Dispatches from my Yoga Mat

I mentioned in last week’s newsletter that I have found it disquieting being back in West Cork. I had hoped to settle into the quiet here, enjoying the slow days and the even slower nights, the dark creeping in earlier and earlier, turning the sky over to the stars. It would be great, I told myself. I would use the three months until Christmas to finish the edits on my seventh novel, to start work on this new project that I’m so excited about, and then I would plan another trip for January, another big city, another adventure. Another life to try on for a while.

But since coming home, I have felt unmoored. Is this where I live? I think when I wake up in the morning, and it’s not that I don’t like it here – West Cork is the sort of beautiful that makes you believe in the gods – it’s more that it’s beginning to feel like this place and me, well, we don’t fit anymore. The scary part is that I’m not sure where else in the world does but that’s okay, I tell myself. I know enough, I have learned enough, to understand that the next step will be shown to me at the right time. I just have to be patient.

So for now, I am trying to take advantage of living in the countryside – I’m swimming in the sea and I’m going to gigs in cozy pubs and I’m… okay, I am attending almost every Woo Woo event that I hear about. I know wellness has a bad rap, not helped by its convergence with conspiracy theories and anti-vaxx rhetoric over the last few years, but I can’t help it, I’m a sucker for this stuff. There’s a lot happening in Clonakilty – it’s not a regular town, it’s a cool town – between active breathwork and ecstatic dance and sound baths and witch circles and Family Constellations. I was at a workshop recently when a woman put up her hand and asked the instructor for help with something I thought was pretty self-explanatory and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

Then I caught myself – why did it exasperate me when someone asked for help? What part of me still believed that the appropriate thing to do was to figure it out alone and not be a burden to anyone else? (Even though this woman had paid to take part in the workshop and the facilitator was there to, you know, facilitate the session) I’ve done a lot of work in this area over the last few years, in realising that my needs are important, that it’s okay to ask for support, that the people in my life want to be there for me, that it’s not a good thing to isolate myself when I’m having a hard time. But the old scars are shown in these tiny moments… That’s why it’s important to take note of it when it arises. To notice without judgement. To look at it and say, that’s interesting without attaching too much meaning to it, without pathologizing the behaviour. In being gentle with the parts of ourselves that are still unhealed.

The very first time I took a yoga class, the instructor demonstrated pigeon pose. I moved into the position, my hips screaming, and I waited for her to give us the green light to come out of it again. Afterwards, she asked us what we did when we were in the pose, how did we deal with that physical discomfort. Did we ease out of it, giving ourselves relief? Did we stay present with the pain? Did we give up? Did we distract ourselves with other thoughts? “Whatever you did,” she said. “That’s likely how you cope when things get difficult in real life.”  How you show up on the mat, is how you show up in life, she said, and I got a shiver down my spine when I realised she was right.

I thought about those words during the summer of 2023, when I spent five weeks at a Thai yoga and wellness retreat centre. I did hours of yoga every day, and I started to pay very close attention to how I showed up on the mat. Here is what I learned about myself.

Dispatches from my yoga mat: