Karma Yoga Practicum Essay (mid to late july)

My karma yoga hours are done and I am starting this essay on Highway 2, passing through North Dakota.

North Dakota has always seemed like a blank space to me – South Dakota tugs at me – memories of my Grandma Joyce’s house in Vermillion; Grandpa Harold, her third husband, and the only one who did not beat her.  I saw many funerals in vermillion, walked streets paved in red stone to thrift stores and watched my 28 year old aunt, 5 months pregnant, be placed set into the earth.  And that good memory from my mother’s drinking days – camping illegally in the Badlands when I was 14 and angry, and for one night, I had fun.

We are on our way to Glacier National Park in Montana.  We are headed West this summer vacation.  Montana – it’s been what, near 20 years since I last climbed your mountain trails.  I am thirsty for the water of your glaciers.

In those North Dakota fields we pass by, the cows huddle together at what I assume must be marshy areas, seeking some respite from the silent muggy prairie heat.

Center

Although it’s not silent here.  The prairie is torn apart, drilled deep, by the oil wells, the oil rigs, pumping pumping pumping.  Our car shudders with every semi-truck that passes, carrying tankers of oil, and every car on every train looks just the same and they all are going back the way we came.

So much has happened.  I need this vacation; I feel so utterly spent, depleted.  Pulled thin as cellophane the dark parts of me begin to become visible under the translucent places in flesh.

My partner’s ex-wife and I have started out own yoga business.  We operate under the name Swastha Yoga, teaching classes at Rail River Folk School in Bemidji, MN.  Most of my karma hours were done here, but some at Yoga Bemidji as a sub for the regular Saturday morning teacher, MT, and one free class for the workers the Family Crisis Center in Bagley, MN.  Everything above the price of rent was donated to the Family Crisis Center, but they were donation classes.  After the cost of rent, I raised $30, and gave each of the FCC workers a 5 class pass card for their own personal use, plus 2 free yoga class laminated badges that can be used over and over again by their clients.  We have more cards made up for the women’s shelter and the Sexual Assault Program here in Bemidji.

Periodically I take my son (the son who grew inside of me those long months of teacher training) out of his car seat to nurse him at my breast – something I believed I would never be able to do with my inverted nipples.  But somehow, we’ve made it work, and I feel liberated, unchained from the breast pump and bottles I had to drag everywhere with me.  One more thing to subtract and we learn to live inside our bodies.

I jump between reading Yoga and the Quest for the True Self and Monster Island.  One to wake me up, one to shut me down.

I’m trying to find the words to describe my practicum experience – fulfilling, exhausting, deeply right but a little bruising, too.

I feel like my birth experience had a very profound effect on my prana and on me as a human being.  In the article ‘Mother Nurture: Yoga and Ayurveda for Postpartum Bliss” by Claudia Welch with Scott Blossom (Yoga International, spring 2011, Issue 113), Welch writes:

“In Sanskrit, the term sutaka describes powerful transitional times like birth and death. Sutaka has several meanings, including “charioteer,” one who transports precious cargo between the heavens and the earth, and “mercury,” a metal capable of alchemical transformation from liquid to solid state.  In the birthing process, sutaka applies to the baby, who moves from one fundamental experience of reality (being in the mother’s womb), to another; to family members, midwives, and others present for the passage; and of course to the mother, who transitions from pregnancy to parenthood.

Sutaka begins in earnest with the altered state of awareness you enter during labor and delivery, and remains very strong for two weeks following the birth; but sutaka can extend for the whole first year – to varying degrees – as long as you remain in transition.  In this altered state, you may become acutely aware of your own prana, as well as your child’s.  You may experience this as a deep sense of connection with – and acceptance of – your own needs and your baby’s; less anxiety over small things; profound relaxation; and a feeling that ‘all’s right with the world

This altered state allows you to bond with your baby easier, and you may even find that your judgments, worldview, and emotions have shifted and softened, and you feel more vulnerable.”

I started doing a few somatic exercises 3 days after my son was born on March 6^th, and I taught my first karma yoga practicum class on May 10^th.  I taught 3 more karma classes by mid-June, and then Arianne and I launched Swastha Yoga officially on June 15^th.

Things seemed to snowball – suddenly I was teaching 3 classes a week, working 2 longer shifts a week at the Co-op, and doing bicycle messenger deliveries for a local company.  Something inside of me started to feel broken, I started to feel like I was forcing myself through the motions of my life, and like my energy was being sucked away from each and every direction.  There was nothing left for me, myself.  I had become last on my list.

Obviously I know/knew that having a teaching practice was no substitute for having a personal practice, but this really drove it home for me.

I’ve started my daily practice again, and hope the fruits will spill over into my teaching.  I think of some line by some famous man, who once spoke of “the long dark winter of the soul” that Christian converts experience once the initial euphoria of accepting Christ has worn off.  I think this may be my yogic equivalent of that.

Postscript

I did not find what I was looking for in Glacier.  We packed up from the park and I had a bad taste in my mouth as we pulled away – that sensation that the whole time, I was just waiting for it to be over.

But I come back cleaned out in my very heart.  And I know now what needs to be stripped away.  I am lucky to have a partner who supports me in quitting my “real” job at the co-op so I can write, teach yoga, and stay home with our children.

My son turned 5 months old yesterday.  My children and I sit in a dark room burning palo santo and listening to kirtan music.  I drink bottle after bottle of water and think that surely there is not enough water in this world to make me clean again.