Abandon: The Bitter Months and Survival Mode

Some notes on kapha season (now through march)

When we first learned that my niece had cancer, the doctor said she would survive but this year would be hell. We’d lose our ability to trust life. In order to get through it, she said, think of something in the future. Think of her wedding day. Think of her graduating from college. Think of her as a healthy, happy adult.

I think oncologists are practical magicians. Holy scientists. They are death ministers, life breathers. They spend what most of us think of as mundane days, just ordinary nine to fives, being real with the question of lives coming and going. I took solace from her words then - even if they did knock a hole through my heart - and I’ve continued to go back to what she said whenever suffering comes up in the news, in a student’s life, or in the forecast.

We need to act on faith.

We’re not trying to root it out or bring to light right now. We’re not even trying to plant the seeds. Those are the ministries of another season. If anything, we’re simply trying to trust that it is there. This is a season of protecting. Strength, endurance, and loyalty are the boons of this season. Out of balance the same things become despair, lethargy, and waves of bitterness.

I’m coming to realize abandonment plays an incredible role in people’s lives. Probably my own. Certainly, the collective. The voice of scarcity haunts us, from women who are afraid of not being loved to men who are afraid of losing face to privilege afraid social change is a direct and personal threat.

I’ve been deep in developmental psychology recently. I’m studying the language for the ways we are first, as infants, a whole and unified universe. Then, as toddlers and children, we find ourselves suddenly independent, or confusingly both independent and dependent, and in a sense severed. In our journey from toddlerhood to young adult, we’re more often told no than we are loved unconditionally. Social regulation, gendered roles, and delaying impulses and gratification make chaos of our once tidy little bubbles. I’m developing words for how pivotal experience is, how important relationships are, to the development of a sense of self.

Few of us have the equation of autonomy and relationship down well. Most of us have been abandoned, in some very tender ways, at key points in our lives. Learning to not abandon ourselves - here and now - is slippery, icy work.

This is the uncanny bit. It shows up in our bodies. It lives in our nerves. It shows up in our habits, and our belief structures. We project clinginess to things or job security. We look for approval in other people’s faces. We brace ourselves with relationship patterns and hide ourselves in postures. It’s in our spending, our eating, where we feel confidant and what kinds of things we say we ‘don’t have time for’. I am fascinated by the heart rate gone up, the tendency to freeze, the way we keep struggling with the same things, decade after decade.

It can be scary. It involves staying in your body when someone pisses you off or when you make a bid at intimacy. It involves possible rejection and developing some inner reserve. Or faith.

But being able to recognize our inner voice of scarcity - or maybe it’s a visceral shutdown, a need to fix, a busyness that gives the illusion of control, a pattern of partnering- allows us to choose. It grants us an opening. Keeping ourselves open is both the point and the hard part.

Developing a trust in our autonomy is one of the essential principles of practice. Oddly, that trust is quite intimate with a knowledge of our mortality and the things we can’t control. You can’t separate the two. Autonomy without condition is narcissism. The conditions with no sense of personal power makes us victims. But the balance is a rich combination.

We learn to say no to what doesn’t work. We learn to stay present and self regulate. We learn the role people pleasing or avoidance plays in our psyche. We learn there is a subtle difference between life threatening fear and out of our comfort zone fear. We learn there is a subtle difference between body signals shouting no and body signals saying yes, but I’m scared. We come to know the fine distinction between dramatic and important, the merely flashy and the actually meaningful. We learn to navigate all of this like an ocean - I mean a vast, swollen, depthful ocean - and we mostly do it in the dark.

Here’s some help:

Exercise

Occasionally I find myself talking with health professionals about my work in an informal setting. Almost invariably it becomes a conversation about the health benefits of exercise and how to motivate people. It’s just fact: most illness is lifestyle illness, and regular exercise has a greater impact on mental health than mood stabilizers or supplements.

But it doesn’t come in a pill. You have to actually do it.

Because the days are short and the weather is harsh, we tend to slide into couch mode all winter long. The governing energy of kapha is made of earth and water. If we just let kapha build in the next few months, it leads to gunk, weight gain, and a heavy or ruminative frame of mind. The blending of the earth and water elements creates the qualities of heavy, slow, and stable. Kept in balance, this leads directly to great strength and endurance.

But balance is hard. The difficulty of this time of year is of course motivation. Let alone all that dark, and the fact that we tend to feel a bit heavy in the gut and less than healthy in our lungs. Learn that motivation comes during the exercise, not before. Also learn that variety is quite literally the spice of kapha’s life; routine leads to a rut. It gets very easy to skip a day. And then two. And then more days than not.

For the next few months, have three or four exercise options on hand rather than one (one routine or practice is better for our more frenetic, scattered, autumal and vata characters).

10 minutes a day is enough, with a longer or more intense work out happening once a week or so. Cardio and aerobic exercises are kinda the goal. I say that knowing those words sound horrible to most of us, unless we are running or gym addicts. It isn’t so bad. And it’s completely relative: cardio means one thing to a 25 year old and another to a 60 year old. Dance for two songs. Get a jump rope (I’m totally serious). Get on the elliptical or hop on a trampoline. Once a week, join a Zumba class or something. A dance class would have the added benefit of play and relating, rather than isolating and ruminating as we’re wont to do just about now.

While it isn’t always possible, exercising during the kapha time of day (6-10 am ish), helps clear low mood, stimulate lymphatic and digestive systems, and encourages stable energy throughout the day.

Get outside

Studies on sunlight and nature’s effects on mood are similar to those on exercise. We know it works; we just have a hard time making it a priority. Every year I become more aware of how hard winter is personally and how real Seasonal Affective Disorder is generally. I bumped into a friend the other day and asked how she was. “It’s winter,” she said; “everybody gets depressed”.

A student and I talked of the winters of childhood. It seems so long ago as to be mythic, and so very different as to be almost unbelievable. It would be frigid and mid-storm but we’d bundle up in snow-suits and waddle our way into the yard. We’d be out there a long time, despite snot faucets and cheeks red as berries. Thumbless in our mittens, starfished in our snowsuits, we’d roll and fall and climb and sit right there in the snow. I remembered the burn in hands and feet after coming back inside, the battle of mittens and snow pants and hats sliding over your eyes, the urgency of getting out of the layers in time to pee. But somehow none of this mattered. We still played.

Grown ups have a much harder time with the idea of play.

(There are actually deep Ayurvedic reasons for this, youth is different than maturity. It IS harder for adults, let alone the aged, to handle the weather).

Yesterday the sharpness of the sun surprised me after days and days of bleak sky. It was misleading. The temperature had plummeted. But teaching a class I cracked open all the blinds to let some of that gold and rarified light in. After teaching, I laid in the light like a cat.

Do what you can. One of the best ways to work out is in nature, not in artificial environments. But even if you can’t exercise outside, do try to get outside every day. Use your lunch break for a walk, or at least get out and about rather than sitting at your desk. Take advantage of the weekends or more temperate days to go for a hike or get out with the kids for some sledding. Get to know some woods or a local park - the changes day to day will keep you alive. We are so technology driven that our technology and society have supplanted our relationship to the environment. Getting back to nature has a profound effect on our well-being. Remember you are nature, so this ultimately helps connect you to yourself. Keep the earbuds out. Set the smartphone aside. Don’t zone out when you work out; check in. Listen to the air, watch the birds, study the trees.

Sing

Yoga teachers say the damndest things. So I’m just going to go with it.

Sing, out loud, while you are driving or in the shower or doing housework. Again, there is a lot of science supporting the mood elevating quality of music, specifically singing out loud.

Do it every day for a week.

Then, start to take up the wild and mysterious practice of chant. (join me for an intensive or online if you want to start exploring this. It’s so central to the tradition. And it’s so under taught.)

Or just stick with singing. Join a choir. Go to church. See live music.

Care: loofah, body scrubs, Neti

Our skin tends toward dull right now. The body in general tends toward water retention. It’s all a little moist and cool.

Before or during bathing, try dry rubbing your skin in vigorous, long strokes toward the heart with special silk gloves, a loofah, or just your hands. I’m a fan of the latter, but I tend to use a body scrub. My skin tickles, pinks, and recirculates. The dead falls away. This is a circulation and immune system superpower. In less than two minutes in the shower, my body feels like it spent a day at the spa with facials and massages. Cracked heels and ashy arms and cold fingers go away.

Anything you put on your body should be edible. If you can’t put it in your mouth, you probably shouldn’t put it on your skin.

Fortunately, this also means you have an apothecary in your kitchen.

We want to shake things up and get kapha energized; this scrub uses sea salt as an exfoliant. Tulsi/Holy Basil promotes lightness in the body. Lemon essential oil is also light and uplifting. Rosemary and sage are stimulating herbs and help with congestion of the lungs and sinuses. This scrub is light on the oil, since kapha is already oily enough.

You can make a scrub out of anything: beans, flours, flowers, spices and herbs. This one is light on the oil because the season is already heavy and oily.

• 1 cup salt

• 2 tbsp dried sage

• 2 tbsp dried tulsi

• 2 tbsp dried rosemary

• ½ cup safflower or sunflower oil

• 10 drops lemon essential oil

In a spice grinder or food processor, blend the dried herbs into a fine powder. Combine the herbs with the salt and add the safflower oil. Mix well and add the essential oil. Store in an air-tight jar for up to 3 months.

Spice: Pepper

Native only to the tropic, evergreen forest of Kerala, pepper today is grown in Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brazil. Pepper is s wild jungle bloom, an actual flower, one of the original treasures moved along the spice trails of antiquity. Hippocrates included it in his medicine chest.

Attila the Hun and the Visigoths included pepper as part of the ransom fee after sacking Rome. Medieval French used the saying ‘as dear as pepper’ in their trade, and the ability to cook with pepper was a definate status symbol in the Middle Ages. Dockworkers of the 16th century were subjected to a dress code that demanded clothing without pockets or cuffs to prevent stealing peppercorns. Pepper could be used to pay rent and was often included in the dowry of a bride. The Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama navigated a trade route to India that led ships around the Cape of Good Hope, challenging Arab control of the spice trade that went back to 1000 B.C. Christopher Columbus set sail looking for gold and pepper. Pepper made Salem, Massachusetts, the richest port in colonial America.

As colonialism and trade routes spread, pepper at one point accounted for 70 percent of the spice trade. Increased availability resulted in an unwillingness to pay the high cost, and regional varieties as well as ease of access drove prices down. Not, however, before pepper had influenced cuisine across the world.

Although there are different varieties of peppercorns, they are all the same pepper fruit picked at different stages of maturity. Pepper stimulates the digestive fire, improves circulation, stimulates the appetite, and flushes toxicity. It is antioxidant and antibacterial. White peppercorns hold a heat like the white parts of flame, green peppercorns hold a more subtle tang, and black peppercorn adds sharpness and pungency. Pepper is incredibly versatile and can enhance any savory dish. It is best freshly ground and added right before the meal. Pepper can also change the qualities of dessert; the pungency can actually amplify the sweet and add an unconventional flavor profile. Whenever your dessert features fruits, lemon, lime, or chocolate, give it a grind. It sharpens sweet. It accentuates tart.

Late winter and early, early spring are a great time to explore quintessentially spicey, historically bold blends such as India’s garam masala, ras el hanout from Morocco, the quatre épices of France and all the varietals of Cajun and jerk blends in the Americas.

Drink: Ginger

Ginger is the fire-keeper.

Precious and central to cuisines the world over, ginger has also been important in medicine cabinents and beauty regimes down through the ages. Indeed there is something lofty and reverential, something of the whispered divine here. Ayurvedic texts call it ‘the universal medicine’ and ‘the most sattvic of spices’, which is no small endorsement given the terseness and moderation of traditional texts. Ginger shows up in the Koran, in Confucius, in middle eastern proverbs, and in Shakespeare. In a sense, ginger is a spiritual herb. It’s referred to with respect. Ginger is linked to prosperity and is sometimes considered to be a gift to humanity from a higher power.

Sattva is any thing - emotion, word, action, scent or spice - infused with lightness, clarity, intelligence, compassion, and wisdom. Those are useful qualities.

It’s close relationship to our internal fire (agni) is where the vaunted benefits of ginger originate. But its role as fire-keeper spark off into a really stunning variety of health benefits. From stimulating digestion it will prevent build-up and burn through accumulated build-up (Ama). As a side effect, joints stay comfortable. Traditional formulas for joint pain all include ginger. Also a side effect of improved digestion, we are better able to absorb and assimilate nutrients and the post-digestion process will be less burby, burny, gassy and bloated. Peak agni is also related to strong immunity, which means reliable resilience, stable energy levels, improved strength, joy, and vitality. Finally, ginger is related to the lungs and lymphatic system. It supports healthy expectoration and breathing. It keeps vata and kapha imbalances - both of which commonly show up in the chest and throat area - at bay. Being sattvic, ginger is tri-doshic, so even a person with a lot of pitta can handle ginger. But of course it’s all about moderation and context. I can use myself as an example: I am predominately pitta. Most of the time, tomato and citrus and ginger are irritating to me. But January-March, they are wildly appealing, pretty freaking satisfying, and pique my interest.

Peel (use the tip of a spoon) a knuckle of ginger and rough chop it. Boil in a small pot of water and let steep for another ten or fifteen minutes. Sip throughout the day.

Or just get some ginger tea.

Chip Away: small things matter, big things overwhelm

I was advising someone to stop thinking of writing ‘her book’ and start thinking of fifteen minute time slots. I’m not making that up: it’s a writing technique I’ve been taught and retaught in many different contexts. And it’s something that personally surprises me with it’s efficacy, whenever I remember to actually do it.

The human mind tends to think in big pictures and end results. This leads directly to procrastination, perfectionism, and deflated motivation. We’ll wait around forever for the will power to do the things we dream of, precisely because it isn’t will power that gets such things done. It’s surrender.

I see it with things like meditation and exercise and learning all of the time: people talk and talk about what they want or intend to do, but months go by and nothing happens.

Small steps, several times a week, is more effective than ‘someday’.

This applies to social change, personal savings, advanced degrees and intimate relationships. I think it applies to asana practice, learning new skills, and marriages.

Small things matter. Big things overwhelm.

Eat: Citrus

Nature provides. As we’re smack in the middle of cold, bleak winter, citrus season is in full swing.

This is helpful, as we often need to provide our own sunshine right about now. Ayurveda sees the whole process of ‘food’ as an esthetic, communal, ritual one. That is, you can’t separate a food’s health benefits from its context. The color, the preparation, the mood of the cook and the look of the plate are all more valuable - health wise - than anything so flat as ‘nutritional content’.

Simply walking through the produce aisle in the grocery store, lifting a grapefruit to your nose, noticing the sharpness of diffused moisture (“squirt” is it exactly) as your thumbs first break into the peel can give you a sense of what I mean.

