beginning again

i tend to take great joy in endings, in discarding old things and habits i’ve outgrown and forking a new path towards the unknown. the most liberating part of growth is shedding, i’ve often thought, and a butterfly never returns to stuff itself back into an old, molted cocoon.

so it’s a bit unsettling to see that, as i get older, i am in fact returning to old, discarded things which i once thought i’d left behind for good. one significant return started last summer, when i began practicing ~15 minutes of sheet music daily after over a decade of mostly allowing my violin to gather dust in the corners of the places i’ve lived. more recently, i find myself contemplating a return to a career path i’d thought i’d left for good just last year, and even more recently than that - over the course of the past few weeks - i’ve felt a gnawing itch to practice yoga regularly again, in the presence of an ashtanga teacher and other ujjayi-breathing, sweat-drenched students the way i used to begin most mornings for ~3.5 years before the start of the pandemic.

beginning again is, if i’ve understood correctly, at the heart of what yoga is all about. after days, weeks, months, and years of re-starting the same sequence of postures time and again, you might one day get to know your own mind intimately. during my first iteration with ashtanga, yearning to prove myself a diligent student, i showed up at the yoga shala five days a week, prying myself out of bed at 4:30 each morning; i gobbled up books about pattabhi jois (the creator of ashtanga yoga) and signed up for weekend intensives with well-respected teachers. whenever i traveled, i searched for a local shala for drop-in practices so that i could remain grounded in a daily routine even while on vacation or business trips.

but i loosened my grip on my routine as the pandemic unfolded; my practice dwindled from an hour and a half down to ten to fifteen minutes of sun salutations, and only on some days instead of most. i relinquished my identity as a diligent yogi. i thought maybe i had distilled the main lessons i could learn from yoga and would remain forever skimming the surface with just my sun salutations from now on. i moved on to searching for other new, exciting ways to be.

but perhaps a return is sometimes not a regression but rather a braiding of old threads to form something new? as i picture myself ramping my yoga practice back up - this time at a different shala, closer to the apartment Ulrich and I moved into last year - i expect that i won’t practice 5 times a week but rather closer to 2 or 3, that i will probably go easier on the weekend intensives, and allow myself to sleep in on vacation rather than seeking out shalas in every city i visit. since i’ve let go of my identity as a diligent yogi, my practice will undoubtedly take on a very different look and feel from the one i once knew. and that, i realize, is what makes a thing worth revisiting: the space and permission to experience it in a totally new light, while allowing wisps of memory to ground your heart in what it already knows.

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash