Seeing an ugly side of myself I've never witnessed before

So.. the break up finally happened. It was like I planted a landmine for the bf to step on. I gave a suggestion that I didn't want him to take (and didn't expect him to agree to), but surprisingly he did, although not without making some derogatory comment first. That became the straw that broke the camel's back. So I blew up and it was all over.

Never in my life have I ever expected myself to perform this kind of unacceptable manipulative behavior. If anyone ever pulled one of these stunts on me, I would totally break up the relationship or friendship and stay as far away from that crazy asshole as possible. Now I know that crazy bitch secretly lives inside of me and so there's NO escaping ever for me.

They say that one of the red signs that a relationship is not good for you is that it brings out your worst behaviors, that you don't like how you act around that person. I always took it to mean that I can't express myself fully, that I feel like I'm walking on eggshells around that person, that I lower myself by acting like I'm always trying to please that person, which was what was happening during the relationship. I was NOT expecting to become manipulative and put someone in a lose-lose situation. I didn't even know I pull such a move until after the whole situation blew up. I never thought I was capable of that, but I proved myself wrong!

The final act was a truly terrible one. Unacceptable and totally surprising. I really didn't mean for that to happen. I realize I so desperately wanted him to behave a certain way that conforms to my ideal of a good boyfriend (say he misses me and that he wants to see me very soon) that I kept dangling carrots, candies and toys at him, even ones that I didn't actually mean to show him. When he refused to behave like I wished he would, I became frustrated, humiliated,  rejected, depressed, angry, furious, I went insane, I threw it all out at him, showing him the ugliest and craziest side of me. Somehow, insanely, I still secretly wished he would ask me not to end the relationship!

He's been very uncommunicative for a long time, and finally he told me what his deal-breaker was. It totally came out of the blue and made me scratch my head in total confusion. Like... this trait is the deal breaker? Not my manipulation, my bossyness, my insecurity, my clinging, my craziness, my indecisiveness, my unpredictability, ie. the long list of weaknesses I really hate about myself? I mean, obviously he doesn't like any of those traits either, but those somehow were not the deal breakers? It really showed how little I understood him, how utterly incompatible we actually are, but also explained why we stayed together for so long. Basically, his complaint was something that I really didn't think was important. I mean, I tried to work on it a little bit, but now I hear it, seems like I could not nearly achieve the level he wants me to be at. Basically I'm fundamentally not the kind of girl friend he wishes to have. But then again if he had communicated it better earlier I would have tried a lot harder. Don't know if it would have made a difference though. In my head I felt like my requests were totally legit (spend more time together, for him to express more that he loves me and misses me), but to him these demands are probably just as foreign. He does not have any friends who act like that and never in his life has he ever wished to become that kind of guy.

It's been a crazy ride. I don't for one minute regret this relationship, but the ending was so weird (we actually both agreed we still want to remain as friends). If I hadn't ended it, I don't think he would ever initiate the break up. In my head, the relationship should keep on progressing, or it should be cut off. Either you like me and you agree to work with me to make our relation function nicely, or let me go. It wasn't until the final talk where I finally began to understand his logic.  He would have been okay with all my craziness as long he kept our meetings relatively short, with enough alone time spaced in between the meetings. It totally made no sense to me this entire time we were together, because he never communicated what he's been thinking. I guess it wasn't necessary, since he had full control of how often we met. He had the upper hand in the power struggle. I was in the dark and put up with it because I was completely being controlled by my oxytocin (the desire to attach myself to him, spatially/physically and emotionally). But of course he also hasn't been happy either, and was relieved about the break up.

Very luckily, I have a group of girl friends who behaved exactly as I wish my ideal best friends would behave - completely supportive, non-judgemental of me, not asking any harsh questions (eg. "Did you do anything wrong on your part"), and totally on my side, saying all the kind words I wish to hear. I love these ladies to death. I don't know what I did to deserve these friends, and not sure how I could have survived the traumatic emotional roller coaster ride without them.

On the other hand, it also makes me wonder: am I just a total control freak, subconsciously aiming to build a social network of friends, family, lover and work colleagues who would behave as close as possible to a certain ideal I wish them to be? Is this what everybody else does as well, only accepting new people who think and behave the way they expect into their social circles, and try to keep out the ones who behave too far from expectations?

I'd like to think I'm more open minded than that, but I guess when it comes to really close partners/friendship, we would all like them to share some common fundamental values with us, along with some superficial expected behaviors. That's an important lesson I learned from this experience.

