Getting There by Lexie Wolf
Over the years I think I’ve become more comfortable with my own shadow. I think I can see and feel her contours. What she’s ashamed of. What she’d rather you not see.
But brushing up against the shadows of a couple of people in the past few months really destabilized me.
This past spring, a loved and respected member of the Yoga Garden community made the bewildering choice to bully me through the legal system. Whaaaaat? Yoga Garden, home of Buddhas and butterflies? I took it personally.
Despite thinking of myself as a wise old owl who understood the darker corners of human nature, I was shocked, disillusioned, and destabilized. It took me months to step out of victim mode (but see me still using the word "bully"—maybe I’m still there). And it colored the studio’s last months with an unexpected heaviness. It hurt, and it has taken me some time to find my footing again.
As I was healing from that incident, another situation came to light in which one person's actions were causing profound harm within another yoga community that has shaped me in important ways. It has been heartbreaking to witness.
I’ll write about that another day. What I want to focus on is my ridiculous surprise.
Why the heck am I still surprised when human beings act from shadow? Why on earth would I think that people connected with yoga would somehow be less prone to expressing their darkness?
All evidence, throughout time—dare I say especially around yoga and spiritual communities—has been to the contrary.
How naïve I am—and how lucky I feel to be that naïve. It’s taken me a number of months to arrive at gratitude for my naïveté, but I’m getting there. This is simply the price of participating fully in life. If you put yourself out there, you will run into people acting from fear, pain, and unconsciousness.
One of my wise teachers, Nav, likes to say that disappointment only arises when we have an appointment with something else. As in, expectations. Should I stop expecting anyone I don’t know really well to behave from their higher selves?
This is such an old story it hardly feels worth writing. We live on this earth; we are going to be disillusioned and hurt by other human beings. It’s just so. I guess the more interesting question is what we do with it.
Expecting it feels like cynicism. Not expecting it feels like naïveté. I think yoga, beloved philosophy of the middle way, asks us to make room in our hearts for the whole world—all at once.
In what is arguably the most famous sutra of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali offers a surprisingly practical response for a mind disturbed by the actions of others: cultivate friendliness toward those who are happy, compassion toward those who suffer, joy for those who are virtuous, and equanimity toward those whose actions cause harm.
By choosing equanimity over reactivity, we don't feed the energy of the disturbance. We don't allow another person's actions to determine our own state of mind. That disruption and hurt is where the suffering happens.
But equanimity is not a place where I can live all the time. The feelings have to be felt. With work, equanimity is a place I can return to. Enough space has opened now that I feel I can start to alchemize these incidents into lessons. Into some kind of growth. I don’t know what exactly that looks like yet, but I feel that I’m getting there.
