I suffer from depression. The most textbook cliche major depressive disorder you can imagine. It started at puberty, strongly influenced my adolescence and helped me achieve a mid-life crisis by age 31. Throughout, I vacillated between self-pity pariah and lab rat. Eking out employment in classically short spurts, rarely making connections with other humans. When I was young and frail, my family helped me survive the worst of it. Now I’m old and frail. Owing to a lucky combination of western medicine and yoga, I’m still here. Just barely.
Yoga is a part of my life like water in a fountain. I discovered it way back in 1999. I had a membership to Gold’s Gym and they signed an energetic tan woman from LA for a 6 month contract. She taught Yoga. No qualifier. Yoga “brands” had only infiltrated elite coastal cities at the time. In hindsight, her style was a great foundation for the basic principles that make all styles of yoga fundamentally the same. Once that teacher left one of the students from the series took over the class. She’d passed her torch to a candlestick. I quickly lost interest. The shininess of the instructor was part of the draw.
Yoga didn’t come back into my life for a long while. I lived whole lifetimes without it in my 20’s. Then I found my studio and in it a community that feels the way I can feel. Not always the same feelings, but the same sense of self-awareness. It’s the one place I can cry without judgement. My light within shines softly, waiting for a chance to light the torch.
