On Finding Your Best Self...

Is there a person, place or situation that invites, encourages and allows you to be your very best as a human being?  Perhaps you are in touch with this feeling in a relationship with a child or a lover.  Maybe you reach it through running a few miles or playing your guitar or volunteering at a soup kitchen.  You might paint or draw or sculpt or sing...and find your best self expressed within your art.  Mountains, the ocean or a sunrise might awaken it in you.  Whatever the vehicle for getting you there, if you’ve reached that place, you know joy.  You know deep peace, gratitude, humbleness and a sense of yourself as part of something expansive and wonderful.  

For me, I encounter my best self in the hot, sweaty room I’ve returned to hundreds of times over the last nine years to practice Bikram yoga.  Maybe it’s the mirrors that run the length of the studio, forcing you or inviting you (however you choose to view them on a particular day) to acknowledge yourself in all of your humanness.  The mirrors don’t lie and I think that’s part of why they are there:  to hold you accountable for who you are on any given day.  How’ve you been treating your body lately?  You’ll find the answer in the mirror.  Are you carrying sadness into your practice with you?  The mirror will reflect that back to you.  How much hate is in your heart today...for yourself, for your practice, for whatever?  You can’t escape it...it’s written on your body and staring back at you in that mirror.  

Stay with your practice long enough, and you’ll learn from the mirrors...maybe about loving yourself and accepting yourself just as you are in the present moment.  You might find kindness and a sense of softening toward your broken places, your faults, your mistakes, your flailing.  That’s certainly been true for me.  Over the course of nine years, I’ve dragged lots of shit into that room and dumped it all out on my mat, picked up the pieces and looked at them in those mirrors.  I’ve held up this or that thought, feeling or belief and taken a good hard look at it, cried over it, struggled with it, allowed it to wash over me in waves....and then let it go and found peace, over and over and over again.  

Besides the mirrors, there’s so much more in that hot room that challenges me and strips me to my bare bones, asking me what I’m made of, what I believe in, how much I’m willing to put myself out there and try...despite the heat and the sweat and the anguish of a grueling physical practice.  And asking me this, too:  am I willing to accept and perhaps even love myself for better or worse, despite how well I can do the postures or stand the heat?  The answers have changed over and over and over again as my practice has deepened, but the question is there every time I enter the room and settle in for a 90 minute encounter with my oh-so-human self.

Like with anything you commit yourself to wholeheartedly and practice often, things shift and things change...and you either quit or begin to shift and change yourself.  Now, at the very beginning of Year 10, there are a multitude of things that don’t affect me when I’m in the practice room.  There are things I used to cling to in the past that don’t have a hold on me in the present.  I’ve worked through a lot of my petty irritations with the practice itself and am able to be calm, centered and focused in a way that’s taken years to hone.  I don’t reach anxiously for my water bottle to cool me down or a towel to wipe my sweaty face, because I’ve let go of those things and I’ve developed a trust in my breath as the number one thing that’ll keep me going through the 90 minutes.   

And...since I’ve got less tugging on my mind while practicing, I’m able to truly listen to the coaching being offered up by the instructor and willingly and openly apply the fine-tuning to my postures.  It’s a collaborative effort between student and teacher to bring me, and each person in the room if they choose to engage, to the very fullest expression of each beautiful posture in the series.  And when you are able to find the strength, breath and stamina to hold on and make it to the end of the 30 seconds or minute and are STILL holding yourself in a posture, damn!  It feels mighty good.  And your teacher is so proud and energized by your effort.  You can hear it in his voice and you can feel it in your chest...that sense of accomplishment and pride in a job well done....together.  There’s really nothing else quite like that feeling for me, and it keeps me coming back as a humble warrior to try again, to deepen a posture just a little bit more, to practice stillness and calmness through my breath despite the intensity of everything around me...the mirrors, the heat, the humidity, the visible and audible efforts of my fellow students.  It’s insane and wonderful at once.  And it’s the way I find the best in myself, the way I measure my growth as a human being.  It’s an exquisite and powerful collaboration, all designed to bring health and well-being to those who are willing to engage fully with their whole being.  

Like anything else that requires dedication and discipline, the more you show up and allow yourself to be vulnerable and open, the more you learn, and in the case of my yoga...and perhaps your religion or relationship or volunteerism or athleticism...I’ve come to understand and know myself better through my willingness to be there, to show up again and again.  I’m as lazy and excuse-ridden as the next person, perhaps more so at times, but the memory of my sweaty face in that mirror is etched inside me and I’ve come to love that face because of what I’ve witnessed in that mirror.  It’s been an amazing and wonderful transformation, turning my negativity into strength, my vulnerability into something beautiful and strong.  My very best self and my ability to love who I am was discovered...uncovered...recovered... in a hot, smelly yoga studio and I am humbled and awed by that.  Namaste.