Abhyasa and Vairagya

February 7, 2018

Abhyasa and Vairagya

Coming to terms with a lack of control and embracing nonattachment.

I was 18 when I went septic with a staph infection. I chose my college in a hospital room I spent my freshman year learning to live with an autoimmune disorder that affected my colon. That freshman girl couldn’t stay up past 10:00 PM. She was isolated. The doctors at the very conservative med clinics nearby didn’t believe her complicated condition was as serious as it was. She found herself unable to make friends at a new school, without proper medical treatment and doing poorly in school.

I was 21 when I was diagnosed with my first ovarian tumor. I was 23 when the tumors returned and took 60% of my ovaries. I was a senior in college with fertility problems and an English degree. I was scared. I felt alone. I was still having trouble getting doctors to believe I was really sick. It wasn’t looking good for me.

So, I went to the only place you can go when life hits you this hard: home. My dad needed a

content writer at his small business, and my mom had just signed up for a six-month yoga teacher training course. I was the youngest person in this course by at least 30 years, and I had no idea what was about to hit me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my first week there was my first real, concrete step to health that I had taken in five years. I held a translation of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali with white knuckles as my teacher explained two yogic principles that must always stay in balance: Vairagya and Abhyasa. I had been practicing Abhyasa or persistence my whole life, but it had never occurred to me to balance it with Vairagya or nonattachment.

I white-knuckled that book the way I held on to everything: for dear life. Health, school, the idea that I was sick despite what those doctors told me, anything I’d achieved, I’d gained by clenching every muscle in my body. The concept

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of letting go sounded like suicide to me. How would I stay well without carefully monitoring everything I ate, how much I slept, and what I said to my doctors? How could I possibly pay attention to every part of my full life without constantly worrying about every detail? How could I trust that everything would be okay when all the evidence over the previous five years had proved otherwise?

I continued on with my yoga training, but I remained skeptical of this Vairagya nonsense. That is until I had to lead the class in my first asana practice. I had rehearsed ad nauseam. I knew I was ready with all my poses and prompts. I started out with my usual level of perfection. Pose one flowed into pose two to three, but then, it happened. We came up from a down dog when I and all 16 women in the class heard a resounding rip over the music. The nightmare made real that had plagued my college years had happened again in front of all the women I respected most.

Living with an autoimmune disorder that affects your colon comes with something known to the medical community as fecal incontinence. It sounds funny (like it did to those doctors) until it happens to you in front of a classroom of 200 students. That dreaded rip followed by the hollow plop on the ground beneath you. Then the inevitable crying as you rush from the room.

This is why I couldn’t live some willy nilly life of non-attachment. If I didn’t clench all my muscles all the time, THIS is what would happen. My eyes filled with tears. My face went blood red. I left brown footprints in my wake as I made a bee-line to the bathroom doing my best not to step on anyone’s yoga mat as I went. Why did I think I could be a yoga teacher? I could barely work outside of the home without this happening. Why did I let my mother tell me I could do this? Of course, my loved ones didn’t want me to believe I was limited, but I know better! I had to live in reality and not some fairytale. I was limited. I was sick. Even if no one else knew it, I had to hold on to that reality, or this would keep happening.

There was a knock on the bathroom door. “Sarah?” I had expected my mother, but it was my yoga instructor.

Humiliation deepening I replied, “I’m so sorry this is a normal part of my autoimmune disorder. I don’t think I can finish leading my practice.”

“I have some wet wipes, and a towel here and Ellen had a change of clothes. I’d hate for you to miss the next lesson.”

I thought back to all the classes I’d missed tending to my illness. I refused to let this class go, as I’d refused to let go of so much else around this time. I cleaned myself off, changed clothes, washed my face, and walked back into the room. They had cleaned up my footprints, and there was an ominous smell of air freshener about the place. I did my best not to think about it. I sat down on my mat and tried to get lost in the meditation lesson our instructor began leading us in.

“I want you to think back to a time before you had to clench without feeling like you’d lose control. Can you remember what you used to tell yourself then? What was your inner dialogue like before you had to remind yourself to hold on for dear life, or else?”

“I am limited,” I reminded myself. “Our teacher is talking to the women who aren’t.”

“Just for a minute, I want you to pretend like everything will be okay if you let go. Just humor me. What would that sound like? For this meditation, I want you to revert back to a time in your childhood when you believed anything was possible.”

It was like I was looking in on a younger me through a pane of thick glass. That girl believed she would travel. She had big dreams of being an anthropologist and going native somewhere deep in a jungle. I did my best to close a curtain on the memory of this girl, but I had a hard time resisting her pull. What would it be like, just for a minute, to melt back into her? She’d never been humiliated before. She probably would’ve laughed at incontinence because she couldn’t fully understand it. She didn’t have to hold on to the

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identity of illness because no one had ever disbelieved her or accused her of trying to skip class.

“You are holding on to certain narratives about yourself that you don’t have to keep living. You are not what you tell yourself you are. In reality, you just are. The yoga sutras state: We misunderstand our world: Things that are not themselves seem to us as if they were.” Then, to demonstrate, she began reading from How Yoga Works, a book set in ancient times when pens were made of fresh bamboo shafts and cows hung around outside of windows.

“What is this thing?” (The teacher in the story asks). “A pen, of course.” (The student replied). “And is the pen…itself?” “Yes, of course, it is.” “Itself, by itself?” “As all things are,” (the student) affirmed. “There, that’s it; you did it, just then,” (The teacher) said. “Did what?” (the student) asked, his eyes looking around him ever so slightly. “You turned it around,” (the teacher) said. “Turned it around?” “Your mind—your mind turned it around. And the master says in (The Yoga Sutras), “Yoga is learning to stop how the mind turns things around.” “I don’t under…. “Moooo! M-m-m-ooo-ooo!” … (The teacher) skipped to the window and looked down…There was a huge black cow… “Again. This is… “A pen.” “Itself.” “Itself.” “And by itself.” “How else?” “Observe.” (The teacher) said… “Chuk, Chuk” (The teacher) called to (the cow)…(The teacher) held out (the student’s) nice new green bamboo pen. (The cow eats the bamboo pen as the teacher picks up another of the student’s bamboo pens.) “Again, what is this?”

“A pen,” (the student) insisted… “Itself?” “Itself!” “By itself?” “By itself!” “And so it is a pen to the cow as well.”

No, the pen was not a pen to the cow. The pen was a snack for the cow. Something clicked into place for me in this passage. Would I be a sick person to the cow? Or would I be another person to the cow? Did I have to be a sick person to myself? I was ill sometimes like the bamboo shaft was a pen sometimes, but was I myself by myself as I was?

It took months more of chewing on that bamboo shaft, but this passage was the first crack in the rock hard identity I’d built of myself as a sick person. This meant so many things to me: I could let go, I could be a yoga instructor, I could be a writer, I could function alongside my disease.

I wish I could tell you that yoga healed my illness. It didn’t. I still deal with fecal incontinence more than I’d like to admit. Yoga cured my mind of being a sick person. Yoga allowed me to again be multidimensional. And eventually, it allowed me to laugh at my struggles instead of feel humiliation from them.

Our struggles do not define us. They are merely one part of life. Yoga did just what Patanjali said it would: it helped me to stop misunderstanding my world, and it can do the same for you.

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