Ballad of a Reluctant Yogi-part 3

All this happened within a week. There were participants that had shared about an advanced program that they had taken. When they shared about it, they could not contain themselves. They fell apart with joy and tears. This scared me even more. The only thing scarier than our self-imposed, comfortable prison is the raw joy of experiencing a piece of unbounded freedom. It seems every time the ego butts up against the possibility of its own demise, it spits out its own form of squid ink called fear. That fear blots out the sky and disorients. It clouds the path one must take for one's own good. It’s a tremendous hurdle. For trauma people, it's even worse. The transcendent experience to overcome and reset the conditioned trauma response is almost a traumatic experience in itself. Asking a trauma person to do what is needed to realize himself beyond his or her protection mechanisms is like asking him to go insane.

That’s what it felt like anyway. But that's what is actually needed. I left that week overjoyed and committed. I started doing kriya yoga practices. Things started to move within. But what I thought was going to be a peaceful process was instead tumultuous. The practices started to open me up. Shit was moving and coming up. What was coming up wasn’t so pretty. The self-inquiry element in my AA program gave me something to do with it that was concrete. Slowly, the practices loosened, brought The Secret of Recovery 9 up, and revealed my interior life. My motivations, fears, regrets, loss, shame, guilt, and dishonesty were all revealed and came up for me to deal with. My distorted, protected, and comically put together self started to become unglued, and then I worked it out through the process of the program steps. This took time. Everyone is different. For me, the next few years was a back and forth dance on a train I was unable to get off of. Every time I had tried to exit stage right, the doors would slam shut. And I would find myself crawling back with the realization that there was no other option but to move forward. I did the back and forth dance that grace required for me to transcend my own trauma response. Most of the dance was not pretty. I did my best. I thought AA and therapy would help fix it and restore me to sanity. Although it helped to know where my trauma responses came from, it did not ultimately carry me all the way across the stream. Self-knowledge availed me nothing when it came to trauma. I was trapped in a never-ending cycle of a conditioned response that I had no control over. I could not solve the problem with my knowledge or willpower. I went in and out of my practices and tried to move forward. I’d drop them and start them again.

The inner fear was overwhelming at times, but I carried on. I never let the fear get the best of me. I plowed through it, but I was not free. I’d wake up terrified in the mornings. I’d throw up in trash cans before performances. I’d throw up dealing with my son. The whole public-school system was a huge trigger. I went back to a counselor. She identified the abuse and flaws in my upbringing and then offered me a book on Jesus. I did EMDR. I redoubled my efforts in the program. I tried the advanced program with the little, Indian man, and I was so terrified that I left. I did another yoga program. I would re-up my practices and then quit them altogether. Back and forth I went. Mind you, I never wanted any of this shit—it just happened. I crawled back into AA thinking I was the problem, only to become more depressed. The AA crowd would just look at me like I was doing something wrong. An AA guy’s biggest fear is that the program is not going to work. He hangs on to the program like it’s life or death because it is. But I re-committed myself. I did more inventories, looked at myself and my reactions to things. But my identification as a 100% be all, end all, selfish addict didn’t add up. I was trapped in a bubble that I couldn't explain. I rolled out of bed every morning feeling sick to my stomach and dragging myself through each day. For almost ten years, I did this in recovery. For ten years, the freedom they promised eluded me.

Then the wheels came off, and I crawled into ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) and found out the root of my PTSD and trauma. I did the work. I accumulated an immense amount of knowledge about my predicament. But in the end, self-knowledge still availed me nothing. I was trapped in a conditional response, as a result of my story, that I had no control over. Finally, I had had enough. I was at the end of my rope. In the first yoga sutra, it says simply, “And Now Yoga.” Why? Because we have tried everything else. I had done the yoga kriya practices I had been taught, but I had never done them completely to open and make them a part of my system. If we start a somatic or yoga practice, we must do it once a day for ninety days, or twice a day for 48 days, for it to become a permanent part of our system. What we are doing is balancing our system and paving new energy pathways to access deeper states of consciousness. This breaks down the walls of our cellular protection mechanisms. If we fail to do this, energy just takes the path it once took. It always takes the path of least resistance and goes right back where it came from into the old riverbed in our bodies. In hindsight, I did it all half-assed. I was undisciplined. I always took the easier, softer way. I wasn’t all in. But at this point, I committed myself to a daily Kriya that opened and balanced the system. (Yoga kriya is a combination of asana, pranayama, chanting, and meditation. It takes about 25 minutes to do.) I did not want to do it. But I found myself doing it anyway.

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