Finding Balance in the Land of Extremes

   There is nothing balanced about life in Alaska.  It is a land of extremes: long, dark, cold winters, insomniac summers, monstrous mountains, and vast empty spaces.  A landscape and environment so out of balance that it forces its inhabitants to either reach deep within themselves to create balance or risk going mad.  Deep equanimity is the only antidote to the myriad mental assailants inherent in the North.
   "Pack your Sorel's®" was the message that came from my mother while I was stumbling onto my path in the Phillipines.  I was accepted into the graduate program in geology/geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a new chapter of my life was about to unfold.  A quick visit in the spring left me feeling heady and invigorated; I knew it was the place for me, but I really wasn't prepared for what it would do to me.
   To say that life in Alaska is intense is an understatement.  It's not just the weather and living at the end of the road, but a jumble of little things that you wouldn't imagine unless you lived there.  For three years I lived in cabins sans running water.  Every teaspoon of water for drinking, cooking, washing up, etc. had to be pumped at the Water Wagon (like a gas station, but for water), frequently at sub-zero temperatures, into containers and then hauled into the cabin.  On campus there were warnings about bears and irate moose.  In the summers forest fires choked the valley and exceeded all EPA hazard levels.  And the people who gathered in this place of extremes were typically cut from an unnaturally tough cloth, often leaving me feeling like a mere mortal trying to compete on Olympus with the gods and demigods.  It was simultaneously electrifying and exhausting.
   Alaska is a fundamentally fantastic place to live if you have come into balance before you touch down.  Unfortunately for me, my heart and head were all over the place when I arrived.  I was in transition in so many ways that I didn't know who I was or where I wanted to go.  I didn't even particularly want to go to Alaska and I will forever reply to the question, "why did you choose Alaska?!" with my standard and honest response that "I didn't, it chose me."  It's true, I really didn't see any other option and so, without so much as a decent winter coat, I bundled up my few trappings and all of my personal baggage to see just what Alaska could throw at me.
   We duked it out for neigh on eight years, Alaska and I.  It was a brutal love-hate relationship.  I've never wanted anything so badly as to be a 'real Alaskan'; to get out there and touch those mountain peaks, traverse the uncharted landscape, feed myself off of her back.  But I couldn't do it.  Something always held me back, curbed my enthusiasm and left me with a cloying unfulfilled desire.  I look back and I still don't completely understand what happened.  I watched my peers head out and embrace the wilderness while I stumbled into the role of city girl.  Somehow Alaska had the opposite effect than what was expected; instead of tom-boy-cum-mountain man, I started reading Glamour magazine and fell in love with Sex and the City!?  For the first time in my life I cared deeply about my wardrobe and fantasized about long luxurious baths in some weird backlash to the extreme disheveledness around me.
    For better or for worse, Alaska forced me to dig deep and really find myself.  The process was neither straightforward nor painless.  I continued to struggle with friends and relationships, but I got better.  Sometimes it was one or two steps backwards for every two or three forward, but I made progress all the same.  Near the end of my life in the North I started receiving the best complements I could ever have asked for: I was a much more likable person than when I arrived and people were actually going to miss me.
   For years up there I teetered on the edge of madness, but I'm too damn stubborn to just give in and completely loose my marbles.  The control freak in me just won't hear of it.  It took a lot of counseling, some amazing friends and the most incredible yoga teachers ever, but by the time I left I could feel that I was just starting to come into balance.

In the Beginning…

Three years ago I was about as unbalanced as any certifiably sane person could be. I was out of balance emotionally, physically, personally, socially and spiritually. Life was spiraling out of control at an ever increasing pace and I lived in constant fear that it would all come crashing down around my ears at any moment.

This was about a year and a half after I found myself, knife in hand, seriously contemplating suicide in the cold dark kitchen of my cabin in the North. Life no longer seemed viable. It was a no-win situation no matter how I looked at it and there just didn't seem to be any good reason to continue. The story from here differs depending on who you ask, and I was probably too numb to really remember, but it was then I realized something needed to change. Unfortunately, I didn't really know what or how so I just started changing things, which does not typically result in a well-balanced approach.

About two months later I was skimming along just fine despite incredible odds against it. My boyfriend of more than four years was out of the country and I chalked up my renewed strength and vitality to his absence and decided to call the whole thing off. Yep, just like that. Forget years of friendship and love, to hell with the shared house and our mutual friends, I was taking the Band-aid® route: get it over with as quickly as possible. I ended four and a half years of incredible intimacy before we got home from the airport Valentine's eve. I moved out, got a cat (he was terribly allergic) and jumped into rebound mode before the stores sold out of roses and chocolates.

In retrospect this may have been a bit rash. It did, however, feel completely logical, reasonable and justifiable at the time. My jump took me out of the proverbial frying pan barreling into the fire.

The intervening months between the afore mentioned events and the place I started this post, three years ago, reads like a bad cross between Danielle Steele, Nancy Drew and Little House in the Big Woods (not that a good cross could likely be produced out of those). Hunks and heartbreak, intrigue and intestinal disorders, harsh winters and insane northern summers, plus way too much time spent working on the infinitesimally small details of volcanic eruption dynamics provided a very long and bumpy roller-coaster ride. Each of the major events along the way deserves its own space to be deconstructed and reconciled, but that will have to wait for another post. Months of insomnia made me feel like a raving loony. Short intense relationships with guys who were just no good turned me inside out and upside down. Through all of it I was very lucky to have a small cast and crew of close friends who stood by me, otherwise I may not have made it to a most important turn in the road.

