DURING A MEDITATION, Doug, a
long-time yoga student of mine,
had a profound spiritual awakening,
accompanied by the recognition that
there was something inauthentic
about the life he was leading. Among
other things, he saw that his medical
practice had gone dead, and he
desperately needed to take a
sabbatical to contemplate his path.
Doug’s wife didn’t agree, and
his decision exposed all the fault
lines in their 20-year marriage.
Now they’re discussing divorce,
while Doug studies yoga therapeutics
and spends hours a day meditating and
writing. He says he cries several times
a week and feels as if he’s swimming in
a fast, hot river of emotions—his own
and other people’s. Even more
unsettling is the fact that he doesn’tknow where all of this is taking him.
Doug’s experience of radical
uncertainty is typical for someone
who’s deep inside a transformational
process. In one of Rumi’s poems, a
boiling chickpea speaks up from out
of the stew pot, complaining about
the heat and the blows from the
chef’s spoon. The chef tells him,
“Just let yourself be cooked! In the
end, you’ll be a delicious morsel!”
Over the years, when yoga’s fire has
felt especially hot, I’ve re-read that
poem and appreciated how well it
describes the psychic cooking that
takes place during certain phases of
transformation, which, after all,
is a process in which you literally
allow yourself to be softened,
opened, even broken apart, in order
to expand your sense of who you are.55
august/september2019yogajournal.com.auPHOTO: FRANZ12/ISTOCKDURING A MEDITATION, Doug, a
long-time yoga student of mine,
had a profound spiritual awakening,
accompanied by the recognition that
there was something inauthentic
about the life he was leading. Among
other things, he saw that his medical
practice had gone dead, and he
desperately needed to take a
sabbatical to contemplate his path.
Doug’s wife didn’t agree, and
his decision exposed all the fault
lines in their 20-year marriage.
Now they’re discussing divorce,
while Doug studies yoga therapeutics
and spends hours a day meditating and
writing. He says he cries several times
a week and feels as if he’s swimming in
a fast, hot river of emotions—his own
and other people’s. Even more
unsettling is the fact that he doesn’tknow where all of this is taking him.
Doug’s experience of radical
uncertainty is typical for someone
who’s deep inside a transformational
process. In one of Rumi’s poems, a
boiling chickpea speaks up from out
of the stew pot, complaining about
the heat and the blows from the
chef’s spoon. The chef tells him,
“Just let yourself be cooked! In the
end, you’ll be a delicious morsel!”
Over the years, when yoga’s fire has
felt especially hot, I’ve re-read that
poem and appreciated how well it
describes the psychic cooking that
takes place during certain phases of
transformation, which, after all,
is a process in which you literally
allow yourself to be softened,
opened, even broken apart, in order
to expand your sense of who you are.55
august/september2019yogajournal.com.auPHOTO: FRANZ12/ISTOCK