Learning Happiness

I've been practicing yoga on and off for over 40 years. Now, my occupation is selling yoga supplies. In the late sixties, when I started doing yoga, it was not popular. No one in the U.S. made a living selling yoga stuff back then. For a tween boy it was the opposite of popular, it was scorned. After a few times being laughed at by my "friends" based on this passtime, I started keeping it to myself. So, while boys my own age were lifting weights in their garages, I was on my exercise mat in the basement, putting my legs behind the same head I had been standing on earlier. If I tried to show my Mom what I was up to she would get upset and tell me I might hurt myself and to stop it. So I did. I stopped showing her.

This was the beginning of hiding things from my Mom. Later I learned to hide almost everything from her. Yoga may have been the first thing that was mine that I held on to in the face of opposition. It was something I needed privacy around if I didn't want to be mocked or chastised.

Now, of course, doing, teaching and selling yoga is something that makes me cool. Even my Mom grudgingly accepts it. I met my ex-wife in a yoga class I was taking and my current girlfriend in a class I was teaching. It has been a long strange trip from dabbling with the physical postures to making self study a big part of my life. Along the way I've been a lot of people and done a lot of things. Some of it I'm proud of and some I wish I'd skipped but I've learned from all of it and I am much happier today because of this journey. Hopefully, I can share some of this happiness with you.