Three years ago, I decided to go cycle around New Zealand. Solo. Not all of it, just bits and pieces. I didn't head off with much of a plan, but I did one little piece of research that completely changed my life and got me acquainted with what was so dearly missing in my life: balance. I've never been someone who looks at the email-content-driven online advertisements that pop up all the time. I'm generally pretty good at mentally filtering them out, but a pop-up for WWOOF came up in response to my email exchange about the upcoming trip with my mother and seemed to beckon to me. I few clicks later I found my way to a yoga center in Golden Bay and knew I had to go there.

I had never really 'done' yoga. I learned a few poses and was given a few private classes from certified yoga instructor friends, but that was the extent of it. I knew very little about yoga and, as many uninitiated Westerners are want to do, just viewed it as a glorified method of stretching. I imagined I would spend my week on the hill blissfully contorting my body for hours a day, living it up with other blissed-out souls and sleeping like a log each night. The reality couldn't have been much further from the truth.

Satyananda yoga isn't for the 'holiday yogi'. Asanas (the graceful, stretchy poses commonly associated with yoga) make up only a single component of the many branches of yoga and are not strongly emphasized by those who follow the teachings of Swami Satyananda Saraswati. At this particular retreat, karma yoga, meditation, yoga nidra and kirtan were the primary daily yogic practices, and as I previously mentioned I wasn't mentally, physically, emotionally or spiritually prepped for the catharsis that these practices would induce.

I think I broke down at least once a day for the entire week. Sometimes I sobbed so hard I nearly flooded my yoga mat in the middle of a chanting session. I didn't know why I was crying and I couldn't stop. It was draining. It was exhausting. I cried until there simply were no more tears to cry. My body seized up and I could hardly move.

Most people, upon finding themselves in such a state, might entertain the notion of stopping, or at least really slowing down, for a while to take stock of their lives and really contemplate what the hell was so f'ing out of whack. I, however, am not most people. I jumped back on my bike the day after I left the retreat and rode 100 km in the driving South Island rain just to ride to the end of the road and back. And I didn't just cruise along either, I pushed and I pushed hard.

The next day I got a wake-up call. I went to see a highly recommended body worker in Takaka. She spent an hour going over my beaten body loosening things I didn't even know were tight. She was far more tuned into imbalances in my body than I and pointed out that I was treading thin ice, something was about to give. I thanked her for her input and the fantastic massage and tucked her advice away somewhere in the back of my brain. She did have a small immediate influence and I decided against riding over the legendary Takaka Hill (which has thwarted many a fine cyclist) in the fog and got a lift instead, which may quite possibly have saved my life.

But I'm a bit like Teflon® when it comes to advice because I'm stubborn as hell. I wanted to keep riding and so I did. I even shrugged off a ride to the ferry terminal and into Wellington (no more than 10 kms) just because I'm so damn stubborn. This last act of pig-headedness nearly did cost my life and left me with physical and emotional scars that are still healing.

I found the signage for the bike route away from the ferry terminal in Wellington confusing and decided to take the main route I felt would lead me into town. This was a very bad idea. Many a cyclist has come undone on this road as it provides a nasty combination of zero shoulder (read: concrete barrier) and railroad tracks at an acute angle to the road. I saw the tracks a'commin', I was riding 30+kms to stay with traffic, I head checked to see if I could move out to cross the tracks at a safer angle and was on them before I could blink.

It took me two days to fully reconstruct what happened by mapping out the bruises on my body and the damage to my bike. All I knew at the time was that my saddle bags went flying out into the road, a semi-truck blocked traffic behind me and that a small group of people was at my side 'immediately'. I put 'immediately' in quotes because I realized much later that four people who were either at work or walking down the foot path could not instantly materialize at the side of a crumpled cyclist and I had, therefore, blacked out for a while.

But still I wouldn't admit that I needed to slow down. I got on a train to National Park the next day and spent the afternoon wondering why I was having so much trouble rock climbing. The day after I took the bus to Auckland and spent the night unable to sleep. Following that I rode my smooshed bike around the city wearing a borrowed helmet because I broke mine in the crash. And later that evening I boarded a plane for the U.S.

It was my mom who finally intervened and insisted on taking me to her chiropractor's office. The woman there realized I had dislocated all of the ribs on the right side of my sternum. The muscles of my abdomen were twisted and matting down in odd directions. My neck was fucked, the inside of my hip joint was bruised and I had a golfball sized lump on the back of my head. She couldn't believe I had walked away from the accident let alone gone rock climbing, cycling!!, and flown half way around the world.

Let's just say I was a wreck for the next few months. The pain, the post-concussive issues, the insomnia, etc. were more than enough. Yet I was dealing with it all on top of the demands of my Ph.D., teaching and a new massive heart ache. Thankfully, I had brought something else back from NZ to help me deal with it all: yoga. I was practicing every day, just little things, but they were so grounding. I felt that the universe had simultaneously smacked me upside the head (literally) and provided me with a tool to get my shit together. It was time to come into balance.