My friend Shirley, who is attending Bikram teacher training in LA, is doing a wonderful job blogging weekly about her experience there. Her blogs are detailed and give me an exact picture of just what teacher training involves. I cannot believe how hard and grueling it is. So much so that it just reinforces what I say when it's suggested to me that someday I should attend. My answer is the same: I don't want to. It's that simple. I don't want to put myself through that. I admire the stamina, both physical and mental that my friend has to attend this training. Then…in conversations….the same thing kept coming up: the reason for the extreme, grueling treatment is that during the first five weeks Bikram wants them completely broken down so he can work with them. At first, this made me uncomfortable – borders on brain washing. After listening to my friend describe her time there, there is some brain washing going on, but not by Bikram. It appears she's in an environment that strips away all the things inside herself that she felt she couldn't work with, wiped her slate clean, made way for her to grow and change and accept things she never thought she could. In effect, she gets to wash her own brain.
While still deciding how I felt about the extremeness of this training, I thought about how I go about doing a room over. The first thing I do is empty it completely, even if I plan to use some of what was in there in the new room, it's important for me to empty it and start with a clean slate. Next I vacuum it and wash the windows and the floor. People always ask why I'm washing the floor before I paint. It has to be a completely empty, beautifully clean room before I can begin creating the new look. After the painting is done, then I begin bringing back in slowly the furniture and things that will fit with the new look. The point is, before a room can be completely changed, recreated, and renewed, it must be emptied and cleaned of all that was in there.
If this is true for a room, must it not be even more true in order to reset and recreate ourselves? I now understand that you cannot effectively embrace Bikram yoga well enough to teach it to others if you haven't done what it takes to make it part of your own personal make up. Sometimes even a relationship must be completely obliterated and begun again. Sometimes a natural disaster forces people to start from scratch.
I was reading an article in More magazine written by Anna Quindlen called "Aging Gratefully". Just the title had me. Then the byline read: "Why is it that so many of us are decidedly happier now, than we were decades ago? A progress report from the near side of 60." Since this describes me, I just had to read the article. She begins with the story of how her country house came through a catastrophic tornado with flying colors. The line that so impressed me with this concept of being "broken down" to be built back up was:
"Most of the big trees closest to the house were gone, their root-balls upended into the air, as though the hand of God had wiped the landscape and ordered us to try again."
I walk around with that line in the back of my brain. God does this. He wipes parts of our lives away, for reasons only known to Him, and "orders us to try again". God is a god of second, third, and maybe even fourth chances. He's patient with us until we get it right so He can effectively use us to help others.
Whether it's doing a room, attending Bikram training, training for a marathon, changing jobs, moving, breaking up with someone, ….any true life change that's to make a real difference always starts with the "breaking down and cleaning out" of the old. This is the hard part. Parting with things, feelings, beliefs, people, is never easy, but oh so necessary to make way for the "clean and new" to enter. It hurts. It's exhausting. You cannot see the end. You cannot understand the reasons. You have guilt. You almost lose who you are. In Bikram training, they say after week five everything changes. Suddenly you're filled with new understanding and you can feel the tiny bubbles of new growth brewing.
I get this. Over the last year I had to be completely broken down, and now, here I, too, sit on "the near side of 60", feeling the bubbles of building back up and change taking place.
And so, as another day goes by, whether we're "on the near side" of 30,40,50, or 60 and beyond, just those words – the near side of something – hold a new decade of promise for our lives, and …I have written.
You explained it so much better than I could ever put into words. I love that, Bikram is not doing the brain washing, I am. That was just so inciteful and so well put my writer extraordinaire. Loved the whole post. Wow can’t wait to see everyone.