A Journey Into Yin Yoga

28 A JOURNEY INTO YIN YOGA

a new adventure together. (On a side note, I was nervous and felt a tremen-

dous amount of pressure. Despite being in front of people regularly to teach

classes, I didn’t want to mess up this important occasion. It was terrifying!)

On the wedding day, I was driving to pick up the groom from his hotel. I

was also the best man, so I was doing double duty. On the way, I received

a heartbreaking phone call: My father-in-law had just passed away. Although

he had been dying gradually from pancreatic cancer, the news was still dev-

astating. To make matters worse, my wife, Lauren, was out of the country

teaching at a yoga conference in Norway. She couldn’t get back for another

two days. There she was in a tiny hotel room, all alone, dealing with the

passing of her father.

Time stood still when I got the news. I felt overwhelmed. Here I was on my

way to celebrate the genesis of a couple’s new life together at the same time

my father-in-law had just died. And this is the nature of the Tao. We all face

gain and loss, joy and sorrow, and birth and death. The laws are inescapable.

“When you realize the truth that everything chang-

es, and find your composure in it, there you find

yourself in nirvana.” —Suzuki Roshi

Everything is in motion. Life is cyclical. It is the cycle of yin and yang that

can never be separated. You can’t have life without death. You can’t go up

without coming down. You can’t be awake without sleeping. You can’t have

sweetness without the challenges. Yet for many of us, we strive to control. We

cling to what we label as good. We try to avoid what we label as bad. This

mentality imprisons us in a little box of misery. Inside of this box, we suffer

because we are fighting the natural flow of the Tao.

I’d like to share with you a personal story of one of the biggest days of my

life, when I found the Tao. On the first day of a yoga retreat I was attending,

some of the other students and I went on a hike along the Na Pali Coast in

Kauai, Hawaii. High up on the bluffs we could hear fierce waves crashing

below, and we had the feeling that this had been the case since the dawn

of time. The environment felt primal and powerful. We made our trek deep

into nature, leaving all signs of civilization behind. As we descended from

the towering cliffs toward sea level, we saw multiple warning signs along

the trail: “Do not swim in the water.” They even warned of the likelihood of

death due to drowning.

When our group arrived at a beautiful cove filled with majestic waves and

surrounded by jagged rocks, I ignored the warning signs and stripped off my

shirt and swam out into the ocean. As I glided away from shore, an undertow

grabbed me. It had a power and force unlike anything I had experienced

before. I was snatched up by one wave after another and thrown down with

backbreaking intensity. I was held under the surface far longer than I could

hold my breath, and to my horror, I began to drown. The ocean current

pulled me toward the razor-sharp rocks. I remember having the thought,