On Gratitude

Lately, I have been thinking about how much gratitude and yoga and change are inter-linked for me.I started practicing yoga almost 8 years ago, soon after 9/11 – I wish I could say I walked into a yoga class and loved it and it changed my life immediately and I felt all this gratitude and made all these positive changes right away.

Not so much.

As life often is, it’s more complicated. You see, at the time I was struggling to end a bad-for-me relationship. I had known for a long time it was a bad-for-me relationship, but something about how I reacted to 9/11 very differently than my then-boyfriend is actually what really drove it home for me.

In hindsight, it’s almost incomprehensible I did not pull out a notebook, make a list of all the things I wanted to change, and get to work – that’s how I handle a lot of big decisions and fears now – lists, lists and more lists. And the gratitude lists are part of that too. Writing them is not a new development, though posting them on here on the blog is, as is using them to handle different types of situations.

But yes, back then, the lists were not part of my approach yet. Instead I was walking around carrying this feeling of “I need to change my life” and not sure about what I wanted to do – it had nothing to do with professional change and everything to do with personal change.

Like so many people in September of 2001, I walked around in a daze. I also became incredibly addicted to cable news coverage. I had been glued to CNN for weeks, understandably at first, but also obsessively after a while.

And then, over the span of a few short weeks, the following things happened in quick succession:

* I stopped all contact with the bad boyfriend
* I swore off CNN and all other cable news
* I went to several yoga classes, trying a couple different ones, but finding Tranquilspace by far the friendliest and most welcoming to a newbie

But I still didn’t feel better. Yoga was interesting, but mainly uncomfortable considering how stiff and tense I felt. Inversions scared me even stiffer. Even child’s pose felt like work.

Then, I had the stomach flu the two days leading up to New Year’s Eve. I had dreaded New Year’s and feeling lonely and single and instead, by 9pm on December 31, 2001 I was just thankful I could take a shower and get dressed. And keep water down. And a little toast. You get the idea. I made an exception to the no-CNN rule to watch fireworks around the world.

And the click moment occurred two days later – somewhere between the stomach flu and New Year’s and feeling well enough to go to yoga soon after – I realized I had changed two really bad habits (bad-boyfriend and CNN), that I had gone to several yoga classes, that it was starting to feel less foreign to me, and that I was so darn grateful. First, I was grateful I was over the stomach flu, but I was also grateful because I did not really miss the two bad habits.

I took that new feeling of gratitude to another yoga class and somehow I started seeing the class differently. One of the things I really loved about Tranquilspace {this was back before Tranquilspace had a studio per se} in addition to the kindness of the teachers was how grateful people were to have a place to practice yoga. Now, yoga is ubiquitous, with studios opening and growing, but back then, there were so few yoga studios.

My yoga practice has been varied over the years – there’s been phases I practiced 4-6 days a weeks and phases where I barely unrolled my mat – and my gratitude practice has also waxed and waned over the years – but the two are inextricably tied together for me because of those few weeks at the end of 2001 and beginning of 2002. For me yoga and gratitude link so well because I associate both with a lot of positivity – the gratitude students 8 years ago had for just being able to go to a studio, and the gratitude I have felt over the years for how my practice has grown – even when it regresses from lack of unrolling of the mat, I always associate yoga with positivity. And a gratitude practice off the mat has also been incredibly positive for me – though that’s been even more of an off and on lesson for me.