Thanks for asking, but I don't feel like talking about my yoga practice with you right now

I never ever thought I'd get to this point, where I don't want to discuss yoga with people (specifically non-yoga practitioners. To my yogi friends: you guys don't apply to this category).

From the amount of yoga videos and yoga articles that I compulsively post on Facebook, most of my friends whom I haven't seen for a long time get the hint that I am slightly obsessed about yoga. When I first started yoga, I couldn't stop talking about it, whether people wanted to hear about yoga or not. Like a zealous religious fanatic, I would shove complementary yoga passes into people's hands and try to get them to come to a yoga class with me. Over time, I learned that most people have strong mental resistance against trying something new. Some people didn't enjoy physical education in high school and concluded that all physical activities suck, period. Others seemed to think that I would be so inconsiderate that I would take them to an advanced yoga class when they are not that active in their day-to-day lives (or maybe they think all yoga movements are too advanced for them). So I stopped mentioning yoga in social situations. However, whenever I meet up with friends, especially the ones who are on Facebook but whom I haven't seen for awhile, they would always casually ask me about my yoga progress. I get questions like "How's it going with you? Are you still doing yoga? (It's only been 2 years) Wow, you must be a yoga master by now"; "So which new poses are you learning lately?";  "Are you going to become a yoga teacher soon? That's not a bad profession, eh? Probably make a good side income."

For awhile I got so tongue-tied that I couldn't even answer them. I blame too many years of grad school for worsening my social skills (which were not so good to begin with). As a total nerd I'm pretty clueless about what people want to hear, since they obviously don't care for yoga. I do admit also I got a little offended by the implications of these questions (which I can't blame them because they honestly don't know much about yoga besides what mainstream media portrays it to be, but it still affected my ability to think straight), so I usually just answered, "Yep, still do it sometimes", and left it at that. I would get a somewhat stunned look and an awkward pause, before people clumsily find another topic to talk about. There's a good chance I have offended them for shutting down an innocently casual conversation-starter like that.

Upon some serious pondering (the only thing that a nerd like me knows to do), I believe that people want me to casually talk about my yoga progress, with a sense of humor, and maybe some gossip, as if I were reporting about my progress in, say, salsa dancing or figure skating: "Oh it's going great! I fell on my butt soooooo many times but I just mastered pirouetting on one foot last week!" "I'm so much more flexible now that before I started yoga. I used to not be able to touch my toes, and now I can almost do a split!" "OMG, there's this one yoga teacher who is super hot! Men who practice yoga have such nice bodies! I go to his class all the time, and he's the only teacher who can get me into a handstand! You should come try his class with me sometime! He has the most sexy voice ever and you'll feel so relaxed in this class!" "My butt is so much perkier now after all the yoga I've been doing. It's super awesome. The yoga inversions help reverse the aging effects that gravity has on a woman's skin and boobs! I feel younger than ever before!"

The above examples have nothing to do with my personal practice, by the way (or maybe some of them do, but I don't really talk like that in real life), but I think these are the type of things people who don't do yoga expect to hear. I'm not sure if they want me to sell yoga to them as a miracle panacea, make self-deprecating jokes about yoga, brag about how many poses I've mastered, demo some fancy asana on the spot, make claims about how close I am in becoming a teacher, or what. Fellow yogis and yoginis, please share your experience with me on this matter.

I guess I personally take (Ashtanga) yoga sort of seriously, even though I haven't been practicing it regularly. I'm not saying it has to be so serious; I'm just in a weird mental state at this moment and just don't feel like going along with what people want by feeding them superficial comments about yoga (I'm 99.5% certain they prefer to hear something short, funny and snazzy rather than how I'm trying to burn through my samskaras with metaphoric/energetic fire generated by breath and postures). Don't get me wrong; I'm not going through post-graduation depression. I'm feeling a sense of peace that I haven't felt for years, as I used to always have my thesis project in the back of my mind at all times. I don't really feel like defending myself or pretend agree with people when they make uncreative assumptions about my vacation plans, career plans, or my yoga practice. I'm aware my social behaviour makes me seem like a total snob, and I'm pissing off some of my friends. Let me be clear: I don't think I'm above other people. I just feel like I need to step off the hamster's wheel of social expectations (how to talk; how to behave; how to proceed through life in a conventional way) for a bit and just be. I'm pretty sure it's only a temporary phase, some sort of cognitive fatigue (societal expectation fatigue?) maybe. Once the phase passes I'll happily get back on the hamster treadmill and conform to social norms again.

