For a couple of years I went to my local CPY studio – which specializes in hot yoga – until October of last year when some of my favorite teachers broke off and started their own studio nearby using the amazing 12,000 square foot space left behind by YogaWorks due to their COVID-related bankruptcy. The new Westlake Yoga Company created its own hot room and given all the space can offer hot and non-heated yoga classes as well as meditation, kids' classes, childcare and more things that seem to be coming out all the time.
The one thing they don't have is an online option. So, for this trip, I subscribed to CorePower Yoga's online video library which I used during lockdown. It's useful because they have many kinds of classes and I know how to navigate their offerings. I also know their class formats and can sort of tailor my own program.
As with a lot of yoga studios, CorePower makes its real money not on memberships – which sort of keeps things running – but on supplemental courses. Some studios, like the ones I went to in Seattle and Bali offer a lot of specialty workshops – a five hour intensive on hips and hamstrings, a six week course on meditation and breath work, a seven-part series on the seven chakras. People pay extra to further their practices and deepen their understandings. CPY focuses heavily on teacher training. Each format of class has its own teacher training, so if someone is interested to teach at a CPY studio, then they must get certified for each type of class they might want to teach – paying more in order to get a job.
The system is kind of brilliant. Few people can make a living instructing yoga, it's more of a fun side-gig – so even the best studios have staff turnover as instructors' lives change. Also, teaching yoga often appeals to young, twenty-something women who often have to transition when they're done with college – or to go back to school – or because they find their full-time gig. So, CPY makes money cultivating their next generation of employees and is constantly ensuring they don't have a staffing shortage. Because their classes are so formulaic, a yoga teacher is more of a narrator or a pose "caller" than a real teacher – making their individual knowledge often pretty meager.
The downside, of course, is that the instructors are often much nicer than they are good. Someone's people skills are their ability to tune-in to a group and coach people is really more what they offer than deep knowledge about yoga. In Seattle I had a favorite yoga instructor who traveled to India to study with Iyengar and who spent much of her youth taking workshops from the top yogis in America. She had a resume that far exceeded what she needed for her job. Needless to say, there were things she could offer, ways she could teach that I just haven't seen elsewhere. Beyond the mechanics of yoga, she really understood theory and how to apply it.
Because most American yoga instructors are educated more like the CPY crew and not like Kitty in Seattle, corporate studio programs are filled with a lot of fortune cookie wisdom, although often in a more Hindu or Buddhist flavor. Worse than that, these fortune cookies are infused with a notes of narcissism and hollowness that usually render them at best benign, at worst dangerous and on average a little funny. There are lots of trite little nuggets like people who "find themselves" on their mats.
That said, one of the real spiritual points to yoga is to be a physical proof and practice on the art of having "no mind." Buddhism teaches that meditation to get beyond our "monkey minds" with all the thoughts swirling is important for ascending the path of enlightenment. Anyone who has ever tried meditating will know it's not easy. Our thoughts don't want to stop and it's very easy to attach to them and follow them around. Buddhist meditation teaches detachment – letting the thoughts just happen without giving them importance. Observing the thoughts. Recognizing we are not our thoughts and they can exist without defining us.
Yoga is a way to jumpstart that process through breathing and assuming postures – or asanas – that in many cases require your complete attention on how to move and hold your body. When you're just trying to keep yourself in some challenging balance posture, you also let go of your thoughts and detach. It becomes just you and your body. Once your body becomes more accustomed to yoga, then maybe it doesn't take quite so much effort and yoga can become a moving meditation – keeping you embodied and out of your head. Afterwards there's a sort of "yoga bliss" that can happen – the afterglow of just not being trapped in your head, living with all of your thoughts half of which are insane anyway.
In that happy, detached state it's easy to recognize how many things we give weight to actually don't matter in the scheme of things. Whether or not I make it to the car wash today, we eat chicken or tofu for dinner or I respond to my emails promptly don't really matter. In fact, no one's tombstone or eulogy commemorates anyone's dedication to quick, reliable responses on texts and emails. Sometimes we need to clear the haze of everyday life to see what matters.
