Look, it’s not you it’s me.

Several months ago a great friend and even more fantastic teacher challenged me. I’d asked her something about my ashtanga practice. Without hesitation she bounced back with: “I think you should ask your teacher.”  To which I genius-ly responded: “but, but blah blah blah.” Undeterred, she pushed on: “where is it all coming from, now?”

I knew the answer. It was easy. It was obvious.

It was “me.”

I’m teaching me, I’m practicing with me– alone at home, no longer with any strong connection to any one teacher or community (my dear David Garrigues is not available in the way he used to be, though he still inspires me), and right now with the summer exodus of teachers and practitioners traveling about the country it’s only more intense. even knowing that some of my practice buddies at the Shala were injured made things tougher for me. It’s like I need everyone else to hold our relationship together, Ashtanga, and maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. The importance of community is no joke.

Look, I’m the only one giving anything in this relationship, Ashtanga.

I’m sick of it. I just feel like I cannot hold things together on my own anymore. I’m not coasting off the energy from my time in DC or with DG anymore. I am doing primary, amazingly enough, or at least A &B, keeping myself together with this bit of faith, this desire to feel again how I felt in June, how I felt in December, how I felt in September, 2012.

I see today that my problem, or what I am missing, is the same as it was in April — now it is just more intolerable:

I miss being a student.

Here I am, a thirty-something-old stay at home mother, former lawyer and overachiever, yoga teacher, blog writer, bored out of my overeducated mind, frightened that my synapses are rotting in dust like the fancy degrees still hidden in boxes after our last move, wondering all the time if I have anything to show for any of it, still regretting the day I left the dance world just because I’d gotten a little uncomfortable and a little bit heavier, the day I failed to pursue writing instead of a goddamn expensive J.D. because I had no way to see beyond the tiny world that had been presented to me when I was growing up, berating myself for my array of acutely first-world spoiled privileged bitch problems — I mean, Jean, have you f*&ing seen the news lately? — pondering writing classes and rock climbing classes and just the taste of newness again, something to challenge my neurons into dancing again. Indeed, when I think of heading to a Shala, what I crave now is my first ashtanga community and teacher in DC — Keith and AYSDC — because that is where I was when you Ashtanga were all drenched in dewy beginningness– my first cleaned up primary series (well, still working on that forever, but), my first drop backs, my first for real attempts at jump backs, my first garbha pindhasana with arms all the way through — this was back in the days when I would do those rolls around on the mat in my lotus and get stuck, laughing until a teacher came to help me. This was back when we used to get dressed up to meet each other, back when we would never, ever have thought to use the toilet in front of each other.

It was a season of firsts and the flirtatious laughs that accompany the new and seductively unfamiliar. It was love– how could it not be?–with my friend the inimitable Peg Mulqueen subbing there so often those days, with her infectious energy (I call her the Ashtanga vampire) and Keith Moore, with his universal receiver energy, welcoming all, teaching all (who still treats me like a student, after all this time). Perhaps there I can inveigle myself into falling in love with you again. Just last week I was there in the Palisades of DC, and it was so lovely to hear an “I know you can get your hand flat here” in uttitha parsvakonasana.

The words of poet e.e. cummings float into view:

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you quite so new

I cannot learn if no one sees me as a student, and “no one” includes me.

So my problem with you Ashtanga is not so much the challenge of maintaining practice with a three-year-old but maintaining it out here alone for so long, with no mysore room close by leaving me isolated in the community where I live– I teach vinyasa to others but I practice Ashtanga alone. I have a place nowhere. On my own mat rolled out in my daughter’s room I practice with this heavy torch, holding it with the stubborn or perhaps perfectly faithful hope that maybe it will all shake out in the back-to-school- organization of the fall, like the array of color-coded school supplies in the stores. I hang my hat on the fall, when my daughter will be in preschool and I can make semi-regular journeys to AYSDC and to Flow’s mysore program in DC and to Ashtanga Arlington — who knows where? I hope that answer will come down with the autumn syllabus too.

Like I said, Ashtanga: it’s not you it’s me. My problem with you, Ashtanga, is in the end my problem with everything. I cannot get away from myself.

Practicing alone right now reminds me how much I don’t want to live here in the f*&ing strip-mall restaurant, traffic-laden world of western Northern Virginia, and that maybe there is no place where I belong, even Colorado, which is the home I miss most.

F&%k you ashtanga, for ruining my life.

I’m sorry if that sounds so down. I’m sorry for breaking the cardinal rule of Facebook whitewashing with yoga happy fairy dust. I’m guilty of photoshopping my ashtanga life here: writing about and instagramming my highs with ashtanga– Look I’ve conquered my fear and can do pincha- I can do this extreme backbend-and look at this picture of me from an angle I know minimizes my physical imperfections — and writing at best deceptively about my low moments and struggles, that is, speaking of these social media taboos (i.e. negatives) only when I can bookend them with a nice Tweet-worthy satisfying answer that sews up the blog happily, distill them down to a singular perfect upbeat hashtag (if I knew what a hashtag was), as if each yoga experience was tantamount to an episode of the perfect television sitcom (Family Ties comes to mind). I’m just sick of pushing against the tide, Ashtanga, but that’s all I ever do.

“Pain is inevitable; lives come with pain. Suffering is not inevitable. If suffering is what happens when we struggle with our experience because of our inability to accept it, then suffering is an optional extra ”
― Sylvia Boorstein, It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness

Maybe I need to accept that this isn’t working anymore. I confess to dreaming of and actually partaking in dalliances with vinyasa and cycling. But who am I without you? Where do I end and you begin? And then I cannot stop thinking of last winter when we spent everyday together — the real deal–how good it was back in June, and the final stanza of Robert Frost’s poem “Reluctance”:

Ah, when to the heart of man

   Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

   To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

   Of a love or a season?

So yeah Ashtanga, sometimes I think we’re made for each other. And sometimes I think we should break up.