For 4 years I lived in Sydney, working as a yoga teacher and teacher trainer. As a teacher trainer, I held quarterly 1-2-1s with my students where they could talk about their progress and their struggles on the year-long course, and in their lives. After a few 1-2-1s, one student, Ella confessed that she had quite a fondness for the old vino tinto, putting away nearly a bottle every night. She’d tried to stop but simply couldn’t. I could see the battle raging within her. And the shame.
Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I suggested to her that the red wine was fulfilling a deep and genuine need within her. To take it away without providing an alternate source of comfort (and ideally one that doesn’t stain your teeth red) might be experienced as a kind of violence. I told her I thought she should keep drinking but just think about that, about other ways of soothing herself and about who or what it was that needed soothing. She looked relieved and I think this was because she was bracing herself for a ticking off. Living in a glass house myself, however, I knew better than to throw stones. If you’re even a vaguely functioning human, you’ll know that will power can only take you so far. And when it runs out, that’s when the fun begins.
Many yogis, myself included, think they’re just going to become pure and holy the moment we commit to the practice. We don’t reckon with the deep and unconscious pain that drives us. But it’s also that pain that got us onto the yoga mat in the first place so there is comfort to be had in the mysterious alchemy of our suffering and how it reaches for the light.
To be seen.
In her book, The Emotional Hostage, Leslie Bounder, a founder of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), confesses that she she remained a severe emotional basket case even though she knew and used some very advanced NLP techniques. She’d yet to do, John Bradshaw (author of Homecoming) reckons, her original pain work. Or, put in the words of many spiritual teachers, was engaged in a spot of spiritual bypassing – the practice of using spirituality to avoid, suppress, or escape from uncomfortable issues in life.
As a yoga teacher, and teacher trainer, that was me all over.
And now?
Not muchy changey changey.
Like Ella, I’m trying to get myself (and my son ) to do things that for some reason we cannot. We then round on ourselves for our failures, thinking we should be better than we are.
The psychologist and priest, John Monbourquette says of spiritual bypassing:
“Without deep and honest self-acceptance, the spiritual life rests on a dangerous psychological foundation and is nothing more than escape into a world of illusion. Humble self-knowledge is the most basic condition for any true spirituality.“
I think that might help to explain why I blew up on the 10-day silent Vipassana retreat.
And why hitting rock-rock bottom as I did when I started this blog might be the very best place to start.
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