From physical practice to personal journey
I started doing yoga for the reason most come to the mat: to stay in shape.
I also thought that yoga, with its emphasis on placement and strength, would provide me a mental and physical challenge not unlike ballet technique. Much to my surprise, yoga turned out to be much deeper than the physical and mental challenge I was initially seeking.
Like many of us in our modern world, I was accustomed to living within my busy mind. Anxiety, and the panic attacks and intrusive thought patterns that accompany it, had always been my version of normal.
However, after several years of practice (and several years of savasana feeling like a particularly cruel mental torture), I began to wander to a new and unfamiliar place within my mind.
“The wilderness within” was my original branding on my home page on the first iteration of this site. It refers to this quote about early explorers.
““All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us.
Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers.
What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.””
I'm fascinated with the idea of having the wilderness within, and with people who, amidst all the distractions and noise of our busy world, remain in touch with that wilderness.
Perhaps it calls louder to some than to others. One of my favorite environmental writers, Aldo Leopold, wrote that there are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. I'm thinking of people like Rachel Carson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and even Chris McCandless of Into the Wild.
Since we're already quoting people, I'll share something that I wrote the first day I ventured into that uncharted territory:
“I finally found stillness. I discovered that if you find it in the mind, gracefully and with ease, the body will be still also. The stillness isn’t something that takes work to find. It’s just there, waiting quietly, as though it always has been.”
That is how I began my journey into mindfulness and mediation, a journey which transformed my yoga practice from a workout to a lifestyle.
Finding stillness doesn't feel unfamiliar anymore. It feels like retreating to a secret spot in the woods, like coming home.
Still, I'll never forget how it felt to journey inward for the first time. Or how I didn't need a guide; all it took was someone giving me permission to be still, to be present.