Last Sunday in New York, sitting on my cousin’s couch in New York, I pulled up the schedule for Laughing Lotus, a yoga studio I had been wanting to make a pilgrimage to ever since I had been introduced to the Lotus style of yoga. We found a 5:00 SoulSweat class taught by someone named Essence. The class promised an upbeat flow taught to the background of soul shaking music. My soul needed some shaking. So we packed up our mats, bundled up against the chill rain that still hung in the air and walked to the subway station. We rode for half an hour, from a quiet neighborhood in Brooklyn to the center of it all.
The studio was located right on the Avenue of Americas and when we emerged from our stop, we did so into a sea of people. We walked for a while, checking out a few sights, popping into a few stores and immersing ourselves into the flow of a sea of beings. We allowed the map on my phone to guide us into the door of the building that held the studio, walked up three flights of stairs and found the door to Laughing Lotus. The SoulSweat class was being held in a large room with beautiful wood floors, windows filling two of the walls and a large painting of Ganesh at the front of the room. The curtains were open and the sights and sounds of a busy city moved in through the panes of glass.
We settled in and a beautiful woman stepped to the front of the room and introduced herself as Essence. She told us that she had moved away from NYC about a year ago to go teach at the Laughing Lotus in LA and that she was back in town for a couple of weeks, covering this class as a favor to another instructor. She then requested that we introduce ourselves to someone in the room that we didn’t know. With my cousin to my left, I turned to the right and introduced myself to a woman who was probably a few years younger than myself. We exchanged names and smiled.
To begin class, Essence asked us to sit comfortably and take the mudra of unshakable trust. A mudra, in yoga, is a positioning of the hands in such a way that provides symbolism as to what one is striving for, perhaps in yoga practice, prayer or meditation. Unshakable trust looks like this—you interlace your fingers and hold the hands a few inches away from the chest, palms facing the body and elbows out to the side.
I sat, I positioned my hands in the mudra of unshakable trust, I closed my eyes and immediately started to feel tears forming in them. Essence began talking about journeys, about being on a path and being uncertain about the steps you are taking on that path when it seems as if everything is going wrong. She talked about how, in those times, you needed to keep that unshakable trust that everything is going as it should, trusting that your journey is happening even when it seems as though you keep stumbling. The tears were running in full force down my cheeks by that point and I was feeling all this space that was happening between the palms of my hands and my body. My heart seemed to be practically vibrating, this tired little soldier that I had sent marching on so many journeys.
Together, as a class we breathed in fully and opened our mouths and let out the sound of everything, a loud resounding harmonious ‘Om’. We separated our hands and opened our arms, breath in and then breath out with ‘Om’. We sealed our hands together in a prayer mudra, brought our thumbs to forehead, breath in, breath out, Om. Then we began to move, quickly ramping up to a challenging sequence that put a smile on my face and a shaking into my muscles. Sweat began to take the place of tears.
As the class began to slow down, Essence guided us into pigeon pose. Pigeon pose is an intense hip opener that feels glorious at times and like the biggest struggle at others. If you believe in the whole subtle body part of yoga (which I fully do), it’s believed that different things that happen to us mentally, emotionally, spiritually are held in various places of the physical body and by releasing, opening, working those parts of the body through movement we are able to tap into the other stuff as well. The hips…..well, they are the home to our emotions, they hold the feelings that wish to be birthed. They speak to our desire to be connected to others. Some crazy things can happen in pigeon pose and lord, after all that talk of trust, I was a goner. I began to sob into the mat and Essence began to speak again of journeys; the wrong steps and the strength that it took to keep taking steps in spite of this. I noticed that the stranger that I had introduced myself to at the beginning of class was softly crying as well.
Essence walked around and pulled the brightly colored sheets of fabric that served as curtains on the window. All of a sudden, the room was bathed in the glow of the sunset and thrown into various prisms of blue, red and gold. As I lay down for savasana, I watched these prisms dance on the back of my eyelids and let the sounds of thousands of strangers below and the honking of horns lull me into a safe comfortable space.
I thought a little about this path of mine. I thought about how it seemed pretty unsure right now. I thought about how it wasn’t well marked and how exhausted I felt sometimes while traveling on it. And then I thought about how all of it, every little piece, had led me squarely to that beautiful room bathed in light, in the middle of an amazing city. And I thought that maybe that path was going the right way after all. In the week or so since that class, life has happened, and as it will, has filled me with laughter at times, uncertainty at others, confidence and bravery, insecurity and doubt. And throughout it all, I have interlaced my fingers, held them in front of me and asked for my trust to be unshakable.