An Intermediate Intensive Weekend with Ashtanga Tech
I am feeling energetically rejuvenated and openhearted after a weekend spent with aligned community at Ashtanga Tech’s Intermediate Intensive in Nashville, Tennessee. Each day, our morning began with a group meditation followed by a sweaty second series practice overseen by three wonderful, seasoned teachers. I wrote the following reflection after one of these sweet community practices. There was no time to share it with the group, thanks to our comprehensive curriculum, so I’ll leave it here for my fellow participants and fellow practitioners world-wide to read.
Often, when I finish my practice and lay in savasana or sit in meditation, I’m overcome by a sense of love and gratitude for yoga. It feels like an elusive, expansive joy radiating out. My face and chest will buzz with warmth as tears bulge behind my eyes. Sometimes, they even spill quietly down my cheeks.
This phenomenon began way back when I first started practicing (long before I knew anything about yoga), but it happens more frequently these days. And today as I lay basking in the sweat and tears, I came to understand that this blissful emotion is not simply ‘love for yoga,’ but the experience of love itself — love for the gift of aliveness, love for myself, love for those around me, for my loved ones, and for all people and beings everywhere. In these moments I think to myself how grateful I am to have found yoga and to have been saved by yoga. And I don’t mean that in a dramatic or evangelical way. I mean it literally. Yoga saved my life because it helped me to realize — or rather, to remember — what an amazing thing it is to be alive.
Yoga reconnected me to my body and to the world around me. For so long, I could not feel those connections. I could not feel myself. I could not feel the sensations of aliveness. I could not feel nature or other people, because I was hurting and I was afraid. The painful things that happened to me as a child had devastated my ability to feel those connections and to engage with love in a manner that didn’t hurt, or reflexively cause me to close myself off to others so that I wouldn’t get hurt again.
Little by little, yoga restored both my ability to feel, and my ability to love — to experience love, to give love, to receive love, and to be love — that is, to merge with the infinite nature of love itself, for brief moments.
It’s often hard to put these experiences into words, but it’s during weekends like these, spent in community with people like you, that my heart opens so wide that I’m able to hold onto these fleeting insights long enough to get them down on paper.
As someone who can be extremely stubborn and who has tried very hard to muscle my way through this yogic path and healing journey alone, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all teachers who share this powerful practice with compassion and humility, but especially to Michael, Cory, and Heather. And thank you to every person who joined us this weekend, because I finally realized that I can’t do this “yoga healing thing” alone. Each and every person who joined us this weekend made a difference in my life (and I’d wager in the lives of many others) simply by being here, too.
It is a rare and special thing to find like-minded community spaces. Thank you Ashtanga Tech for cultivating them!
