18 Jan Why are Yoga Girls Single?

I am a single yoga girl – a girl who teaches yoga. You could even say, I am a ‘hot’ single girl that teaches yoga.

Ok, another way.. I am a ‘hot’ single girl that knows grace and humour, and can put her leg behind her head.. Interesting, no? Now, I have been single for a while, long enough that I sometimes wonder if perhaps there is an inherent flaw that is being missed, despite the level of personal internal work a yoga teacher and meditator undertakes along the way.

RAM DASS said it, despite decades of personal and spiritual work he did not lose one neuroses. Right.

I haven’t always been single. I know how to do relationships, and have been in serious, long term relationships. So I am a self aware, hot single girl who knows the difference between love and “in love”.  And you know, I am very happily a hot single girl etc etc, but c’mon there’s only so much “walking my path” that you can take before you start to wonder if perhaps all this focus on Self is turning me into someone selfish.

When I first was introduced to yoga I was living amidst the high-rise clamor and in-your-face energy of Hong Kong. I was six years into an 11-year relationship, and at the time I was working in commercial property. I was majorly stressed – with work and lifestyle – and felt like every day was just bleeding my life out, that I was living a life so far removed from any connection to heart and spirit. I didn’t know yoga would help me with that, I went along for kicks and kept coming back for savasana, but somehow early on I recognised “this is useful to me, this is helping”. I started to sense a way to uncover and connect to my essence.

I remember when that 11-year relationship ended I asked the question, was the split a result of yoga? If I’m honest I do feel the work of my yoga practice contributed, that I had started to get to know myself and from the clear seeing that comes with learning to be present, to realise I had fallen asleep and into a life that wasn’t really mine.

Right from that very first day on the yoga mat I had felt myself, through my skin down to my bones. I was fully present from the vibration in my cells, my effort and sweat, my ticker-tape-tormentor mind, my breath – the fullness and immediacy of experience. I felt myself alive and paying attention. It was a clear moment of “well, hello there, nice of you to stop by, where have you been all this time…”. Now the energetics of yoga fascinate me, but where the juice is for me at this moment in time is in the pragmatic psychology of the practice. How a state of mindfulness together with the movement of my body holds me present to my relationship with myself, and takes me beyond the construct of mind and into the all the possibilities that are borne of gratitude and creativity and inspiration, beyond moment to moment personality and the fingerprints life has left all over me to a deeper resounding resonance like the background hum of nature around us.

My first foray into relationship-post-marriage didn’t go well. I was a child again figuring a lot of things out and wanting direction from my partner. Eventually I figured out I needed to mature from this growth to know and love myself, before I could really actually selflessly love someone, instead of selfishly need someone.

By Cassie Lee

About Cassie

Cassie is a fiercely passionate and soulful teacher. She first fell in love with yoga almost 15 years ago as a way to quieten the mind and find stillness from the stressful pace of the corporate monkey’s life, and knew immediately that she had found her tribe in the curious seeker spirits she was meeting along the way.

Through yoga that she has discovered an honest language for the creative and heartfelt life philosophy she intrinsically feels and feels inspired to share, while living and breathing a playful heart and curious spirit.