Yoga Journal by Hillari Dowdle

April 2004

Cry, Baby
I was having a grand time at the Yoga Journal Conference in Wisconsin last May, meeting up with the world's best yoga teachers, sampling classes the likes of which I'd never before encountered, challenging myself in ways both physical and spiritual. And then came Duncan Wong's class. Duncan teaches an exhilarating form of yoga that incorporates elements of martial arts and Thai Massage. It's a high-intensity, flow-based yoga with moments of deep stretching - so deep, you can hardly believe you're doing it. I let Duncan's instructions and adjustments lead me deeper into poses than I'd ever been before, and even into backbends and twists I'd previously thought inaccessible to me. I was having a great time, right up until Child's Pose. As I knelt quietly, breathing calmly, I heard the first little plop -- then another, then another. It took a few seconds to realize that the plops were tears: I was silently crying. I couldn't really pinpoint the source of my sadness; the tears seemed completely spontaneous, even cleansing. But as I turned my attention inward, I began to take a mental inventory of what I might have to cry about, and the tears picked up steam. Suddenly, I was in total despair. If you were there, you may have seen me, face splotchy and eyes red-rimmed, running through the halls with downcast eyes praying that no one would stop me to ask a question or say hello. By the time I made it back to my room, I was sobbing. "What's wrong?" my roommate asked, alarmed. "I, I...don't know," I stuttered before breaking for the shower, where I let the tears wash over me. Spontaneous emotions during practice are fairly common, as Donna Raskin reports in "Emotions in Motion" (page 72). They can certainly be disconcerting -- or even alarming. But no matter how strong the feelings, the experience needn't be frightening; in fact, an emotional release can be seen as something positive, a sign of progress in your practice, in your life. As we do the work of self-transformation, old feelings and pain and patterns of negativity must by necessity fall away. When we have a breakthrough emotion during our practice, I choose to think, we are setting it free. But on the other hand, we might just be blowing off a little steam. Most of us go through this American life at high speed, stoking our engines with stress. A yoga class is a rare occasion to pause and reflect. Though my experinece in Duncan's class felt like a momentous event, I have to acknowledge that I was also a little stressed-out at the time and that my tears likely were more about a simple release than a break-through. (Things didn't get out of hand, after all, until my pesky mind got involved and began to assign meaning to the tears.) Either way, that cry seemed like a good thing; it knocked me for a loop at the time, but it forced me to to take a break, get a little rest, and, yes, honor my emotional state. If I'm a little bit closer to enlightenment because of it, so much the better.