More Yoga Homework: Affirmations

Yes! More yoga homework! Just when you thought the book report was over, it’s time for assignment #2, affirmation cards. Lucky for you, this is a one-post sort of deal, so we can keep the eye-rolling and suffering through my lessons learned to a minimum.

This assignment is to choose an affirmation from a deck of affirmation cards published by Taylor Wells, founder of Prana Power (my training studio). The idea is that you keep your card with you and read it often throughout the day, allowing it to influence your thoughts and impact your life. Maybe in a big way, maybe in a tiny way – I think it all depends on you.

This, of course, is exactly the kind of cheese-ball yoga nonsense (OR IS IT) that makes my inner skeptic start to itch. I don't mean to offend, just being honest.

Anyhow, the assignment remains, so I close my eyes, fan out the deck and pick a card. Makes sense to leave this one to divine providence, right? Pick a random card, let it do its thing?

Here it is:

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

Right. So.

Okay.

Despite much carrying-on from my inner skeptic, I begin to put my affirmation into action. As prescribed, I glance at the card throughout the day. After a few days, I really start to remember to look at it. Sometimes, I find myself looking FOR it. I want to see it. I need to understand it.

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

It bothers me.

I write it on a little post-it and put on the bottom of my computer monitor. I post it as the lock screen on my cell phone. I pen it on the tender underside of my right wrist, where middle-school Jen used to ink the initials of boys she was crushing on. Remember that? Glitter gel pen scrawlings, sealed up in a heart as a badge of allegiance – the earliest indicators of a fledgling tattoonicorn.

This sort of thing is actually really quite well-suited to my obsessive personality.

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

When the train is late, when my clients are irritating, when the math isn’t working out, when I am struggling in my personal life, when the cats are destroying the furniture.

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

When I start to panic, when I can’t breathe, when I just don’t know what to do.

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

Slowly but surely (and let’s be honest, I think we all knew where this was going), it begins to creep in, seep in: under my hairline, in between my eyelashes, into the creases in my elbows, that icy cold spot between my shoulder blades and into the soft flesh between each finger and toe until it’s running through my veins alongside my vital juices, powering my engine from within.

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

Along this process of opening my heart to yoga (which has, at times, felt an awful lot like a physical spreading of my ribcage), I have come up against an undeniable friction – all the illusions I’ve built up throughout my life, about my life and about myself, struggling to keep me within their reigns. It’s physically and emotionally painful, releasing and believing and allowing this great love to worry away at that which is not really me, burning up until there’s nothing left but Self and ash.

And I don’t ever want it to stop. I’m really only seeing the momentum increasing from this point forward – that’s the universe, right? Assisting me?

I feel the power of the universe assisting me.

As previously mentioned, I've found that things tend to play on repeat for a reason. Eventually, it has to click.

When Taylor visited our teacher training, she asked each of us what our word for the training would be – you know, like a defining thought. At the moment I thought my word was BALANCE, but I’m beginning to find that it may be more along the lines of SKEPTICISM.

A clouded, all-encompassing and once quite-tenacious skepticism that continues to crumble, breaking away in small but significant pieces, allowing the piercing light of BELIEF to shine through.

Of course I can feel the power of the universe assisting me. I AM the universe. As an active participant in the whole thing, I have no choice but to assist myself, and be assisted. I cannot help but draw myself in this direction, like a magnet, bringing myself here, right to where I was meant to be.

I was always going to find myself here. And I can feel, have felt, will continue to feel the power of the universe assisting me along the way.

Yes.

Fine.

Dear yoga: you win again.


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And you fools thought I was learning to teach fitness classes.