How Yoga Helped Me Find the Home I Was Missing
My neighbor turned dear friend Sumanth and I on Christmas Eve
I’ve been living in southern India for a little over 2 months now, and am spending my first holiday season overseas and away from home. But to me, “home” has always been more of a feeling than a location anyway.
It’s been a different way to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve to say the least. Though it’s chilly during my scooter ride to the shala each morning before the sun rises, I wear a T-shirt and sandals most days and am currently sporting the dorkiest of foot tans. I spend most of my time after practice enjoying masala chai cross-legged in a cafe, writing on the balcony of my apartment to the sound of palm trees swaying, or simply walking around and exploring Gokulum. This solitude has yielded me the opportunity to reflect on my relationship with the holiday season and how yoga has played such a significant role in shifting it from bitter to sweet.
You see, I understand what it’s like to struggle with the holidays when the world around you seems to be puking merriment and joy. During my young adult years, I didn’t feel like I had a home and the holiday season was a sensitive and confusing time. My parent’s prior battle with alcohol addiction and our resulting multi-year estrangement caused the house I grew up in to feel more like a triggering battleground than the familiar and comforting retreat others described when they spoke of “home.” The customary question “Are you traveling home for the holidays?” from college classmates and coworkers was an emotionally excruciating one that I dreaded answering. I was caught between lying and feeling uncomfortably inauthentic, or telling the truth and viscerally experiencing their discomfort as they struggled to respond. My abandonment wound led me to search outside of myself to fill the void I perceived inside. I selected romantic partners quickly as winter approached and clung to them. I attempted to alter my introverted personality to be more social and outgoing in order to acquire invitations, acceptance, and approval. But I was seeking a reprieve where none could be found. When friends and past partners invited me to spend holidays with their families I was grateful for the welcoming hospitality and a distraction from my self-pitying thoughts. But part of me always felt I was on the outside peering in, at something that I would never have.
I don’t feel this way anymore. A combination of extensive personal work in therapeutic modalities including yoga, plant medicine, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and Autism acceptance education plus the good fortune of my parent’s recoveries conspired to make this so. It wasn’t until I forgave my parents, accepted my childhood for what it was, and let go of the idealized version that I thought I was supposed to have, that I began to understand that the void I’d been trying to fill for so long was an illusion of my mind. The things that happened to and hurt me were not my fault of course. But I am—and have always been—whole. I was never broken, but I was suffering from a persistent illusion of separateness that is common among highly sensitive people with traumatic childhoods. And that is not to say that illusionary wounds are any less painful or real than physical ones. In fact, I think the suffering caused by our own minds is often more painful and long-lasting than the wounds of the flesh or physical reality. Perhaps illusionary wounds are better described as spiritual ones, lest the former invalidate any reader’s pain. Unfortunately, the term ‘spiritual’ is associated with religion as well as holistic hippy science deniers in contemporary western culture, which causes many logical free-thinking minds to tune out the moment it’s uttered. Fortunately, yoga philosophy provides us with a word for this phenomenon that is less bogged down by debates and connotations.
Vikalpa (विकल्प) is a Sanskrit word for one of the five types of thoughts or mental fluctuations of the mind according to yoga sutra 1.6. Vikalpa is commonly translated as imagination fantasy, or illusion and more rarely as verbal delusion. In essence, when we misperceive the present reality by failing to consider the facts, catastrophize about a future that does not exist and work ourselves into an anxious wreck, or imagine a preferential version of the past that fuels regret, guilt, or resentment, we are experiencing vikalpa. This mind state is not abnormal, the human brain naturally generates these thoughts, but it comes with consequences. Controlled imagination (known as kalpana) intentionally activated for the purpose of creative endeavors is conscious and productive. But Vikalpa is unproductive, unconscious, and spirals out of control when left to its own devices. True yoga according to the sutras is not flexibility training, but the practice of becoming more aware and conscious of our thinking patterns; its purpose is to slow and eventually stop the constant fluctuations of the mind.
I think one of the reasons why yoga is especially therapeutic to people on the autism/ADHD spectrum, is that these neurotypes are known to generate thoughts faster and more frequently than allistic (non-autistic) people due to hyperconnectivity within certain regions of the brain as a result of reduced synaptic pruning (Tang et al., 2014) This is what makes us so creative and outside-the-box thinkers, but it is also what predisposes us to cyclic thinking patterns, rumination, and catastrophizing. The accelerated generation of thoughts makes it easier to get snagged on an unproductive one and then to fuel it with— you guessed it— more thoughts. Throw some trauma in the mix on top of our overactive minds and we have a colossal obstacle to overcome on our quest for peace. But please don’t fret. Whether you are on the spectrum or not, if you identify with the experience of extreme anxiety or an overactive mind, I’m here to tell you that lasting change is possible, but it does take time, practice, and patience.
