Hide and Seek with the Soul

I've been encouraged to do quite a few things as a college student: To study the second I get back from class, to stick to eating healthy food in the dining halls, and to start drinking now so that I lose interest by the time I'm 21. All quality pieces of advice, but the universal thing that I hear is that this is the age when we're supposed to "find ourselves." I'm not exactly sure how piling on ten million rhetorical analyses will help me find my true self, except that I can, with utmost confidence, say that I'm that kind of person who uses hyperboles as a rhetorical appeal. But most days, I can barely find time to crank out five essays; what am I supposed to do, put "find soul" on my to do list? Let me just do that between breakfast and lunch. It'll be a fine time.
At least I've discovered that after much denial, and wondering if I do yoga just to have nice abs, I really am a  yoga geek. In the midst of "we are!" and football jerseys, I'm the girl who's omm-ing in the background, and talking about the vibrant shakti of this campus. Any sane person would say there's a vibrant energy of Penn State Pride. When you're bitten by the yoga bug, you don't just start putting your legs behind your head in between (or during) homework. You start using freaky vocabulary that people wonder if you've just made up. I may be creative, but right now my brain is way too exhausted to pull Sri Shambhavananda yogi out at the top of my head. Especially when said head is upside down, leaning against a wall.
I've been pining for yoga ever since I started college, because let's face it, spending twenty minutes on the mat in your dorm isn't the same as going to an actual yoga class, no matter how much you chant next to the drunken basketball game outside your window.
 Throughout the time I'd normally be stretching and lunging, I've been able to reflect more on how many places encourage this search for the soul. Shoshoni was also about finding yourself, but with much less of the bam-factor that a college campus would. At an ashram, you find yourself by scrubbing floors, and video chatting with people who have meditated for a hundred years. You learn by persisting. In college, you learn by scrubbing the alcohol smell off in a shower the size of a cardboard box, video chatting with people you're just met off of Pottermore, and experimenting. Both Shoshoni and Penn State succeed in the final result of its participators realizing they know absolutely nothing, and are just a tiny speck in the sea of yogis and frightened freshmen alike. It's funny how two completely different atmospheres can have the same ultimate goal. I'll let you know when my "true self" decides to stop hiding in between a massive pile of textbooks and yoga mats.

Namaste.