Yoga Teacher Training OmWork: Book Summary

Book: “Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic”
Author: Darren Main

It’s interesting to me how the Universe comes together when something is meant to be. For me, it was reconnecting with my friend, Kiara, and participating in Corepower’s Yoga Teacher Training because of that friendship.

I read Darren Main’s book, attended all three days of his workshop and listened to his podcasts this summer, and they were all very validating. This man has a gift that he is able to share and communicate with others, and that is what separates scholars and teachers. In “Path of an Urban Mystic,” Darren makes the lifestyle of a yogi more palatable for the mainstream.

I climbed my first fourteener this summer, Mount Yale in Buena Vista, Colorado. When I returned to camp after summiting, the weather was ominous, so I hid in my car and curled up with Darren’s book. The passage about pratyahara was perfectly timed as my mind and my heart were open to hear its message. It’s uncanny how the Universe finds the right moment to send us messages when we are most receptive.

“Seeking outside for a solution to suffering is a guarantee that peace and contentment will remain elusive because the problem does not lie within the external circumstances…. Only the truly numb can deny we are all searching for something. As long as we deny our true nature, we will feel within us an emptiness that is intolerable. This desire to search is the most natural thing, and the unavoidable result of believing that we are not whole.”

Darren’s fly-fishing analogy of the ego casting the mind out and the Spirit reeling us back in is as beautiful an acknowledgement of the flow of life as vinyasa is.

At any given point, I can be caught reading five books at one time. Another book that I am in the middle of is “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Coincidentally, within the same week, I read a section of that book that completely coincided with Darren’s book.

“We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.”

Over the course of this summer of yoga teacher training, certain life experiences started to make more sense to me. About five years ago, I lived in Portland, Oregon, for one year. I had moved to be closer to my long-term, long-distance boyfriend at the time. I worked at a recruiting agency and had a ‘devil’ of a manager. With ten years in such a cut-throat, bottom-line business, she was a hardened woman. Despite her confident professionalism and attractive appearance, there was nothing sweet about her presence. When my relationship had ended and I was leaving my job with the recruiting agency to move back to Colorado, Melissa said only one thing to me. “Find your bliss, Michelle.”

It is not easy to really comprehend such things when your mind and heart are not open or not ready to hear such things. I took Melissa’s deep message to mean that I should focus on what makes me happy. For years after leaving Portland, I was a woman with no identity to speak of. I had either forgotten who I was, or maybe had never realized who I could be. I could be whoever I wanted. Upon moving back to Colorado, I made a promise to myself to become the woman I always dreamed of being. And I am happy to say that I feel a lot closer to that woman than ever, especially after yoga teacher training and reading such digestively insightful books as Darren Main’s. Melissa’s message has much deeper meaning to me now than it did back then. Coming from a boss that I feared, her message is able to transcend a mere well-wish to find temporal happiness.

A summer of yoga teacher training allowed me to tap into pratyahara, withdrawing from the senses and pulling my attention inward, and for this I am forever grateful. I thank all of my teachers, my gurus, for all the love and compassion they put into the training experience. That mentor-like compassion and desire to share made yoga and teacher training more palatable for a student like me.