My Sanskrit and philosophy teacher Lakshmisha and I posing after the last class of the season
Studying Sanskrit and yoga philosophy here in India, is providing me with a whole new way of understanding and talking about the pain in my past. The yogic philosophy lens does not pass judgment. It is not restricted by the limitations of the diagnostic model of mental health that fuels a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry by pathologizing different minds. Nor does it follow the overly simplified pop psychology/holistic healer approach which dictates that the secret to healing is loving ourselves (and paying an influencer/coach to teach us how of course.) That’s not a knock on all coaches by the way, I have greatly benefitted from talented and trained space holders and am a certified coach myself, but it has unfortunately become a fad to prey upon the vulnerabilities of people who believe the illusion that they are broken and in need of perpetual healing.
When I continuously obsessed over my childhood, and tormented myself with thoughts of “the family I would never have” I was experiencing a temporary mental fluctuation of the vikalpa variety. I believed my mind’s illusion of separateness. If I had been able to recognize what was happening, I could have consciously anchored myself back into present reality by focusing on my breath or bodily sensation. After all, research has shown that it only takes ninety seconds for an emotion to dissipate if we simply notice it without fueling it. Harvard brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor explains:
“Something happens in the external world, and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body, it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological reaction, over and over again.” (Taylor, J. B. (2009). My stroke of insight. Hachette UK)
But instead, I fed the falsehood with a stream of negative thoughts. I generated my own personal hell, locked myself inside, and metaphorically threw away the key. I burned alone in the flames, all the while surrounded by people who genuinely loved me, albeit in their own imperfect ways.
But that’s the irony of it all. No matter what form love came in back then, I couldn’t accept it. My mind developed a sneaky habit of nitpicking the love apart until it became something else entirely. I couldn’t fill the void inside me until I experientially understood and felt in my body that there was no void to begin with. This would take time, the various forms of support previously mentioned, and over a thousand hours of meditative yoga practice. Each day when I unrolled my mat and moved into slightly uncomfortable positions while breathing and gazing ahead at a fixed point, I practiced witnessing my fluctuating thoughts and emotions, then releasing them and refocusing on the task at hand. I got stronger, more flexible, and less distracted as a result of daily practice, but even these benefits were secondary— mere side effects alongside the real transformation that was taking place in my consciousness. I did not know it at the time— I was much more interested in the aforementioned side effects—but I was training my mind with the tristana method of Ashtanga yoga, the same way a bodybuilder trains his biceps with dumbbell curls.
Practicing on the rooftop of my apartment in Gokulum
The slow dissolution of my old patterning was sprinkled with many periods that looked and felt like relapses but were actually indications of breakthroughs. If you are reading and resonating with my story, please know that it is customary for things to get harder before they improve. Our sense of self, otherwise known as the ego, revolts when we approach a big shift in our patterning for the ego does not want us to change. That’s because our identification with this new, calmer version of ourselves means that the previous ego must die.
Fast forward to the present and I feel truly at home in my body, at my parent’s place, among old friends and strangers alike. There are still moments of discomfort yes, triggers at times of course, but no gut-wrenching sense of seeking something lacking. Of not being enough. Anyone who has known me through this transition can tell you how much calmer and more secure I am now.
Before I left the U.S., a few people who cared about me asked if I was running away from my problems by choosing to solo vagabond. The question always made me pause and think critically about my choices because truthfully, part of me was looking forward to a break from the exhaustion and overstimulation of trying to “keep up” physically, socially, and financially in the busy capital city of Washington, D.C.
So in conclusion, here is how I know in my heart that I’m doing quite the opposite.
Long-term travel has been a dream of mine ever since I was a little girl mesmerized by animal planet and the discovery channel. So It initially seemed ironic to me that I started my solo travel after finding the things I’d always yearned for: a community of friends who taught me what family feels like, genuine reconnection with the family that raised me, and a sense of personal wholeness. But it had to happen this way, in this exact order, for me. Previously, when the idea crossed my mind, I was too afraid to leave. I had to feel at home in my own body, and to realize that home was never something outside of myself to begin with, in order to feel at home anywhere. I’m happy to report that I’m spending the holidays on the other side of the world, away from my loved ones during a time that used to trigger me more reliably than any other, and I’m sincerely, deeply, content.
Spending so much time writing these days and it feels so good.
Happy Belated Holidays everyone! I miss you all and send my love and well wishes for the new year to be one of self-discovery and contentment. Please do drop into virtual vinyasa class sometime soon and say hi!
As a special gift I’m dropping discounted 4-packs of virtual vinyasa to my newsletter subscribers only until January 14th 2023. If you signed up for my newsletter but haven’t received my email with the discount, shoot me a note at Victoria@victoriawolfgang.com and I will send you the details.
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Much love <3
Victoria
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