I think my love for yoga has been infectious. Most of my best friends have fallen in love with the practice (maybe that's why they're my best friends - which, in the words of Mindy Kaling, "is a tier"). A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging out with my favourite Toronto Mommy Blogger and badass BFF #milf, Ferris, her sweet angel baby daughter, and her elementary school BFF talking about high school bullies, sketchy ex-boyfriends, and the struggles of adulting. It's actually kind of insane how a mom, a high-end fashion stylist/photographer, a law student, and an 8 month old baby girl could all sit in a room with bottles (red for us, the house white for baby H) bonding over our boujee tastes in Balenciaga, our bad taste in boys, and best of all, our common love for yoga.
We talked about the different types of yoga classes we've been to and how it's the instructors that really make a huge difference in terms of the impact of how we all feel post-yoga class. Both Ferris and Gianna mentioned that some of their favourite instructors encourage their students to adopt a mantra at the beginning of class (something most of the amazing instructors at MYM also do). As I was one sad/depressed loser that night, Gianna offered me one of her mantras - "hurt people hurt people" and Ferris offered me hers - "attitude of gratitude". And I loved both of them. Absolutely loved them. I loved them both so much that they inspired tonight's blog entry because recent events have allowed me to arrive at a place where I'm finally able to internalize those words and that's a beautiful thing.
All first year law students are required to take foundational, mandatory courses as part of the LSUC curriculum. Property law is one of those courses. With the utmost candour, I can honestly say that I never expected to find so many potential LLM research questions in my first year property law class. My prof was very engaging, clearly passionate, and extremely challenging - we were required to read the textbook that he wrote, which, he obviously knew backward and forward, making our level of comprehension of the material seem elementary at best. It was confusing. It seemed to bounce around all over the place. We kept coming back to this case called Yanner v. Eaton and I never understood why or how it connected to basically everything we learned in that class. Needless to say, studying for that exam was stressful. During the lectures, my prof would continuously and explicitly make connections between foreign case law that, at it's surface, had no tangible relation to one another. I had those connections in my summary, but I never fully understood why or how they were connected throughout the semester. Truthfully, it wasn't until the day before the exam that I had given up studying at the library and left to go home and nap, that it finally all clicked in my head. I was on the footbridge on the way home and I had some sort of epiphany where I realized that the nature of property or the ontology of property was not something "object-like"; instead, the nature of property ought to be re-conceptualized as something "processual". It's fluid. It's changing. It's dynamic. And that's why it was previously so difficult for me to fully comprehend - I was thinking about it all wrong. In my Anthropological Theory course in grad school, we learned about how anthropological objects of study had evolved from "thing-like" to "processual" due to our shifting paradigms in various theoretical frameworks. Our anthropological objects of study embody a type of agency that enables them to actually participate in our research in a meaningful way. Property is the same thing. Once I started thinking like an anthropologist again, the doctrinal law stuff associated with the ideas of property law naturally followed. I was able to make sense of the connections myself and even make nuanced connections between the case law.
What on earth does this have to do with yoga and with my sad depression on an otherwise fantastic impromptu girls night? Relax, I'm getting there - as I said in my About section, my postings often intentionally overlap because everything is always interconnected. Experiences cannot be classified in distinct silos.
The lessons I learned in my first year Property Law class were twofold: (1) The law needs anthropology; and more importantly in the context of this post (2) I don't like being spoon fed. I don't like being told or showed what the big picture looks like - I need to figure it out on my own in order to fully appreciate it. If I can't arrive at the big picture on my own or can't get there in my own time, I'll never have a complete understanding of what happened.
Anthropology is a unique discipline that teaches students to see the big picture, by looking at small, fragmented lived experiences of different people. The job of anthropologists is to make sense of these fragments and see how they ultimately come together to create meaning. Deciphering the broader meaning of fragmented events is a practice that has helped me delve deeper into my yoga practice in that it connects minute movements/transitions in postures with breath to ultimately arrive at a place of balance, inner peace, and gratitude. Moreover, this practice of deciphering meaning - among and within fragmented events - is something that I hope will translate into my eventual legal practice and subsequent LLM studies, in order to make greater sense of how the law necessarily affects people. Finally, this practice of deciphering meaning - among and within - fragmented experiences is something that I've come to employ in my everyday life because it forces me to connect confusing, frustrating, and messy experiences with the things I've learned in yoga by broadening my perspectives on things, accepting Gianna's mantra that "hurt people hurt people", and ultimately arriving at a genuine "attitude of gratitude".
My Property Law prof, as brilliant as he was, spoon-fed me the connections between case law, which is why I never fully understood it during lectures. My beautiful friends, as wise as they are, also spoon-fed me the bigger picture, which is why I never fully heard them when they told me their mantras. I needed to get there on my own. I needed to stop forcing gratitude. I needed to stop trying to control my emotions. I needed to stop resisting. And I did. And it sucked for a while. It hurt. It was awkward. It was confusing. And It was uncomfortable (still is) - but, that's just growing pains. I realize that now. Things are starting to make sense in my head again after all of my best friends (again, it's a tier!) tried to show me the bigger picture. I knew I'd get there, I just needed some time.
Feelings are messy. Emotions are messy. But, allowing myself the time to experience them, as opposed to avoiding them, is enabling me to learn from them; and, growth often hurts. Like the first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created, nor destroyed; rather, the total amount of energy in the universe stays the same. Feelings are similar (if not the equatable) to energy; they too can neither be created, nor destroyed - and thus, they never really disappear. But, they can transform into different emotions and that's where I'm at right now.
I just finished my first week at my new job in Yorkville (which is somewhere I've wanted to either work or live in since high school) and I can't help but smile every time I walk to my office. I am literally living almost all of my dreams and sometimes I catch myself smiling for no reason (something I often did on my couch back in Ottawa). And I'm pretty sure that means I'm happy. And I'm 100% sure that means I'm healing.
