I am the universe

Playa De Jandia, Fuertuventura - 2022

Context: This is the first assignemnt in the yoga allaince teacher training course I am currently attnding, they entitled it "My personal yoga journey".

I am the universe

My name is Thomas Ive, or Tom to people who know me, and I live in the UK on the very edge of the Yorkshire Dales. At the time of writing this essay I'm pretty sure I'm 38, I definitely have 2 amazing, well-adjusted kids and a beautiful supportive wife, Caz, and Caz and I have a partner, Sarah, with whom we share our life and home. For work, I run an arms and armour company selling everything from historical swords and armour to replica weapons from your favourite movies and games, my company and my job are mental. We ship our products to our wonderful customers all over the world, and I will tell you that I absolutely and genuinely love my work and my customers.

I am, I’m very pleased to report, a happy guy. I love my life, I love the beautiful people I have surrounded myself with, and, most importantly I’m unashamedly fond of myself. I pride myself on having always been a hopeless optimist, lover and serial haver and persistent creator of the very best of times. Life is good.

Let’s draw a line under the positives and focus on the reason I underwent a reincarnation at 30. My 10 year career as a plumber and gas fitter had reached its grand, shitty, crescendo. I ended up taking a job at a secondary school, not any old school, but the very school that I went to in my teens. I know this sounds dramatic, but it was a nightmare. People literally have nightmares about being back at school, that old teacher who hated them looking down their nose at your failures, well, that was me, I was stood at the end of that teacher’s nose, holding a mop bucket.

In the process of getting on with ‘working a job I hated to pay the bills’ I fell; I fell really fucking hard. They say that depression manifests differently for everyone, for me this meant I put on a great amount of weight, wore a lot of knitwear and jogger bottoms, I considered the benefits of death and much worse than this, I listened to infinitely more Dido and Damien Rice than was socially acceptable. It was not only a terrible time for me, but a terrible time to know me, I was a real boring, sad mess. My wife is a wonderful, almost limitless source of faith in me, but I tested those limits, and I came close to losing everything.

I remember vividly the turning point in my life, I was sat in a corridor painting skirting board with a ‘One coat’ gloss paint that had the most unpleasant smell. I had my headphones in, there was no music in them, I just used them to muffle the sound of the kids running past me in the long school corridors, and the so the teachers would think twice before asking me for something. On this day, I was also scrolling though my phone looking for a YouTube lo-fi channel I could put on for the next 3 hours so I could zone out till I got to go home. I have no idea how I came across it, audio books were not really in my world at the time, but I found an audiobook on YouTube, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by H.P. Lovecraft, narrated by Conrad Feininger, an OG of cassette tape horror narration. This audiobook was 3 hours and 5 minutes long, it would last almost exactly till home time. Perfect. I had nothing to do and nothing to lose so I pressed play. If I’m being wholly honest, which I always endeavour to be with myself and others, I had a friend at the time who used to mention H.P Lovecraft in conversation like it was a name everyone should know and at the time I had pretended I did, so I think part of me wanted to feel like I wasn’t quite so out of touch or maybe even feel like I hadn’t lied to a friend.

This audiobook was an odd landmark moment for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. This was to be the first audio book I would ever listen to, and probably the only the 9th or 10th book I had ever read in my entire adult life. The reading of books, be it in paper or audio book was something that would change my life immeasurably.

I realised I could dedicate more time than anyone I knew to absorbing information in audio form while doing the mind-numbing daily tasks of a chronically depressed secondary school caretaker. At the time I didn’t know what Audible was, and I listened to recordings of people reading books on places like YouTube and online audiobook libraries with horrific audio quality.

I absorbed Everything, hundreds of books. I blasted thought German fairy tales, and odd old stories, some that I’ve never managed to find again, I learned how to gamble, how to talk and write properly (or certainly better than I used to), how to hypnotise, how to do card tricks, how to scam people and pickpocket. This lead on to reading many books on philosophy, different religions, Zen and love. In these books many mentioned yoga, and as I began to make massive change my life, it became a daily part of who I was, and my healing.

I came out of this period of deep learning someone spiritually different, reincarnated – a now fully realised, or constantly realising version of myself. I am the universe.

This is not arrogance; it is pride. I am the universe, as are you and as are my cats.

Yoga to me has always been deeply personal, something I did alone, just me, my body and my thoughts. My first ever yoga class with other people was in a studio in Keighley in 2022/23 when Caz dragged me along for company, and knowing Caz, because with my company, my yoga practice had disappeared from my life, and she knew I needed it. Yoga to me is peace; time with my sovereign self, egoless, just ‘I’, someone I have come to know very well, in part, thanks to yoga. Yoga is the deepest connection a person can experience with their own body, a hard line to the physical self.

My knowledge on yoga was and is still limited, I know what I learned from different spiritualists, authors and what I gathered from my own personal practice of it over the last 8 years. More recently and much more technically, I learned so much from Caz’s journey into yoga, both what she got form it on a personal and spiritual level and the information she learned and discussed at home while going through her training.

Yoga is and always will be something I practice, whether it’s all the time, or something I default to when times are harder than normal. Yoga will always be with me, and understanding it better and having accreditation to lead a group through practice will only help me evolve. My ultimate goal is happiness and contentment - I am exceptionally happy and my life is one of great contentment. My stretch goals, if I’m lucky enough to continue through life, will only be augmented by further study of yoga, and I choose to do that now before its no longer an option.