No One Is Coming
The wooden floor beneath me has been causing me pain for the last few hours. The bolster I have beside me no longer eases the pain of endless sitting. It’s day three of four in the second intensive block of my yoga teacher training. I sit in the middle of a large yoga studio floored with wood and walled with mirrors. A breeze flows through the side door, along with the noise of the cars passing outside on Vincent Street as a reminder that we aren’t fully removed from the modern world.
Our lead teacher, Adam, sits in front of us speaking about the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient yogic text. Students are splayed about in rows of uneven semi-circles facing Adam. Some are leaning against the mirrored walls to ease the burden of sitting, others are reclined over bolsters with their legs resting at full length. I sit in what feels like the exact middle of the first semi-circle with my legs crossed. I feel rather exposed in this central position. There are no bodies between Adam and me to absorb the potency of his words, they are coming straight for me.
As Adam dives into the Bhagavad Gita and the main learnings from the text, his words start firing. He begins with Dharma, which is understood to be one’s life duty - what one has been placed on Earth to do. Dharma is traditionally thought to be a predetermined purpose which each person should follow selflessly, regardless of how noble or simple it may be.
Adam asks the room if anyone feels they have found their Dharma. Two people out of twenty-eight raise their hands. As discussion between these two and Adam evolves, I fade out of the room almost entirely. I am somewhere in my thoughts trying to piece together my life to see if I have a Dharma. My mind traces back over my life like a finger tracing a rolodex. I flick through memories and feelings to see if any experiences in my twenty-six years of living have felt like my true duty. I see flashes of hockey but my stomach drops. I see flashes of business but my mind aches. I see continual chasing of goals and I start to feel weak. My mind becomes vacant and embarrassment surges as I realise how lost I am. Wanting to escape my internal embarrassment, I return my mind to my hollow body that has somehow remained upright despite the emptiness I feel.
When I arrive back to my body and my ears start to register the sounds in the room as fully formed words again, I realise I’ve missed a lesson and we’ve begun discussing another one - Self-Mastery. Adam is explaining how all the answers lie within us, not in the external world or in our desires, status, achievements or other people - everything we need is within us. As he speaks to this more and more, my body starts to heat up. Before I have the chance to exit the room mentally and fade into nothingness, a sentence leaves Adam’s mouth and fires into me.
“No one is coming to save you.”
With no bodies protecting me from his words, they puncture my stomach. My head bows as I take the blow and I stare down at my feet as I feel the tears swell to the surface. The sounds in the room turn to white noise. I keep my head bowed as tears ride the waves of my cheekbones and chin before falling from the cliff of my face and onto the wooden floor between my legs.
My body aches in the painful truth of his words and I cry in silence hoping no one can see me. No one is coming to save me, I repeat it over and over again in my head. No one. No one. No one. I feel the pit of my stomach become deeper and deeper as I realise that this is an absolute truth that I’ve been ignorant of my whole life. The emptiness of my body is scratching at me with hunger, clawing in fear that this being has to save itself. I’m paralyzed by the responsibility and remain motionless with my head bowed. I sit in hunger. I sit in tears. I sit in truth, waiting for the class to end so I can pick myself up off the wooden floor and work out how the fuck to feed myself.
A few days after my time on the wooden floor, I find myself sitting in front of my psychologist telling her of my experience at yoga training. She prompts me to consider Adam’s question on Dharma again. I trace back through my rolodex and one card right at the very end draws my finger to a halt. My mind dives into the moment - I’m back at my desk writing Upstream where truth is flowing out of my fingers with no lag, then a flash takes me to the emails readers have sent me with their truths spilled out for me to hold, and then a flash takes me to a lectern with all female eyes staring back at me, compassionately holding space for me to speak my truth. I share with my psychologist that I have glimpses of something that feels deeply true… that feels like my duty. That glimpse is writing - writing my truth and flourishing in the connections that follow it.
I’m not sure at what point Adam’s terrifying words became my mantra to help me through the days but now I hear myself repeating them time and time again. No one is coming to save me. The words terrify me so much that sometimes I don’t want them to be true. I want to crawl into my bed, find comfort in the covers and let someone else fix everything before I re-emerge. But no one is coming. Sometimes the words feel like they’re saving me all on their own and I convince myself that if I say the words enough I’ll be saved from this valley of languishing. But no one is coming.
And if no one is coming, then the task is left up to me. What an empowering responsibility to hold.
Lily x
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