There is a liveliness to citrus that is completely salvific on a cold winter afternoon. Just the names starts to juice the imagination, if not the salivary glands: rangpur, pomelo, tangelo, blood orange, ruby red. There is something to the vibrancy of citrus color and invigorating scent of citrus that activates the sluggish, brown washed winter mind. Their sour activates digestion. Citrus warms the body internally. All this can be as real and felt as a good sunset.

Fruit in general is energizing but heavy (sugar, sugar). This is why Ayurveda generally recommends that they be eaten alone (spiced or salted or peppered still counts as alone. But banana splits are different than peppered peaches). Again, nature provides: the pith of citrus balances sweet with some bitter. Bitter is detoxifying. Eating citrus with some membrane retained preserves the natural balance of nutrients - sweet combined with sour and bitter. Orange or grapefruit juice, by contrast, reduces fiber content and the bitter, detoxifying element as it removes all the pith. Juice also increases the serving portion (and sugar content) from one piece of fruit to perhaps three or four. This is why we should juice our vegetables but eat our fruits (generally. There is nothing wrong with a glass of oj. Just don’t live on juice).

Grapefruit chutney: (use all late winter long).

1 ruby red grapefruit, peeled, sectioned like an orange with some pith retained, then cut or torn into small pieces
1/2 red pepper, diced 
1 small jalapeno, diced 
1 T fresh ginger, grated 
1/4 cup mint leaves, thinly sliced 
1/4 cup cilantro, chopped 
1 Tbs olive oil 
1 Tbs apple cider vinegar 
salt and pepper to taste

Put it all in a bowl and let marinate for 40 minutes. Eat with an avocado, rice or dal, or just eat it with a spoon. Put the leftovers in a jar and use as a digestif (I eat a teaspoon or two of my chutneys as I prepare meals or with the meal itself. They are a simple way to ‘balance’ meals and improve our digestive capacity).

Spice your citrus

Try cut grapefruit with cinnamon, cardamom, and a drizzle of honey.

Or cut various citrus into finger food: circles, triangles, half moons. Display prettily, toss with a tiny teaspoon of rosewater (optional), sprinkle with mineral rich salt, rosemary, and pepper. The prettiness, the scent, the spice are all going to counter midwinter bleh. The scent lingers on your fingers. It’s a perfect thing to set out when the family is gathered or for a social event, or simply to have on your desk for snacking. Details matter.

Inspire and find solace

Those things that allow us to lay our weariness down are beneficial when times are dark. Don’t take this lightly.

Weeping and bowing can be baptismal. Just laying there and listening can be communion. Having something to look up to and fall back on saves lives.

Use your time on the mat as sacred time. Connect to a teacher or the path with an invocation or chant before you start. Pray. Call together a consortium of angels, saints, mentors and spiritual leaders. Keep them alive in your life. Light a candle for a personal hero or an ancestor. Talk to archetypes and myths in your journal, your art, or your prayers. Have a mala or an icon or an altar but keep it alive, don’t just do it symbolically. If traditional religions have any personal relevance for you, lean in. If they leave you cold or angry, open up to reverence, awe, and things being beyond your will. If you can, let someone else take you to their spiritual places and be deeply appreciative, not all appropriative and belittling. If you’re going to burn sage, you better have some real respect for and relationship with natives. If you’re doing asana, honor the tradition implicit at it’s roots.

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The final moon: sloth, poverty, sorrow, ugliness and the crow

The cold has come. And it is bitter, bitter.

I felt myself tapping heart lines in classes this week - aiming at the hard edges and addressing the bitter frailty. I was trying to soften our way into something more central, more vulnerable surely but also more sweet. I tried to address the things we don’t even know we’re doing: the posturing, the bracing, the gripping. The burial of grief and the performance of okayness. The stickiness of holidays and the grunt of winter.

We’re at the dark point of the nights, the vulnerable phase of the moon, the harsh season of the year. Tonight is the new moon, the last lunation of the year, and one called ‘dreadful’ in the oldest books.

According to sidereal astrology, we are in Scorpio. Deep, emotive, passionate, intuitive, mysterious, perceptive and hell or high water determined. Tip this out of balance and you have jealous, manipulative, prone to lashing out and struggling, mightily struggling, with concepts like forgiveness. All of those are shorthand, of course, for insecurity.

It’s a long, painful route to refined self-respect and legitimate self esteem.

Long, long ago when the demigods churned the primitive milk of the world, the milk’s froth produced a poison, halahala. This poison then gave birth to a woman named Jyestha. She was ugly. She was sad. She was diseased and full of sloth. Crows seemed to like her. No one else did.

This is all supposed to be a metaphor: as we churn the milk of our consciousness in contemplative practices, the first thing that comes up is suffering and pain. Sloth, poverty, sorrow. Mortality and crows. Hags. Poison. Scorpions.

Later, Lakshmi was born from the same churning process. Lakshmi is a much more familiar deva. Goddess of beauty, prosperity, and wealth. She is all auspiciousness, material comfort, perfect woman and domestic bliss. Immediately Lakshmi became the perfect wife while her older sister was shunned. Lakshmi cajoled Dussha into marrying her older sister, but he soon abandoned her. Lakshmi then moved her sister into the stars where she could live forever. She also took a vow. She swore she would never reside where poverty, grief, ugliness, the sorrows of the world are dishonored and outcast.

I suppose we must reckon with our hags if we want the rosy glow and fleshy comfort of wellbeing. I suppose it’s an open question whether we honor poverty, grief, ugliness and sorrow. I have a lot of questions about how one actually does that.

Jyestha is the imperfect woman. The unlovely. It’s rumored that Jysetha was respected in an earlier age, but today even to look at her image causes fear and is considered taboo. She is called Inauspicious and unlucky. I don’t know what this says of our modernity. Or rather I do, but prefer not to go into it.

She will go through a process - our we in her will - in the upcoming cold moons to an ugly woman who doesn’t care that she is ugly, who walks with pride and could care less. Or we won’t and we go through the cycle all over again.

Interestingly, Jyestha also means ‘expert’ and the older goddess was once given the deference of the original wife, the eldest woman of a family. She is self-respect and detachment from worldly things or relational measures of success and accomplishment. She stands alone and her aloneness can more perfectly see the unfolding cycles of life and death than anyone who is superficially ‘happy’ could.

It is hard to reckon that kind of self-respect. But fully apropos to the ending of a year

Picasso. Woman with a crow.

Scorpio is a time of deep metaphysics and emotions, inward turbulence, waters and drowning. There is a spiritual courage and a fight. All this is lovely, noble, the good work. The difficulty is always in recognizing our insecurities. Emotion and drive comes to fruition if we realize the battle is a depth one, not necessarily something to be argued out in relationship or at family gatherings. The deepest and most perplexing places are not marriage, social gatherings, or our investments; the depth of this stuff originates and spins in the murkiness of our own hearts.  

This may seem heavy. As oldest triggers are triggered we may feel anxious or depressed. It’s okay. The transformative potential of this dark moon is considerable.  This last dark moon is a portal to the secret and forgotten worlds of our hearts and to the broken hearts of our ancestors. It’s no small thing to face inner weakness with inner strength.

There is another story associated with this area of the sky. A dragon tried to steal the Ganges, which means all the waters of the earth. Indra dove down into the serpent’s belly, sacrificing himself. He cut through the belly of the serpent and returned the waters to the earth. When you read water, think emotion. To swallow them all, to steal them from the stage of the earth where we play ourselves out, is actually a pretty apt metaphor for how many of us live our lives. What would it really, really mean, to return the waters to the earth next spring?

The challenge of course is balance - to somehow let our dark emerge to be transformed in the fire of wisdom but not lose ourselves in the process. Suppression won’t help. But letting our inner bile contaminate everything around us doesn’t help either. Silence, carved out space for retreat and healing, finding some ways to really just be with yourself will all help. Of course they are all hard things to do this time of year.

All the more reason to be conscientious about them.

We might have uncanny insights into the source of insecurities, jealousy, and negative beliefs currently playing themselves out in our relationships, given all these holy days and dark nights and triggered triggers. This can feel raw, like we’ve been caught naked or called out. And as we tend to react to core feelings at the level of our development, not necessarily our real age, inner child shit can be outright needy. Jyestha can empower aspects of ourselves that we may have silenced or shamed. I mean in ways no outside other possibly could.
 
Try to take it easy on yourself and others.  Be patient.  Open your heart and allow space for healing. You have the right to everything you feel. The unruly and angry wisdom of the ancient goddesses has power. Rather than fall into drama and power plays, to be overwhelmed by the sadness and the poverty, try to find self respect in the face of imperfect femininity. We can hone our expertise and clarify our reality as the year comes to an end.

Or we can stay on the surface and be overwhelmed.

Try to find some space for self respect.

The hundred syllable vajrasattva mantra

short hand from this weekend’s teaching, and a way to practice the mantra going forward. If you like this work, join the art of self care online in January or spend some face time with me in an intensive.

All healing is a listening. A zen teacher asked, does listening stop when the bell falls silent?

When you listen, really listen, to anything at all you’ll hear its wisdom. The bird’s wing, a snowflake as it dances to pavement, the rustle of pages, the sound of breath. When you listen, really listen, any given thing can either draw you back down the same old dark pathways of your life or break open the way forward.

Greed, anger, and stupidity are morality, compassion, and wisdom. It’s a matter of how you use them.

Thus: all listening is -or possibly could be- a listening for one’s own heart.

As the poet has it:

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life. -Derek Walcott

Listen to the body and you’ll find old, twisted patterns of loss or insecurity, deep belief structures, and strange, silent places that are potent as unopened doors.

A long, long time ago a student asked his teacher how to practice. That is, the student already knew, but he was still unsure. He’d been given the teachings, the techniques, the definitions. He’d already been practicing for a very long time. But he still didn’t really understand what to do with himself. He was very much like us, this student.

This story is told in the Diamond sutra, which is composed of 32 chapters. The book itself is a diamond in its many facets, its brilliance, its ability to cut through our illusions. But the book is also a question about bodies, and a description of the teacher’s body, and a reflection on emptiness and how to transform ordinary days into esoteric ones. It’s a treatise on how to turn our own bodies into the teacher’s body. How to be a great being.

Its said that after many lifetimes - and we’ve all lived so many, many lifetimes - the buddha eventually discovered this. This thisness. His body was marked with this knowing in 32 different ways. And so, the teaching is the teacher’s body. But it’s also our own body. Its an empty body, and no mind. Being no mind, a space arises out of it for compassion.

The story begins ‘thus’, but thus can mean so many things. Does it mean ‘like this’ (and go on to the details of the story, the lineage, the history) or does it mean ‘just so’, as a musician can strike a note with a particular nuance, as a painter leans back from her work after just one stroke, as the body of the beloved tilts her neck or our own necks veers toward the lover, just so. Just: the snow fell all the time we were practicing. So: there was no outside, and we were separate from everything out there. Change Wei-nung says: “when people believe something, they say, ‘it is thus’. When they don’t believe something, they say, ‘it is not thus’. Belief, faith, marks the beginning of all practice. It is the first gate on the path.” That we show up is everything. And: from the very beginning, we have everything we could possibly need.

The whole body of the diamond sutra is a reiteration of what happens in the first chapter. It is a description of the buddha. A portrait of his body. It starts with a bowl (charity), a robe (morality), going into the world (shanti/peace/forebearance), and a meal (energy, virya). It leads to contemplation (dharana).

Are you done eating?, a zen master asked. yes, said the student. Then wash your bowl, the zen teacher said. Do everything completely, perfectly. Do just one thing at a time, I told my students. Three years later, a student came back to me and said it’s so hard.

In the second chapter of the diamond text, one of the oldest students asks the buddha a question. How are we supposed to be? I mean, how are we supposed to live? What should we say? Where should we dwell (oh we have such dwelling, ruminating, possessive hearts). What should we rely on? and what should we do about our problems?

This isn’t in the text, but was something I’ve learned about the book:

The buddha’s dear friend Ananda asked the buddha as he died, “Tathagata, how shall we carry on the teaching?” The buddha said “Thus” (see above, for thus ambiguity).

Ananda asked, “but we’ve been living with you all these last decades. Where should we live when you are gone?” The buddha answered, “live in the teachings”.

Ananda asked again, “but what shall we practice without you to teach us?” The buddha said: “Walk like the wind, stand like a pine, sit like a bell, lie like a bow.”

“But teacher, dear one, friend of my heart”, Ananda said, “what shall we do about the monks who misbehave?” Which is really not about other monks, or other people generally. Our questions never are. Not really. Ananda was really asking, “what shall we do about our problems?” “Oh that.” the Buddha said. “Ignore them. They’ll go away.”

When the book was originally written, it was said to be thousands and thousands of lines long. Then they wrote a shorter one. And a shorter one still. Eventually, they wrote a version of just three hundred lines. Hearing one line of it in passing, the fitth patriarch achieved enlightenment. While translating to Chinese, an abbot noticed that the peach tree blossomed six times in one year. And all the flower spirits, all the tree and animal spirits, blessed the monastery.

There is a 100 syllable version, taught as a chant. It first calls on the diamond being, which is a manifestation of our own innate purity, which is to say the first line is a cry expressing the way we lose sight of our own true nature.

The second line asks that the diamond being be seen. That he arrive. Which is really a way of saying may we show up for ourselves.

Then the lines get progressively intimate: bhavagan is called on to support and be firm with us, then to nourish us as a spiritual friend rather than a teacher, and finally to love us passionately.

Later lines ask that we accomplish, thusly, all that we do. It asks for effective actions, rather than useless life. It asks that our minds be pure in all that we do.

Then the chant laughs as we realize wisdom.

Then the lines call on the heart of all the buddhas - because when ever any one, in any age, has a moment of insight the diamond being will answer back. With a knowing. It would be nice, of course, if that knowing arrived in a text message: relentlessly cultivate generosity, compassion, and wisdom (emoji) eliminate greed, anger, and stupidity (emoji), Whenever we cry out from the heart we are seen by the ancestors. Being seen is important. For very young children, not being seen is equivalent to not being loved. All psychological issues are relationship issues. We heal in connection, communion, and intimacy.

Be the diamond that cuts through illusion. Preserve (says the chant) the great bond of being which asserts the perfection of our character will show up when we begin to work on our character.

Fearless bodhisattvas, be of radical character.

Yoga Alliance is beside the point.

Yesterday I had a conversation with J. Brown.

He asked how I was and I paused. I’m not sure he caught this. It was slight, so there’s no reason why he should have. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe there are always pauses, yawnings open, cliffs in the act of conversation.

My pause had politics in it, and my niece’s cancer. It wasn’t a dark pause, exactly. In fact I wanted to laugh. ‘How are you?’ just felt like a terribly loaded question.

Then J. asked where I was, and I said Minneapolis, and we moved on. We talked about Yoga Alliance, yoga teaching, humanity.

It’s hard not to be pessimistic. Hard to be hopeful. But I want to be.

There’s also a pause when conversations end. The voices disappear but a space remains, a slight but tangible hollow in the room. We can, often do, simply ignore them. But sometimes we go into them, into or under as it were, following if we can, their influence. I choose to fall into this one. It had faces in it, memories, pull. At first I thought it had a lot of pressure in it. But it was finer than that, not exactly hard as pressure is expected to be. This space had not pressure but pressure’s release.

Yoga Alliance is beside the point. Yoga Alliance is irrelevant.

YA in no way reflects the work I do, nor the wisdom - if I dare call it that, experience perhaps a better word, knuckled knowing, street cred, a measure of years, a thin but true line - I’ve come into along the way. I want to say life changing but I do not mean my life, I mean others; the immeasurable but predictable way in which I can watch lives open like ink spilled into water and what that in turn has done to my own heart, let alone understanding. I do not mean that my life has changed, though it has, but that is consequent not precedent, effect not cause. My hands are invisibly ink stained.

When I fall into pauses I alternate between laundry, writing, and floor sweeping. But these are just background, just a stage. For anything to happen, one needs to set the stage. I have a white pine to look at, so I do, between sweepings. I end up with very clean floors. This has nothing to do with tidiness of character.

I wrote memories. I took down names. I tried to render the mere facts of passing time to some kind of narrative. Or perhaps question. A question of whether this is ever really possible, or true:

Is there, when all is said and done, any such thing as hope? Do things ever pass out of mere happening to actual importance? What does anything mean, in the wider span of time? Mere happening isn’t enough; the bald having of experience is not the understanding of experience. Data does not necessarily become wisdom. Teacher training, for example, Yoga Alliance and its model of hours, is completely beside the point, hardly registers as a prelude. You come out knowing the piece of paper represents humility, not competence, and either you accept the humility and keep going though you don’t know what it is you’re looking for, keep asking though you don’t know the implications of the questions, or the paper isn’t anything at all and you go on with your life. It’s just a piece of paper.

I personally kept going, kept asking.

The narrative, the thread if there is one, is nothing but a long string of failures. And yet I can pull meaning out of it. Let me explain.

I went to training and realized training wasn’t an end but a beginning. I had to teach. 200 hours was not the thing, there was more.

So I taught, and I started a years and years long practice of astanga and Iyengar. This is what you’d find if you went looking for ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ in the 2000s. Which lead to an interesting paradox: the things I taught were not the same things I practiced. I recognized that the extremity of the astanga, the rules of Iyengar, weren’t appropriate for most studio classes, and most of the community based yoga I taught was more about exploring movement and agency than asana.

I moved away from the forms of astanga and Iyengar just as I moved away from yoga studios. I realized what I wanted wasn’t actually the practices themselves, but something more subtle. Something more psychological. I wouldn’t dare say religious, but it stunk of god.

So I started to look for a teacher. And proof, something I could understand to be real of the body and feel to be verifiable in the mind. Something better than standard.

I mean an actual teacher who could explain not just the postures or the traditions or the chants, but the reason. The spirit. The truth. I started to wander away from yoga, pure and simple, into zendos and mindfulness. I spent a lot of time wandering around in the New Mexico desert, studying with Tias Little and Vasant Lad’s Ayurveda school. Mostly I was wandering. Mostly I was torn, and frustrated, and lost.

By then I’d opened a studio and was trying to bridge the gap between the physical work outs people came looking for and the advocacy and community I knew to be the actual guts. This worked, more or less. And at the same time it didn’t. It was a brilliant experiment. A lovely space. A precious moment or culmination of what I’d learned so far and this-can’t-keep-itself-afire-much-longer. I kept wandering off into the New Mexico desert, and spent increasing amounts of time working with Michael Stone. Michael and I talked of poems, of insanity, of social justice. We planned a ceremony for my buddhist vows, over the new year, in the snow.

The plan fell through because my dog died. I didn’t go to New York to meet with Michael. I stayed home.

Later, he laughed at me. He always laughed. That seemed to be the gist of his teaching.

I don’t think you should do this after all, he said. I don’t think you are a buddhist. He pointed to my continued obsession with yoga, with the yogic texts, with the body. You’re not a buddhist, he said; you’re a yogi. Go back home.

So I did. I went back to teaching, and back wandering around in the desert, back to reading neuroscience and the Upanishads.

Then Iyengar died, and my lostness became a kind of steady moan. I realized the lineages were dying. I felt alone.

There is a space, a part of the yoga story, that has to do with absence. Theo Wildcroft speaks elegantly of post-lineage yoga. Most yoga today doesn’t refer to or seem to need anything like patrimony. But I think we’re at where we’re at as a culture, as a country, largely because we’ve never really admitted or accepted the daunting weight of the patrimony we do in fact have. Yoga is alive and changing, and we’re creating it as we go along. But that doesn’t speak to the whole story. If we don’t point to where our practices come from - or think we have any responsibility to the community - we’re negligent. Tias used to say if a teacher can’t talk about his lineage, the teaching is suspect. Which is not to say authority or credibility comes from a lineage or a guru, per se.

But our credibility and our authority don’t come independently, either.

Not exactly.

Then one day Leslie Kaminoff found me. I was, ironically, in New York when it happened. It’s just downright irony that I left New York as soon as my yoga began, irony that New York is Leslie’s home. It’s a little strange that one day I happened to be back, visiting, again because someone close to me had died and I was doing the rituals of grief. I was sitting on a park bench checking my emails, and there was this message from Leslie.

I almost fell off of the bench. I was humbled- and violently moved- that Leslie Kaminoff knew my name.

This has - he has - both ruined my yoga career and saved it. Ruined: he spoke directly to my scariest questions. He validated my doubt. And once that happens you can’t very well go on teaching what is doubtful. Saved: had he not reached out when he did, I would have quit. Calling bullshit is also preservation of what isn’t dirty.

When Leslie’s teacher Desikachar died, I happened to be there. I mean New York. I mean working with Leslie. He was holding a seminar on the yoga of relationship. Desikachar died the night before it began. I watched, sat, I was there as Leslie went on and through with the weekend’s teaching. It was both devastating and a precious kind of gift.

Vi-yoga, Desikachar called it. A separating from all the things that are not yoga. A falling away of unimportant things.

J. Brown and I were both at Kripalu this early summer, listening as a host of our teachers shared their stories up on stage. I’d be lying if I didn’t mention the fact that these teachers are a generation or two older than I, and I am increasingly aware that I generally teach people a generation or two younger than me. That’s important, because it’s part of the question. At the closing ceremony, J. got up to say thank you. He said: you’ve shown me, through your lives, that it’s possible to teach with integrity. Then his voice cracked and he put his face in his hands. It’s so hard, he said. My heart opened like an umbrella in my chest, and then J. and I were in the same predicament. Devastated and preciously gifted. Both.

Oh, I’ll understand after training I thought only to realize I didn’t, couldn’t, that is not what training does. I thought: oh I’ll teach but ended up needing to leave the yoga studios because the scandals and the paucity of the commercial made me sick. And then I thought oh I’ll have my own space, and I did that, and it both worked and it didn’t. It didn’t work financially. It didn’t work on the personal, physical, I have the capacity to keep this thing in the air, ways. Nor would it work if I wanted, really wanted, to take up where the path was clearly headed.

Not with Michael laughing at me. And Tias nagging me. You’ve got chops girl, he said, use them. He’d generally scoff when I worried about keeping the studio alive, tell me to stop trying to please other people. And then Leslie, who just by being himself both proved everything I suspected and left me with nothing.

The best teachers always ruin your life. Just as art does. Or a good love affair.

The possible comes so close it makes you ache.

Then Michael died.

I haven’t dealt with that. Not really. One aspect of my life stopped, quite suddenly. Nothing came in to replace it. Not that anything ever does. The hole is there but I just walk around it. He said it himself, of death: a part of us dies, and some other part of us comes to be.

Just try to wrap your head around that: parts of yourself you don’t yet know, parts you didn’t even want, coming to be.

The chapters of my yoga career- now this, now that- often co-incided with death. I don’t know how this works, or why, except as honesty. It’s a further example of what I mean: I’m standing here looking back, realizing I’ve got nothing really to show for any of it, which by definition renders it a kind of nothing, a kind of pointless, a kind of fail.

But I’ve come to be a better person, every single time.

Which is a kind of integrity, I suppose. If a wholly unexpected one. Though yielding, made heavy with love, and hard.

Yoga Alliance isn’t important. Yoga Alliance is one small part of a much larger whole. It’s like a single needle on an old, a very old, pine.

Have you ever tried, would you ever dare, count the needles of a pine? Michael taught me that. You don’t have to be able to do a thing to understand what it means. In fact you’ll never wholly understand. And going on is important. It matters. Lives do.

Systems, like Yoga Alliance or Supreme Courts, distract from the reality they are intended to represent. And when systems fail to be representative, their legitimacy comes into question. That kind of pause, that suck of space, is not something you choose to go into so much as find yourself stranded by. But you’re standing there none the less. Devastated, and gifted; humbled and called; truth if there ever was one.

Rose and the essence of love

I've always loved flowers.  Plants.  But flowers in particular.  This is not to say I am an ecologist or have anything like a green thumb.  I tend to ruin.  But you can love a thing and not be very good at it at the same time.  Indeed, we mostly are this way.  

The day I learned I could buy my own damned flowers was a revolution.  Self care tends toward the revolutionary.  Almost by definition, the actions we take toward self healing and self care are decisions made against prior learning and prior experience.  There is a lot of breaking of chains involved in this work.

I once stumbled uninvited into a party in the East Village.  My friend and I were out on the streets, I don't remember what we were doing or why, this was back when nights only ended when the drugs were gone or I passed out.  There was an open door and music pouring out of it; this was enough. Inside, there were disco balls and champagne fountains.  We grabbed a bottle and snuggled into a corner.  We figured out this was Patricia Field's place.  We were surrounded by queens and the prettiest shoes to come in size 14.  I laid my head back on the dais - yes, a dais - and I played with a rose I'd plucked out of the decor.  In the midst of a conversation about love, sex, and isolation, I said we should eat roses for breakfast.  We should consume beauty, since it so consumes us.  I implied defiance and poetic justice.  But mostly I was high.

There is a poetic justice in this practice.  The things of our lives come back, proving they were wisdom from the very get go but we weren't ready to understand.  It's stunning the way the most simple, natural things turn out to be medicinal. It is inevitably the simplest things that change people's lives - not the complex or the 'advanced' or the esoteric.  We often have to go deep - deep years or far down rabbit holes - in order to figure out the truth was way back there at the beginning.

The poetry of justice is never quite literal.  It may be.  But it is more often subtle, essential, metaphorical.  Divine.

I have always loved flowers, but not roses.  Roses are cliche.  Roses are drunk with saccharine implications.  Their popularity of the rose renders them obscene.  Whatever original beauty there was is ineffective through overuse and all that's left is trite.

But it also isn't.  

I'm talking about my own prejudice, not roses themselves.  There is a difference. 

It isn't that roses are cheap, it's that I didn't believe I deserved them or anything they implied.

Pr(evocative)

There is a technique in this practice known as bhavana.  We're using it all the time, but we're generally unaware of it.  On the simplest level, bhavana refers to the power of language.  Words matter.  The genius of this system is always the way it takes what is and gives it back to us as a technique.  Everything is a tool.  Use whatever means necessary.  Do what you can.  Everything is workable.  This is revolutionary because it means anyone can do yoga, we already have everything we need, etc etc.  It's difficult because we tend to not want or value what we have.

The hidden reality of this technique is that the tools are completely arbitrary; we're not given tools so much as we are given our own selves.

I am very aware that some students are drawn to me because of the way I talk.  The obverse is also true: my language turns a good many people away.  I'm okay with this because I recognize it's irreducible; in an uncanny process that looks like synchronicity, people tend to find the teachers who work for them.  And at the same time, I am terribly mindful of my words as a teacher.  I know how hurtful they can be.  Words can deceive.  Words can lie and language can oppress. Care in what I say, developing skill and vocabulary, working for greater clarity and veracity have been important and intentional parts of my development.  Finding one's voice and all that.  One mentor literally suggested I work with a voice coach or take acting lessons.  Another has worked very carefully with my singing.  Someone else just pointed out that my barmaid swagger comes out when I need to project my voice; Be careful with that, he said; and use it, he said. That is a whole other chapter, a whole set of technique.  But this technique, bhavana, is best understood as the use of imagery and the power of suggestion and the astonishing way it reveals our minds.

When a core strength teacher tells us to feel the burn, a lot happens in the room.   A lot happens in our heads.  This also happens when an alignment teacher suggests you step your feet three feet apart or turn your toes out to 45 degree angles.  

Words evoke something in our minds, and this in turn does something in our bodies.

And at the very same time, what a word means varies from person to person.

Bhavana is the technique of working with our own mythology.

In order to work well, bhavana can't be arbitrary.  We can't just make shit up.  Invoking chakras is generally bad technique, and the only students who tend to get something out of it are students already invested in that mythology.  A good bhavana draws us toward reality.  It has a certain accessibility, but it also has to have a certain relevance.  What is relevant changes, depending on the context.

Given an opportunity, bhavana becomes evocation.  This is wild.  It becomes not merely suggestive.  We feel, certain things.  What we feel has an effect on our chemistry.  Associations and memories and assumptions gurgle forth.  Suddenly, we're rooting around in psyche. Given variation, we have different perspectives on the same techniques.  Given repetition, we glean familiarity.  And it is no small thing, to become familiar with a feeling or an experience.  It can counter a lifetime of lack, fear, suppression or neglect.  You don't know how to love, for example, if you've never been loved.  Given a chance, we build resilience, wisdom, dig a deep reserve of personal experience. 

Evocation teaches an underlying truth of yoga darsana by giving an experience of the interconnection between body and mind, memory and perspective, perspective and the lives we happen to be living.  It also teaches the idea of subtlety itself.

And evocation becomes provocation. We all have our own backstory, our own ancestry and life lived thus far; bhavana is an intentional tripwire, crash course, or maybe lifeline.  You cannot do this practice for very long before your personal assumptions show up, your self-awareness increases, your character traits become obvious and you begin to re-story the foundations of who you are.

And generally speaking, none of this is explicit.  We'll never know the entirety of what practice is doing on our deeper levels.  We only notice, once in a while, that we can do something we've never been able to do before.  We catch our anxiety or tension as it arises.  We find ourselves more patient, more steady, more tolerant.  It's hard to explain, but after a very little bit of this practice, we become aware that we have changed.  

Bhavana is vehicle for abstraction. It's the poetics of yoga.

