Karmic crap

One of the hardest things for me about yoga teacher training is when we do things that remind me of my upbringing. I was raised in a spiritual community (some might call it a cult)and my dad was/is the leader. About a week ago I got an email from my dad regarding some "tests" he had been doing regarding my MS. In his email he asked me several questions. One of them was along the lines of "what do you think I actually do?" This gave me some pause because throughout my childhood I was surrounded by the members of his community and I had at least a partial lens into what I thought he did. Color me crazy, but maybe I am completely wrong about the work he does.

Anyway, I do certainly remember snippets of my childhood that involved my dad's work. One of the things I remember was the body work he did and that he trained other sto do. The person being worked with would strip down and then both stand and walk around in the nude so that my father or whoever was working with that person could see the subject's posture. I am not sure what they did with the data that was gleaned or how the subject was then worked with but I do have a distinct image of the work in my mind.

Yesterday morning at yoga teacher training was reminiscent of this childhood memory. A woman came in and worked with our posture. First we worked with partners and noticed things about their bodies and posture. It was a "non-judgemental" environment. The teacher then selected a few of us to come up front and she asked the group what they noticed about us. I was selected to come up front. The woman had several things to say about my posture. One of the things she noted was that they way I held my hips was usually associated with bad menstrual cramps. I laughed and told her we should talk but on the inside I was already sobbing.

One of the hardest things about me getting MS has been trying to answer for myself and sometimes others why I got this disease. I look at other people who have always had unhealthy lifestyles, spewed negativity into the universe and never excercised a day in their life and they are not sick. I read all this yogic literature and books about energy work and am informed that we hold all the crap that happens to us in our bodies. This crap often manifests as an illness. I see those who have abused their bodies be fine, I read about how we create our illnesses and then I feel like shit. If I choose to believe that we create our own illnesses then I am filled with horror, sadness and guilt. What did I do so wrong that I should find myself not only karmicly punished with MS but with cramps and the possibility of rheumatoid arthritis and allergies to boot?

On the one hand, I want a spiritual life. On the other, I don't want to believe these things I am being told. It seems fraught with judgement and the judgement seems to be that I am somehow bad.

I told this to one of the other girls in my teacher training and she said, "Maybe you are just imagining the judgement." Perhaps she is right. I thought that I was now beyond fear but I guess that it must still haunt me. I have always noticed many things about others just from their body language but I think I sometimes overimagine their opinions of me. I speak and I see myself through the imagined eyes of another and I am an ugly thing. I am all my faults. I talk too much, I'm conceited, I'm not centered and I speak too much and too quickly. Am I even grounded in reality anymore? Is this really the way that I am perceived? Does it matter how I am perceived?

For a short time I quit caring about pleasing others. I stopped caring how people saw me. I really believed that I am my own best teacher. Now I waver, a fragile stalk in the wind. Some moments I am certain I can find my own route back to Samadhi (the recognition that I am one with the universe and everything in it, outside time, place and space). At other times I find myself weakening and believe that I am indeed being punished or that if I don't listen to my father and/or the other teachers in my life and follow their advice, my health will surely get worse.

I want my personal power back. I want to believe that I can handle this and learn what I need to learn all by myself. Sometimes I think that there is no one I can even talk to about this whir of thought. I am torn between my old beliefs and my new ones. I am conflicted by new ideas that reflect how I perceive my past and my father's work. There is an enormous primal scream hidden behind my lips, my soul is an abyss. I howl into the darkness of my questions and only my own voice comes back to mock me...