The Gift Yoga Gave Me

It’s curious to ask what keeps us doing something, what makes things a habit.

Habits give us some rewards and the more immediate and short term those rewards are the less likely they are to help us in the longer term.

I learned a habit early on in my yoga journey which offered longer term rewards. I had never done any lying down, still and in silence, when I was 18 years old so shavasana (corpse pose) was an unusual thing to do. But in those moments I had a lucky break: I found something. I found myself.

I grew up gay in a time and place where being openly gay did not attract someone to love and share, but instead attracted taunts, bullying, put downs and occasionally violence.

With no one to turn to who could validate my feelings of hurt and injustice these taunts became internalised. And as they became internalised I started to believe there was something fundamentally wrong with me. And added on to that there is the shame.

Yet after years of adopting other people’s words and opinions of who I was, I then discovered some part of me that was all my own, ever present and unchanging. The immutable self. And I discovered this lying on a hard, wooden floor with my eyes shut in a room with a bunch of people doing yoga.

And it stayed with me, and I practiced it. A lot. And sometimes it would come back to me and sometimes it wouldn’t, but with persistence and patience this thing - this sense of the immutable self - started to stick. It became a habit.

In some ways it seems cliched to say that yoga saved my life. I wasn’t in imminent threat - ever. But yoga gave me a path to follow, it revealed my path. It revealed me. And if I hadn’t found this ‘me’ my life would not have been mine. And if I am not leading my life then somehow I don’t exist, right? So yeah – yoga did save my life.

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