Category: addiction

I watched this video interview with Moby on his relationship with yoga.

I started to perk up around his discussion of panic attacks.  There wasn’t a name or a diagnosis or someone who ever recognized the anxiety and disorders I was suffering from in my early teens.  I would have had to been taken to a doctor or someone in a professional setting in order to diagnose them.  I would have also had to have professionals step in and do something in my immediate family and living situations.   In my twenties, the term was given to me as “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” 

While this might have been a ‘oh he suffers from these things too and I relate’ kind of post, it was when Eddie Stern asked the question, ‘what was your life like pre-yoga and then after yoga’ that I turned that question inward.  My life before yoga was being in a relationship with a man who was bi-polar, in a job that I hated and wanted desperately out of but didn’t know what else to do, unhappy with my current lifestyle, overweight, smoking cigarettes, in recovery programs for addiction, just generally unhappy.  I’m not saying yoga made me happy.  Or that these behaviors changed overnight.  But with the yoga practice came shifts in my thinking and behavior.  I let the relationship go.  I had been going to school and took a theatre class, and became open to hearing the teacher say “I think you have some talent here and I hope you continue to develop it” and letting that be the mantra for my new career.  I started running, ran and trained for a marathon.  My life didn’t get hunky-dory overnight.  Nor did I make the best decisions.  But yoga has helped me slow down enough to shift my thinking that something else could happen. 

One of Moby’s gems in this video “There isn’t an aggressively right way of doing things…” which pertains to his yoga practice and his outlook on life. Ahhh.  Thank you.  My practice and my life has evolved, during times of intense practice I’ve gotten injured, sometimes I need to slow down, back away, not do the things I used to be able to do.  It works with people too, intense relationships, slow down, back away, I can’t be friends with people who tear me down or require too much of my time and energy to maintain.  It’s a work in progress, this life.  It’s a practice not a perfect.