the digestion of others.

Two years in, I was burned out and bitter. Guilt-stricken for ending teaching because something within did not feel right. I couldn’t name it, place it, or analyze it and that frustrated me, and yet I was responding to a spaciousness within that knew better.

When I listened, this spaciousness opened up new doorways of possibility to explore. Reiki, shamanism, tarot, astrology, crystal healing, hermeticism, Egyptian studies. Yoga did more than open my body, it supported the opening of my mind. As my mind opened, new horizons became available; I was seeing into multiple pathways and digging many rabbit holes. I couldn’t stop, I was insatiable to knowledge. And without knowing it, I was expanding myself further and further away from the point of self I still had yet to acknowledge, accept, and establish.

But I was established in service to others. Trainings and certifications became a grounding force that supported me in feeling like I belonged to this planet. Feeling a sense of contribution by way of following where another had laid down roots roped me into a familiar sense of safety. Conformity through another’s authority, overdeveloped in the arena of teaching another’s methodology, only when permission was granted for something to belong to me could I understand just how comfortable I was existing in the shadow of another’s glory.

Tens of thousands of dollars I invested over the years learning from the authority of others. Hundreds of hours of trainings with only a fraction of the hours practically applied. I was throwing so much of my trust into others, but what about the trust I had for me? What was the path that I was actually carving, or was I simply a dandelion in migration with the breeze? This old loop kept wrapping itself around me, year after year, and I felt I was no closer to solving, only that the grip became tighter, the boa of my soul using time and patience to squeeze me into an inevitable submission.

Did I mention I had a particularly rough Christmas?

Those words spoken from my mother pulsing new life through lifetimes of expertly trodden patterns. “What if yoga is just for you?”

In that moment I experienced a necessary divide. A cut through the fabric of an independent self separate from her service. A slice through the core wounding of dependency of needing to be needed to belong. A lifting of the veil, a pulling back of the curtain to reveal the deepest energetic imprint of a memory passed on from lifetimes past. I swim with understanding and fly in the presence of awe. A bow of deep gratitude as the pieces of present and past synthesize to form a new foundation of a self becoming established.

See, I felt compelled to establish myself as an authority to gain inner authority. Hence the investment in trainings. I mirrored the strongest and most successful and adopted their traits as my own. But only so far did these adaptations carry me; it was the dissolution of the teacher that this student learned to seek herself spiritually.

Painful the process has been learning of my own true nature, one that does not rely on an external lens. For me it was the past I am meant to conquer, traveling backwards so I may build a road to walk forwards.

‘Stabilizing ones own biological inheritance’ as one astrologer spoke of the 4th house of Cancer. Looking back into the pool of experience do I create the ground for which I now walk on. Every opportunity when choice is made leaning into the curious unknown do I know I establish myself in future success. When I can look back and trace patterns and uncover why roads had ended, I reveal more of what I am meant to leave behind so that the leap off the edge becomes a little more enjoyable each time.