Yesterday I had such a moment. It wasn't directly after yoga, though it felt as if it could have been. It was just a moment between setting a bag down on the kitchen counter and heading into the bedroom to put my wallet and keys away. I realized that if I could just let go of attachment in the Buddhist/yogic sense – all of this doesn't have to mean anything at all. I don't have to care what Emily chooses. I don't have to care what I choose. I don't have to be hurt, sad, happy, excited or any other emotion. This time doesn't have to be infused with meaning, weight, anxiety, hope. This juncture in my life and marriage could just be. Since none of us are in any physical danger, maybe the outcome is whatever the outcome is.
All the feelings I've been wading through – hurt, anger, blame, shame – maybe those actually aren't necessary here. While understandable and natural, maybe I don't have to be in them. Maybe I don't need Emily to know how she's hurt me or how unfair it feels because maybe it doesn't need to feel unfair. Maybe, in the trite words of corporate trained 22 year-old yogi girls everywhere, if it doesn't serve me, I can just let it go. It could be possible for something to have been wrong and uncool and no longer be relevant. The only thing that makes it relevant is my need to be recognized for the hurt I've sustained. The truth is, our pain isn't currency. It's not worth anything – even to ourselves. We may on occasion use it to dramatic effect in negotiating something, but in reality holding onto pain doesn't - again in 22 year-old yogi parlance – serve us. No one will love me more or less for my pain – and if they do, it's probably not a good relationship.
In the end, I want things out of Emily she is unlikely to give – and perhaps never could. This isn't Emily's first time having difficulties in a relationship with this same set of issues. I need to recognize it's completely possible Emily's love for me led her into a bad choice – that committed, long-term partnership is not something she can really do. Or maybe, I've handled some or even all the issues wrong. Perhaps I'm the one who doesn't know how to navigate a long-term partnership? Or maybe just not one with her? I could sit around, analyze and derive 10 excellent working theories and even more avenues for conscious personal exploration. Or maybe none of it matters. All of this just is. It doesn't have to be her fault. It doesn't have to be my shortcoming. I have the right to the hurt and it might be fair to want to have my position and feelings recognized – but that doesn't mean I have to exercise that right. One of the beautiful parts of rights is we have the freedom not to exercise them if we so choose.
My mind went to the Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty song, Stop Draggin' My Heart Around
It's hard to think about what you've wanted
It's hard to think about what you've lost
This doesn't have to be the big "get even"
This doesn't have to be anything at all
The simplicity of this viewpoint belies its difficulty to maintain. When facing Emily, in our home, making decisions, when she says things that would typically trigger me – can I maintain my clarity? Can I be truly settled in the fact this doesn't have to be anything? It's not important how I feel and I don't have to worry about how she feels? Can I let go of categorizing myself and deciding what kind of person every choice and sentiment makes me? If she's hurt or upset, can I resist my impulse to repair things or make sure I'm not misunderstood or mislabeled? Can I decide I'm not an asshole for disengaging or even saying "no" to what doesn't work for me? Can I be all business without feeling badly? Can I let her go and accept that she's letting me go? Can I not take the bait and not be angry the bait is there?
By design, we are creatures who care about each other and ourselves. Letting go and detaching don't come easily.
But what if I could do it? How much better off could I be?
I don't know that I'm ready to forgive. I don't know that a lot of things were or are okay. At the same time, deciding they don't matter doesn't mean I have to say that they were/are okay. Perhaps I'm forgoing the catharsis of coming to an understanding – feeling seen, seeing her – deciding it's okay now and forgiving. Simply deciding something doesn't serve you and letting it go doesn't resolve anything – it just makes it no longer important, no longer worth holding onto. Sometimes, that's the best it gets. We don't always have the opportunity for reconciliation, resolution or closure. As nice as it would be to imagine Emily and I finding one of these, that may not be realistic and it doesn't have to be.
Maybe the secret is that the only one dragging my heart around is me.
