Enlightenment

Two weeks ago I was running with wet feet on a marble floor and came crashing down on my left side. For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to have the wind knocked out of you. An x-ray showed no fractures but very bad bruising. I was ordered to stay away from my yoga mat for a fortnight.

My initial dismay soon gave way to crankiness. I missed the energising backbends, the calming forwardbends, the challenging balancing poses and the tension-relieving twists. To take my mind away from this deprivation, I stayed longer at work. I used the time set aside for my daily practice to write that extra report or reply an email. I figuredthe injury was meant to give me time to catch up on work. A couple of days ago, I realised I was looking at the wrong silver lining.

I was complaining how rotten I was feeling and my wise friend said, "maybe this is a good time to practice your breathing or meditation." Then it struck me how my reaction to this injury had contradicted my entire outlook on yoga. The reason I want to be a yoga teacher is because I want to teach others that yoga isn't just about postures and the physic. Yet that was exactly what I had reduced yoga to when I stopped practicing because of a physical injury. I could have still kept to my daily yoga schedule by using that time to study yoga philosophy, get a headstart on my reading material for next year's course or like my friend suggested, practice meditation. Instead I chose to rest the value of my yogic journey solely on the postures. And for that, I am truly ashamed.

This discovery has also led to a personal breakthrough in my writing as well. When I was a teenager, I declared that I wanted to be a writer because I wanted to be a voice for those who had none. I have been wondering what happened to that dream and it only recently occured to me that I can still make it come true through this blog and my magazine articles. Ordinary words can have extraordinary results if I use them to reach out and touch someone. An article on post-natal depression could bring relief to a new mother who doesn't understand what she's going through. And an article on emotional abuse, could be the final push a woman needs to leave her relationship. I will never know. And that's why I will now work harder at each article in the hope that it may speak to someone who needs to hear those words.

When things go wrong, we sometimes feel compelled to create our own silver lining in order to justify misfortune. Perhaps if we just step back a little and take another look at the big picture, we may realise that the silver lining has been there all the while. We just couldn't see it through our emotional haze.