When feeling wrong is right.
+ How that makes us better
I practiced yoga for 15 years on and off before I became a teacher. When I decided to pursue my 200 hour training, I borrowed $2000 from my boss with the promise to pay him back a little from every check. The point wasn’t to make money being a yoga instructor- I had been told long before it didn’t pay the bills. I wanted to understand the practice more. I wanted to see what I was missing when people talked about how yoga saved their life; how they use it as their spiritual practice; how it made them a calmer, more aware human being. Yoga felt good to my body, I knew I wanted to continue to get stronger, and eventually be able to do cool shit I saw other people do. But the whole idea was just to understand more of what I was doing. I wanted to be more in tune with my body. I wanted to see what this was really really about.
When I learn anything, I ask for the one teaching to explain everything as if I am 4 years old. If I know the “why” behind doing something, I remember it. If I am told why we choose this way of doing something over that way of doing it, I am more likely to not assume the wrong tactics when I try to replicate what we are doing later on. I become comfortable with the routine, confident in my hands, and I build trust with my decision making. Then I can bend the rules, push the straight path wide, and see the real boundaries of what the process looks like.
For all of the ways I chase after God on a daily basis, I have rarely taken comfort in the idea of “Jesus loves you.”1 For the first 2/3s of my spiritual life, I was taught this was all that mattered. This one really simple, really important, single concept was supposed to change my world. It never hit me in the way I think it is supposed to. There has been no resounding revelation of the love Jesus has for me, specifically, that has put me in awe. At least none that I can remember.
This part of my faith makes me feel slightly fraudulent. I feel like the disconnect lies in the fact that I cannot physically witness this great act of sacrifice; I have a hard time connecting the blood = atonement part of the story that relates to me now, in this moment; I am removed from any and all understanding of the practice of killing to appease God.
So to say that Jesus died for me because he loves me- and that is supposed to change my life- doesn’t really stir anything within me.
There is a lot of pressure in the christian world to get this right. From a young age, kids are taught to take this very seriously. The focus is on being saved, admitting a sinful nature, adhering to the standards set out by the church. The words “God-fearing” and “christian woman” are given as highest praise to ones who are doing Jesus right and we do our best to be like them. In this world in which I clung to in my early 20s, we weren’t taught how to understand any of it, but only to take it as truth and accept it. God faded into the background, a silent investor in Jesus’s game. The Bible always felt sacred, but distant. I assumed there was no way to play with the Bible, no way to push it and pull it, pick it apart and put it back together. I found false intimacy with God in submission, afraid of a Father who would reject His children. There was no wrestling with God, no challenging actions, no questioning words.
With this gap in understanding, the church has often felt separate from Jesus. I would see us reconstruct the law, repurpose sacred words, set up barriers to protect our righteousness. Maybe even to protect God. This seemed to lead to complicating and corrupting something we claim to understand, telling others it’s simple and straightforward.
At one point, I thought I wanted a box to tick. Steps 1 through 212 to cross off on the way to salvation. But we are more complicated than that. I wanted so badly to be right, not to be confused and led astray by my own heart.2 But I wanted to understand where the lines were. I was told they were thick and stark, but I could never find them. I asked questions; I was told to trust.
The scariest part about this is the very real possibility of getting it all wrong. We have based our entire lives (and the afterlife!) on this one thing. So how do we determine what is trust and what is fear? How do you appreciate something you don’t know?
When we talk about yoga, most people usually think they have to be flexible or fit in order to practice. Our bodies are so unused to being still, we obsess that if we aren’t moving we aren’t doing anything. Our minds wonder, we begin to feel restless, we think we can’t speak or make noise. The magic of when people think they are failing yoga because they “can’t seem to sit still”, is when they finally see that is the practice.
After almost 20 years of practice, someone showed me how little I knew. My whole day is focused around listening to what is happening within my body. I move meditatively during my morning practice; I adjust my spine, align my elbow and wrists when I sit at my desk; I breathe into the bottom of my lungs and journal and talk through feelings even when they are uncomfortable. Then someone asked me to bring my body to a neutral position. What I had always assumed was a neutral position turned out to be pretty fucking askew. With subtle movements and verbal guidance, I was led into the alignment my body should be in and I felt so contorted it made me question my entire sense of awareness. What I had thought, for years, was correct was only hurting me. It was making my body weaker, and I ignored all of the messages.
After 30 minutes, through no pain and no physical manipulation, I was able to singularly identify the muscles that were causing trouble and the ways to release them. Without the foundational knowledge I had gained over the last 20 years, I would not have been able to feel the wrong or the right. Without the years of practicing being wrong, I would not have been able to trust myself when I finally felt the subtle changes that made it right. There was purpose in all of it, but only because I made it mean something. Otherwise, the years would just have been wasted on what led to pain.
But there actually is a space between right and wrong; and I’m not sure those are the only two answers. We can choose that space between. A little resistance is good. Pain is never the goal.
Let’s talk about it:
Is there anything you couldn’t have been able to do well, unless you had done it so poorly before?
What do you fear being wrong that you wish you could explore more freely?
That is a big statement for my people.
I can relate to your story entirely, having been raised a conservative Lutheran but never really feeling what I was supposed to be feeling. I went through the motions because that's what one did. But the hunger was still there, which led me eventually to spiritual path that wasn't based on the idea of a wrathful God, but a truly loving God, and provided spiritual practices (including raja yoga/meditation) that helped me attune to God. Then I found that I was fed, even for as much as I still have to work on the details and my many imperfections.
Samantha I appreciate how you grapple with the big questions here. We are told to stay within the clearly drawn lines, but then can’t find the lines!!! Yes, yes, yes, I too cannot find the lines. We have questions and are told to trust. That’s not quite good enough.
I still don’t have it right but I can look back and see that all my stumbling questions, or lack of them, about my relationship with God may have felt like failure at the time but led me here to this point of understanding.