Investigating our own mythologies

In the name of Him who taught the soul to think, 

and kindled the heart's lamp with the light of soul - Gulshan-i Raz

I've been using the bhavana of a rose for the last few months of the online techniques sessions. I have dozens of reasons.  I have reasons I'm not even aware of.

I lived across the street from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens for years.  Without meaning to, merely by association, I became hitched to seasons and ecology.  This is perhaps only interesting because I learned more living in Brooklyn than I did growing up as a kid in the Minnesota woods.  Or perhaps I absorbed in Brooklyn what I'd taken for granted at home. Whatever: I took in earth science every time I walked to the subway, I smelled trees and flora when I lay on my roof top looking at the sky, I studied tree lines casually as I sat on my fire-escape.  So I can never think of June without also thinking of roses.  June, in the Botanic Garden, was Rose Month.

So I wanted to place us in time, but I also wanted to suggest cultivation and familiarity with the organic processes and cycles of time. I wanted to create familiarity with the spirit of blossoming, blooming, coming into fullness and fruition.  But if I had suggested lotus flowers, I would have been taking students away from their own experience. I would have superimposed imagery of eastern spiritual tropes.  We know lotuses as foreign archetypes.  Roses, however, are personal.

I also wanted to invoke the lushness of summer, the sweetness of petals under hothouse conditions, the coolness of beauty amidst the rush.  There is both fragility and resilience to the natural world, and exquisite aesthetic pleasure.  Awareness of this tends to stimulate all sorts of humane reverence and insight.  You can't observe the sway of nature and not be, somehow, moved.

Finding the beauty in our contemporary world is a hard thing to do. I wanted to deal with this directly and forthwith.

I wanted, too, to elicit the medicinal qualities of roses.  Roses are more than merely pretty. The perfume of a rose is said to soften the jaded and comfort the weary.  Rose balances disillusion.  It soothes depression. It stands for lineage and the gifts passed down through generations.  A rose is said to contain the essence of love, and love is said to heal all things. The fragrance of a rose is rumored to have the power to crack open the gates of the most guarded heart.

And it seemed this was something we needed.  We've needed, out of self-preservation, to guard our hearts in recent times.  There isn't anything wrong with this.  It's important that we set boundaries.  It's vital that we be able to tune out the noise.

But we also need access.  We can't simply shut down.  Not, any way, if we want to be effective in the world or go on with our lives or find some sweetness in the difficulty.

Smarmy platitudes aside, the rose has been used in literature, cuisine, painting and fashion for centuries.  Rose is said to sooth the communication between sadhaka pitta, the fire of the heart, and prana vata, the wind of the mind.  Pitta tends to inflame over the summer. Prana vata tends to make us wild and neurotic by the time late summer has blown all the roses.  Throw fire and wind together and you ravish fields, forests, whole landscapes.  This is true of the world, and it's true of the inner world. 

If that's a little too esoteric, just know rose is said to sooth emotional issues, allow a processing and digestion of past hurts or grievances, so that we may experience joy in the present moment. There is no possible, other joy.

Physically, rose is cooling and uplifting.  A counter to inflammatory issues and heavy ones.

Thich Nhat Hahn said something to the effect of becoming so gentle, so kind, that we touched every surface and looked into every face as if it were delicate as a flower.

Roses are iconic and transculturally so.  In the pre-Christian era, the rose symbolized devotion to Venus.  Once Rome was Christianized, that symbolism became associated with the Virgin Mary. Rosaries, for goodness sake.  In Islam, Sufism, and the offshoots of Persian culture, the cultivation of roses has held pride of place in the extravagant and symbolically rich art of gardening, let alone poetry.  Roses are prominent with folks like Hafiz.

The imagery of lover and beloved, and a surfiet of roses, became a vehicle for expressing the mystical quest for divine love.  Roses are both the beloved's blush and associated with the divine names and attributes.

Roses are regional, historical, rife.  One of my favorites, though, is its symbolism of anti-authoritarian association.  Resistance has always carried roses. 

Simple decadence  

It's fascinating what comes up when you work with a practice in this way over time.  Fascinating how varied people's experiences can be.  I'd love it if you join me in practice, or join us to talk about these practices the first Wednesday of each month via Zoom.

But the nature of gunas, or qualities, is that they are not limited to one thing.  They are universals, and as universals we can start to recognize them on the daily if we want to. We can have language practices, visualization practices, nutritional practices, gardening practices. There are thousands of ways you can practice with rose.  Notice color, texture, stories, symbols.  Stop and smell them. Indulge in beauty, even if it's common and gaudy.  Take what you can get.  Notice your judgeyness. 

And at some point you realize you're practicing love.  Meanings change.  This is important.

It Felt Love, Hafiz

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart

And give this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all remain

Too

Frightened

Yoga Alliance

*Shannon Roche, YA CEO, has asked that I make corrections to this article to reflect that David Lipsius did not, in his telling of the origin of YA, mention YogaFit or Beth Shaw by name.  Since I know this story and the players, I provided the names for context.  I have also spoken with YogaFit's VP of Operations Jenny Baldwin; YogaFit has no problem with their mention in this story and thanked me for the article.

I recently attended one of Yoga Alliance's listening tour events.  It was a small gathering, with sixteen or twenty people in the room.  I nodded to one of my own students as I walked in and thought it interesting that she was there.  She had brought another teacher with her, who later said our mutual student seemed to know more about Yoga Alliance than she did.  I thought this was interesting, too; we yoga teachers, as a group, don't tend to know what our wider group is up to.

On the whole, the group was young and newer to teaching teachers.  There was one, slightly older, woman, who complained that people won't pay teachers what they are worth. Then there was the studio owner, dreadlocked, who answered her financial concerns with a quip about yoga being free. There was an academic gentleman, in his sixties, who said he was a member of a group who'd been working on a standardized test for yoga credentialing for years but this test had been stolen by the Indian government.  None the less, he affirmed, a standardized test is inevitable. There was a woman who said we should just get as many ACE and YogaFit certificates as we can.

But the rest of the room was made up of very young women in stretchy pants, who had Natarajasana-on-a-beach-selfies as screensavers on their smartphones. I am not making this up. The girl next to me was on hers the entire time, including during a kind of grounding-invocation-dedicationy thing offered at the outset.

David Lipsius was there. He led the gounding-invocationy thing. He had handouts.  And consent cards.  I'm being trite but I do not mean to be.  I was both disturbed and humored by the accuracy of the room.

I woke up the next morning confused, because I had dreamt about the talk and in dreaming about it was a little unsure what had actually happened and what I had merely dreamt up.  But for me to dream about anything tends to mean I'm thinking pretty hard about it. So I spent the entire next day fact checking and hounding my teachers and peers.

I said I'd write about it, but it's been over a week. The embers are a little cold.  It felt both too big -I have to be careful these days what I say online - and too piddling to be worth my bother.  If the general sway of things is apathy and disengagement, there is no reason why I myself shouldn't also play armadillo.  But these arguments, played over and over again in my head, also tend to mean I'm thinking pretty hard.  It tends to mean there's something in there.

There's something that has to be said.

Yoga Alliance, ostensibly the representative body of yoga teachers in the United States of Yoga Industry, is out of touch.  It is making a loud and public statement about revising itself, but it is unclear what that revision will actually look like.  There is a grand show of transparency, diplomacy and 'listening', but it remains unclear whether that is merely a show or has something substantive behind it.  Here is the irony: a body that claims to lend credibility to teachers is dubiously credible.  This could be and generally is met with apathy and do-it-yourselfness, which is both honest enough in its way (you can't actually define let alone credential a teacher of yoga) and disturbing (every man for himself is generally not a healthy room to be in).

It is unclear whether Yoga Alliance can or should represent the body of yoga teachers as a whole, whether any of us should bother registering, what the point of any this is or if we're all just making it up and fending for ourselves.

Something in my dream was terribly angry.  Some other thing was very sad.  And yet some persistent, spitfire thing looked and sounded vaguely like hope.

A brief history and the question of standards

This is hardly the place to discuss the admittedly ancient but also contested history of yoga, other than to give a nod to the fact that Yoga Alliance and the modern yoga teacher are terribly new phenomena. Yoga has existed far longer than yoga teachers, studios, or franchises. More to the point is the question of how yoga teaching has come to mean what it means, and to highlight the fact that it's all very shadowy.  

By which I mean the general public hasn't a clue.  Which isn't the general public's fault. But the vast and growing popularity of yoga means that the general public believes in something called 'yoga teacher' and increasing numbers of that general public are participating in that belief by getting certified here and there, or going to a beer and yoga class now and then, or trying it out through the secrecy of YouTube.  Sure, some folks just wear yoga pants because it's au couture or socially acceptable, but that's part of my point, too.

Lipsius gave a brief story of how Yoga Alliance was born.

In the 1990s, right along with the birth and boom of the fitness industry, a number of fitness professionals started to ask for yoga instruction.  Beth Shaw of YogaFit capitalized on that demand and started offering weekend training courses.  A number of long time yoga teachers, from various lineages, saw a danger in this and started talking.  Across their varied experience, according to Lipsius, the one thing they all had in common was having gone to India at some point to study with a teacher.  One month in India translated into 40 hour work weeks gets you to 200 hours. Unity in Yoga, a 501(c)3 that had been inactive for half a decade, offered to roll it's non-profit status over to this new conversation in 1999.  Yoga Alliance, and the RYT200 model, was born.

In the pursuant 18 years, the fitness and yoga industry boomed and wild fired.  It's supposed to go on, booming.  Lipsius cited the IBIS report to the effect that in the next ten years, yoga will become a 20 billion dollar industry.  If yoga teachers aren't feeling their accounts swell, he suggested, its because we have failed to professionalize.  If YA standards seem out of touch, its because the standards have not been revised since the founding.  Hence, a massive show of re-organization, a calling on the yoga experts for their feedback, and an open to anyone standards survey.  

That's Lipsius' version, anyway.  

Scope of practice

There is another thread to this story.  I don't think Lipsuis' rendition was wrong or misleading so much as it is telling; the other thread is more subtle.  The dominant narrative, the one told by Lipsius, is literally dominant with all that domination implies.  Prevalence. Entrenchment. Hard to see past and therefore a thing we tend to talk endless circles around. This narrative has created and sustains the status quo. The status quo says yoga is mostly fitness, mercantile, and downright soggy with an over saturation of RYT200s, the vast majority of whom never even wanted to teach but felt 'teacher training' was the only route to deepen their own study.

It is important that we develop subtlety.  It's important that we be able to see and deconstruct dominant narratives.

So I offer this:

At the same time that yoga asana were adopted by the about to take flight fitness industry, yoga started to show up in medical research and practice.  The work of Dean Ornish in heart disease and Jon Kabat Zinn in mental health elicited a demand for qualified practitioners and a wealth of research dollars. However, to show up in the halls of science raised not only questions of demand but a more subtle question of regulation and scope of practice.  

These questions were not hammered out very well, perhaps because of their softness and intricacy. YA started a teacher training mill and yoga went the way of the gym and fashion. The research went on, but it wasn't conducted by yoga teachers.  

Lipsius suggested that we - yoga teachers as a whole - have failed to 'break in' to the medical, educational, and military industries (and the moneys there).  We have failed to 'professionalize'. I don't think he is wrong: yoga is not integrated into mainstream medicine, education, or government. But I question the implication that it should be.  I have qualms.

After nearly twenty years of riotous growth, the riot itself brings us right back to our unanswered questions. The current reality is a quandary over scope of practice and regulation.

For simplicity's sake, I'll talk of the medical industry.  And I by no means intend to take on the whole of the question, but only a high level theoretical one.  

It's not a stretch to say the health care system is broken.  We as a culture are more sick than we are well and more constricted by the health care model than we are served by it. It's less a health care model than a disease care model.  The medical industry fails to address the whole person just as it fails to address health; it can't do such things because it's focus is on 'cures' and 'symptoms'. I say nothing about money, politics, or pharmaceutical companies. 

Yoga, so far as I understand it, is the inversion of this scenario.  Yoga's underlying, if subtle, principal affirms the humanity of a person rather than her characteristic flaws, symptoms, or insurance coverage.

Way back in the long ago practice of medicine, there was an adage.  This was back before medical schools existed, when one became a doctor after years of mentorship.  Back when doctors made house calls.  The saying was: a doctor cured sometimes, relieved suffering often, and comforted always. 

I don't think a yoga teacher should be involved in the curing of anything.  I think our scope invokes the always end of the adage.

A question of principle

I'm speaking of theory, only.  Every nurse, doctor, and researcher I've ever met does what they do out of love. We are all of us us placed in these imperfect systems and it is our job to change them rather than allow the harm we're positioned to perpetuate.

David Lipsius, Yoga Alliance, and myself are all engaged in one and the same question.  I'm just not sure it's being explicitly stated.

Here's a portrait of reality: Yoga Alliance claims to be the largest representative of the yoga community and uses the words integrity and diversity in its mission statement. It has a 90K member base, all of whom are charged about $50 a year for the privilege, which makes for a substantial war chest.

And yet, YA is in no way representative.  It is out of touch with the 'yoga community', the vast majority of whom are either completely disgruntled with it or ignorant of things like listening tour dates.  The thought leaders and experienced teachers, those original voices, were not in the room last week.  For all that yoga is a billons of dollars a year industry and every Jo Schmo on the street knows a yoga teacher or two, the general public has no idea what YA is; the consumer-at-large was not represented in the room last week, either.  

The only people there were people somehow inveigled in the RYT200 model. Folks like me who are trying to offer more than 'yoga classes' and a handful of freshly minted RYTs who are confused and alienated by the very model that made them.

Yoga Alliance is not representative in that it can't, for all the heft of that war chest, get more than 16 people into a room in a major U.S. city.  It does not provide 'members' with a yearly publication (there is an infographic on the website, but nothing more than an infographic), a conference or any other consistent gathering. There is no regional or community based action, nor a representative to whom a member could file a complaint or ask a question or seek guidance of.  I've taught for over a decade.  This was the first face contact I have ever had with YA.

When I tell people I am a yoga teacher, they generally assume I am either a fitness barbie or a ditz wearing a flower crown.  This is frustrating, but tolerable.  When I tell people that there is really no such thing as licensure their eyes register surprise.  When I try to explain that the 'only' voice of the yoga community doesn't actually have a magazine, like Rotary International, or a local chapter or representative or office, like the Women's March or the Audubon Society or the AMA, or elected offices like any union of actors or writers or run of the mill plumber's guild, nor does it have peer review like any good institute or worth it's salt mental health clinic, people are outright stunned.  

What kind of a membership organization can function that way? No wonder disgruntlement. No wonder people voluntarily choose to not ally themselves.

