Sunday, May 01, 2016

Balance--a Yoga Lesson in Long-term Recovery

I have just arrived home from two weeks of yoga training. Two weeks of doing daily yoga, and extra yoga posture training, and study of yoga philosophy, and the anatomy and physiology of yoga. In addition, there were lectures on Ayurvedic medicine, nutrition, psychology, and conscious communication.

So, yes it was very intense. And an emotional roller coaster at times. But here’s the thing: I loved it! I also knew—even at the hardest moments—that practicing my twelve-step life tools was carrying me through. 

One thing that was physically present was this question of balance. In my last post I wrote about the value of an unbalanced life—following a passion (like yoga an yoga teaching) is seriously unbalanced, even as, yoga brings more balance into one’s life.

Seem like a paradox? Yeah, it is, just like all the paradoxes in our Twelve-step programs.

One of the challenging tasks in these first two weeks of yoga teacher training was that we had to get up and start teaching within the first few days. Yeah, kinda intimidating to find my voice in this new area. But I also felt my recovery become full-bodied. I know how to chair a meeting, and how to stand up and share, and how to guide a newcomer. And I could draw on that.

I also heard myself say something that made me laugh: I was teaching the Tree Pose where you stand on one leg and put the other food on your calf or thigh and balance while breathing, and I heard myself say, “And you’ll feel yourself wobble a bit because balance is really made up of a million moments of being out of balance.”

Balance comes from out of balance. Our lives get balanced as the pendulum swings get smaller and smaller. We are coming out of the woods. 

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