Love Slow

I drink my tea fast. I know I should drink it slow.

I also know the word should ‘should’ be banned and there it is again, sneaking in like the leech that climbed the seam of my tights and grew fat and happy on the taste of my blood.

I know that life is to be savoured. So why am I always in a hurry. I know that pleasure takes time, so why do I crave the quick fix. I know about mindfulness. I teach it for a living which seems ridiculous sometimes and what kind of yoga teacher cant drink her tea slowly?

There’s a ravenous monster inside me who wants to gulp up life at lightning speed. It seems to be afraid of missing something. What that something is, I can never tell.

In 2015 I went on a Vipassana retreat in the Blue Mountains. 10 days of sitting cross legged in a cold hall for 12 hours a day. Silence. No distractions. No books. No phones. No eye contact. Just me and the ravenous monster in my mind.

Before I went on Vipassana I had meditated maybe once or twice in my life. Sure, I’d always sat for a few minutes at the start of a yoga class but that was the extent of it.

I wasn’t sold on the idea of meditation to be honest.

But ‘EXTREME MEDITATION’ now that was something I could get behind.

It seemed exciting. AND. I thought to myself. If something doesn’t happen after this then I’m clearly a lost case and I should give up all this yoga and meditation stuff and run away to Mexico. I don’t know what I expected, or wanted to happen. But I really believed that if I practiced enough yoga and ate enough kale, one day I’d transform into someone else. Someone who could focus on one thing at a time. Someone who always told the truth. Someone who never scrolled through social media and never ate salt and vinegar crisps. i thought I’d turn into a ‘real’ yoga teacher.

I learnt a lot in those 10 days (you can read all about that journey here) but when I finally stepped out of the centre, put my car keys into the ignition and drove (albeit much more slowly) back to my life, I was disappointed to find out I was still me. It wasn’t the method that has failed. It was that I was trying to do the impossible.

The same thing happened a year earlier when I started teaching yoga.  I thought, well this is it now. I cant be the same old me I always was. I have to be responsible. I can’t be running around all night and dancing on tables at strange parties and eating cakes. It’s time to get serious. It’s time to grow up.

I wasn’t a natural yoga teacher. at my first teacher training I was by far the worst in the group. I was so shy I could barely speak without bursting into tears. I was naturally flexible but had terrible coordination and couldn’t go upside down to save my life. of course, yoga has very little to do with going upside down. It has very little do to with the physical movements at all, but in 2014 in Sydney, if you wanted to teach yoga, it helped to be able to handstand. I could not. I could barely hold a plank. I also couldn’t remember sequences. I continually mixed up my left and rights (nothing  changed there), couldn’t project my voice and would get so nervous I’d shake.

Even though I was so bad at teaching something spurred me on. In the rare moments when I got out of my own head, words would come out of my mouth from seemingly nowhere. When I could relax enough to breathe, I’d somehow know exactly what to say, and it was the opposite of what I’d been taught. After class students would come up to me and whisper ‘how did you know I was going through that?’  Of course I had no idea, but a glimmer of hope had started to ignite somewhere in my heart. Maybe. Just maybe I can do this.

I knew that if I wanted to get better at teaching I had to teach as much as possible. I threw myself into it with relentless determination. I taught yoga as if my life depended on it.  I had no other job, no qualifications or prospects so I had to make an income teaching. Most other people in my course had corporate jobs on the side and didn’t need the income. I was waitressing for $18 /hour. I’d been working in hospitality on and off since I was 13 and frankly I was over it. I was about to turn 30. So in a way I felt desperate. But it was more than that. The fire inside me was lighting me up from the inside. I started to access energy and inspiration I thought had gone out a long time ago. I started writing again.

This fire gave me the energy to jump out of bed at 4am and jump on a train to somewhere in the suburbs. I’d sit cross legged listening to Tara Brach and Pema Chodron drinking tea (very fast of course) and watching the tradies in their high vis skulling energy drinks and scroll on their phones.

One of my first classes was at a CrossFit gym at 5am. I had to shout my head off to compete with the gangsta rap playing downstairs and I’ll never forget trying to lead a calming Savasana whilst DMX screamed about punching people in the face and weights dropped constantly. I got paid $30 for the class. I’d then get back onto the train, go into the city and walk amongst the suited high flyers of Martin Place. I’d walk into immaculate offices where manicured receptionists would glare at my unbrushed hair and bare feet and grudgingly let me into some conference room where I’d get so hot and sweaty moving all the chairs for a 45 minute class where half the people spent the whole time looking at their watch and most left early.

This would continue til the evening when I’d teach til maybe 8pm before collapsing into bed ready to do it all again. It might not sound that fun, but I was having the best time of my life!! I loved every second of it, even when people rolled their eyes, even when the train broke down again, even when I fell asleep and missed my stop. I was totally lit up and it showed.

I got used to speaking in front of people. my nerves subsided. I realised pretty quickly that the less I planned the class the better I felt. I would turn up. Greet everyone in front of me with a huge smile and eye contact. Sit down. Close my eyes for a second. Breathe deeply. open my mouth and see what happened. Usually it was a success.

I started to realise. Oh, I’m just me and that’s OK. It’s not just OK. Its fan-fking-tastic. I dont have to pretend to be anything. I dont have to have a personality transplant, I’m absolutely fine just the way I am. And of course when I realised that, my appetite for social media scrolling, drinking and eating salt and vinegar crisps diminished (somewhat). I started to actually enjoy meditating, not just pretending to.

Now I still teach and study yoga voraciously. But now I understand that I won’t be transformed into someone else. I’ll just be me. so as I sit here in the clover as the light rain falls and the droplets hold the light I can smile and know its enough. As I watch the flames flicker in the fire we made together and the whole galaxy comes alive above my head I know that ultimately life is for living and I’m doing just fine