Fake it ’till you make it – Yoga Husbandry Entry #5

There is a trick to this.  There is a way to navigate the yogic world undetected.  Almost like I fit in, or that I care.  I’ve got it.  The trick is to just do all the stuff with your partner, chant, meditate, workshop, stretch and sweat, all for your partner of course.  Then at some point it just happens, no one doubts you anymore, they accept you in the yoga circles and you become integrated.  Brain power your way through it until it ends.

This is where my heart was not that long ago.  I was faking it, I was committing to some weird shit and not regretting it because it made Kaitlin happy.  All the while I was getting better at pretending to be interested and pretending to be spiritual.  Thinking I had it nailed, this is how I existed for a few years.

Then one day, I missed a morning meditation after a long stint of daily 30 minute sits, and I felt off, anxious and little disappointed.  I felt this and didn’t think too much of it, then it clicked.  Fuck!  I’d been dooped!  I thought I was playing this systems to stay in the pants of my hot yoga wife and turns out it had me all along.  Almost as if my pretending to enjoy things was not make believe at all.  As if it was supposed to happen this way, like a progression of some sort.

Once I had this realization, that I was now at the mercy of this Om chanting, mudras taking culture I felt strange.  I felt like my favourite dirt jumps had just been bulldozed, lost and unsure of where to spend my saturdays.  I was never going to get those hours of meditation back, the downward dogs were all for nothing and the fact that I just felt better about myself was a lie.  In some ways I wanted to quit it all, go back to McDonalds, binge and go watch TV.

So I tried it, I ate some greasy ass pizza and watched Anchor Man.  Even though I’d had pizza, waaayyy better pizza than the garbage I had just eaten, something about the abused meat and the sad cows milk cheese was like a little fuck you to the yogic world.   If your thinking this is where I felt triumphant and good about myself, your an idiot.  I felt awful and just about shit my pants the next morning.  Anchor Man is pretty bad movie too btw, it fit the bill when I was 19, but at 30 it was truly bad.  I felt empty and had mud butt.

So inside of that week I had a punch in the face from yoga life that it had been trying to fool me all along.  Then another punch in the bowels from the old world of neglect and gluttony.  Which was was I Supposed to go?  The new manipulative girl or the old crazy girl?  So guess what I did?  I sat in quiet place to think it through. Did I want to continue down this HARD path of self growth?  I mean hard hard, like the hardest work I had ever done hard.  Or did I want to back step into the way I was for the rest of my life?  19 years old me wanted pizza, beer and BMX.  30 year old me wanted to be comfortable, mobile and get up early on a Saturday to have coffee with one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. (that’s Kaitlin, *ding!*…that was the sound of a browny point ringing in)

In the middle of this thought process, this debate if you will, I realized something.  I was fucking sitting, cross legged in my living room, with essential oils diffusing away in the corner, trying to figure out if I wanted to do exactly that anymore…  Needless to say, I am blind and dumb sometimes.  Occasionally I miss some shit like that, I do things and realize after the fact what it means.

Still feeling the greasy hangover, I found that I didn’t want to feel that way, well as little as possible, and when I did feel that way I chose the time and the place.  I mean come on, pizza is delicious and I will always eat it from time to time.  Good pizza, with good ingredients and meat and cheese from happy animals.  It’s not as greasy but it hits the spot the same without the disasters pants to follow.  I decided I wanted to feel free and happy.  Calm and grateful.  Peaceful and excited.  I am finding these spots more and more as I walk this road, I am finding that I don’t need to fake being interested.  I’m allowed to be interested in something the old me would scoff at, and I’m allowed to choose not to be into some of the further edged hippy shit….yet, I am assuming it will all come around at some point.

All I know is that this snuck up on me.  I did not see the day coming where I was going to feel good about meditating or chanting.  Or having conversations about consciousness and what it all means.  Why are we having this experience and why is it seemingly so hard for some and so effortless for others?  I like contemplating those things and now that I chose it, it feels better.  I still get into the pants of my hot yoga wife, aaaaand I get to feel better about myself and the world around me on a regular basis.  Win – Win.

-ben