Or – “Das Leben hat immer recht”

Devotion to life – real devotion – goes a little bit deeper than the one that you will hear every yoga teacher talk about in front of his or her class. But you won’t understand the deeper meaning of it until you really let it happen. You will be forced to give up every single conviction and belief you were still clinging on to. You will have to burn the plans and the timelines that you thought were holding the answers to your future life. You will go through the nasty and painful experience of being disliked, misunderstood and maybe even abandoned – and you will crumble and fall (in fact it’s inevitable for the process of healing) – but you will not be entirely prepared for how much it hurts when it really happens.

You will initially and habitually put on your helmet, and your mouth guard to prepare yourself for the battle you are just about to fight until you suddenly find yourself on your knees, humbly making amends. Anyway, you are still going to take a big hit – big enough to almost eradicate you from this planet; Powerful enough so that you finally and in the end will have to ask for help – being thereby fully aware of the embedded risk of loosing your last contained bit of dignity and self respect.

Consequently you will try to protect yourself by building walls. And inside those walls you will feel the full impact of your self-proposed exile. You might find yourself concurrently running against those walls and raising new ones – all in one day.

You will exhaust yourself from lack of sleep, lack of hope, and a deep sense of perplexity that constantly seems to fog your mind. You will learn to sit quietly centred in the eye of the tornado and persist only on the memories of the person you were when you were still intact (actually, even that being a delusion).

After an appropriate amount of time (it will feel like endless) you will transform heart-crippling pain into an action of propulsive force. And seemingly out of nowhere you will receive instructions guiding you towards some distant horizon you don’t even have a language for. You will regain comfort, and confidence, and peace. And you will naturally be able to tune in with the rhythm of your very own committed life.

And that authentically inhabited experience of devotion will stay with you – hopefully for as long as it takes to ….. (please insert Your furthest destination).

After a long period of devotion seeking I have come to decide that I will dedicate the next year (or as long as it might take) to qualify in Germany as a non-medical practitioner, thereby reclaiming my legal rights to use the term “yoga therapy” and apply healing arts on the basis of this permission.

And I can already hear a small voice inside me whispering “Thank You” – for all of it – including that recent incident (please read more about it here) that transiently knocked me off my feet but by doing so taught me real devotion to life (or at least my interpretation of that).

I am looking forward to filling up “the gaps”, broadening my knowledge in anatomy, physiology and pathology, and incorporate it mindfully into my teaching of yoga. Please keep visiting this page for further insights!