A Part of You Must Die 💀

2 days ago
4 min read

"Be like seeds; do not see dirt thrown at you as your enemy, but as ground to grow." - Matshona Dhliwayo 🌱

The following is extracted from a book I will probably never finish. I was going to call it Yoga is Dead. As in, it must be reborn without the contamination of man. Although some people argue that The Grumpy Yogi's Guide to Enlightenment works too 🤔

"Before you can truly live, a part of you must die. You have to release the ghost of what could have been, the stories of how you should have acted, what you should have done, and the endless replay of words left unspoken. You must accept that the past cannot be rewritten, neither your choices nor the reactions of others. When that truth sinks into your bones, compassion replaces conflict. You cannot carry the burden of days gone by, and you cannot carry the weight of who you should have been."

This comes from my own journey. As a child, I was an exceptionally sensitive soul 😵‍💫. Life always possessed a unique ability to stir those sensitivities. Anger, resentment, and jealousy have a curious way of wiring a young persons brain 🧠. To say that I grew up without the privileges my son Zaccy enjoys would be the most massive of understatements.

As I grew older, I felt like I was drowning in that resentment towards life. My head endlessly replaying what I wished things could have been. Interestingly, as a child I remember watching my dad smoke his Rothmans 🚬 whilst I read that smoking does to the lungs what resentment does to the soul. A sort of poetic truth.

When you grow up feeling like you don't fit into anything, you carry that weight wherever you go. Unconsciously, it affects everything that you are. Physically through low-grade inflammation, psychologically through your choices, decisions, and reactions. You become the sum parts of your trauma. On reflection, I now I understood what Robert Sapolsky meant when he says that there is no such thing as free will. We are all acting or reacting to our biology 🧬. And our biology is just reacting to everything beforehand. A constant biological loop in motion.

I eventually stopped feeling a victim of life when I found yoga at the ripe ol' age of 30. When I started to see yoga beyond the poses, I saw so many parallels to what had really saved my life as a young teenager: religion, in particular Sufism. The idea that what you seek, you find within yourself. I had a choice. Keep looking for a solution on the outside, or seek and find balance within. On reflection this was all unconscious. One decision just created another.

I later found an Osho translation and commentary of the works of Bahauddin, a Sufi master, and it had a profound impact on the man I would become. Bahauddin taught that the real journey is safar dar watan, the journey within one's own self. Alongside Goraknath's Die, O Yogi, Die, both spoke at length about dying as you are and being reborn as you should be. The constant theme was that you cannot change the past. And unless you act in the present, your future will be written for you.

I realised that if I didn't do something, however small and insignificant it seemed, I would soon become an old man, still a victim of the dirt that I felt life had thrown at me.

Through the baby steps of trying not to feel like a victim of my circumstances, I began to understand that life isn't some grand quest for answers. It's a voyage of self-discovery (as is Yoga). The sufi's say it's an expedition through your own heart and to really FEEL the raw truth of being alive. The most introspective of us are often those that have been hurt the most. Which is why being inside our own heads can feel so overwhelming. But its only through that self reflection, self analysis and self study that we see the clear sky of our own minds. We have to sit long enough for the clouds to pass 🌧️

When I finally began to find that feeling of peace, that I wasn't a victim and in fact, I am so unbelievably grateful to life, it changed how I showed up in every other part of my life. And I was lucky too that on that path, I met some people whom I will be indebted too for my whole life. But I don't feel it was luck. They were choices.

I still reflect my trauma most days. I try to be better: a better person, friend, husband, and dad. Do I always succeed? No. Often I fail miserably. But I am only human. Gabor Maté once said he still reacted childishly today as a reaction to his own childhood trauma at eighty years of age. It happens. But the daily work is what helps us recognise that and strive to do better.

My first seed was embarrassingly small. I picked up a book I had no business reading. I sat with the ideas I barely understood, and just kept doing the work of trying to be better. That was it. Nothing dramatic. But when I look back now, that was the moment the ground shifted.

We cannot change the past. If we dwell too long in it, we can start drowning in our own sorrow. Believe me. The art to life it appears, is to leave it behind like it belonged to someone else, and make the first step today. I honestly cannot see myself in my younger days anymore. Which is why I can talk about it without getting emotional.

And that first step today doesn’t need to be big 🦶🏽. Pick up a book . Get back to yoga. Write your first blog. Do the thing you have been putting off.

If life has handed you dirt. Go plant some seeds.

Namaskar,

Zahir