About ten years ago, when Erin and I had just met, she brought me to an Al-Anon meeting. Everyone there loved someone with an addiction, and they shared what that cost them. I listened and waited to relate, but I couldn't. My life was good. I didn't have a storm to bring into that room.
I'd wondered if that made me naive, or just untested. Then last month, at Stephanie Snyder's kleshas immersion at Love Story Yoga, I started to see it differently.
The kleshas are the five obstacles in the Yoga Sutras: ignorance, ego, clinging to pleasure, clinging to pain, and fear of death. Each one is a kind of grip. And I realized how little I grip. I don't think much about the storm. Things are just okay.
But okay isn't nothing. Steph described her practices as ways to “strengthen tolerance of the unknown and build resilience.” Maybe being okay is what preparation looks like after years on the mat. The steadiness builds quietly, so it's already there when the weather turns.
Those people at the meeting were in the middle of their storms, and I was somewhere calmer. Both are worth accepting, the hard seasons and the easy ones, without guilt.
After the workshop, Steph wrote: “You have authorship and an arrow in your quiver, in what direction do you want to aim that arrow?”
I'm aiming mine at the people around me who are in their storms. I don't need to fix anything. I just want to be a calm place to stand.
Maybe that's why the storm never comes. I've been practicing for it all along.