The travel bug bit me at an early age. My first international trip was to the mountains of northern Mexico, and the dust and the sunsets and the grinning brown-eyed children stole my heart immediately. I returned to those mountains several times during my high school and early college years, until my collegiate studies took me even farther afield. I was incredibly fortunate in that regard; I studied acting in Dublin, arts as politics in Prague, Spanish in Barcelona. After graduating and moving to eastern Pennsylvania, where I began studying Iyengar yoga through a providential accident, I ended up (don’t ask how, unless you want to sit down over a cup of coffee to hear the whole chain of events) quite literally in the middle of the Pacific, teaching middle school English and science in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
It is there, in a tin-roofed, two-room house on an atoll accessible by shortwave radio and a twenty-two hour boat ride, that I wish to begin this blog post.
When I arrived in Jaluit, RMI, I knew no one, absolutely nothing about how to teach, and even less of the Marshallese language. I was also deeply concerned about what would happen to my nascent yoga practice. I had expressed this fear before leaving to my teacher at the time—how, a year and a half into my practice, would I be able to keep it up so far from any teachers or classes? She advised me to take Geeta Iyengar’s book, Yoga: A Gem for Women, and beyond that, she said only, “You carry the yoga with you.”
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Jaluit was beautiful. And hot. And extremely, intensely, painfully lonely. About six weeks into the experience, I began to notice a familiar refrain in the back of my mind; it was one I’d heard in Mexico, in Dublin and Barcelona and Prague. I’d heard it in Pennsylvania and in my hometown in Michigan. It was, simply, “I want to go home.”
The infuriating thing was that, because I had known that “I want to go home” in all the places I’d ever travelled, studied, or lived, that “home” didn’t refer to any of them. Nor, I suspected, did it refer to some distant frontier not yet explored. One morning, while doing adho mukha svanasana (downward dog pose) in a tiny room on a tiny atoll in the midst of a vast ocean, thousands of miles from everything I knew and everyone I loved, it hit me: “I am home.”
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I realized then that, just as my teacher had told me I carried the yoga with me, I had also—if I so chose—carried the “I want to go home” with me. All across the globe. But I could also choose to let that “I want to go home” go, to leave it behind and go, not to any external place, but deep within to find “home.”
BKS Iyengar writes in his book Light on Life, “You do not need to seek freedom in some distant land, for it exists within your own body, heart, mind and soul. Illuminated emancipation, freedom, unalloyed and untainted bliss await you, but you must choose to embark on the Inward Journey to discover it.”
Embarking on that journey is not only a choice; it is a daily choice. Will I go to class or will I skip it? Will I take personal offense to the driver who cuts me off on the freeway or will I wish them safety in their travels? Will I notice only that my partner or children have left the dishes unwashed, or will I appreciate the chores they did, unasked?
Fortunately, the more I make the choice to put myself on my mat and practice, the easier it is to venture towards that internal “home.” And fortunately, even when the travel bug bites again, salamba sarvangasana (shoulderstand) feels like home the world over.
Kirsten Brooks is a Teacher in Training at The Yoga Space. Each week one of the teachers at the Yoga Space shares her thoughts and experiences in this blog. The Yoga Space is a studio just east of Dexter serving Saline, Chelsea, Manchester and Ann Arbor. We have been helping people with their flexibility, strength, focus and stress management for over 14 years. Fall 2 Classes begin soon and we offer a free class the last Friday of each month from 6-7 pm. 180 Little Lake Dr #1 Ann Arbor, MI, 48103. www.yogaspaceannarbor.com 734-622-9600