Discovering Sanctuary
The first time I truly showed up for yoga, I was sitting across from my reflection. I felt a pillar of light move up through my torso and a phrase resonated through every cell of my body: “This is where you will meet yourself”. It’s not that I had never done yoga before - I had plenty of times, but this is the first time I showed up with intention. The class hadn’t even started yet but I had showed up early to prepare my space and I had asked what I needed to learn from the practice. This is where I experienced the power of asking questions. It was true, I did meet myself on that mat. I met myself in the reflection as we moved through asanas (the postures of a yoga practice) - I learned how to make adjustments so my body felt more stable, grounded and sure. I met myself in savasanas at the beginning and end of practice - it was like stepping into a warm bath, a sigh of relief and an inner “ahhhhhhh”. I learned how to be in stillness, solitude and silence with myself - a practice I never thought possible from living with rattling anxiety.
The more I showed up in yoga, the more curious I became. What else could I learn from my body? I had no idea that yoga was the beginning of my deconstruction journey - not only of my religion but of my marriage as well.
I actually started practicing yoga because of my husband. He would attend 5 AM classes with a friend - never with me, no matter how many times I asked. There was one time we went to a class together in Vancouver and it felt violating, like something sacred and important to me was being objectified (and it was). I stopped asking after that. But I would always use his mat. Even when I got a mat of my own (one my mother-in-law picked out - blue like the ocean on a cool autumn day with navy blue dots that blended my tears that inevitably fell when I practiced at home). I preferred his mat because it was the perfect olive green that felt like I was standing on the most beautiful, fertile piece of earth. I felt so inextricably held.
Yoga created clarity in my inner world, brought me into a space of self-compassion I had never experienced before and allowed me to listen to my own inner voice. I wanted to know more, I was hungry for the context of yoga. Having grown up in the conservative church, yoga was labelled as “devil’s worship”, based on the fallacy that each posture was conjuring a unique demon to plague your life and rip you away from eternal life. Yes, that extreme. My experience of yoga didn’t line up with that at all. I couldn’t comprehend how something so uniting (yoga, after all, means “union”) could be so evil, so scary. The messages I was told didn’t line up with my experience.
For me, spirituality is our innate capacity to connect to ourselves, others and the world. How we seek that connection is unique to each of us but connection requires space, stillness, silence and solitude. Spiritual awareness & practice strengthens our inner resiliency by meeting our existential needs: belonging, purpose and meaning. These existential needs are often used to control, but the purpose of these existential needs is to connect. I wanted to create a supportive community with shared values of presence & conscious connection to meet these existential needs through embodied spirituality by sharing insight from decades of spiritual exploration and teachings to help you heal the depths of who you are.
It wasn’t because of yoga I left the church or my husband, but it was through the practice and philosophy of yoga that I learned to listen to my intuition. I can understand why the church demonizes yoga as a dangerous endeavor - it is dangerous to systems of power that require disconnection from the self to wield control. It was my intuition that was uncovered in my yoga practice and it was my intuition that led me out of the doors of the church and my marriage. I already had all the answers within me but yoga unplugged my ears so I could hear what those answers were.
I enrolled in my yoga teacher training shortly before asking my husband for a divorce. I had spent Christmas by myself in a reformed abbey in Quebec City and attended yoga three times a day. It was in the stone cellar on a borrowed mat that I realized I was more content, spacious, authentic and alive by myself - in the stillness, solitude and silence of my own inner world, than I was shrinking myself to fit the space I shared with my husband. My yoga training was the cocoon for my grief as I moved from married, separated, divorced in the span of my certification. We began each class in a meditation, I would lean my back against the cool window, trusting it wouldn’t break, and allow my body to feel. I would often nod off into timeless emotion, coming out of the meditation with tears I didn’t recall crying. Amidst all of the chaos and change, I found stable footing in each asana and felt my self-trust soar. I was choosing myself one posture at a time.
My training was beautifully integrative, the philosophy of yoga being as important as the asanas. We followed ayurvedic nutrition, practiced breathwork (pranayama) and integrated yogic teachings, the vedas, into each class. One of our mandatory readings, the Gita, a Vedic text nearly 5000 years old, jump started my deconstruction of Christianity. In its pages, I found familiar Sunday school stories, only with traditional Indian names. I read about Noah and the whale, Abraham nearly sacrificing his son, Jacob and Esaw clawing over their birthrights. I realized that the stories of Christianity were not new, they were recycled mythology framed in a context that made sense for the culture it was presented to.
This made sense to me. That all paths lead to the same realization, the same truth - we are the divine. That truly the god of the universe, of whom we are made in their image, would want to connect us to ourselves (the microcosm of they, the macrocosm).
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Deconstruction for me wasn’t only deconstruction of faith. I deconstructed everything in my life. I deconstructed how I viewed relationships, how I experienced obligation and expectation in my marriage and beyond. I deconstructed how I viewed myself, skewed from projected perceptions of how other people viewed me. I deconstructed my goals, hopes, dreams and desires because they were too enmeshed in people-pleasing for me to trust what I wanted wasn’t based on approval-seeking. And yes, I also deconstructed the religious dogma I was raised with, to deconstruct faith and find the relief of doubt.
My deconstruction was disorienting, certainly, but also assuring. I had the freedom to choose what I believed. As an ardent existentialist, I knew there was meaning bigger than myself. While I couldn’t fully endorse the Christian beliefs I was raised with after seeing behind the canonical curtain, I also wasn’t willing to exist without spirituality. For me, spirituality is the connection between ourselves, others and the world and I felt that undeniably. For me, deconstruction became an invitation to reconstruct my beliefs, practices and ethics with thoughtful intention, not fear-based control. What a beautiful, consciously corrective experience!
I want to create the same opportunity for a conscious, corrective experience of spirituality for you, too. Community, the existential need of belonging, is so often a barrier for deconstruction. Leaving the nest of the church feels daunting to enter the void of the unknown - it can feel safer to stay in the familiar, even if the familiar isn’t good for you.
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