Downward Dog Style: Upward or Downward Spiral?

Ever notice how when you’re going through some sort of problem, experiencing some sort of trouble or crisis, everywhere you turn that trouble is like a burning light shining straight into your eyes. Every news story, magazine article, radio broadcast, every conversation overheard at work, in the grocery store, on the street. Friends bring it up, either related directly to themselves, or because, of course, it is plaguing a “friend of a friend.” Then, as if the omnipresence of the problem isn’t bad enough, your most trusted yoga instructors seem to have, somehow, conspired and collectively gotten inside your head and have decided to use that particular predicament as the lesson for guiding every class you attend, to be taken off the mat into the grand, wide world. Each time you hear the trouble mentioned, it’s like an alarm goes off in your brain and sends an electric shock through your entire body; you actually feel it and it hurts: How can this be happening; there’s no way this can keep popping up like this?, you ask yourself while you agonize over what to do.

Come on! Of course this is the way it rolls out…this trouble so concretely inhabits your mind. It. Is. Everywhere. The chatter inside your head has all but grown to a scream, suffocating most routine thought, so how could it go down any other way? Is it to show us life is twisted, that we should resign ourselves to never win? Is it to make us question every move, each decision made over the last ten, fifteen, twenty years that have propelled us into this time of turmoil? Is it to bring us to a place of hopelessness? Or, just maybe, it’s to show us life is filled with empathy.

I took a yoga class with an intuitive recently…being in a room with an intuitive is quite unnerving. You have to wonder the entire time, is she reading my thoughts? or what she said right then, that was directed solely at me, oh crap, oh crap. Even questions like, I wonder if she can tell by the shaking of my legs in Vrksasana TREE POSE that my root chakra is imbalanced. Many yoga teachers already seem to have some sort of sixth sense. They just always say some thing that seems to correspond to your life in a way that, at the time anyway, seems uncanny and more than coincidence. But any yogi knows, as any person knows, that we all, as part of human nature, experience similar sets of thoughts, predicaments, conflicts, disappointments, doubts, stressors, and triumphs, celebrations, successes, and joys. But it was in this class with the intuitive instructor that the unraveling of a tightly-wound, long-standing habit/problem began to unwind. And because of and since this class with the intuitive instructor, I’ve begun to realize the spiraling can be viewed as downward or upward. It is surely a choice. It is the calling of attention to this problem that its strength and grip and hold finally can begin to loosen. The problem, or situation, or crisis or habit can no longer be ignored or swept away to be dealt with another day. It must be faced directly in order for some sort of release and forgiveness to be granted. And the forgiveness of oneself is often the hardest forgiveness to come by. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever actually, honestly, attempted it before. I’m sure that I’ve vocalized forgiveness for whatever terrible things (italics intended to mock, as terrible is not my norm whatsoever) I’ve done over the years, though I now know I was lying. I had never granted myself full forgiveness for mistakes I’ve made over the years, for problems I’ve instigated and egged on over the years.

Yes, that must be it: the dilemma has been bestowed again and again to shed some new focus on a problem so old, so deeply rooted, so familiar and accepted, to finally push away thoughts like this is just the way things are for me, to move away from the resignation that this is all that life is: a bunch of battles that seem insurmountable. Rather, it is to prove, once and for all, that a fresh approach is necessary for solving the problem for good. To provide real vision and opportunity for accountability. Present an answer. Supply wisdom. Or just wake us up from whatever it is we have been getting into that is clearly not working.

The problem pops up everywhere so your eyes can be wide open. Finally. Sometime. Not never, now. Always. Time to open them and get to the root. It can only be offered up to you so many times and in so many different ways before it all drops in your lap and stops simply threatening to shake and topple your existence. Eventually, if you allow it to, it may do more than threaten…the trouble blurs your vision and blinds you. It just has to be spotted everywhere or you would lose the opportunity to take the different, better path.