FOUR TESTY YEARS

Degree done, yoga teacher training done.   I feel as though I've achieved something over the past four years.   Its been like being in the wilderness, and occasionally coming up against sand storms and tsunamis of other peoples emotional dramas.   As though I've walked into their book and don't want to be there, so I've walked out again, literally.   Interesting as I'm a storyteller and I've found the most interesting ones are the ones we tell ourselves.    Never again.  I didn't feel like myself, as though I'd lost myself.  Not got lost. I'd lost myself.    I've felt like Paul Pennyfeather, things happening to me, and when I've walked away, walked straight into someone else's storyline, and I was nothing more than a mirror for them to project onto.   Their stuff, their story.    I though it was my drama, my storm, my tsunami, but it wasn't.   I was just pulled into it, sometimes willingly.   Perhaps thats why I did the degree, watching all those years ago Educating Rita at the theatre in Bath, and realising I knew the stuff, I just needed to get the accreditation to be heard. And write my own story, and my own book again.    And the yoga teacher training, because although I can write, I wasn't appreciated.   They strangely complement each other.   Academia is isolating, as is teaching yoga.   They are both disciplines.   You focus in on yourself with yoga, and focus in on a subject with academia to the point of exclusion of everything else. They discipline the mind.   And the mind, if asked, wishes to be disciplined like the body.    The emotions want to be appreciated and let go of, and the body. Well the body likes to be stretched, and balanced and twisted but really just wants to have a good time.   Oh, and it loves it when you breathe.
Both the degree and the yoga has allowed me to walk above, below or around the sand storms and tsunamis without even knowing I am doing it.
I'm telling my own story again.