It's not supposed to be easy
“You have to feel the bandhas in your body while your mind is actively engaged in the process. Mind and body have to be in sync; you aren’t thinking about anything else besides the breath and your body. You might feel completely in it, and then something hits up against something the wrong way, and it’s over, and you have to get yourself back to that place again.”
I keep hearing the same message coming from different places: if you are in it, be in it. One coach says “mindful” and the other speaks of “every stride.” Their language is the same (as is their second language, which my lack of Portuguese forces them to speak), and what they see in me is the same: determination; consistency—I always show up; and a mind that easily wanders out the window or to the grassy pasture.
Yesterday my yoga teacher talked about the three most important physical aspects of yoga: strength, flexibility and coordination. The last one is my weakness, which didn’t surprise me. Just last Thursday my riding coach told me to hold my hands steady at the canter despite my body lurching back and forth (and about ten other things I was trying to do or feel). Since I spent my childhood in the countryside climbing trees, running through fields uneven with holes and hills of dried mud, jumping on horses with no saddle and a halter and lead rope for a bridle, one would think I had a great formation in coordination. Was it city life, sitting so long through college, not playing sports for twenty years, or just not having to connect my mind to my body for so long that reduced me to such low levels of coordination?
At this stage, with a break from work, I finally have the time to pick up my passions again; so why, now, have I chosen two hobbies that require such high levels of physical and mental concentration and coordination? Both provide immediate reward (ah, it feels great to ride again; my body feels stronger), but instant gratification is quickly lost with sore muscles and bruised pride. If I’m actually in this (and the schedule I’ve taken on indicates nothing else!) I have to accept that both yoga and dressage are laden with detail, exemplified in the profundity of levels and philosophy, both require constant, mindful repetition and the patience to accept that the tiniest shifts indicate progress.
If I’m honest with myself, I have never been amazing at either riding or yoga. As a teenager, my brother Josh turned out to be a quieter, more consistent rider, winning higher awards than I ever did. Still, in my apparent lack of mindful decision making, I leapt back into two sports in order to find myself again (why not drawing or singing, both of which I loved in my younger years?). I made these choices very deliberately not long after we moved to Lisbon, when I was flailing and drowning in the many transitions I took on to be here. Perhaps I returned to yoga and dressage because the intense intellectual and social challenges that were copious in my work as a Director of Curriculum are blatantly absent in my life since moving to Lisbon—and like this, I’m filling the void of challenge. What I didn’t anticipate, however, is that finding myself isn’t a turning backward. It made sense to return to what I loved, what drove me, in order to reignite the person in myself that I love—and recognize in her youthful simplicity and adult complexity.
My teachers have reminded me that I am only as much or as little as I am in this moment. I can do this with mind, body, and heart engaged, or I can be half here. And half there, elsewhere. Since I wouldn’t even recognize an Amanda who does things half-heartedly, it feels like only one choice truly makes sense: to keep turning forward, accepting the new challenges for how they test me and shape me now, in this moment, in this place, with these people, in Lisbon, at almost 40 years, with two children and a husband and a dog and a horse, a life full and complicated and far away and yet sunny and bursting with possibility.
