2017: A comeback story
2017 was pretty rough. No, I didn’t experience a major health crisis or death in the family, but as far as the regular flow of life goes, this year crushed plans and dreams, and forced me to face some hard realities.
Since December 2015, I have switched jobs four times and moved from Oakland to DC to Portland and back to Oakland again. Two weeks after leaving my most recent job, I broke up with my girlfriend, someone I loved deeply and expected to spend my life with. The pillars that make us feel grounded, relationship, place, work — all were crumbling. At 36, this is not where I expected my life to be. As if all this wasn’t enough, 2017 also began with an existential tailspin that shook many of my deepest beliefs.
There were moments when I had to force myself to just take a breath. I went running almost daily to escape my mind and took unusually long showers for rare moments of peace.
As a meditation teacher, I’ve always been resilient. For almost my entire adult life I have had tools to manage emotional swings and life challenges. These tools were life-saving in 2017, but they weren’t enough. I had many lonely and lost moments wondering where my life was headed.
Then everything changed.
I spent the last week of 2017 at an ashram in Boone, NC. Ever since living at an ashram in India in 2001, I have made many trips to escape the day to day and recharge. These trips are always transformative. But somehow I didn’t expect this trip to be enough to heal my broken heart and help me find direction. At the very least I hoped I might get a few new tools to deal with the endless uncertainty that seemed persistently just around the corner.
The first couple of days were tough. I saw many old friends and acquaintances. When they greeted me with “how are you” I struggled to be honest without launching into a five minute sob story. I got tired of hearing myself recap the year.
But then about mid-way through the week, something changed. The combination of deep meditation and powerful wisdom created a dramatic shift in my perspective. Things that seemed so heavy and consequential just a day before, became light and manageable. More than this, the week started to gain a purpose far greater than healing my recent wounds. It connected me with something profound and beautiful that reframed how I was thinking about everything in my life.
There is no way to fully explain an experience like this. Words are insufficient. However, I know from my own inner circle that many people have had years harder than mine, so my hope is to at least try and impart some of the things that brought about such a profound change for me.
Practice yoga sincerely. Without a settled and clear mind, wisdom is just a bunch of words with temporary effects at best. Yoga is far more than stretching, it is meditation and wisdom. It is a series of tools that let us experience more of ourselves and navigate the world with skill. This shields us from the petty and even monumental dramas of life. The wisdom in yoga allows us to draw out our best qualities and use those to uplift those around us. It has a wealth that 17 years in I am only just starting to understand. And perhaps the most important thing I relearned about yoga in 2017 is the importance of doing everything with sincerity. Anything we do regularly can lose its charm. But the difference between a routine and distracted practice vs a sincere and engaged one, is night and day.
Embrace life’s uncertainty. Life is always changing. But despite this, we make our best efforts to construct a sense of security. We fantasize about our future. We start families and build careers. We buy homes. Even though we often feel trapped by these same things, life can feel empty and scary without them. When a relationship ends prematurely we construct a story of its necessity to our happiness. We idealize it. Life is a mixture of what is certain and uncertain. When uncertainty rules, we have to understand the changing nature of life. This is especially important in our era, when fewer people are getting married, we change jobs more often, and technology evolves too fast for most of us to comprehend.
Look deep inside. We are far more powerful than we realize. This is probably the hardest point to convey because of its subtlety and experiential nature. After nearly two decades of meditation and yoga, I am just scratching the surface of what this really means. However, what I hope can be explained is how we can all shift more of our attention inside. We tie our happiness and well-being far too closely to the outside world. We are swept up in interactions — boosted by praise, shaken by conflict. By turning our attention inside, we float above the turbulent waves of all this activity. By seeing our relationships as deeper than our interactions and learning to experience the stability inside us, we can be among the chaos of the world without being devoured by it.
2017 hit me hard. It tested me and took me to some dark places. But I don’t think I could have experienced what I did this last week without a year like this. Tough times push us to look deeper and focus on what really matters. This hard year brought me one of the most illuminating and beautiful perspectives on life I’ve ever had. It let me dip one more toe into an ocean of truth that I have always wanted to know.
Good times are wonderful, and I hope everyone reading this has an amazing 2018. But if you find yourself in a turbulent and unstable year, full of challenges and defeats, I hope you can find a way to turn that into a doorway to something far more beautiful than you were seeking to begin with. Life is an incredible and beautiful mystery. It is much greater than the careers, relationships, and places we so often measure ourselves by.
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