Warrior II Pose

Why we make a noble image of ourselves for ourselves

When I was at the cusp of the new millennium, at the height of my music career and nearing the end of my first marriage, also freshly in recovery, I began to study yoga. I’d been fascinated with the discipline ever since my septuagenarian grandmother returned from India and promptly began the practice of standing on her head every morning. I knew there were lessons in yoga I would never find in my lonely attempts to control my body by running six miles a day and trying to imitate Kathy Smith on her workout videotapes.

My meandering path brought me to the school of Ashtanga, and I took a long weekend intensive with the teacher Beryl Bender Birch at Kripalu in 2002, Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. Whenever we arrived at the point in the practice where we took the Warrior II pose, my perennial favorite, she would say, “Make a noble image of yourself for yourself.”

This instruction felt like a powerful spiritual teaching. Of course we need to regularly demonstrate to ourselves the inherent nobility within ourselves. We need to remind ourselves we are gentle warriors, firmly and unshakably on our own side.

The word Noble has some uncomfortable class connotations, but its root is the Proto-Indo-European “gno-” and is cognate with “to know” and “Gnostic.” To be noble was to be well-known of course, but it also means distinguished, splendid, magnificent, worthy of honor.

As many of you know, I broke my right arm on February 1 on the morning I was scheduled to play a show with my full band at the Iron Horse. As I lay moaning on the cold sidewalk, unable to get up by myself, I might've laughed if I hadn't been in so much pain. What exactly was the universe trying to tell me, first with a surgery perilously close to my vocal cords that left me needing to rehab my voice, and now a broken strumming hand? Was this a signal for me to quit the music business at the age of 57 and take on something that requires less of my poor frail body?