Evidence

On a particularly playful evening, my Mom started sucking in her belly and showing her rib cage. My older brother, then 16 (making me 8) started becoming all rib cage, all hollow stomach, squatted and haunched. She laughed and swatted and said it was yoga.

She had been one of the leotard-clad women in the 70s teaching her friends yoga in the basement. She was trying to juice and eat vegetarian. She knew she was pregnant with her fourth, me, at age 39, when she craved a cheese steak.

As a girl my parents took me on a trip to California. My Mom and I spent a day in Laguna Beach. Around lunchtime we hunted for a spot to eat. We dipped into a temple and looked at the buffet of ghee-heavy vegetarian food, listened to the droning kirtan, and saw the young white kids wearing saffron robes. My Mom asked the Hare Krishnas where we could get a burger. They giggled nervously and said, “I forgot people still ate cow!”

In college, I needed a part-time job. I wandered around campus to see what I could do. The religious center had an intricate Japanese tea garden. Woven mats. Stones (one duty was to pick leaves from them). I was hired to clean the tea garden.

The summer after first year in college I found a sublet in Brooklyn. I had an internship in Manhattan. My college had given me a stipend that covered some rent and expenses, but not all. I wandered around looking for a job. Randomly, unexpectedly, the health food store in the West Village, Integral Yoga, hired me. The dreadlocked yogi who worked in the bookstore came in to buy his bulk nuts. After classes above, students came down to pick up ingredients for dinner. I was cashier for the yogi's transactions.

My husband and I purchased our first house on a dead-end street across from a park. At the far end of our street there is a Jain Temple. I often run past the creek behind the temple. On the best days, the creek is bright with discarded marigold petals.

Yoga is a question

My relationship with yoga right now is funny and convoluted and for me, very central. I'm sort of having an affair with my practice. I made it secret and private and a bit clandestine so I could keep it sacred. I try to practice 4 mornings a week, doing the most classical and some say dogmatic stuff.

And then I teach sort of the opposite. I teach 6 regular classes a week and they're mainly informed by new conversations in functional movement. We explore patterns of movement, the classical poses deconstructed, and then reconstructed. To the degree that I have one, my goal is to try to make a space where each of us can truly begin to feel and know our body. Yoga teachers, for years, have told students "listen to your body" but the underlying truth is that most of us go to yoga to learn to do just that.

I try to teach a practice that is more about questions and space than answers and dogma. Cause what do I know?

My own body feels anchored by the classical because the practice I'm engaging in doesn't let me escape from my body. And I have a tendency to try to do so. Being placed squarely in my body, with no distraction, is useful for me.

I'm very clear that my students are not me. My students are practicing for a broad range of reasons. As facilitator, my goal is to see them to the best of my ability, keep them safe, and make space for them to explore, know, and steady. I learn a lot watching them. It reminds me that the broad variety of yoga practices (Ashtanga, Iyengar, etc) are generous-- there's an implicit understanding that we live many lives in one lifetime (if we're lucky) and we may seek balance in a plethora of ways. The practice is both a mirror so we can see ourselves and our own needs-- and a balm-- it gives us ways to create balance.

Yoga is not a magic bullet. It's not a one way ticket to zen. It's another means to coming to know ourselves and be intentional with how we are in the world. That's all. And that's everything.

I've positioned myself between a few voices in the yoga world and they're providing me with a really interesting orientation. Whenever I can, I practice with Alex Auder. I understand through her teaching a lot of functional movement patterns. I feel safe and comfortable in her class because she is so unapologetically herself. She's not for everyone and that's the joy-- she's not trying to be. By being herself so thoroughly I have the opportunity to opt in or opt out, and I opt in. I pull that understanding into my own teaching, reminding myself "don't dilute, obscure, or diminish yourself. That can be a distraction too when it's felt by the student. Be fully integrated to actually be able to serve the student."

I read Matthew Remski for his studies of abuse of power in the yoga world. He talks about the subjects and controversies that many yogis avoid. Through his conversations and insights, I start to map some of the pitfalls of power and abuse. I start to figure out how to own my space, make choices that are right for me, and untangle what is yoga and what is nonsense.

I watch videos from Diane Bruni and some of the teachers she's gathered around her in the study of functional movement. Some of it's yoga, some of it's something very different. It's a study of our bodies, feeling, form, and option. It's very organic.

I think about the stories I've heard of why or how yoga was invented. Some say it was whispered to a snake man. Some say the poses developed so we could sit quietly in meditation. Others say the poses developed to flush the digestive tract. Still more say that the poses were attempts to reintegrate into the natural world. As original yogis watched the animals and landscape and felt other than, they decided to imitate what they saw to try to get to its sense of being.

And then somewhere along the line that exploration became dogmatic.

I don't think that was the idea.

I think yoga is questions:

"where are you?"

"what do you feel?"

"how will your body move through the world?"

It's everything and it's enough.