The YA shift in policy regarding scope of practice, the culling of the experts in the field, the standards survey and the listening tour are all tangled up in a backdrop question of principles.  They are gestures of change and shows of transparency.  I think they are all well and good.  But I don't understand what YA intends to do with all this information, so I don't know if there is transparency or just reference to it. I think the question of standards spits us back to the original questions. The persistence of the question proves that standardizing teachers is not an answer to the question but a part of the problem.  Nor is it the the same thing as inclusivity, advocacy, or representation.  

This all begs a question of whether a community or a regulatory style organization can best speak to our most urgent needs.  They are two very different models, amongst many.  I think YA has thus far been trying to apply the wrong one.

Advocacy doesn't work well from a distance.

No one is happy with teaching standards.  Not veteran teachers whose gifts are poorly reflected by lowest common denominators. Not the RYT consumers who were sold and bought into the idea that 'teacher training' is a part of a personal path only to graduate to disillusion. Nor the people who are excluded in myriad ways from studio and training culture.

Yoga Alliance is simply not credible as a standards maker.  It is - or may be - credible as an advocate, an organization of self regulating yoga professionals.  And it has done this, showing up to lobby when legislation threatens.

It has not done this within its own ranks and at its own boundaries. The shadow question of YA has always been regulation, and the ideal that we can organize ourselves so that the government or the medical industry or insurance companies won't do it for us.

But the thing about self-regulation is that it doesn't work very well unless it's participatory.  (NB: world history).  

Unless YA can figure out how to include and involve itself in the yoga community, this whole public service announcement is a rouse. The ethics talk and code words are propaganda. The standards are just slights of hand, inveigling folks.

Freedom and Responsibility

I don't blame YA for 'ruining' yoga.  I don't think yoga can be ruined.

“Our problems - the scandals, the credibility, the false claims and hollow posturing - can’t be addressed with a top down, managerial model. Accountability is no more handed down than is credibility.”

— Karin Lynn Carlson

Further, I am a direct beneficiary of pop yoga culture.  The person I was when I first started was not a person who had the information nor the means nor the slightest inclination to go on a pilgrimage to India.  I didn't - as most folks don't - have any idea how broad and deep the tradition goes. I had no idea what I was getting into. So instead of  following 'ancient, traditional teaching' I became an RYT200 in Kansas City over the course of a summer. I repeat: I had no idea what I was getting into.  I just did it because it seemed to be saving my chronically suicidal, ruthlessly alcoholic life.

This is no small thing, this opening of doors and saving of lives. YA is perhaps a victim of it's own gargantuan growth, it does stumble under it's own weight, but it also met me where I was. 

Yoga does not work by standardization any more than it does 'ancient, traditional teachings'.  Yoga works by individuation.  Which brings me, I suppose, back to the point of principles.

Yoga helped me. I do not think it can - or does in it's current expression- meet everyone that way.  I was lucky. Therein lies the question, and here I am, inveigled.  I am no longer satisfied with the answers being offered.

My credibility as a yoga teacher does not come from YA, thank god.  The only reason I've been able to emotionally survive is my constant, often desperate, seeking out of mentors, peers, and a wild cohort of friends (only some of them yogis).  The greatest teaching skills I've picked up I've garnered out of relationships, in time, generally outside the context of formalized 'training'.  Any clout or authenticity I've got comes from social justice and mental health awareness, which are things I picked up not from the yoga world (thank god) but from advocacy in other fields.  Also, I have a raunchy bar maid's moxie.  A poet's obsession.  A feminist tilt of the chin.  Whatever legitimacy I have I only have because of personal relationships.

That is to say, I've got folks.  They laugh at me when I'm ridiculous, call me out on my bullshit, and encourage me when I'm about to give up.  Which is often. Which is often daily. Often daily I'm brought down from any ideals I have about myself or my teaching or yoga as a whole and smack hurled right up against the reality of breathing life.

I am directly trying to state the indirect.  I think the only legitimacy YA can claim - and it'll have to claim it - is a principled stance within the yoga community.  YA should be a place yogis can express concern, hammer out difficult questions in real time, and vow, like doctors the Hippocratic oath, to do no more harm.  We do not lack teachers, trainings, certificates.  You cannot define 'yoga teacher'. But you can grow an ethical backbone.  Which turns out to be the very thing the amorphous yoga world lacks.   

But here is more, issue.

Credibility and accountablity are interdependent. And they are things found in the guts and organs of communion. The most important moments on my life have happened in the aching silence of meditation. Or they developed slowly, slowly, out of year's long inquiry into yoga darsana with people who came into and out of my days. Or they happened suddenly, because someone happened to have been there right when I needed them. The most beautiful things I've ever seen are related to human bodies, breathing, together. Sometimes in a yoga classroom.  Often, not.

And yet there is nothing so universally or frequently expressed in the yoga world as loneliness.

Read that last part again.

Community and Credibility

I often feel the yoga world is like a Petri dish.  The viruses and the organic matter decomposing and the stimuli of regular ordinary life are examined, prodded, and erupt in a context of containment.  Our scandals, discrepancies, and failures are not separate from those of history and culture at large.  They're just convoluted and so precious to us they seem more loud, more urgent, more insane. They bubble up like yeast through various guises of spiritual by-pass, selling out, posing and deflecting, personal crises and cult like revelations.  

Our problems - the scandals, the credibility, the accountability, the false claims and hollow posturing - can't be addressed with a top down, managerial model.  Accountability is no more handed down than is credibility.   

This isn't often seen, because it's subtle, but the yoga world suffers a void of accountability.  We lack people who can call us on our shit and hold us steady.  Most of us in the yoga demographic are only in it for ourselves.  This is true of teachers who are abandoning their registration, to schools who are claiming Not Yoga Alliance Registered as a selling point, to the wide swath of general population who are just in it because it feels good and are only interested in the feel good.  We want the freedom, but not the responsibility.  We're more concerned with our personal issues or what to brand ourselves than we are concerned with community or underlying truths.  Again, Petri dish.  

The only feedback mechanisms we've got are positive: you attend a training and get a slip of paper, but nobody ever fails and there is no option of auditing or mentoring or working with someone to get through the hoops. And we don't want it any other way.  We want credibility to be a thing we can buy.  That is, something handed down from an Other.

Again with the Petri dish.  Go ask pop culture how effective fixing your outsides to heal inner wounds is. 

You teach a class and most of the students gush thank yous, but the one who was uncomfortable simply leaves and never comes back. You post something on Facebook and your brain pops with likes and dopamine. So you're drawn to post something again, something more popular this time, something impressive or beautiful or a meme worthy.

Popular classes are better paid, driving teachers toward less integrity and more accommodation. This makes teachers avoid negative feedback and peer collaboration as a financial necessity. It spins lowest common denominator into warp speed. 

You graduate from a 'training program' and upload your certificate but other than an occasional email reminding you to do your CEUS and pay your dues, you're suddenly left very alone.  Training programs don't offer after care.  

There is no place, no community, not even a Yelp for concern or negative feedback.  Again, literally: graduates of RYSs can leave feedback on the YA website, but this excludes anyone who didn't complete the program - for any reason. The website also excludes peers, let alone employees, employers, competitors, other professionals or community members. 

And forget the website, which in no way serves the wider community: if a student feels uncomfortable or is hurt by something a yoga teacher does out there in the wild world, that student has no one to turn to.  

There are no peers, no supervisors. There is no mentorship.  No integration.  No base.  

There is no forum for a common conscience.  

The yoga world is a mess.  It’s contested.  It’s volatile.  It’s confusing.  It’s wishy washy.  There are claims and counterclaims and standards and improvements all over the place.  We don’t lack them.  There is no shortage of teachers, or research, or dollars available to the industry either.  YA’s claim to best or better or standardize any of that flies in the face of reality. 

What we do lack is a voice for concern, for hope, and for commitment to something.  There is no clear ground on which yoga teachers can stand with integrity. If YA could articulate that, then it can fairly claim to advocate. It's code of ethics would become a living text and an endless working over.

Failing that, it's just fake and it's dead.

Kali and Feminine Rage

Anger is an emotion.  This tradition says that all emotions are holy.  All emotions can become the path.  Emotions carry information and- if you can get to the heart of them- they bend us toward wisdom and love.

But that doesn't help much. 

Answering specific questions with platitudes rarely does.  

Anger is so uncomfortable.  It is hard.  It is bitter in the mouth.  Anger hurts.  And I think that there is a very real difference between anger and feminine rage.  

Both anger and feminine rage are things that anyone can feel.  They are not specific to gender.  But they are different both in source and in essence.  Feminine rage is not the female expression of normal anger.  Feminine rage is the physiological, ancestral, naked and embodied response to things gone wrong in the world.

This tradition, like every other, is patriarchal. It was articulated, written, and transmitted for the benefit of men.  That often leaves women in the dust.  Women's bodies, women's power, women's questions, and feminine rage.  As if menstrual flow could actually be reversed in inversion, I mean.  C'mon.

So a tradition that says anger is an emotion like all other emotions fails to answer, directly, to feminine rage. 

According to the tradition, anger is a complex of thought, belief, and physical body.  Just like all emotions.  Just like other emotions, it is fluid.  It is fluent.  It speaks some truth.  And then it passes.  However, anger is clumped together with things like greed as being something we need to train our hearts for, if not 'purify' from our system.

In that traditional view, anger is often first examined and then an attempt is made to see it with acceptance and clarity.  Clarity shows that anger is a sea change to our heart rate, our blood pressure, our perceptive field.  It's an adrenaline surge, generally.  It makes our faces hot and our hands tremble.

It's uncomfortable.

But some people like it.

Just like some people like roller coasters. 

There's a rush.  The that rush is 'energy'.  It is power.  We become scary looking or sounding, and this makes other people react to us differently; some people find that empowering.  Or convenient.

There is a common belief, taught not just in this tradition but in western psychology generally, that anger is a 'secondary emotion'.  Anger masks something more vulnerable like sorrow, embarrassment, or shame.  And I can see some truth to that.  Often in my rage there is deep, deep sorrow.  Often there is tremendous grief that is so big and pulpy it can't do anything but thrash about.  It's an animal, guttural, howl.

But I think the concept of 'secondary emotion' can be misleading. 

It's misleading because all emotions come with other emotions. We never feel just one thing.  And there are thousands of shades, endless potential shades, of any over arching emotive concept like 'sad'.  There is the sadness of lost opportunity, and this is different than the sadness of my favorite coffee mug just broke, and this is different again from my soccer team lost the match, or my partner no longer loves me as he once did. There is the sadness of nostalgia, and the sadness of running out of cookies. Part of mindfulness is starting to comb through the morass of tangled and convoluted emotions to see how much this is true.  Now pride, now tenderness, now childlike, now selfish.  As you comb, emotions become more transparent.  We see how they are laced with physiology, old patterns, and assumptions.  So often anger isn't anger: it's just fatigue or low blood sugar.  How often have you barked at someone because you were tired or hungry?  How often have you snapped at someone or stomped away not because of what they did, but because someone said or did something years and years ago? How often have you made a judgement because you assumed someone should know what you know, or share your opinion?  True, all of this.  True.

But not quite the whole story.  Saying anger is a secondary emotion is an easy way to dismiss anger.

Women's anger has been dismissed for generations.  My anger has been dismissed for decades.  For most of our lives we've been told we don't really feel what we feel.

I do think anger is sometimes a mask, a safer thing to feel than threatened or wounded or sad.  Anger is a handy container for sorrow so deep it wails.

But sometimes anger is pure.  Straight.  Solitary.  Pissed and holy. Anger can be morally, physically, archaically, down to my most private places violated, offended exasperated provoked and choked and pressed and denied and hot and heavy, outright fury.

Feminine rage is what the heart mind does when things are not okay in the world.  It is the truth that some things are just not okay.  

Kali in my pocket  

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When the movie Kill Bill came out, I left the theater brazen. That was so refreshing, I said.

I find relief in images of women's rage.  I mean this physically. I find such stories comforting.  I mean this viscerally.

This can make me sad.  Complicatedly sad.  Multiply sad.

It is sad proof that I am a pent and coiled harpie of spitting indignation and outcry.  It is suggestive that I carry deep and abiding inner pain.  I'm not denying this.  It is sad that I have such subtext, always and still.  And it is sad that I know I'm not alone.  And it is sad that any expression of feminine rage is dismissed as personal trauma, rather than valid, even when it's concerning things like other women and children. And it is sad that the angry woman is an archetype that makes people uncomfortable - an Angry Woman is symbolic of hormonal irrationality, civilly inappropriate, a Bitch -while simultaneously touching real women's hearts in a sweet way.   Real life women recognize something in images of Medusa and Kali and Athena like we recognize our own name called across a noisy chattering room.  We cock our ears almost instinctively.  The duality of women recognizing and feeling rage while society is made uncomfortable by it ends in a repression of women's reality.  This is all so complicated.  It's woven and unwoven like a Sutra.  Or Penelope's rug. Or the circulatory system.

So we react with sadness.  Sadness is nice.  I find it interesting that general anger is considered a secondary emotion to sad or afraid.  But sad or afraid are secondary emotions to feminine rage.  

I once went to a shooting range with some friends, just because it was a thing to do.  I vomited when the handgun was put in my hand.  My girlfriend, however, took a stance and a solidity I've never seen her stand before and threw bullets as though they were coming directly out of her mouth.  Or her pussy.  She reacted one way.  I another.  

I've had conversations about martial arts and kickboxing and such, because people often say I would be good at it.  People have suggested that such things are empowering for women. 

I shrug.  I've tried.  But I can't even punch a bag, let alone a face.  There is such deep aversion and repression in me that my arm locks, as unconsciously and unstoppably as a reflex. I, like so many other people I know, have pushed even the hint of anger down so deep inside it solidified to self-hate.

One of the reasons I knew I needed to quit drinking, back in my still drinking life, was that the bleariness of wasted all the time meant I had hurt people.  I mean violently.  Aside and apart from the fact that I was hurt.  Violently. I remember a conversation, way back in that still drinking life, about gun ownership.  My response was not first or foremost political, although it is those things.  First and foremost, though, I said I can't have a gun because sooner or later I would go ahead and use it.

I am glad that I quit drinking, and I truly don't want to hurt anyone. And at the same time, it is infuriating that repression is one of the core realities of who I am.

I often carry an image or a murti of Kali in my pocket.  She is with me.  I've taped her portrait onto the bathroom mirror and I've tucked her into the pages of books for years and years.  I consider her a saint.  She's sacred.  She is a comfort.

And I am not alone in this.  

I used to work much more directly with sexual assault, domestic violence, reproductive rights and immigration than I do now as a yoga teacher.  And here's an interesting thing: even though the context was infinitely sad, the resources never sufficient, even though moment by moment by moment I was in direct contact with real women's lives being broken or ended or hurt, just hurt, I have never felt more safe or beloved in my life.  I have never been so comfortable in my own skin.  The laughter, when we laughed, was rich like glorious food.  The eye contact was heady like wine and hard, sharp, like lightening.  Like lightening it was always a little dangerous, but also pretty.  The voices were like live orchestra, vibrating the bones inside.  

