Letting go of deep seeded emotions ...... a personal experience.
written on Wednesday, 1 May 2019 by Vim Lane
Letting go of deep seeded emotions ……. a personal experience.
It was a balmy summer night when I received a ‘middle of the night’ phone call, which wasn’t too unusual in my household because I have relatives scattered all over the world & our night-time in Australia is their day-time. My siblings often forget this so I’m used to being woken up in the middle of the night by a ringing phone. However this time, the voice at the other end wasn’t familiar. My elder brother’s house mate in Cape Town was on the other end with not such good news, that Johnny was in a bad way & the doctors didn’t give him much time.
I was shaken & felt terrible being so far away & knowing Johnny didn’t have any family with him. I had last spoken to him at xmas & the time before that in November to wish him a happy birthday. On that occasion I remember thinking he didn’t sound so great, his voice was strained & as if his mind was elsewhere. In fact he’d forgotten it was his birthday! When I asked if all was ok, he reassured me it was, & that the bad phone connection was probably making him sound different.
Early the following day I contacted my other brother in New Zealand & sister in Italy & started making flight arrangements. Thanks to good friends & neighbours organising school drop offs & pickups for my then 10 year old son was made simple.
The night before I was due to fly to CT I came home from teaching an evening yoga class & my husband sadly informed me he’d received a call earlier to say Johnny had passed away 2 hours ago. My rolled-up yoga mat dropped from under my arm, my knees buckled & I burst into tears saying, “I never got a chance to say goodbye.”
My siblings & I arrived in CT & were told by the doctor that Johnny had died of Emphysema. All those years of heavy smoking eventually caught up with him. He once told me that despite all his efforts to stop smoking he just couldn’t give the cigarettes up. He had stopped & started an umpteen of times. In the 1970s he discovered yoga (in fact he introduced me to it whilst I was at uni) & even the yoga couldn’t break his strong addiction.
We were very saddened. Needless to say the trip was emotionally exhausting & because there was so much legal work to manage & organise none of us really had time to mourn. I remember boarding the plane to come home to Sydney feeling very numb, not in my body at all & unrealistically calm. And of course when I arrived back, I continued my day to day life as before, ‘living in the big city’.
I was eager to get back onto the yoga mat because it always makes me feel better. My yoga practice is like a good friend who never lets me down. But my yoga had changed. I wasn’t able to ‘melt’ into the poses with as much ease as before. My back began to stiffen & my forward extension poses were like those of a beginner; my head was miles away from my knees & shins in pascimottanasana pose. And I so longed for that sense of peace one experiences when the forehead rests on the shins & the trunk on the thigh in the full pascimottanasana pose.
My back extension poses too, were far more challenging than usual & I kept feeling flat & empty instead of invigorated & uplifted (which are the normal effects of back extensions)
I couldn’t understand why my yoga practice was going backwards & why my body ached all the time. About 6 months on, I exploded into tears after a restorative yoga session that included supported poses with props. Johnny had been on my mind for days & I realised I hadn’t given myself the time or opportunity to truly mourn his death & finally the grief was being released. For months after, on many occasions my heart would begin to ache & tears would flow uncontrollably, regardless with whom I was with or where I was. My emotions poured out.
And then one day during practice, when I least expected it, my forehead reached my shins in pascimottanasana & my trunk rested comfortably on my thigh. I released a grateful sigh; all was ok again.
This demonstrated to me the power of the yoga poses. Subconsciously I had been in a lot of emotional pain & it manifested itself through stiffness in my body. With the practise of the quieter & more restorative yoga poses that require a deep body/mind focus, not only did my body begin to respond physically but my mind began to process the past events & this helped me let go of the suffering.
I had so much wanted to thank Johnny for giving me the gift of yoga. It was because of him I pursued the subject & changed my career from school teacher to yoga teacher. He will always be in my heart.
At the end of each & every yoga practice I sit at the end of my mat with the palms of my hands together, bow my head in gratitude & whisper, “Namaste Johnny."
Written by Vim Lane 2007 (certified Iyengar yoga teacher)
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