Day 67

Style: Hot
Teacher: Michael Dynie
Studio: Ottawa Yoga

Pulling up in front of Rama Lotus under the beautiful, blazing sunshine, I take in a deep, euphoric breath and step out of my car. I proceed to take three steps, and suddenly I feel a rusty blade tear through my chest, ripping a ragged gash across my heart. I locked my keys in my car. They're still in the ignition. My car is still running.

I feel my blood come to a boil, then it begins to curdle. Every inch of my being tenses up in frustration and rage. As I listen to the engine of my car purr mockingly at me, my inner dialogue mutates into a never-ending string of profanity. Every curse word I've ever heard, including a few I invented come raging through, spewing out black exhaust deep inside me. My teeth are clenched to the point where my jaw is coming dangerously close to snapping. My fists are balled up and my knuckles are bone-white. I'm tempted to grab a two-by-four from the construction yard across the street and smash in my windows, maybe just let loose on my car altogether until it looks like a crushed tin can. Fury spins me around in circles at a dizzying pace. I want to wage war on the entire world. All the while streams of relaxed yogis flow gracefully one by one into the studio while I stand outside watching, hating them all. Oh and my cellphone is in the car. Great.

As some more time passes I abandon my God-forsaken car and walk up the street, looking for a payphone. Halfway around the block I find a phone booth and feed it a few quarters. How the hell did I do this. I call my buddy Jakob, and fifteen minutes later he meets me with a coat hanger and a fork. Um... okay... whatever works! Luckily, my car is ridiculously easy to break into and a few tense minutes later we're in. By now Ichih's Yin class is well underway, and I'm on my way back home, having accomplished nothing, other then sending my blood pressure skyrocketing out of control. Yin is definitely not going to cut it today. I need to burn this self-inflicted turmoil away with something more powerful. In the meantime, I start to realize how absurd my reaction was. I completely plunged into the deep-end, absolutely obliterating my progress and taking ten steps back. I close my eyes, sinking into a meditation, practicing a few pranayama breathing techniques. Soon order is slowly returned to my internal government, all arguing and hatred slowly subsiding and fizzling out. The frustration I endured felt like an internal chemical toxic-waste spill, contaminating my whole nervous system. I'm taken aback at how easy it was to lose control, how fast I went from bliss to a near-murderous rampage. Like a reflex, a knee-jerk reaction I threw everything I've worked so hard for out the window. At the very least it's a lesson, one I've been tested on and failed over and over again. I think I'm slowly getting the point though. I can't let outside circumstances regulate the balance of my internal climate. I need to maintain composure at all costs. The bottom line is, things could get a lot more intense then being locked out of my car, and I need to be prepared to keep calm. I'm learning, I'm paying attention. I'll figure it out eventually. I got this.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad that I did not bump in to you on my way to Ichih's class (with my keys sfely nestled in my pocket!.

Also glad that by the time I got home, there was no sign of previous rage... a successful recalibration having taken place.

And finally, one must not be so hard on ones self as it is not possible or even perhaps desirable to have complete composure at all time me thinks.

Oh and, the car did not get trashed in the end therefore some control was present.

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