Hello. I am showing up in this space tonight feeling like I have too much to say and nothing at all to say. This week, this month, this year so far has been a lot and I am simultaneously super riled up and also managing my own numbness. This shit is unrelenting. Oh. Whoops. I believe I have said that before. But fuck if it isn’t still true.
So what have I learned? Well. What I really want to say is not much because everything continues to be extra hard and I am well past over it as are all of everyone else I am sure. But that is not entirely true. I have learned a few things that ultimately center around my own discipleship to my own nervous system and that all roads lead me there despite adjusted plan after canceled plan after derailed plan. And so. Back to basics again and again and again. The rant won’t fix it, the blame won’t fix it, the self-medicating won’t fix it. And once again I am left with the quiet spaces inside myself where I hope to god honesty and sanity and peace prevail.
I am well over the sad trend toward looking on the bright side that I have seen more than once every time I scroll through my socials. As someone who has mostly never been a look on the bright side kind of a gal that shit irritates me to no end. To me, at this moment in time, it lands as the most toxic sort of emotional bypassing that we could possibly begin to contrive of and I am simply not here for that. I am here for the truth and that is not it. Not to say of course that there is not pleasure and beauty and wonder and joy in the midst of chaos and tragedy and suffering. If history and art teach us anything they certainly teach us that. But no broad bright brush strokes over the unending endurance event that is the 20s. No thank you to that.
Ok. Now that that is out of the way, the real thing I am here to talk about tonight is my word for 2022. Of all the cliche things to write about good lord. I am not one for words of the year. Like really, not at all. This might be my first one ever in fact. I have themes and goals and intentions, but not words. Not really. And as this year I am mostly choosing to be over goals, I do not have anything along those lines to share with you. What I do have is my word, and that word is STATIONED.
I found my word- or my word found me- last month when I traveled to Tucson for a weekend of yoga and writing with Christina Sell and Mary Angelon Young. In part, it emerged from the content of the workshop, but more than that it emerged out of the content of the trip in its entirety. I occupied some spaces inside of myself that I had not occupied for a good long while and I received some reflective recognition for aspects of myself that I couldn’t be sure even existed in me anymore. It was helpful. Up to that point, I had been thinking that some shift or some big new becoming was necessary for me moving forward when in reality, I am already very well stationed within everything that I am wanting to be and indeed already am it is just that everything is so well dormant after the last 2-3 years of life and apocalypse that my doubt has taken the upper hand.
It is hard to feel like a yoga teacher when you never teach yoga. It is hard to feel like a mentor when you are not actively mentoring. It is hard to feel like an educator when everything you have to offer educationally feels so lackluster and, well, lacking in general. I think what I had been- and to a large degree still am- feeling is an internal severing as a part of a basic survival strategy to live another one of the days set before me within the limited scope of the new and current reality of things. It has been bleak. Even with all of the bright spots. (please please please hear my recognition of the bright spots!) But, basically, don’t do the thing for long enough and begin to doubt that you ever did it to begin with. Something like that.
My trip to Tucson was a reality check with that bit of my personal narrative. It served, quite surprisingly to me if I am honest, as an excellent opportunity for me to take a step back and look at me and my life with a broader lens and maybe even more of an objective perspective. Being around others who know me to varying degrees for a stretch of days afforded me a chance to see myself as they do, and see within that the ways in which I am already seated in the position of embodying the woman I have been becoming for the past 2+ decades. I have years of training, knowledge, experience, and aptitude for not just teaching yoga but a whole heck of a lot of all of the things that interest me and engage me and whose pots I have had my hands in from the get-go. I needed the refection. We all need the reflection. The chance to get out of our own worn-out story of ourselves and see us as the folks that know us and love us do. Like that.
So anyway. That is it. And I am already stationed there. So. Stationed. No big pressing objectives other than perhaps trusting the positioning of myself within my life. The woman I once was, the woman I now am, and the woman I have always been coursing toward woven together indistinguishably into a just-right-for-me yoke. I am working with the small things this year. My discipleship to my own nervous system, my daily steps toward personal growth and fulfillment and forgiveness, and taking note of the small (and sometimes huge) moments of delight that present themselves. A Wednesday ski with my boys. A shared slice of pizza. A game of chase. A peel of laughter. A good book. A hand-knit. A hug. Or any other shared and simple moment of human connection. This year. I am stationed for all that.