This week I climbed out of a hole. For months, I felt like I was getting sick but never really did. My immune system was fighting something and symptoms kept dragging me down. Never recovering and never collapsing, people around me said it was age. That statement only pulled me deeper into the hole.

The hole is a hard place to be and hard to talk about. Recently, a student who is also a yoga teacher asked to speak after class. She told me that she has felt a general malaise, a feeling of discomfort, unease, sometimes a illness whose cause is hard to identify. It affected everything in her life, her relationships, work, and activities. She wondered if I had heard of this problem and had any ideas about how to practice yoga during this time.

I marveled at how this woman who lives in another country who I saw online asked me a question that I had been asking myself. Seeing and hearing her talk was like icy walls melting around me. In an instant, I knew that I was not alone. Many of us feel this way, and she had the courage to talk about it. Sometimes we can't see the horizon and the shore is hard to find. I asked her if she accepted this phase of life or was she trying to get out? This is always the hardest part when I'm struggling with a health condition, be it a wounded state of mind, heart, or body. It's hard to accept that my back hurts or that I feel sad or tired. From talking to my student, I realized that in order to climb out of the hole, I had to accept there was a hole (or a few) in the first place.

By giving her experiences a voice and sharing her experiences, she acknowledged that she was going through something. Patanjali, in The Yoga Sutras, outlines in sutra 1.33 for a clear and tranquil mind, maitri, friendliness, are the essential qualities to cultivate. We think of friendliness as being nice to other people but rarely look at what it means to be friendly towards ourselves. Practicing yoga with acknowledgment of our current state and making the needed accommodations, be it using props in different ways or practicing different asanas, can be ways of cultivating maitri. What happens if we practice yoga from where we are rather than where we want to be? We can explore our current state with maitri and let those experiences inform our next steps. Remembering the famous teaching from Gautama Buddha, “Be where you are; otherwise you will miss your life.”