Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.From the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi
Four years ago today, I was immersed in my first yoga teacher training. I was basking in three hour practices in the stained-glass sunspots of the Fremont Abbey; I was gobbling up the Sutras, and anatomy, and sequencing; I was watching my body change and my mind open.
And four years ago today, I walked out of the Fremont Abbey, out of one of those three hour vinyasa practices, to find I had 15 missed calls. Four years ago today, I answered one of those calls to learn that one of my dearest Friends had been murdered.
Let me begin by saying this post is not really about my Friend. To discuss the details of his death in this public forum is not my place; it would be unfair to his family and our other friends. Rather, this is instead about the role yoga played in my life during that difficult time.
It is impossible to separate this event from my yoga immersion. I will never know how my experience in teacher training might have turned out had I not experienced this trauma. And I will never know how I might have handled this tragedy without the support of yoga.
My teacher said to me, “try to be in it, but not of it.” The day after my Friend died, we were set to study the klesas (the obstacles to enlightenment). Maybe we talked about all five of them, but the only one I remember discussing that day was clinging to bodily life. We suffer because we are attached to this physical form that is impermanent; when we understand and accept the impermanence of the physical self, we can ease our suffering. Some of my classmates talked about observing death in India, or watching a grandparent die. The phrase that kept repeating was “it’s natural. Death is natural.”
Except when it’s not. As my friend Maggie later put it, our Friend ‘was not just taken out of the world, but shoved out’. I have never felt so paralyzed as during that conversation. I was in hysterics, absolutely unable to move, while my classmates offered gentle thoughts on death. I remember feeling very, very angry, that no one understood that nothing about this death was natural. It took a very long time for me to collect myself and walk out of the room.
I spent the rest of that summer couch-surfing in New York. That trip was originally supposed to be a month of networking in the dance community and maybe starting to audition; instead, I sat comatose in Central Park for about a week. I slept until noon and then worked to pry my sobbing self off the kitchen floor. I vacillated between confused, angry, shocked, guilty, and just plain depressed.
And then I went back to yoga. I practiced in the Park, and next to the Hudson, and on the roof of an illegal sublet. I went to class almost every day.
Regardless of how I felt that summer – and most days, I felt, for lack of a better word, shitty - I moved through it. In a time when I truly could not grasp which end was up, it was comforting to know that I could return to this one thing every day, and that this one thing really let me be where I was. If my mind started to wander and my heart started to pound, I could restart in child’s pose.
Two months after my Friend’s death, on what would have been his 21st Birthday, I returned to Seattle. A group of us took some of his winter clothes to Waiting for the InterUrban in Fremont, to dress up the statues and to celebrate the life we loved in him.
I held a sweater vest and, as I looked down, I saw this on the cement:
Sometimes words find you just at the right time. Sometimes movement finds you just at the right time. And sometimes people come into your life at just the right time.
The question I kept coming back to was how do you believe that people are good again? The answer was in the pavement: LOVE HEALS. This loss turned my friends into my family; I fell deeper and deeper in love with each person in my life. My Friend introduced me to a whole new group of people in his wake, a whole new family to fall in love with. A few days following this death, a friend wrote me an email about all the things he knew our Friend loved about me. ”I just miss him like hell,” he wrote, “and the only thing I can think to do is spread his love around.” This love continues to be our Friend’s legacy.
I could say that yoga healed my heart that summer, but that would be untrue. Yoga has helped to heal my heart over the last several years. Practicing yoga helped me move on days I wasn’t sure I could get out of bed, and yoga helped me speak more kindly when I was angry. Yoga gave me constancy when it felt like absolutely everything was changing.
Yoga helped me come to a place of forgiveness – forgiveness for the person who took my Friend away, forgiveness to the universe for the cruelest lesson, and forgiveness of myself on the days I felt okay (but wasn’t sure if I was allowed to be).
Yoga gave me the opportunity to process all of this at my own pace. I spent the summer following my Friend’s death feeling guilty that, as a yogi, I could not make sense of what had happened. I felt guilty when I was still sad about it. And then I realized: nowhere in the Sutras did it say, “You must be enlightened about the klesas immediately.” Nowhere, in any yogic text I read, did it give me a timeline. In all the loftiness of getting my yoga certification, I had forgotten that it was valid – and necessary – to grieve. And that it didn’t matter when I came to an understanding about all of this; it mattered that I had the tools to process it one day.
My teacher said Everything you need, and need to know, is already within you. And she was right. It took me a few years, but eventually, the klesas made sense. While it threw me in a tailspin, I finally understood impermanence at its utmost. There was no moment of epiphany. At some point we all find ourselves in the dregs of grief with no other option but to keep moving through it and to keep moving forward. Life is death, and death is life, and we’re just lucky to be along for the ride. Yoga helped me come to a place where – while I still miss my Friend, tremendously – I am simply grateful that he existed at all.
Love (still) Heals,
yogini and the city
