Fourth Form of Madness

I have always been a bit of a loner. I guess I have always loved my own space and my own quiet. Then I started yoga and started to really like practicing in a group, a community. To be part of something collectively, even if you don’t know the person next to you or behind you, expands your experience as a being and like any ritual, heightens your consciousnesses. To me, yoga is ritualistic and the world certainly needs a good ritual to link us all with what is important. Just like a call to pray, saying hail mary’s or chanting mantra, yoga focuses our mind, lifts us up out of the mundane (mindlessness) and gently places us at the feet of the sublime. In class you get to go there together, lifting each other up in a supportive network of devotion (and admittedly a little sweat :-)).

When I was practicing ashtanga, I fell head over heels in love with the silence of the practice. There you were surrounded by others a hands reach away as you flowed through your silent practice. There was always the gentle sounds of collective ujjayi breathing, which always lulled me into a state of absolute calm. A whoosh and the occasional swoosh is all that you heard of your fellow yogis as they moved their bodies into the shapes encouraged by an asana. When my shoulder first started hurting, I still attended morning practice for a while and did restorative up the back. One day I was practicing pranayama I just stopped and looked at all the beautiful shapes that were being formed around me by people’s bodies. As I watched it was like the bodies were writing a beautiful poem all around the room and I felt lucky to be living in world that had such beautiful poetry close at hand.

Another group practice that still remains close to my heart I experienced when doing a land crossing between Tibet and Nepal. Now crossing Tibet had been quite the adventure. We had unfortunately or fortunately chosen to travel with two of the angriest tourists ever travelling, not good when you are going to be in a 4wd drive together for 10 days. Anyone that thinks it is okay to spit on, physically fight with and throw money in the face of a Tibetan needs to be doing some serious work on themselves. The whole trip crescendoed with them trying to get our driver sacked because basically they didn’t like him because he wouldn’t do their unreasonable requests. This resulted in him trying to drive off to the border without the two of them in the car. My hubby and I did not speak Tibetan but we did our best to talk him down even though an insy winsy little bit of us kind of wanted him to keep going. In the end, he stopped the car, let the other two back in begrudging and we made our way to the Nepalese border on a wave of high drama.

Once at the border both hubby and I were too frazzled to walk the however many miles it was through the no-man’s land to Nepal, so we decided to catch a ride with the locals in the back of a big bouncy truck with hardly any barrier keeping us in. It was packed with people and I managed to sit fairly close to the edge of the truck. I was a little afraid I was going to bounce right out of the truck but then this amazing thing happened. All the people surrounding me all laid a hand on me and held onto me so I wouldn’t fall out of the truck. I felt their warmth, I felt their support and I felt that I had never been more close to life than at that moment. We rode like that for about 30 minutes, laughing and trying to understand each other with what ever common words we could find. One lady took the opportunity to read my future from my body and told me “You are very, very, very, very, very lucky”!!! More people promptly put their hands on me and started rubbing me for luck. I felt like I had come from such a harsh and argumentative 4wd drive environment to one full of love and support and full of gracious people and at that time it was exactly what I needed. I ended that journey feeling very nurtured and cherished and blessed to have fallen into the hands of such giving and beautiful people.

It’s great to know loneliness and to make it a friend but equally great is being part of a group a community that works towards creating something collectively. The group where each individual is equal and travelling on their own journey yet acknowledges that their journey is for everyone, reaches it pinnacle of existence. This group has the ability to place a hand on each individual and hold them in the truck on the bouncy, unpredictable ride of life. In this balanced state, life is bliss!