Final reflections of 2008

The clock reads 12:51AM and I cannot sleep. My alarm is set for 5AM. No doubt a nap will be in order tomorrow afternoon before the New Year's Eve festivities begin.

I've been wanting to post this for awhile, but for some reason have been putting it off. For the greater part of my life, I've had really bad posture due to a weak core. The style of yoga I had gotten into is Ashtanga, which has a reputation for being very hard on the rotator cuffs due to the number of vinyasas in each practice. As I began to build strength, my front chest and shoulder muscles bulked up while my back muscles were sadly neglected, exascerbating my ape-woman posture. This was pointed out to me by a watchful instructor, and I began to really work on heart-openers and backbends. Enter the introduction of second series of Ashtanga, and I was really able to open up. My posture improved, and all was right with my yoga practice again. However, as my second series practice got longer, I've been feeling fatigued in my front shoulder muscles, and I noticed my shoulders drooping forward ever so slightly when I'm resting in bed. I was baffled.

Well, last week I got my answer. Matthew D., the Michigan (more accurately, Midwest) Ashtanga guru I've been practicing under is an absolutely fantastic instructor. After watching me practice a measly 2 times, he made an observation that no one has ever caught before. Though my shoulders were very open and my posture good in the held postures, my shoulders were still hunching - badly, I might add - in transitionary postures (tittibasana and bakasana - for those who are curious). Today, when I was practicing, I got into those transition postures again. Suddendly, I hear him shout across the room to me, "lift those shoulders and straighten that spine!!" I couldn't. I completely lacked the muscles to do so. It was sobering to realize that all this time I thought I was building upper back muscles, I've been fooling myself by overcompensating with being super open in the chest. Matthew later pointed out to me, the drooping shoulders that came back to haunt me was likely produced by fatigue when I increased the number of postures I practiced due to second series.

Underlying problems show themselves during mindless transitions. In the case of yoga, you could not detect my hunched shoulder problem in the "regular postures" - they only appeared during mindless transitions. Likewise in my life, my character flaws and reactions that show up in transitory periods are not aberrant behavior - rather, they are symptoms of hidden underlying issues. I truly believed that I had matured and worked through some character flaws that I had. However, those flaws still show up from time to time: when I am under a lot of stress from school, when I lack sleep, when I am on vacation stuck in a hotel room with my entire family. I wrote those behaviors off thinking they were brought up by these special circumstances. No. These unregulated behaviors are actually indicative of my true state.

So what now? I have yet to make a list of New Year's Resolutions yet (surprising, since it's pretty much my favorite thing to do every year). But one thing for sure I will do change from here on out: I will pay attention to my behaviors during transitory periods rather than excusing them away.

Christmas Break

I woke up this morning at 4:45AM to drive to Royal Oak to practice Ashtanga with a local authorized instructor. At around 5:40, I slid on some black ice, skidded across 3 lanes on the freeway, and got stuck in a snowbank that blocked me from a steep hill. As I waited for the arrival of the tow truck and a very concerned dad, I contemplated just how lucky I was to survive without a scratch! Since I was in the left lane, I could have veered left and smashed into a wall. There could have been cars to my right, yet I coasted all the way to right shoulder without encountering another vehicle. Had the snow bank not been there, I would definitely have rolled down the hill, and had I been going too fast, I would have flipped over the snow bank.

Yet I'm alive. Thank GOD!! I remained pretty calm for much of the ordeal and arrived at the shala almost 2 hours later than I intended. I entered in a state of frenzy, berating myself for a wasted morning and distraught that now I would have a much shorter yoga practice than I would have otherwise.

My instructor gently calmed me down. He told me to stop focusing what I had lost this morning. I couldn't control what happened to me. Rather than viewing my time as lost and wasted, I needed to think of the time before me as a gift. Plans are plans, but you cannot lose what you did not have. You can only embrace what you have in front of you.

I came back from this semester incredibly jaded. I felt unhappy with where I was in my program, with where my life is and where it looked like it was going. What if I had chosen a different field? What if I made some different decisions in my life? What really frustrated me was that yes, I could just pick up and leave and "follow my dreams," but for some unknown reason, I know that I am (albeit unhappily) in the right place. I came back to Michigan for 3 weeks with a single prayer: that God would give me perspective and a renewed outlook on life.

For most of today, I've been chewing on this verse: "I will remove from you all who mourn over the loss of your appointed festivals, which is a burden and reproach for you." Zephaniah 3:18. It struck me that perhaps part of the reason I feel so jaded is that I had these plans of how my life was going to turn out. I have an ideal in my head of what success is, or at least what "success" looks like for Tracy. What it means for Tracy to be following God's call on her life. Now that I don't see how my life is leading that way, I mourn that loss and am completed fixated on the what-ifs.

Plans are plans; they were never anything I had a tangible claim to. I cannot lose what I never had; I can only embrace what I have in front of me. Why do those people in Zephaniah receive God's reproach? Because they are so focused on those festivals, rituals, and plans that they forgot to simply embrace God. So rather than focusing on what could have been, I need to seek God in what is now. I need to lay down the sense of entitlement to the life that I believe that I should have and begin embracing the life that I have. And rather than idolizing what I believe it means to serve God, I just need to cut all that idealistic crap and look for God here and now.

Hopefully, these lessons will slowly transfer from my head to my heart. Excitingly, this is all from day 1 of my Michigan trip!

Ashtanga is not for the faint of heart...