The practice of stopping – a different kind of New Year’s resolution

by Ann-Charlotte Monrad

”As the past pulls away and the future rolls in/I say goodbye to all that//As the future rolls in/like a wave, like a wave/and the past with its savage undertow/lets go”, Nick Cave in Sun Forest

”Promise me you won’t do anything stupid”, my body implored me, as I was packing my favourite summer yoga leggings for a ten day-retreat in Thailand.

I had mainly signed up because the retreat was advertised as a silent event, and because it gave me the chance of a long overdue catching-up with my teacher since 2002. But there would also be a daily asana class, and that class would primarily be ashtanga yoga, a practice I for various reasons left for good about three years ago.

”Don’t worry”, I told my body. ”There’s no way that we’ll be going down that route again”.

So there I was, in the wonderful, tropical climate of Koh Samui, doing my own thing in the shala, as primary and intermediate series practices unfolded around me. I had even placed a ”no assists”-sticker on my name tag, as I know from my anatomy studies that the harder, physical adjustments you sometimes meet in practices like ashtanga aren’t really the way to go if you want your body to respond in a sustainable fashion.

But after the first couple of days, a thought appeared as if from nowhere: ”I guess it can’t hurt to do a little bit of primary”, it whispered, and so I did, and the thought was right: It mostly didn’t hurt.

”Maybe a little bit of intermediate, then,” seemed like a reasonable thought during my next practice. ”You do a lot of those poses in your own practice anyway”.

I started out traditionally with pashasana and krounchasana and then moved on to a bunch of backbends at the end of which I found myself signalling to my teacher, much to my surprise ready for some help in supta vajrasana.

“I haven’t done this pose for three years,” I whispered, “so I have no idea, what will happen”. He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you’ll die”, he deadpanned. “It won’t be the worst pose to die in,” I answered. “Or the worst place”, he replied.

I folded my legs into padmasana, grabbed my feet from behind, and with him supporting my knees I leaned back, letting my head touch the floor. And it was glorious. Actually that entire practice made me feel like a glowing, golden goddess with a heart that was open enough to fit in the entire Universe. I definitely recognized that ashtanga buzz where you feel strong enough to conquer the world and overcome every obstacle on your way. It was almost like that feeling you get when you bump into a former lover and have a chat that’s just long enough to remind you of how much fun you used to have together, but not long enough for you to remember how much he hurt you. I didn’t quite ask myself “Why did I ever stop doing this?” But I almost did.

The answer to that unasked question came the next morning. When I woke up I realized that everything in my body hurt. The pain was so intense that it felt like it was seeping from my muscles into my bones. It was a kind of pain that I hadn’t felt since my ashtanga days and that I had completely forgotten about.

“Maybe it’ll go away when I start practicing. Actually, it’ll probably be fine once I start moving, and then I’ll do intermediate and become a golden goddess again”, I decided, as I moaned my way out of bed, and picked up my mat to go practice.

But it didn’t go away, and as I started contemplating doing deep backbends after a couple of miserable suryanamaskars my body objected: “Have you learned nothing during five years of anatomy studies?” it almost yelled. “What kind of an example are you setting for your own students right now?”

“But they’re not here,” I mumbled.

“Does that really matter?” it countered, and I had to admit that it didn’t.

So I reached for my myofascial release balls and a few extra props and did what I would tell a student to do if they experienced pain like mine, adding a little bit of gentle strength and flow to the release. After I rounded of my practice in a delicious waterfall pose on a bolster, I felt a lot better. Not goddess-like, but at least normal and more or less pain-free.

“We did pretty well, didn’t we?” I asked my body as we sat down for the first meditation session after asana practice. “Sure,” came the answer, only it didn’t sound like my body responding. The voice that greeted me now sounded more like that of the Joker, and it was giggling ominously. I was pretty sure that it was my ahamkara, the ego in yoga philosophy, always out to keep you firmly placed in your misery. It left me in very little doubt as to what was about to unfold.

So I buckled up for half an hour of despair, and I was right, because there it was, all dark and tormenting like a super hero villain: A thought that, rooted in a habitual pattern that I’ve carried with me since childhood, has found a new, painful shape in my life over this past year.

“For f…’s sake. I didn’t travel all the way to Thailand to stay stuck in this pain! This is SO inconvenient” I thought, before the usual waves of sadness engulfed me. Because when you’re meditating in a room with sixty other people, the occasional, mindfully pittoresque tear running down one cheek might be acceptable, but the big, ugly sobs that you can get away with when meditating on your own and that I could totally feel coming are not.

“I’m not doing this again, I’m just not,” I told the threatening sadness tsunami with rising panic, for I knew that I had absolutely nothing to bargain with. Or had I? Because “Just stop”, a new voice now said.

“What do you mean, “just stop”?” I asked while keeping the wave at bay Jedi-style with one arm outstretched in my imagination. As the voice sounded quite Yoda-like, this seemed somehow fitting.

“Like stopping the painful physical practice less than an hour ago you did”, it answered.

“But I don’t have metaphorical myofascial release balls for my mind!” I protested.

“So continue suffering you will?” it asked. And it was right.

I wouldn’t be able to change what made me suffer even if I had a million years to do it, because it was basically unfixable, so my suffering could potentially continue for the rest of my life. Did that seem like something I deserved? Like something I wanted?

Only a little bit surprised that my buddhi – or discriminative awareness in yoga philosophy – sounded like my favourite Star Wars-character, I had to agree with it. I was done. Totally and completely done. So I let go. The wave dissolved. And for one sweet moment, alone on my cushion, I was noise-free, pain-free. And I realized that it could potentially always be like this. Not - as we often seem to expect in the yoga community - through the grace of the moon, or the Universe or some divine form stepping in to help me. But through the grace of my own insistence, my own acceptance of the state of things, my own refusal to give my destructive thought patterns any more power.

Just because I had walked through fire didn’t mean that I had to keep doing it. I could choose a different path. I could make a conscious decision to release the past. Not because everything had finally fallen into place through the kindness of the Universe. Not because I’d gotten closure. But because I’d at long last and with absolute clarity seen that neither of these things would ever happen. And because I’d finally had enough.

It occurred to me that just like we might chase that glorious feeling of being invincible on our mats, but mostly falling short of it, so we might also chase other things in life that are always just outside of our reach, making us lose sight of everything that is already ours and so deeply precious.

While we chase that perfect asana, we forget to appreciate our bodies that carry us around each day for their incredible resilience. While we chase popularity and success, we forget the people who like and maybe even love us just the way we are. And while we chase love, we forget that no love should ever be greater than the love and respect that we have for ourselves.

I realize that to claim that I’m done with the chase and that, just like the Buddha in the story of Angulimala, I can say: “I’ve stopped”, and know it to be true, is not really realistic. But even if stopping isn’t going to be a continuous state for me, I also know that the moment of no noise and no pain on my cushion was more profoundly nourishing than any golden goddess moment I could ever experience. And that, as a yoga teacher, it’s the most valuable lesson I can share with others.

So at the beginning of a new year, while new plans and ideas and hopes are sprouting, I promise myself to continuously sit back in moments of stillness as a reminder of the valuable lesson that this year has taught me: That the best way to start is sometimes to stop.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by for yoga in Magstræde in 2019. As a small, independent studio your support makes it possible for us to keep being of service.