Moving into Meditation by Anne Cushman

Author:Anne Cushman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala Publications

FROM FAKING IT TO MAKING IT Kate Johnson

Kate Johnson teaches yoga in New York City schools.

In my yoga teacher training, we were supposed to keep a meditation journal and meditate ten minutes a day for a month. I totally faked the journal. I didn’t meditate at all and made up the whole journal the day before it was due: “Day One—Sat 10 minutes. Felt really calm. . . .”

I had this resistance to the idea of doing nothing. I was a professional dancer. My mind couldn’t be quiet unless I was moving. My approach was to become really absorbed in movement or do a lot of movement to tire myself out so I was too tired to think. It was all about controlling my experience. I didn’t want to sit down and check out my experience and just be with it.

Then, about four months after my teacher training, I fell through a trapdoor in a restaurant. I tore the ACL ligament in my knee and crushed my left hand. I needed three surgeries. I wasn’t able to use my left hand for three months, and I was on crutches for almost a year. I was bored, I was in pain, and I didn’t know if I would ever be able to dance again.

So I got really interested in this idea of meditation as a way to work with what I had avoided before. So many things were beyond my control. Here was a practice that could help me bear this lack of control.

I didn’t realize how much energy I’d been putting into resisting my actual experience. It was a relief to be able to let go of that struggle and open up to what was actually going on without trying to make something else happen. I had been so afraid of doing that.

Through the various surgeries and physical therapy, I got meditation instructions for working with the physical pain I was dealing with. I began to notice it wasn’t always present in the same way. It came in waves: there would be periods where the pain was building up, then a peak, then it would subside. So when it got bad, I no longer had the sense that it would be like this forever. I was able to go to that place in my body that didn’t hurt for a while, that wasn’t in pain. As a professional dancer, I had a lot of fear about my future. Meditation helped me to be able to be with that process of recovery without knowing how it would come out, to be with that uncertainty.

Now I teach yoga full-time in public high schools in New York. My students are almost all students of color, black and Latino, mostly low income. Many of them have experienced a lot of trauma—the trauma of being poor in the United States, racism, or physical abuse. My meditation practice has made teaching in this situation more sustainable. The average turnover for teachers is five years—they just get burned out.

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