A new kind of travel plan for 2021: On always choosing walking over preaching.
Well if it wasn’t the year of all the great travel...plans!
Admittedly, as I look back on my diary, the first 12 weeks of 2020 were insanely full. I travelled to Belfast on 4 separate occasions (three times to run training, and a fourth time to teach the only studio workshop I taught all year). I co-ran two yoga retreats in Dublin and Sligo. I traveled to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia to lead the first yin yoga training there. I taught a training in Dublin right before lockdown, and I even managed to fit in a weekend mystery tour (Warsaw!) with my school crew. And as if that wasn’t a full plate already, I was also in school Monday-Friday, full-time and very full-on for 10 of those 12 weeks.
By early March my summer was fully mapped out; In June I’d be running yin training in Holland and then I’d do the same in Dubai. I had investigated more training in Costa Rica in July, planned on maybe fitting in a holiday in Belize, and then spending August in the south of France for more yoga work. A Boston yin training was in the early planning stages, I was planning dates for a studio I used to teach at in New Zealand… and well, you get the picture, there was absolutely no stopping me and my plans!
And looking back now I honestly don’t know how I did it. I mean I absolutely love my work, and am generally blessed with plenty of drive and vision to see it through, but even by my own standards, my schedule was utterly devoid of balance. There was no rest. There was only the tiniest amount of free space. I would likely have been unable to follow through with everything that found its way into the diary. And if I did, it likely would have come at a cost.
On March 12th, the infamous announcement of the ‘great pause’ came through. I tuned in to Leo’s announcement with my 6th years. We were sent home from school and told to take everything with us. We moved online and got consumed by digital learning strategies. Plans rapidly changed, trips were cancelled, flights became vouchers. Trainings were postponed. Getting on a plane looked less and less likely as each month progressed. The lens became less and less focused on external horizons.
I can say, hand on heart, that I am one of the incredibly lucky navigators of 2020. I actually get to utter the words “What I missed most in 2020 is travel”, and absolutely mean it. I know what a privilege this is. I live for my summers and the travel opportunities they afford me. And I’ve never been more acutely aware of just how much I depended on those explorations to feel fully free.
But of course, there is always a rebalancing taking place whenever any kind of dependence has developed within us. The psyche senses it. And it will need to be corrected. It’s a rebalancing that we have absolutely no say in whatsoever. And it will naturally be the lesson we had to learn all along (and perhaps not for the first time!).
When June came around I found myself with an alternate travel plan: I took myself off to Cong for the peace and quiet and the space to surrender to some deep and often painful internal explorations. I journeyed though The Artist’s Way, dived into Jung, meditated, journaled about my dreams, did a great deal of inner child healing, and processed endless amounts of grief (of which only some was my own). I finally sank into a true and lengthy stillness, examined my extra layers of resistance, met more shadow aspects, re-encountered trauma I was “sure I had already dealt with”, all the time desperately seeking a nice and tidy alternative to the void. An escape route from the abyss. And an accompanying timeframe. And maybe a user manual. And a few ... dare I even say it, ... a few answers maybe? You know, the kind of answers I spend a great deal of time encouraging my students to quit seeking!
I guess I am that kind of teacher!
Of course I got absolutely no answers at all, but when I finally surrendered, it was the bittersweet entering and subsequent dwelling in “the temple of my adult aloneness” that held every bit of me. It was in trusting the raw truth of the empty moments, and not fearing their revelations, that I understood the depth of connection they also offered. I’ll never forget the poignancy of that full understanding of how “I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life”. When I first heard these words some time ago (David Whyte’s) they provoked such an outpour of emotion I couldn’t fathom it. But 2020 has absolutely given me all the embodied sensations and felt reverberations of these words. I simply cannot unknow what I have felt. And the relevance of this for yin yoga is nearly too obvious to state. I guess just like Rilke suggests, I really did live my way into the answers I was seeking.
““It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching”.”
As I look back at those months, I see just how much I was craving some certainty. How overwhelmed I felt by my incessant Grace-ness every goddam day, the doubt and all the questions and on some days, all the terrible sadness. And I really do know that it couldn’t have been any other way. It was exactly the experience I was meant to go through, and grow through, and ultimately - the only path of integrity open to me. I may live for my travels but it’s the inner landscape I mainly navigate. It’s the inner eyes that my voice guides, and peoples’ internal unravelling that I ultimately hold space for.
We have had, and continue to have, a potent opportunity to deepen our internal horizons, and not just because Marianne Williamson says it’s our only hope! :-) But because all travel in the world outside must be matched by the same willingness to dive within. That’s the world we can never leave. That’s the world in which we are destined to find our greatest sense of belonging. As we embark on 2021, with movements restricted, freedoms curtailed, and perhaps heading into our toughest lockdown yet, it might just be that the yin way of surrender will hold us all.
Happy New Year to each and every one of you,
Grace - who is still very much on the journey of learning what she teaches,
x
