On Choice…

Butterflies are free…

By Cara Chang Mutert

Life is teaching me to live it.

Many of us move through life just to get through it. I think I was that person for a long time.

I went through the motions. I did the thing, always. Went to school. Got good grades. Did my best to be a “good girl.” Went to college. Got my degree. Went to work in the field of my degree, Journalism. Got married. Bought a house. Had 3 kids, a couple cats and a dog. After working my way up from the bottom rung of newspaper ad sales, to obit writer and post-accident chaser/photographer, to government reporter, staff writer, special editor, and eventually senior editor, I left my journalism career at 31 to focus on raising and spending more time with my children to be a “better mom.”

As a young mom dabbling in yoga, I rediscovered my body, and found a new career teaching dance, my first love. Did that for another 10 years. Meanwhile, my love of dance and movement turned into a love for yoga. As the years, and now decades have passed, my love of yoga itself has evolved from a passion for feeling and expressing myself through my body, to understanding myself better through my body.

Now that I’m a “senior,” I realize my body has morphed through periods of great flexibility and mobility, to phases of significant strength and control, to moments of noticeable discomfort, roaming pain, dull aches, and stiffness that I never experienced before. People are often surprised that as a career yoga teacher I still experience pain. I think partly, it’s a willingness to admit the truth. To be honest about it. To accept it. To be human.

I retired last week from a 20-year stint as an adjunct at our local community college, which I think prompted a lot of these thoughts about my life, its trajectory, the choices I made, and where I’ve landed as a result. When I ponder the word “wisdom,” I’m beginning to think it’s really just life experience, what we decide to do with it, and if we learn from it.  

As I enter the infancy of my sunset ;) I understand that the aches and pains are just part of my very blessed life. Living in a body that endured decades of intense and arduous training as an eager, goal-oriented young dancer, and the second half teaching dance and eventually yoga, averaging 16-20 classes/week, I’m grateful that my body still moves with relative ease, and I have the tools to manage the physical discomfort in my body as it arises.

While practicing yoga all these years has been both strengthening, opening, and a soothing salve to my aging physical body, the psychological, emotional and mental support it has provided me has been such a great refuge.

For those of you who have laid in savasana and found yourself with a tear trickling out of one corner of your eye or streams of them pouring down your cheeks, or even choking back an ugly cry, you get it.

Yes, yoga does increase strength, endurance, and balance. Yes, we gain flexibility and fluidity, and over time, even stability. But equally, if not more importantly, it offers us a process to remember who we are.

Tears and emotions during practice can serve to release sorrow or grief you may be experiencing, or suppressed feelings that you’ve locked down in effort to forget. But these moments of stillness and sometimes tears, can also serve as a time of your own remembrance. In my experience, yoga has been a long, slow process of drawing out the “real me.” These times of quiet reflection offer an opportunity to connect with who you really are and have always been.

Through consistent and regular practice, we learn how to connect with that place of inner knowing. To cope and manage our stressors by learning to access that place of balance that we rarely experience except when we are lying flat on the floor in savasana.

The more often we come back to that place of quietude, again and again, the more who can operate from that place of equanimity as we contemplate our life, make our decisions, and continue to move forward.

It’s kind of a magical formula, really. Something the sages knew long ago.

From a place of patient, quiet stillness, gentle awareness rises, allowing clarity to appear. From that grounded space, your answers will arise, and you too will be free to live your life and flourish.