Yin yoga, she said, is a journey along a path. From time to time, you reach a gate. You have the choice press into it. You see if your body wishes to surrender and move through or if the gate must stay shut. The practice is stay on path and accept that this is as far as you’re going to get today.
I followed along, contemplating the divots in a mat that once saw vigorous daily use. It was distracting, trying to remember how long it had been since I took “work time” to do something as rebellious as an online yoga class. Clearly this was one of those “emotional gates” the instructor was talking about.
The resistance in my hips, in the back of my thighs, I knew these were untold stories. These were the stories I had literally been sitting on. The body was asked to hold them because my mind was just too full.
This isn’t an original idea, of course. We know that the cells, the joints, and the muscles carry the information and the feelings the brain refuses to claim. But this “gate theory” that Julie Schoen talked about, I felt this reverberate through my creaking bones as I tried to rely on them to support me through these long poses.
There are gates along the pathway to telling your Story.
And by “Story,” I mean the capital “s” Sovereign Story that you craft as you pass through the gates of all the small “s” stories. Your Sovereign Story is your declaration of why you are here, what you are meant to offer, who you know yourself to be. It is your True Story of what it means to be human.
To get to that story, you write into situations, into long held emotions, into unresolved hurts, and triumphs you think you fully understand. You invariably get stuck by thoughts of "this is too dark, too boring, too contrived, too intimate..."
You allow all that to be true. Until the next writing session, of course. The next time, you just might discover that there is light in the darkness, wisdom in the boring, humor in the contrived, and universal insight in the intimate.
Dive deeper into story with me and join The Story Triangle webinar when it goes live on May 11.