There are some things I simply can't do by myself.  There are some emotions we can't hold, alone. So we make goddesses, witches, and fairy tales.

Feminine rage is communal.  And it's personal.  Both.

The Erinyes, or Furies. The 'hideous' goddesses of vengeance.

The Myth of the Divine Feminine

There's a lot of talk in our (the yoga world's) circles of 'reclaiming' the divine feminine.  I am uncomfortable with this. 

First, because it often appropriates other people's mythology or spirituality.  Fond as I am of Kali, I am not nor do I want to be Hindu.  What she means to me is different than what she means to Hindus, or historically.  And to invoke a 'universal' earth mother is just a way of trivializing world history and cultural difference. Much of our spiritualizing, imaging, and positioning of femininity uses concepts to deflect from reality rather than work with it.  I empathize with the longing for 'juicy hips', but I have serious questions about the real life consequences of such practices physically, socially, and personally.  We tend to indulge in 'hip openers' and 'sacred circles' in the same way we indulge in bulimia.  Trading one harm for another is not progress.  It's like a lateral career shift.  And any good yogi knows that same old story told over and over again, even if it's told a little differently, is the very definition of there being a problem.

Secondly, talk of the divine feminine doesn't really address the fact that there has never, ever been a culture that respects the bodies of women.  An historic matriarchy is a myth.  Even in societies where women have held positions of power, that power took place within a context of patriarchy.  Her position did not serve the interests of other women in that society.  She was a figure head. 

There is a relatedness between queens and whores.

I'm not making this easy.  I know it. 

It's complicated.

On the one hand, this practice and history in general disparage women.  On the other, contemporary western women have found this practice empowering.

I tend to think that modern feminists can, and should, change yoga.  Just as we can, and should, change the world.  This is earth shattering stuff.  Yogis don't like to think about yoga changing.  Yogis tend to revere yoga precisely because of it's ancientness, 'the tradition'. What I'm suggesting is really hard.  It's terribly scary.  There is a lot of bathwater.

But listen.  Babies are precious.  And there is a difference between myth, tradition, and truth.  We should try to practice truth, not tradition because it was our first experience of truth.

The Practice of FEminine Rage

Feminine rage is distinct from anger.  Feminine rage can be felt by any one.  It is the body mind's response to injustice.  General anger is a signal that a boundary has been crossed.  Feminine rage is the specific boundary violation of social injustice.  It can be both or independently personal and impersonal.

We can practice with it. 

Just like all other sensations, thoughts, and emotions, the first stages of practice are about recognition and seeing things as they are.  It's so freaking important to recognizing the difference between low blood sugar and anger at the person in front of you.  And it's important to discern the difference between boundaries violated in the here and now as distinct from the times a current situation brings up a boundary violation from the past.  That's what being 'triggered', means.  I've often 'gotten mad at' joe schmo in front of me, or my partner, when I'm really mad at someone else entirely.  Sometimes I've felt a flare of anger for people who have been dead for years.  

And it's important to recognize all the tremendously different ways in which our boundaries can be crossed, to be really really clear about what and where boundaries are. Sometimes, we cross our own boundaries but then project our anger - as resentment - onto other people.  Sometimes, we get angry because the boundary of ego has been crossed or called out.  We feel impeded or challenged in some way and we don't like it, even if the Other was totally within their right. Sometimes we get angry when we are not given credit, but sometimes we get angry when we are given responsibility we didn't ask for. Sometimes, we get angry in traffic.  But it isn't that traffic violated our boundary (of time, of responsibility, of where we are supposed to be), it's that circumstances did.  Or, we over scheduled or procrastinated and we did it to ourselves.

If and when a boundary has been crossed, the work of anger is to rectify the boundary.  The work of the practice is to clarify boundaries.  Anger is a call to take some action, to right some balance. 

But in all honesty, that often means nothing in the current scenario.  It means we need to reapply some breathing room and give ourselves a time out.  It means we need to shut off Facebook and go for a walk.  It means we have to renegotiate, often tenderly - by which I mean both prickly awkward to ourselves and gently patiently toward the other - family roles and expectations.  We'll have to keep renegotiating roles and expectations, over and over again. We'll have to keep the question of our ego, going.

So often we get angry in at work or in traffic or in a conversation that we can't just take a time out from; then boundaries mean we need to center ourselves in our body, slow down our words with care, both feel our crazy heartbeat and not be driven to a frenzy by it.  We can learn to stay in our body.  Things like resilience and tolerance can be improved.  We can be fucking zen masters if we need to be and for spaces at a time we're able to stay with the experience rather than projecting into stories.

Once we start to realize we have old anger, we eventually have to work with that.  Once we realize a current relationship is chronically boundary invasive or enmeshing or obscure, we're going to have to figure that shit out.  Once we get clear evidence of how often we're doing our own selves some trouble, we've got work to do. Once we start to know what anger does in our body and mind, we're going to have to learn some down-regulating or grounding or stress management, skills.  Working with anger means feeling all of this, coming to know and coming to see, and feeling that the feeling passes.  It will.  Emotions are fluid.  And they are fluent.  

However.  Feminine rage is going to be unique in that question of the feeling passing. It's going to keep happening, simply because the issue is systemic.  Feminine rage persists because it fucking has to.

Fury and Blessing

There are about three people who know this in the world.  That old twitter name of mine that became my instagram name that keeps hanging around just because it's locked and loaded and familiar? That's a direct bow to feminine rage.  Coal was a baby I couldn't have.  Fury invokes the Erinyes.  There.  Now my private is your insight.

The only way to 'transform' or 'heal' feminine rage is through civil justice.  Civitas and lady liberty, Kali and whatever other old old myths you can find.  It is both vital that we take care of ourselves and that we see how self care ultimately ends up being community.

Let me tell you a story.  Once upon a time, the Furies were born.  Some say they were the children of Uranus: when his genitals were thrown into the sea following his murder, Aphrodite was born of the sea foam but the Furies were born from his flecks of blood.  Some say they are even older and more chthonic than this: they spring from the very merging of earth and wind.  

However they were born, and birth in general is always going to be a mystery, the Furies have forever been wailing, screaming, endless rage.  They personify vengeance. They moan for justice.  They punish, through agony, people who commit crimes.  

They have been described as having snakes for hair, bloodshot eyes, dog's heads, bat's wings.  They are 'infernal' and 'hideous'.  They live in the earth's depths. They pursue, like guilt, those who have done wrong.

They do this for millenia, until Aeschylus writes the Orestes stories down.  There are a number of stories, a lot of murder.  First a daughter is offered to the gods for success in battle, then mother takes vengeance and murders the father.  Then the son takes vengeance and murders mom. This goes on for a while, with lots of choral singing and the Furies hounding people down over the whole damned world.  Eventually this son is brought to trial in the play The Euripides, with the Furies standing in for all those murdered folks as 'accusers'.

The trial becomes a debate about blood vengeance, the honor due to a mother compared to that due to a father, and what respect should be paid to ancient deities such as the Erinyes. The jury vote is evenly split. Athena participates in the vote and chooses for acquittal. Athena declares the murderous son acquitted because of the rules of the trial. 

A little disgruntled by this verdict, the Erinyes threaten to torment all inhabitants of Athens and to poison the surrounding countryside. Athena, however, offers the ancient goddesses a new role as protectors of justice, rather than vengeance, and of the city. She persuades them to break the cycle of blood for blood. While promising that the goddesses will receive due honor from the Athenians and Athena, she also reminds them that she possesses the key to the storehouse where Zeus keeps the thunderbolts that defeated the other older deities. In the play, the "Furies" are thereafter addressed as "Semnai" (Venerable Ones), as they will now be honored by the citizens of Athens and ensure the city's prosperity.

The Furies become the Beatitudes, see?  

Justice is a hard thing, but beautiful.  Just because it doesn't exist doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for it. 

That fight is an attempt, a repeated over our lifetime practice, of being fully and heartfully present in a crazy world. It's hard.  But I would rather have a hard practice and a better life than a feel good practice and a hard life. 

Since life is desperately hard, practice matters.  

Anger and Hate

Women's stories, women's bodies, and women's reality are almost transgressive by definition. Given all that history.  This is another complexity. If you are a woman, everything is political.  You didn't choose to make it that way, and at the same time if you choose to be 'non-political', it's political in spite of what you want. 

We don't get what we want.  We get life.

I'm not talking to women, exactly.  

I'm talking about anger and hatred. I've had to wrestle with both.  I'm still trying, as so many of us are these days.  It's still hard.

It turns out the platitude, the teaching, was right from the get go. There is a difference between anger and hatred and the difference is this: anger is love. 

Feminine rage does not need to be healed; it's a sign of life.  If I could tell you how little I need someone to feel sorry for me or how little I need anybody to fix my problems, you might realize that love is about presence.  And if I could remember that there is a time and a place for my truth but it will almost never be where it's easy for me or how I want it to be, that I have no business feeling sorry for anybody but it is my work to keep myself present, I might actually feel togetherness rather than projection.

Presence is so hard - it's so hard - because anger is uncomfortable. But it's okay to be angry because anger needs presence, not healing. Anger bends toward wisdom and reparation, solidarity and resolve; it's a wild and terrible call that says we have to deal with boundaries and renew relationships.  It's a throaty, impassioned urge to settle down and in.

Feminine rage persists.  It has to. It has to because it literally defines the future. Its suppression is harmful to everyone.  Suppression is related to hate.  And hate, unlike anger, will need a lot of healing. Hate needs the kind of healing that is so hard I wouldn't believe it possible unless I knew some folks who've done it.  Stay soft, I said while teaching: stay strong.

This may not feel like I'm being helpful.  I still haven't told you what to do.

I think you should stick Kali in your pocket.  And the Virgin Mary.  Work with women.  Work with children. Do whatever you need to do to keep your own body safe and happy.  Take up kickboxing, if it helps, or yin yoga if that does. Mother yourself, and let your self be mothered.  Cry.  It's very yogic to cry.  Make a ritual for your body and if you need to you can use the bodies of the gods, the demons, all of angels and ghosts and stories. Use the whole consort of mythology because there are somethings we cannot hold alone.  Realize that your body is not the only wounded flesh. 

Use this as solace.  Also use it as urgency.

But repeat, like a mantra, for the rest of your life so that the children behind you know it and might have a shot at better lives: there is a difference between anger and hatred.  My anger always means that something has to be done, something is being called for, love has been obscured.

Embodying Core Healing: Saturn and the Capricorn full moon

Recently I've been talking with students about falling apart.  We've talked of all the ways in which this practice unearths us, provokes us, and brings underlying issues to the forefront. 

I've told them that at this point I recognize that everything can fall apart and I will still be okay.  There is an underlying sense that I can handle the hard things in life.  I trust that I can both take on and survive adversity. I have access to a deep pulse that drums steady even as everything around me- or inside me - feels unstable, unsafe, or just flat out wrong. I have this sense precisely because I have gone through transformation over and over again in these practices.  Having gone through it, I trust it.

It's important to acknowledge that it's not a safe world out there.  This can get buried in contemporary yoga culture with it's emphasis on bliss and freedom, power and release. We have to acknowledge adversity, suffering, and unfairness or we're participating in repression.  We have to acknowledge suffering or we alienate huge swaths of the population who are living with adversity.  Simply saying 'feel peace' or 'relax' or 'recognize your innate goodness' can rankle people and turn them away.  This was my first experience of yoga, to be sure.  Self-help and self love seemed cheap and unrealistic.  And they are cheap and unrealistic in much of their contemporary expression. The vast majority of yoga studios and teachers left a sour taste in my mouth.  Yet there was something in the yoga itself that drew me in.  There were a few teachers, and hints in many of the teachings that took me years and years to draw out and find and come to terms with, that embraced me as I was and suggested my inner conflict was both very real and okay.  That it was, actually, promising. There was, beyond any argument, my own experience.

Of course all of this is true not only of 'the world' - or within yoga culture where it shows up in projecting 'wisdom' onto the body of a teacher, attachment to or objectification of the body, escapism and magical thinking, addiction to what feels good in the moment or for ourselves - but it's true within our heart.  We can't heal the world unless we're also able to acknowledge our own guttural need for healing.

We've all been wounded in some way.  And we all have needs.  These needs go beyond simply needing food and shelter and physical safety.  We need to feel heard, seen, connected, and that we are vital.  We need to feel that we matter.  There are far too many of us walking through the world feeling that we don't.

We're half way through the year.  The summer solstice has passed and the eclipse season is coming.  This full moon involves Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, and occurs with Mars in retrograde.  Saturn is the planet of being ringed in, constricted, a reckoning with all our limitations.  It invokes honesty and reality. Mars is our sense of personal power or core identity, the essence of our deepest values and beliefs.  In retrograde, all the qualities of Mars turn backwards or twist.  That is, we're likely to question or doubt our values and core identity. We're likely to doubt or berate our selves. 

This moon is likely to feel a little cold and dark.  It could provoke detachment or withdrawal, even regression or retreat from the face of things.  Fear is present, weather consciously or unwittingly influencing our moods and behaviors.  Pessimism might leak in.  Doubt and insecurity.  There can be suffering, including suffering of the undue and unfair and unrelenting kind.  There can be an urge to shut down.  Worry.  Worry.  And however we personally respond to worry.

This isn't a good time to wallow in victimhood, though the urge may be there.  It is a time to take responsibility for our emotions and behaviors and if necessary set boundaries. 

It is a good time to work with deeply held - often inherited - core beliefs.

The gift of Capricorn, and of limitations themselves, is the way they teach us to step into our own lives.  Capricorn's lesson is how to become ourselves, paradoxically, by overcoming ourselves.  The end point is integrity without harshness, an ability to do the work of our lives without becoming attached to power or frozen by fear.  Capricorn is tremendous in harnessing power, order, structure, in melding intention and actual behavior.  But that behavior tends to be motivated by the will and detached from feeling.  There is dedication and will galore, but without tenderness and vulnerability and feeling the will turns to stone, and loneliness comes. 

Hence, our work, our really real work, has everything to do with getting out of our head and into our emotions. Capricorn's gift is learning to be okay in ourselves.

Join me at Sacred Space on Saturday for a little practice, a little talk, a little work deeper into this stuff.

Saturn

Capricorn is ruled by feminine Saturn, which means limitation - Saturn's rings - reflecting upon herself.  It isn't like Aquarius, the masculine sign ruled by Saturn, where wisdom and the gifts of wisdom are poured out into society.  It's an inner parsing. Saturn forces us to face the essential truths of life - including the obligations we acquire just by being born and members of society.

