A High Heel Wearing, Sequin Loving Yogi's Reflection on the Bhagavad Gita

A little over a year ago, I was accepted into a 300 hour teacher training program at Bodhi Tree Yoga, taught by Colin Hall and Sarah Garden.  I had no idea what to expect, or how it would change me. I just wanted to begin the journey of deepening my own practice and understanding of yoga, and hopefully learning to become the kind of teacher that might help people develop their own yoga practice.

I am not sure sometimes why they let me in. I am not what one might associate with the term "yogi".  I am a high heel wearing, sequin loving, capitalistic free market economy entrepreneur who believes in doing good things, doing what I do with love, and loving what I do.

But there I was with 21 other people, each of one us there with a collective life lived, a compendium of experiences and stories. I remember listening to each person's story that day thinking, how do I fit in?   I was later to learn that fitting in was not the point.  That there was no expectation of fulfilling a role as I had become accustomed to doing in my life thus far.

I had become accustomed to working to fit in all of my life, changing who I was to accommodate someone else's needs. My roles currently include mother, wife, grandmother, publisher and business consultant. I have been a dance mom, a teacher, an executive and myriad of other roles. But those were just roles. Not who I am.

A year ago, the question, Who am I, was keeping me up at night when I joined Teacher Training.   Worse yet, there I was, in a room full of amazing people who seemed secure in the knowledge of themselves.  They knew why they were there. The only thing I knew was that intuitively I had to be there.  I was a flamingo without a flock, as it were.

I had been a corporate strategic planner for a large corporations. My job was to help large organizations plan their futures and write about it so that the employees could see it too, and be inspired to follow. I loved my work.  It was purposeful to me, because I could see how amazing it would be if employees could connect their personal purpose with their work, as I had mine. There were tradeoffs during those years, sacrificing my health and time with my family in order to perform and prove my worth in that world.  For 20 years, my yearly employee development plan included improving my work - life balance.  I now see how impossible that was given the bubble I was living in.

I always had a someday plan for freedom, keeping one foot in the freelancing world.  My someday plans including starting my own consulting practice, writing professionally, becoming a publisher, and a yoga teacher.

Someday came February 2011 when I backed out of my bubble and said no more.  I cannot disclose what happened but suffice it to say there was a duck, a flamingo, and a closed door.  Instead of trading my dignity one more time as I had many times before, I chose to walk in the other direction to freedom.

It was not an Indiana Jones moment.  There was no orchestra, no rugged manoeuvres and no witty one liners.  There was just me, faced with the reality that a chapter in my life had ended. It was very painful on many levels and the hurt was at times unbearable, which was surprising to me.  I kept asking myself, why does this hurt so much? Why can't I just let it go?  Why does the story of that day never end?

I am a writer, so I did what I knew how to do.  I began to write my way out of the situation, seeking to understand what had happened, and why it hurt so much.

"On that day, I fell from the sky and began to fade to white".

Writing the story was a process that I called The Flamingo Project, so named because it was my way of finding my wings and learning how to fly again.  The writing process at first was localized on the final experience, but over time, I realized that the journey had been going on long before.  I was only just able to see it now.

This journey began with the wind, back in the place where I became who I am, long before I knew who I would be, or could be, what I would hold true as values, and my very nature as a defiant, freedom loving being.  The winds of time carried me into Nirvana, the Belly of the Great Whale, onto the Precipice and through the Rain of Nails to freedom.

"A flamingo shall never a duck be, and when we dance,  we dance a littler wiser. And when we take flight, we change the colour of the sky." - Pink Flamingo in a Brown Duck Pond 

In the process of telling this story and working to understand this journey of my life and my future, my yoga practice and training was the wind that carried me. It took me out of the muck of the past and into the present, to see what is, and to understand that stories are just that, and can be rewritten.

As a writer who had written words for other people all my life, I realized that I could write my own way through and out, and my own story.

"Pink Flamingo in a Brown Duck Pond" is a work of true fiction that emerged.  This 26,000 word tail of two feathers that began May 2012 was finally put to rest after 35 drafts in January 2014, which coincidentally happened to be the tail end of the 300 hour yoga teacher training program.

Writing Pink Flamingo in a Brown Duck Pond began with a struggle. It was borne out of a desire to fight back and exercise my anger.  Over time, it became a process of seeking to understand, to answer the questions that would lead me to a better place, to a place of my own choosing,  to find the balance between holding on and letting go, to own my part in my story, past, present and future and to consciously make a positive difference through my intentions and actions.  Pink Flamingo is my own Bhagavad Gita. It embodies my struggle to know when to stand and fight, when and how to let go, and how to own my part in my story.

Through this journey and writing process, the lessons learned through yoga teacher training not only challenged my thinking and caused me to question my intention, it was also a leap of faith once again into the arms of the wind, that would carry me through the traditions of yoga, its language, history, philosophies, stories, anatomy and asanas. I learned that there is so much more to learn, that I am minuscule in the scheme of things, yet significant in my contribution and that I will spend the rest of my life learning and practicing to become worthy of the being  "a teacher".

It is impossible to describe what has changed in me.  Everything.  I look at the world from a more healthy perspective than ever before in my life.  I understand and practice balance. Yes, I still love high heels and sequins, but I am also passionate about aspiring to being the kind of teacher who helps others in their pursuit of balance in the face of the hurricane, calmness in the face of calamity and the space to explore and discover the limitless horizon.

I am grateful for this journey for I have discovered a place that I never believed existed, and now, I can through my practice and teaching, help facilitate a journey of awareness, and hopefully offer an opportunity for space and understanding as my teachers offered to me in imparting their knowledge and faith in me as their student.

Namaste.