Detachment and acceptance -- How yoga saved my life

Dancing with a ballet group in college --

having just discovered yoga and with a lot of healing left to do

To say in the least, I had a complex childhood. Divorce, significant medical issues, and bullying left me feeling like a willow branch in the wind -- ungrounded and vulnerable to being thrown about at any moment. I’ve been four feet eleven from twelve years old onwards. More subconsciously than consciously, I felt small in spirit as well as stature: insignificant, unimportant, even less than average. I found dance, which gave me a blissful channel for the trauma and emotion locked in my muscles in sinew.

The push towards perfection without possibility of attainment, so intimately enmeshed in the art form, gave me endless challenges and avenues for commitment. Those things fueled and exhilarated me. On the other hand, that push to unattainable perfection only reinforced the type-A tendencies that had become deeply ingrained in me. Dancing felt amazing, but when I was done, the depression, anxiety, and obsessive tendencies remained. Combined with bodily insecurities, which the dance world only intensified, an eating disorder was on my doorstep. With college’s thrust into semi-adulthood and the ensuing stressors thereof, another was coming my way.

The push towards perfection without possibility of attainment, so intimately enmeshed in the art form, gave me endless challenges and avenues for commitment. Those things fueled and exhilarated me. On the other hand, that push to unattainable perfection only reinforced the type-A tendencies that had become deeply ingrained in me.

Then, in my sophomore year, I went to my first yoga class. Classes were free at my university’s gym at the end of the semester, and dance classes were done for the rest of it as well. I felt like I needed a way to move. I was no stranger to stretching; I had stretched daily for years (which backfired by making me tight and in pain -- but that’s a whole long other story). Yet what yoga demands -- a demand for strength, balance, and kinesthetic integration along with stretching -- was unlike anything I had experienced before. As an understatement, that first class was difficult for me. Yet something about it, something I couldn’t define, had me hooked. I went back. And back again, outside of my university’s gym.

I was finding something in the practice that I never had before. I could move, breathe, and explore my body’s possibilities, just like I could in dance, but without the call for unattainable perfection. True, yoga has its own unattainable perfection, but the key difference is the presence of detachment and acceptance, concepts intrinsic to the practice; on that path to unattainable perfection, wherever you may be at the moment is alright. Or, at least, the practitioner is encouraged to see where they are in this moment as alright.

Posing in Boston Common -- at a much healthier place in my mind, body, and spirit

Detaching is letting go of the deeply-felt need for a certain outcome, and acceptance is meeting whatever that outcome may be with grace and ease. If a Crow Pose is not happening today, it may happen another day. Or not. If you can't stay stable in your Warrior II today, try again tomorrow -- but if you can’t then either, your breath, body, mind, and spirit remain. The pose is not the point.

Detaching and accepting doesn't mean indifference. It means releasing from the perspective that the stakes are so much higher than they really are, and failing to achieve a particular outcome says so much more about you as a person than it really does. Oh, there is certainly self-discovery -- a whole lot of it. But in yoga, none of that self-discovery objectively tells you that you're inherently worthless or flawed. Rather, you are human and have strengths and weaknesses, and you can always come back to your mat. You can always try again, learn, and grow. Coming to all of that is a life-long journey of its own.

A key point in my journey was, as a recently graduated Dance major looking for work, deciding to train to become a yoga instructor. Apart from limited opportunities for viable employment, I wanted to share with others what I had begun to find in the practice with. Study and practice fished deep into remaining layers of trauma. I began to find that detachment and acceptance for myself. I’ve continued to find more and more of those essential components of yoga practice through eight years of teaching and watching my students travel on their own journeys to finding those things -- those gifts which we can bring far off the mat. In truth, that’s the real journey.

Detaching and accepting doesn't mean indifference. It means releasing from the perspective that the stakes are so much higher than they really are, and failing to achieve a particular outcome says so much more about you as a person than it really does.

Most powerfully for me, detachment and acceptance means that I’ve begun to be able to accept myself, my body, and my past. Standing short, I can speak and act much larger. I've found far greater confidence and courage, while balancing those traits with the humility and high levels of empathy that are more natural to me. My path has taken me to much less teaching yoga and to other work, that which I feel called to and in which I can uniquely serve. I still dance, and as a dance journalist I am deeply enmeshed in that world. It's my first love, my deepest passion, and where I am meant to work in this world. Through finding detachment and acceptance, yoga has helped me to experience achievements and setbacks in my dancing with more calm, easy pleasure.

I also continue to practice yoga and teach yoga to children, in ways that they can receive -- in so doing planting the seeds of what it can offer to them, and those they will touch in their lives, as they begin to form who they will be. Without yoga, the worst of my mental health challenges might have taken my life. With it, I have begun to accept who I am and make the most of it in this world. That's been my journey. What will yours be? That is yoga. It is not cute leggings, expensive retreats, wheatgrass smoothies, or what your abs look like. It is the journey of detachment, acceptance, and self-discovery -- on the mat and far beyond it.

Me now, with a renewed determination to leverage yoga's gifts and power

to help dancers be in a better place, just as I am now