by Kara-Leah Grant, Musings from the Mat
I’m sitting in the Picton Ferry Terminal, about to head over to Wellington for my second book launch event.
The first was at the International Yoga Conference and Festival at Kawai Purapura last weekend.
It was both a blissful and challenging experience, and – as always – a learning experience.
The bliss came in teaching a class to 40+ eager yogis and feeling the flow alongside them. It was such a joy to share my teaching and my yoga.
It was also blissful to launch Forty Days of Yoga.
Some 20 people or so came along to the lunchtime book reading, listening and asking questions about home practice. I sold my first books face to face and realised that yes, people do want me to sign the books for them.
Both of those events put me on a high for the rest of the day.
But it only lasted a day.
By Saturday, manning the stall with my friend and colleague Melissa Billington while attempting to keep my three year old entertained, was grinding me down.
It was wet and foot traffic was sparse. We hadn’t sold any product.
However, I’m wise enough now to know that sales are not the only indicator of success. During my time on the stall I had some beautiful conversations and got to meet many people who read The Yoga Lunchbox. Nothing beats connecting in person!
Person after person told me the same thing.
I love your honesty.
I love how you keep it real.
I love how you don’t pretend to have it all together.
The was the message, and I heard it loud and clear.
By Sunday, the single parent challenges of being at the conference had worn me down.
I was shattered and emotional, so turned to my writing to get it all out. The resulting article felt raw – I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share it with my audience. I was afraid.
But I remembered all those people I’d talked to over the course of the conference and what they’d said. That’s what they value – the honesty.
Honesty is so rare in our society now that when someone who shows up as they it stands out and inspires others to have the courage to show up as they are.
So I published the article.
Later, a comment arrived that made me cringe. “May your longing…”
My longing! I hate that. I don’t want to long for anything or anyone thank you very much. I don’t need anyone. I’m fine all by myself.
Oh… watching that train of thought and feeling the contraction in my body flicked a light-switch on.
This was an old pattern, from childhood. This was the seed of my bolshy, independent feminist self who declared boldly that she’d never get married and she didn’t need any man.
This was the Me I thought was Authentic Self up until about age 35. Then I realised she was all an act – an act so well delivered even I believed her.
As with all projected Selves, this one often ended up creating the exact opposite manifestation in my life. I’d get into relationship and turn into this weak, needy, insecure woman I didn’t recognise and despised. Who was this woman I wondered? What happened tony strong independent Self?
It’s only now I see that these two woman are one and the same. The qualities I denied in myself and pushed away, morphed into Miss Insecure. The qualities I projected and valued made me Ms Independent.
The woman I am now knows enough to integrate all aspects into Self.
I can be capable of taking care of myself and still need support and love from other people. I can be happy being by myself and still fervently long for a relationship of the highest order. This is the nature of life. Day can not exist without the night. We can not feel warm without knowing cold. We always contain both aspects within us.
Anytime that we demonise or reject a part of ourselves, it will come out in our lives in other destructive ways.
Yoga helps me integrate these rejected aspects of self.
My practice of yoga means when I read that comment from a reader on my article I was able to notice my reaction to it and inquire into that reaction in order to learn something about myself.
It’s the same as going into Warrior I and using our awareness to notice that it’s difficult to square our hips and so learning that we need to open our hips.
I learned that I need to open into longing. I need to feel ok with having desires.
I need to learn that longing for a thing does not make me incomplete. That I can hold lightly to my longing. That I can own my longing and not be consumed by it.
And as I discovered on reading this article called Getting off the Crazy Train of Romantic Relationships, this longing is immerative. It’s the marker of a mature relationship.
It’s important to learn the difference between needs-based love and desire-based love. Needful love is really just a strong attachment to someone, where your happiness or unhappiness is tied to the relationship. The primary motivation is to get your childhood needs met. This kind of love is immature, unconscious and will leave you feeling empty.
Desire-based love is a strong bond, where each person is responsible for his or her own happiness. The relationship is a vehicle for personal growth and true intimacy. The primary motivation is to learn to be a better lover and human being. This kind of love is mature and conscious and will provide a feeling of fulfilment.
I get it now. I’ve observed before that my relationships appeared to be needs-based, and when my own transformation meant the underlying need that created the bond was no longer there, the relationship melted away.
Now I understand why that was.
And now I know the way forward.
I’m fascinated by all of this, and look forward to sharing more of my learnings and understanding of relationship and yoga over the next few months.