Saturn takes a very very long time to go through a full cycle, unlike the moon that does so every 30 days, the sun that does so once a year, or other planets like Mars who completes a cycle in two years.  

No. 

Saturn takes 28-30 years to complete a full transit of the zodiac. Therefore, he represents time and the wisdom that comes with age.  There is a very real sense in which every seven years or so, or one quarter of Saturn's transit, a person will go through a new stage of personal development. A different chapter in their life story.

Time is a really hard thing to reckon with or wrap our minds around. The inner pressure and awareness that we need to be safe and protected into the future comes from Saturn. We not only need to eat food today, or need a place to sleep today; we need a place to sleep and food to eat tomorrow and for the rest of our lives.  Saturn is also the awareness of the past and what has happened to us, and is related to the ways in which we hang onto the past and have it dominate our thinking in the present.

The enormity of time and our relationship to it is the very the nature of Saturn and through Capricorn, we reflect upon this.  We seal that relationship in our mind and heart, for better or worse.  Capricorn is always a little bit scared of making mistakes, therefore very calculating and rational.  An earth sign, Capricorn plays out in questions of structure and material reality, wealth and resources.  

All that being true, Capricorn brings up questions of vulnerability and a tendency toward clinging and greed.  This can turn people and events into commodities, seeing the whole world through the lens of self vs. everything else.  There is an urgency, that inner pressure, toward things being useful and practical and rational. This is tricky, though, because once you've objectified a person or an event, there will be an underlying need to control or manipulate and an underlying anxiety that we may lose control or become vulnerable.  There is an underlying mistrust of emotions and precisely because emotions are irrational and bring us out of 'control'.  The Water of emotions and the subconscious dissolves the Earth of material resources.

In general, Capricorn is a hard working sign, good to their family, great providers with a strong ethical foundation and a rock solid sense of responsibility.  Be careful about clinging to those principals and values out of fear; learn to be more in flow with the heart, and with the heart of others.

Fixed Stars

Facies - the face or eye of the archer.  This is a tough, if not ruthless, concept.  The root word is the same from which we get the word fascist.  But it's also related to facere, or the latinate 'to make'.  There are images of sticks being bound together, either for use as a punitive rod or with the connotation of strength in unity.  As with anything, this influence can go either way: it can be the authoritarian perpetrator of violence or the humanitarian witness of violence who is stirred to make change. The urge here is strong, and you have to choose.  To not choose is to become perpetrator to your own and the world's suffering.  We know this already.  To remain ignorant or not want to see directly creates suffering.  Even though taking action can be frightening and may involve some humbling, some feeling, some vulnerable ickiness that we are discomfortable with, it is ultimately sweeter than keeping our head in the sand and our hearts under lock and key.

Kaus Borealis ~ This star, also in the archer constellation but southern, is a counter-balance to the more negative associations of Facies.  It promotes humane ideals and a sense of justice, the right aim of the archer's bow that requires skill and flexibility, both.  Right aim involves discretion and truth: when we level our gaze true we shoot straight.  There are also implications of ideals, of aiming high, and of transcending distance or difficulty.

Mula Nakshatra - Darkness and shadow

This full moon is going to appear in the area of the sky known as Mula in the jyotish nakshatra wheel.  Mula is represented by a bundle of roots, harking back to the influence of Facies.  It's located very near a black hole at the center of our galaxy, and related to Ketu, the headless tail of the shadow serpent who represents that which is old and dead and still hanging on in us unconsciously.  Mula is ruled by the goddess Nritti, a proto-Hindu version of Kali, one who rides a black crow, brings destruction, and abides in the realm of the dead.   Her name means calamity.

That black hole symbolizes center, core, root and invokes questions as to what we need to uproot and what we need to plant.  There is a lot, a hell of a lot, of heaviness and digging and uncomfortable revelation to all of these things, but there is also a possibility of working with our core beliefs for healing.

Embodying Core Healing

The difficulty of healing is that it's not thought or decided: it is felt.  It is a felt sense.  It happens in the body.

Think, for a moment, of some of your most precious relationships or deepest values.  Think politically, spiritually, of your children or pet.  Think of your childhood home with its scents and its textures, the voices.  Think of someone or something you have lost.

We don't think these things; we feel them.  We feel them in our gut.  This is why working with our body leaves us so inexplicably, past understandingly, changed.  There is rage in the body.  And fear.  And tenderness.

When there has been a wounding, there is a severance.  Trauma has been defined as blocking off part of our human experience because we can't, at that moment in time, integrate it.  The problem of course is that when we block off part of our life, we have to block off good feelings and experiences as well.  We are no longer whole.  The block was, at the time, the best possible thing we could do.  In a very real sense, it kept us alive.  It allowed us to get here and now.  But so often those blocks are no longer keeping us alive, they are not necessary, but they are familiar and ingrained.  What was once our survival has become our own limitation.

Serenity of the flesh

Yoga chitta vrittri nirodha.  Yoga sutra 1.2

yoga is going past the mind (chitta) to inner wholeness (nirodha).

Nirodha is one of the yogic concepts I've struggled with the most.  I have beat my head on it, and the meat of my palms, and it still stands as a mystery. Nirodha is translated as stilling, constricting, stopping, controlling, or ending.  But I don't know what it would mean to 'stop' or 'control' the mind, because you can't stop the mind.

When you go deep into the teachings, however, you come across slightly different understandings of nirodha.  It may not imply stopping or controlling all of the mind, just the patterns laid down by our past.  It may, perhaps, refer to using the attentive qualities of mind to witness the still, calm center that is a part of every human being's capacity.  

All human beings have an inner well of silence and serenity.  It is birthright.  It is what it means to be human.  It is inseparable from being alive.

Nirodha entails both our ability to still and disidentify from the relentless turning of our mind (chitta vrittri) that prevent clear seeing (a verb, a thing we can do) and our ability to recognize or witness the underlying stillness or wholeness (nirodha as a noun) that is our essential nature (purusa).

So long as we identify with our turbulent mind or various beliefs it's cooked up, whenever we forget our basic wholeness, we feel that something is amiss or wrong in our life.  We feel that something is amiss, wrong, or lacking in ourselves.  

Contrary wise, when we embody our wholeness, we recognize an indestructible and unchanging inner resource that enables us to face the world and the difficulties of being alive with equanimity, joy, and serenity.  

I am saying that nirodha is not thought.  It is felt.  It happens in the body.

Feeling Whole

In studies of various mindfulness practices and trauma or stress, it has been affirmed that all human beings can invoke a sense of safety and security.  In military studies, one man was asked to call up an image that made him feel safe and he said he was holding his weapon, his finger on the trigger, and his feet were squared.  While that image makes me personally squirm, when this man was asked if he felt secure, he said you bet I do.  Another man said he thought of making love to his wife.

Point being: we all have radically different and personalized imagery.  But we all have something.  Studies have shown that all people can, using imagery and suggestion, invoke a sense of security that changes their biochemistry.

The studies have also shown, however, that once we drop the image our biochemistry goes back on auto-pilot.  

When advanced meditators, however, drop the image, their changed brain activity and blood chemistry continues.  

We discover our wholeness or through experiencing the bodily sensations of being.  Being is universal.  It is somatic and non verbal.  It is a felt sense. It is beyond what we typically call 'the mind'.  Again, everyone has their own archetypes and images and language for this thing.  Call to mind some of your own as you read through this list of examples:

peaceful.  calm.  whole.  indescrible.  warm.  undeniable.  everywhere. connected.  safe.  refuge.  sanctuary.  well being. serene.  pure love.  

Being is a dynamic, living, background presence.  It is always there, but it goes unnoticed until it's directly pointed out.    When we lose touch with it, when we forget our essential nature, we easily lose touch with our wholeness.

Core Beliefs

Beliefs are implicitly about relationship.  Our relationship to money, for example.  Or authority. Or gender.  God or men or mother figures or sexuality.  Whatever.

The primary relationship, of course, is to ourselves. 

These practices help us reclaim our wholeness, not by implying that the world is safe or has our best interests in mind, but by helping us address our sense of safety, serenity, or wholeness within ourselves.  This is why any variation of these teachings that implies a teacher, or a space, a gemstone or the accomplishment of a certain regime is the way to wholeness is a by-pass. They are fraudulant versions of the teaching that may be appealing but aren't, actually, true to the bone.  They'll leave us conflicted or alone.  They may work for a while, but our inner core beliefs continue to surface and resurface as soon as we leave the studio or return home from a workshop. 

Remember that the physiology of advanced, long term meditators was different than those of novice meditators.  These things happen through repetition.  These things can take time.

A few weeks ago, I was asking participants of the deeper practice online work to call to mind their 'perfect place'.  Everyone would have their own physiological and psychological response to this practice.  Some might remember a special place.  Some might invent one, out in the woods or alongside the ocean perhaps.  And some might simply struggle with the words themselves, struggle with themselves.  Even that experience is rich with information.

Once we have tapped into imagery, memory, or pure imagination, we take that process further by staying with the feeling but letting the image or the practice, go.  We stay with the feeling.  The feeling is real.  And it is in us, not the object.

What we are doing, in such a practice, is giving the lived experience of having a place.  Our experiences are what influence us.  Our experiences make us who we are.  Practice provides experiences.  Of course, if our experience of life has been deeply fragmented or harmful for a long period of time or hard enough just once, we'll need a deeper and deeper well of experience of being whole.  Generally speaking, I think it takes a whole lifetime.  And it never, ever, gets us over or changes the real experiences we've had in our lives.  

It doesn't change the truth of what's happened to us.  It simply gives us a new relationship to the characters at play.  I mean this, and I mean it loud as thunder: yoga doesn't change the world, it changes us.

Practices

Many of us are familiar with the term sankalpa.  We're often told it means intention or vow, and we may have been asked to 'set an intention'.

But we're not often taught vilkapa.  I think the two teachings should go together.

San means to bring closer, and vi means to take you away.  Kalpa means a long period of time (Saturn is time, remember).  Kalpa means eon, means decades, means through your lifetime or maybe even multiple lifetimes.  Kalpa also means ritual or rite.  Kalpa is what unfolds in your lifestory.

So: a sankalpa brings us closer to what unfolds over time.  Vikalpa is what takes us away from unfolding ritual.

Vikalpa is what arises when we feel limited, lacking, or broken.  It's the voices in our head and the physical sensations that react in our body to such terms as 'peace', 'serenity', or whatever the hell.  Vikalpa was my absolute disgust, rising like bile whenever a yoga teacher told me to breath and let go.  It was bells and whistles and blood and terror in me screaming that if I let go, everything would fall apart.  Everything.  Everything.  Me.

We're not taught to work with vikalpa.  We're never taught to see and feel and taste what comes up.  We're never told that they are exactly the thing we need to work with to get through.

Pratipaksha bhavana

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When vikalpa arises, cultivate the opposite. Yoga Sutras 2.33

On the simplest level, pratipaksha bhavana means when we're having a really hard day, we should take a break and go to the movies before we come back to the problem.

It also means that we should use opposing poles to deepen our well.

We can work with our vilkalpa by cultivating nirodha, or that felt-sense of aliveness and just being, even as we are aware of constriction, limitation, fear or terror or pain.  Like moving into and out of shapes in our asana practice, we can oscillate our awareness back and forth between reaction and felt-sense-of-embodiment.  We can keep coming back to the felt-sense-of-embodiment.

Try it:

sankalpa: I am safe within myself.  I don't betray or abandon myself.

vikalpa: I'm not safe within myself.  I don't trust myself.

or

sankalpa: I enjoy my physical body.  I am strong.  I am alive.  I am beautiful.

vikalpa: I'm ashamed.  Guilty.  Powerless.

Notice that I didn't say "I am safe in this (or any given) situation." The prompt is 'with myself'.

What are some of your core beliefs?  are there ways in which you can see them and care for them?  Are there ways in which you can directly cultivate the opposite?  This might be gritty, snotty, simple simple body things or an investigation into how things like punishment and love were meted out when you were a kid.  It might be looking at how you think about food, or sex.  It might be saying I need a hug now, or realizing that you can take a hug from a tree if there is no appropriate human being around.  

Richard Miller teaches that vilkapas are messangers.  They are not something we want to get rid of.  They are messangers who show up to tell us that we've split or separated from the unfolding rite of our life.  It's important to note, though, that sometimes we should separate from scenarios or relationships or behaviors.  But we can realize we are separate from an Other without having to separate from ourselves.  Developmentally, no preceeds yes.  Children learn to say no before they say yes.  But more essentially, we have to be able to feel ourselves and our boundaries before we can effectively 'join' with anything else.  No preceeds yes.

Vilkapa tells us when we have severed ourselves. Pratipakshava bhavana is cultivating - or doing - the opposite.  It's going to the movies before you come back and realizing that you aren't stuck figuring it out right now.  But it's also becoming a person who can give herself the love she was denied, exploring physical practices that invoke nirodha, learning to take care of your money or your heart like the awkward learning to ride a bicycle.

There is a story from the buddhist tradition.  Buddha said to Ananda: last night I recognized Mara and he went on his way.  This happened many nights over the course of time.  Buddha was 'noticing', as we are taught to do.  But eventually, the Buddha said: last night Mara came, and I recognized him, and together we had many cups of tea and long conversations.  The story goes on to say that Mara and the Buddha eventually became close.  They became intimate.  Mara became a student and together the two followed the path.

In the yogic tradition, it's said that there are three stages of working with the messengers.  First, shravana.  First, we hear the messenger at the door.  We become aware.  But in the manana stage, we hear the knock and get up and walk to the door.  We open the door to the messenger.  In the third stage, nididyhasana, we welcome the messenger and do deep contemplation with it.  We become intimate with it, and together walk down the unfolding path.

You are not separate from your suffering.  But there is also, deep within your suffering, some part of you that is breathing, listening, on-going.  The life force is still there.  And it is that thing that heals.

What would it mean to go closer to the ritual unfolding of your lifetime?

If you're interested in going into this work and these teachings in depth, you should join us for a week of intensive. CEUS or RYT both available.

Each week I guide deeper practice members through a 30 minute exploration of various techniques. Over time, you’ll lay the seeds for an ongoing path of self care and self discovery.

Join us on patreon.com/karinlynncarlson

The dregs of winter, the light of spring

Fatigue is cumulative.  Weariness grows.  Think of the way a steady, slow drip of water will erode a mountain or a wall over time.  Or the way you can handle one bad day, one set back, but after a series of setbacks your response is going to change.  Eventually, you yourself change.  There will be a proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back.  One thing more and you might just crack down the middle.

We are, for all our modern gadgetry, primitive beings.  We have bodies that are prehistoric and digestive tracts that precede the agricultural revolution.  We have minds that are older than the industrial revolution, and we're simply not intended to be able to process a constant barrage of information, stimulation, environmental strain.