Yoga dizziness

When I first started doing yoga, I started feeling funny things in my body that some yoga teachers couldn't explain to me. I went to a doctor; he did some very basic tests and determined I had no postural hypertension, carpal tunnel syndrome, or obvious heart problems. He said yoga puts people's body in weird positions, so sometimes these weird things happen. If I keep practicing, the symptoms might go away. If they don't, then I should stop practicing yoga. That last phrase was kind of unsatisfying. I looked at him quizzically and asked, "Really? I started yoga for health reasons and you're telling me to quit yoga if the symptoms don't go away?" He said, "Why yes! If you decide to go sky diving and find out it hurts your back, wouldn't the best and most obvious action be to stop sky diving?" Then he promptly kicked me out of the room with an annoyed look on his face. Hmm, if sky diving gave me backaches, I would definitely try to figure out why, because sky diving is not an activity known for causing backaches, just like yoga is not known for being a health harming activity, besides physical strains caused by doing the asanas improperly or forcing the body into advanced asanas before it is ready for them, but that's not why I went to see the doctor. So I decided very early on to document these funny feelings because I wanted to figure out the causes of these strange sensations, if and when they will go away, and/or if there are remedies for these symptoms.

Here are the list of "funny feelings" I get from yoga:

1: I would get dizzy from continuous deep breathing.

One teacher said it was because my body wasn't used to breathing so deeply and was going into shock. This is probably true. After 1.5 years of practicing, I actually can't proudly tell you I have significantly improved my breathing overall. I can however tell you I am now capable of noticing how poorly I breath outside of yoga class. I remember going to a voice lesson a couple years ago (before I started yoga) and the teacher told me to observe my breath, and I couldn't do it without stopping breathing. Observing = "consciously taking over control of breathing" at the time. Now I can somewhat observe it while it does its thing and my breathing is pretty shallow and choppy if I don't consciously deepen my breaths. And you can only be conscious of your breaths for so long before your mind wanders off to something else again.

2: At the end of class, during cool down and before savasana, when my teacher would make us sit, meditate and observe our bodies (this was not an Ashtanga class), I would be freaked out that my chest, or my mouth, or a foot, or part of my face would go numb and then feel pins and needles. This is probably related to the nervous system not used to deep breathing (but how would I know when I first started?)

3. I would get dizzy and have brief black outs when getting up from standing forward folds.

My teacher told me to breath deeper, same advice that Sharath gave to Claudia ("and drink more water"). Someone else told me to engage my leg muscles more because too much blood or too little blood in the head both can cause dizziness.

4. After savasana, sometimes my legs would still be shaking as I walked from the classroom to the change room. Recently my teacher told me it was probably because the savasana wasn't long enough and my nervous system hasn't fully recovered yet. This is all very speculative and unscientific but I have no idea who if anyone does research on all these phenomena I mentioned and because it's not health threatening, I doubt researchers would get funding to study them.

When I first documented these things my intention was that they would go away, and then my practice would feel awesome and look beautiful and I would live happily ever after. Or I would get bored of yoga and move onto something else. Unexpectedly, because yoga teachers keeps asking us to be internally aware of our bodies, I have become more and more sensitive to body sensations, so even though I don't black out in class any more, I now sense a million other small aches and weirdness in m body both on and off the mat. The most noticeable observation is that my breathing sucks. I've gotten to the point when I can maintain steady long breathing for about 2 poses + vinyasas, then my attention goes elsewhere until I happen to hear my teacher remind us to focus on our breath (which he probably says every 2 minutes). This tends to happen during sun salutations, janu sirsasanas, marichiyasanas, and first 2 of the final 3 closing poses (definitely not during utpluthih). Everything else I don't remember being able to breath smoothly for long. Off the mat I can now often catch myself holding my breath, or feeling anxious, which happens so much more frequently than I realized before I started doing yoga.

I guess the benefit of yoga is to have the ability to do a mental body scan often during the day, and whenever I feel anxious, to catch myself and start breathing deeply. Also, if I can notice body strains when it happens (e.g. poor posture sitting in front of the computer), I can correct myself before it becomes a big enough problem that I need to go see the doctor.

As for breathing, believe it or not I still feel funny when I breath deeply through the nose (oh I used to mouth breath a lot). Maybe a couple more years of yoga and it'll start to feel more normal?