I’m also curious – what’s your experience of relationship like? Needs-based or desire-based?
Uh, er, I’m the ‘may your longing…’ commentator, I believe. Didn’t mean to create distress, but it does seem to be resolving.
I’m basically a needy-ish person. It took a long time to come to terms with being okay with needing someone or something. When I’m up front about it, I can think of it as just one of my loveable bundle of neurotic behaviours – part of my humanity.
BTW, I don’t remember if I said that I admire your pluck, and, of course your honesty.
Kindly,
E
Hey Eve,
Please don’t apologise! Your comment was perfect, as it lead to greater inquiry. Yes, I felt uncomfortable, but sometimes this is exactly what’s needed. So thank you!
I also appreciate this site for its honesty. So much of commercial yoga culture is anything but.
Hey Peter,
The honesty is key – it’s the only way to create genuine community. If I can’t show up in all my brokenness and be accepted for who I am, as I am… then what’s the point?
Spot on 🙂 Thanks for the site and your inspiration.
The realization of the “needs” part of my romantic relationships hit me like a hammer. Too much to explain all in one comment (perhaps Skype?), but when I realized the connection from what had been missing in childhood and how I was trying to recreate it as an adult was profound. PRO-FOUND. It made sense in a way that I couldn’t have rationalized without intuition, like I could never have mapped it out on paper without connecting it first to the emotional body. The dots were instantly connected and it completely changed my relationship to a much, much healthier way of relating. That was almost exactly a year ago and the changes, though sometimes tested, have sustained!
I realize how nebulous that paragraph was, but the specifics surrounding the transformation warrants its own article!
Hey Seka,
A skype sometime sounds fabulous! It is a profound realization isn’t it? So many things dropped into place for me… Great that you’ve been able to move past needs-based relating and into desire-based relating within the container of your relationship. Most awesome indeed!
KLx
Hi KL
Sometimes reading your thoughts is like reading from my own private journal! I too used to swear off marriage and kids to the point where I believed my own propaganda. The surprise came when I casually suggested that my partner and I marry for the paperwork (we’re different nationalities) and he refused. Needless to say I fell apart.
For years, I could never figure out why I was so needy when my rhetoric on the nature of relationship flew in the face of that kind of behaviour. We did marry, for love, and after about four years and our first child, it all crumbled. My toddler and I headed back home to Ireland and I had to go on welfare as a lone parent. I was adamant that my husband and I would maintain a good relationship for our daughter’s sake, but also because neither of us had done anything to knowingly hurt the other; it was just a very sad fact that we could no longer be happy together. I spent the next year or so taking a good hard look at myself– which was very difficult at times– and realised that I had to be happy to be alone, happy in my skin, before I could share my life with someone else. My husband used to visit us from overseas once a month and for the first year we behaved as good friends might, taking our daughter to the zoo or the cinema as a ‘family’. She was conceived in love and I never wanted her to even suspect that the two people who made her didn’t love each other anymore. Perhaps, she would reason, that if we could stop loving each other, we could stop loving her. It was hard and sad to be together but not ‘be together’. After a year of co-parenting we decided to work on our marriage again. Social services were pushing for divorce and could not fathom how we could be ‘friends’ but no longer together and my panic at the thought of severing our marriage for good forced me to examine what I really, really wanted. It was obvious to people around me that I still loved my husband as my husband, but I was afraid of the risk of ‘failing’ again. We swore we would not get back together just for our daughter’s sake because she would have seen through that eventually, but because something had changed. I can only speak for myself here and say that I had wanted to change and I made a lot of effort to. I work on myself and my side of the marriage every day. I take nothing for granted. Respect and love at all times is my mantra. Five years later, we’re very happy together and our second child is on the way. Because there was a willingness on both sides, we altered the nature of our relationship. For me a driving factor was shifting from a needs based to a desire based way of being in the marriage – no mean feat, and requires daily maintenance but one of the most important growth experiences of my life. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to share your life with someone, as long as we don’t make them responsible for our happiness. That’s too great a burden to put on someone we love. Thanks for the article – as always, very thought provoking.
Namaste.
xxx Mandy
Hey Mandy,
Wow! That’s one helluva a tale you’ve got to tell. Kudos to you and your man for sticking the distance and making that leap. Takes enormous courage to do that I imagine. Thank you so much for sharing your story, for I’m sure it will inspire other people. It has me!
Much love,
KL