I've been a yoga teacher for twenty-five years. A former student asked me: How can yoga help me with my relationship? How can I "help" my partner to change and to feel the serenity I feel when I come to class? I've been contemplating this question. Do we want our beloveds to change? (If so, we'd better prepare for disappointment!) We have charge only of our own selves. I think that's the reality... only our own dear selves. Perhaps we can use the longing for things to be different "out there" as fuel to create "in here," the "serenity to accept the things we cannot change..." Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see..."
My beloved husband does Svaroopa(R) yoga's Magic Four poses only when he's in pain. (The Magic Four are reliable for lengthening the spine and releasing chronically held tension in the body and in the mind.) He doesn't know a mantra from a match stick, nor his sacrum from a satchel. He's tolerant of my morning rituals and I of his... which includes his deep dip, first thing, into email.
Most days in recent years, he's a volunteer in service to kids in hospitals and at various camps for kids with life threatening illnesses. His persona is bigger than life at these venues as a very funny magician teaching kids to do magic (besides the very real magic they perform every day just by BEING). He teaches these kids rope tricks and they, in turn, teach their parents, siblings and friends. Empowerment is a gift.
There was a time when I bemoaned the fact that we were on different tracks. How lovely it would be to share with him this revelatory experiment in consciousness that meditation and yoga offer. How lovely it would have been to take him along to La Jolla to do teacher training with me. Hah! No way! That's not the man I married.
So he worked in game shows and I taught yoga and did bodywork. Now, he does great things to help kids feel better about themselves, while I still see the occasional client and continue my daily sadhana (spiritual practices).
We're on parallel but not too distant tracks. We do some sessions of camp together. He respects my unusual practices of chanting and meditating and even joins me in two of the Magic Four some mornings - if his back is hurting. Generously, he agreed to giving over our garage at the old house for twenty years, so I could teach yoga classes there.
Neither of us really wants the other to change... but over the forty-four years of our marriage, each of us HAS changed... each of us has become more tolerant of the other's preferences. Do I wish he'd practice better posture at the computer? Sure. Do I want to make that a battle ground? Nope. If he gets too crimped he knows the tools. Legislating how he "should" live creates friction, which unlike tapas, which in Sanskrit, the language of yoga, means "heat from friction," and is one of the yogic practices for shifting unhealthy habits, doesn't seem to burn away the behavior I wish he'd change... it only leads to cooling down our very real enjoyment of each other and the warmth and ease of relating.
There are plenty of "common grounds" where we can enjoy the sweetness of relationship... so he has his sadhana and I have mine and we communicate about how we're growing in our chosen fields of practice and where we're hitting pot holes. I have yoga & bodywork buddies; he has camp and game-show buddies. We can "talk shop" with them.
But we share the nitty gritty with one another. It's safe to be ourselves in relationship.
My beloved is always going to be my best friend and lover. He's not destined to become a yogi this lifetime and that's fine with me. I'll keep plugging away at cultivating my relationship with my "Big S Self." That way, I don't feel disappointed all the time. There's a LOT in the world to be disappointed about.
Lilly Tomlin was quoted: "No matter how cynical you are, you just can't keep up."
The Pollyanna in me (or is it my Big S Self?) says: "This world is so beautiful, it makes me cry... tears of joy."
Namaste
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