I’ve never been very good at existing. There’s always some place I should be that I haven’t been yet, some thing not yet attained or a goal not reached, a feeling I’m sure I can will into reality if only I push harder. I’ve lived an anxious life.
I remember when my OCD first really took hold, I was about eight. For reasons unknown to me at the time (which I know now were compulsions), I had to make strange facial expressions. I would roll my lip out and down to my chin over and over. Whether the people around me saw it as sad or funny or just plain weird, I found it terrifying. I couldn’t even control my own body movements. I was ruled by my brain. It was the first time I realized I wasn’t in charge.
Photo: Hanna Evensen
Turning your attention to something that part of your mind doesn’t want to pay attention to is extraordinarily difficult. Focusing on a math equation when all you want to is go outside and play is not an easy task for anyone, let alone a kid. When you’re small, and your brain is constantly telling you to do something you don’t want to, like make a funny face while reading a presentation in front of the class, or having to touch the doorknob 8 times before leaving a room, causing a line of children to get annoyed that they can’t leave until you’ve finished your foreign ritual, there’s an indescribable feeling of helplessness that starts to become a part of your daily existence.
Meditation wasn’t introduced to me until I was 19 and going through my first real struggles with addiction (another form of compulsion). I was sitting in a group of about 30 people, all struggling with the same thing, and suddenly saw them close their eyes and sit still for five minutes. I was stunned. I kept waiting for them to do something, but they just sat longer, and even had the audacity to look peaceful! It was like watching someone climb Mount Everest with ease when all you wanted to do was get to the top of a tiny hill.
Some people change just because they think it´s a good idea. I’ve seen it - my wife is like that. You tell her there’s a better way to do something, and she just does it because it makes sense. I am not like that. Change has to be beaten into me. I do everything I can to hold onto old patterns until the pain is so great that I’m forced to do something different. Growth occurs, for me, because there’s a gun at my back. When I realized that meditation was part of the solution for my suffering, I hesitantly resigned myself to the cure.
Years later, living on the other side of the Atlantic as successful artist, and new father, my wife asked me to join her for a retreat at Nøsen to learn yoga. She had taken a teacher training, and had a glow about her that she wanted to share (like all good yogis). Most of what I knew about God or the spiritual realm at that point was intellectual, not physical. Yoga was my first introduction to spirituality through movement.
During my visit, at first, I only really watched. I was a voyeur, as I’ve often been in my life, intellectually dissecting my surroundings. Participation felt awkward. Safer, it seemed, to create some kind of internal dialogue about the whole thing. That was familiar. Maybe some good words would come from it, or a song perhaps. Joining the group seemed excessive.
But then I just jumped in. Like with meditation, I took a leap into the unknown and was richly rewarded. Yoga hasn’t changed life, but it has changed how I do life. It´s the same stress, the same difficulties - the urges to chase feelings or do something counterproductive are still very real, but I´m able to pay attention to them less. There’s a subtle expansion, an openness, a little less grasping and resisting, a little more softness and acceptance. I find that the time I spend practicing is time I’m teaching myself to remember how to breathe. Focus back on the breath. There’s real power to that. Like anything, the more you do it, the more you get out of it. The more I do yoga, the more I’m able to move into a more peaceful existence.
Here is Luke, playing his own song All on Board for the TV show Exit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvJ2Qea8tE