Balancing

The best, strongest poses in my asana practice are balances. The most difficult thing in my life right now is finding balance.

It's been about a year since I first found the space that is now Square One and started thinking about whether to open a yoga studio. I worked from 6 am until 11 or 12 at night for the next three months. There was a certain point after the studio opened when I went on a daylong meditation retreat and realized that I had not taken a day off of work in over four months. It's good that I went on a retreat, but at the same time, if a friend or student had not taken a day off in four months, I would tell her not to go anywhere, to curl up with a book or a bunch of DVDs, to sleep, to do whatever required the least mental and physical effort possible. But even my day off was about improvement.

It was right around New Year's Eve this year (which I spent alone for the first time ever) that I found myself sitting in the car on the phone, in between appointments, sobbing, with a potential new therapist. What happened to my relationships? Where were they? Why wasn't I in one?

I had paused long enough to feel lonely.

Starting a business is really hard work. Starting a business and working another job at the same time is simply insane. I love what I've created. I just wonder if I have created it at the expense of something else. Or maybe what's more accurate is that I busied myself with its creation as a way to distract myself from the loneliness and disconnection that were already there.

I distract myself and check out in so many ways. At this point in my life, it seems to be with work, but at other moments in my life it is with eating or drinking or shopping. I even (gasp!) have done a lot of drugs! These are all strategies that have worked for varying amounts of time. But if what I'm distracting myself from is loneliness, maybe it would be a hell of a lot easier just to address the loneliness.

This week, I'm saying yes to every social invitation that comes my way. I'm going out to dinner tomorrow. I'm going sailing and I'm going on a nighttime cruise to Alcatraz on Friday. Saturday I'm going to Bodega Bay where I'll spend the night at a house a friend has rented for the weekend. There will be a whole bunch of people there, many of whom I won't even know. I'm going anyway. I don't know when I will do the payroll, or find houses for my clients. I do know that I will show up to teach my yoga classes, and I do know that my teachers will have checks on the day they are supposed to have checks. Past that, there's nothing else that I really have to do. Except have fun, dammit!