Ama is the sludge, the build up, the slowly or not so slowly developing layer of grime that weakens our immunity, dulls our enthusiasm, and clouds our vitality.  It's a toxic wet blanket thrown over our cell's ability to communicate, and without clear communication between our 70 odd trillion cells, things go a little haywire.  We'll get sick more often and sickness will linger, longer.  We'll be prone to allergies, including food sensitivities.  Our hormones will back fire and our inflammatory response will alternately spit and roar, roar and spittle. 

Ama is

• the consequence of inadequately digested food or experience
• toxins which build up in the body and prevent our connecting with or ability to discern the body's underlying intelligence
• blockages - weather in our arteries, our joints, our our ability to experience love and happiness
• improperly digested food - any substance not utilizable by the body as food
• excess of the bi-products of metabolism (uric acid, components of bile, free radicals)
• the physical substance of maldigestion which blocks the body's subtle and not-subtle channels

As spring comes in, we're aware of changes in the environment around us.  The skies get lighter, and higher.  The earth thaws.  Something deep in plants begins to move like a white milky pap toward the surface and then breaks through.  Animals are born, the rains come, the heaviness of winter becomes the green wild pulse of spring.  

These are profound shifts.  They are a regeneration process.  And the thing is, something similar is going on in your own physiology at this time.  But we tend to be so disconnected from seasons and nature that we don't recognize the signs, wouldn't know what to do with them if we did, we live more by our newsfeed and our work demands than our body's inner wisdom.  

The ancient vaidyas encouraged people to go through seasonal shifts with a purification process known as panchakarma.  Every April, I go through this process myself and guide others through it online.  It starts April 1 and is four weeks of ritually cleaning out your gunk.  I mean the emotional, and the physical, and the old, and the relatively new.  For $100, you'll get

• a PDF guidebook with a week by week plan to prepare your body to deeply release, to go through the release, and then to rejuvenate.
• daily reflections as a part of that guide
• a weekly 'how to' video, as well as supplementary videos that are all optional (how to make ghee and kitchari, a few asana videos, etc)
• this year I'm including a series of how-to-meditate videos that will give you a technique for effortless meditation, different than watching the breath or mindfulness.  Meditation is purification.

Stress and strain and less than optimal digestion are part of the world we live in.  But there are things we can do to recover, rejuvenate, regenerate.  You can feel spring, as a thing that is happening inside of you.

Training

Last night I got a text from a friend.  The Yoga Center of Minneapolis closed it's doors last night.  No one knew it was going to happen except the few key players involved.  I know how bad this can hurt.  I know how many people are affected.  This morning the word has spread and more and more people are expressing sadness, hurt, and confusion.

There is grief there.  Grief is a complicated thing, both a process and not a process at all.  It lasts.  And it changes.

From a humble place, I want to make myself available to anyone who needs to talk.  From a more humble place still, I will open my intensives/teacher training this summer to anyone who can no longer complete their work with The Yoga Center.

It doesn't fix everything, but it is something.  It may not be the right fit for you.  But we can have a conversation and figure it out.  "Training" and "yoga teacher" and "Yoga Alliance" are all confusing topics right now.  We'll address every one of them.

Deep bows,

Karin

Resolution, Revolution, and Ritual

It’s mid January. The dawns are so deep they break to ink blue. Stars are sharp. To say nothing whatsoever of the cold.

Only that it’s a hard kind of season. It’s a difficult time of year.

Now that 97% of the human population has trashed, dismissed, or diminished their New Year’s Resolutions, I want to talk about them.

To be fair, I’m not a person who makes resolutions. I never have been. In the first 29 years of my life, before-the-yoga, I fully identified as a fuck up. I wouldn’t to commit to a damned thing. I wouldn’t commit because I knew I’d fail. 

I no longer think of myself as such a damaged piece of work. But I still don’t make resolutions. My reasoning is different, though; I don’t make resolutions now because I know that changes happen – beautiful, devastating changes – in spite of me. Change is an experience of grace.

Sankalpa – the Sanskrit word for intention – means the law that arises from the heart.  It means the rule you follow above all other rules.  And here’s where I think we misunderstand: intention doesn’t come from the goal setting and thinking part of us; it rises up out of the flesh like a baby.  Or a disease.  To try to think or plan or strategize our way into the new year is to misunderstand both human beings and change.   The heart is going to do what the heart needs to do.

Being human is what traditional yoga studied.  In depth.  From multiple angles.  Down through the layers and into the shadows.  Movement studies.  Mind studies.  One of the key things the sages came to understand is the inborn capacity for human beings to overcome, to heal, and to grow.  Lay the ground, plant the seeds, cultivate the space, and the human spirit soars.  Change is what human beings, do.

But laying the ground is decidedly different than a bucket list.  It’s related to healing, not goal setting.

There is a tremendous cultural pull, born in the holidays and proved in the longest nights of the year, that resurrects and reflects who we’ve been in our lives.  The pull underscores aging.  It’s laced with familial roles – how sweet and sustaining they are, as well as how fraught with contradiction.  It’s sourced in finances, commercialism, and gender roles while being boxed by cultural traditions.  It trades in shame, hits our weak spots, and plays on self-esteem.  To top it all off, end of the year rituals are reminiscent of religious rites; even if we’re not religious, we want to be spiritual.  We’re drawn to things that smell like candles in the dark, salvation, and promises.  The resurrecting and reflecting pull is so strong we start vowing.  We want a clean break.  Never again, we say.  Or this year I promise.  From this point forth and so on.  Sometimes it appears more mild: it’s true I’d be happier if I finally lost this weight, maybe.  Or, now that I’m middle aged, I really should start exercising.  I don’t know that these are actually mild.  They’re rather passive aggressive.

Resolution and change are not the same thing.  They aren’t even related to each other. 

The one is sourced by ego, master of phrasing self-hate as self-improvement and avoidance as self care.  Resolution implies a problem needing to be fixed.  But the problem here is the self.  We so often make problems of ourselves. We try to change ourselves to fit in or get enough likes, without realizing that’s an endless hunger.  We may stoke our ego enough for today, but tomorrow we’ll have to do the same thing.  And the next day.  And the next.  The needing will never end.  There is no ‘goal’; there’s only a hamster wheel.  Or one of the minor circles of hell.  Resolutions feed either our ego or our insecurities.

Our ego and our insecurities turn out to be inseparable.

The other, change, is sourced elsewhere.  By god, maybe.  The really real.  By the ordinariness of biological, historical, genetic and teeming life.  And let’s face it: ordinary life, in the power of the galaxy, the wonder of a seed, the outright miracle of human birth and the delicacy of minerals in the soil, is wonderous.  I could go on and on.  The ordinary life of snowflakes and sixty five million refugees, salt in the blood, the wild bones of children and the fact of guns in America; I mean racial wounds, feminine persistence, immigrant dreams and native wisdom. I mean hope and sadness, hope and guts, hope and the medicinal poetry of ancestors. 

There is so much more to life than our ideas about ourselves. 

We need rituals, after so much talk of resolutions.  Rituals dabble in the taboo and make it sacred. Ritual approaches the ordinary with a sense of humility and revelation.

Ritual leans in; change and healing follow.  Then, and only then, do items on lists start to check themselves off.  They fall off surprisingly and without effort, a kind of domino effect.  What was vague becomes clear.  What was ignorance becomes wisdom.  Like photography, resolution has to do with clarity. Resolution is a side effect of healing, not the means.

As I write this I’m watching the sun rise, flamingo pink and throat red.  Everything but the light is freeze blue, hard white.  The juxtaposition is sharp.  By the time the light reaches a diagonal, it will be molten gold, a lava on window panes, hot honey on houses. A siren wails and an ambulance rushes to the hospital.  I’m working on my own love, my own marriage.  One of Martin Luther King’s books lays spread-eagled next to the coffee cup. 

I can’t ignore reality. Nor can I deny beauty. Nor can I handle even one of the greater questions of our time.  In the face of all that, I need something to hold me. 

I need something to hold me because I am not strong.

Ritual makes an offering of the self rather than an imposition of the will.  Rituals invoke our heart with all its vulnerabilities.  Vulnerability has power.  Ritual notices the beauty of deep winter even as it shivers in the face of it. Rites acknowledge need, accept uncertainty, appreciate human effort and sing earthy wisdom.  Ritual sacralizes the taboo, the profane, the frustrating, the quotidian; and what else could we do with such things?

What else could we possibly do?

Ritual is the mysterious work of hope and healing.  Their mutuality.  Their human and ordinary realness.

But healing looks so very different than a yearly pep talk or ultimatum.  Change often takes years to unfold.  Decades.  Generations. Sometimes this is so hard. It is so tiring.  How can we take on such tremendous problems without losing hope?

Like many of the deeper questions, this one has two apparently contradictory answers.  It’s paradox. 

On the one hand, we only have the courage and capacity to do such things when we remember that they are bigger than us.  They are generational, historical, and communal. We have to do our part.  It’s important that we realize we are part of a movement. It’s possible to see with the eyes of the not yet born.  Our work has been handed down directly from the ancestors.  Then the difficulty of the present doesn’t matter.  Our frustration isn’t the whole of the story.  When we do this, we are uniquely able to notice the beauty of things without their beauty being tarnished by the shitty context in which they happen. 

And on the other hand, we have to take care of ourselves.  We have to learn the lessons implicit in our own lives.  When we do this, when we explore personal healing, we find a beauty and a grace quality to life that we’d never suspected before.  We find parts of ourselves we never knew existed.  Parts of our self we couldn’t get rid of become our standing ground.  If we don’t leverage our own life lessons, we re-iterate them.

If we don’t have both levels of healing we suffer.  If we only think about ourselves, we eventually become self destructive.  We’ll roil in diet mentality.  We’ll self-improve ourselves to death.  We’ll never have enough qualifications, or degrees, or respect.

But if we only ever look at the big issues, we lose ourselves. We’ll get depressed. We’ll burn out.  Everything will be heavy.  No one will want to be around us because we’re self righteous and annoying.  And we’ll develop conflict and resentment because we can’t claim the problems of the world as our own personal destiny.  They don’t belong to us.  They aren’t ours.

Ritual is the only thing I know that draws these polarities together.  A yogic truth, if it is one, suffuses through all the layers of reality.  It has to be true at the subtle level, as well as the most scientific.  It has to be both a universal truth, which can anchor us; and it has to be an intimate - almost embarrassing- personal experience, which floats us. 

Ritual lays the spirit on the altar, using whatever altar it can find.  Dust motes in a column of sunlight, say.  Or clumps of black grasses, shrouded in snow.  Ritual is seeing breath crystallized in bluey light and ego decrystallized into something not yet finished, nowhere near done.  To watch the ego decrystallize is hard, and such a relief.

Ritual redeems us like a coupon. 

Love, it says, is possible.  Even though we doubt.  Doubt, it says, is workable, because we still love.

Ritual heals us.  Which is what we’ve needed year after year.  It’s what we all, need.  It’s time for us as a society to focus on healing. There’s no task of greater importance and no undertaking that could be more profound. 

Now is the time for us to finally heal the painful legacy of racism, the lineage of patriarchy, the division between the wealthy and the poor. Now is the time to seriously take on the task of healing the environment.  It’s time for us to heal a broken educational system.  It’s time to heal an antiquated disease care model that poses as a health care system.  We have to address the ill health and depression that affects fifty percent of the world’s population.  We have to address the cost and the suffering laid on families and see the stress that comes of not getting essential things right.

I suppose what I’m suggesting amounts to a revolution.  I mean social justice.  I mean public wealth.  I mean human rights and acknowledging the staggering beauty and urgent role of science before our policies do irreparable harm.  

The gyst of such a revolution would be individuals healing themselves and the people they come in contact with.  It will spread until our halls of power are brown and feminine. Our governors won’t descend from fraternities but rise from immigrant families and we’ll support them. This revolution will enrich our economy and restore wounded dignity and we’ll celebrate it.  We can promote a revolution based on healing instead of the band-aid of suppressing.  We can call shame culture and bullying culture out as being the same culture. This healing will look for wholeness in our fragmented society and this shift will benefit everyone, every last one, in society. 

Like any revolution this won’t come from government.  It will come from individuals. It will come from us. 

The need is clear.  The way is clear.  Your soul longs for it and the world is so ready for it. 

I’m not asking for utopia. I’m speaking directly to the way things are. Things don’t have to be this way.  

There is an emptiness to mid January.  It stands in all the doorways.  It’s rubbed people’s cheeks to raw.  We’re depleted but expected to go on.  Lean in to ritual as both balm and sugar. It’s a fire and it’s a song.  It’s important, and it’s something we already know how to do.  Sankalpa is like that.  It’s proof that we already and always have cared.  We fill emptiness with love.

yoga and #metoo

"On some level, I wish also that I had spoken publicly about them (Jois' sexual assaults) before now, but they were confusing...I didn’t really know how to talk about them without disparaging the entire system." Mary Taylor

The #metoo movement has roiled social media and the news cycles for months.  Industry after industry has shuddered through a series of allegations that prove sexual abuse goes hand in hand with our current structures of power.  

I've been quiet.  

I've been angry.  I've been upset.  I've felt a need to set my agenda aside when it comes to wider social issues.  As a woman I've felt a need to take care of my own boundaries.  As a yoga teacher I've been upfront about the reality of sexual abuse and the inherent vulnerability of a yoga practice.  I hope my teaching stands in defiance to cultural standards; I want to provoke exploration of our own inner worlds, both joy and sorrow; I hope I have been approachable as an ally. But I've avoided any kind of public statement about #metoo.  It felt inopportune.  I didn't want to use shared pain as a personal platform.

More honestly, #metoo hit a nerve. I've been confused, hurt, and pissed off.  More close to the bone, still: it's one thing to read the news, to have conversations in public, and to do some serious ball breaking in all sorts of contexts, but another thing again to question yoga.  I've wanted to keep yoga separate.  I've wanted to keep it sacrosanct.  I don't want to befoul something so dear to my own sanity, so necessary to my own well being.

But #metoo applies to yoga as much as it does the red carpet or the Senate.  We need better conversations in our yoga practices. We need more integrity in our teaching. We need  accountability and willingness to face reality in our yoga practice.

Silence, incredulity, and misogyny trickle down social ladders with far more efficacy than economic benefits ever have.  Social outrage has brought with it a barrage of information, emotional overwhelm, and pain.  Good men have been left confused by the prevalence of sexual misconduct, the systemic undermining of women and kids.  Women have expressed relief and a swelling of pathos.  But people have also expressed pain.

There is a sense of hope, of justice.  We are alight with passion and righteous anger. But there is also a sense of frustration and foreboding.

I'm frustrated.  I've found the movement hard in its hyperbole and late to the game insights.  I'm angry that we're still surprised by revelations of sexual assault.  It's infuriating that we should debate the reality of rape culture when we have a pussy grabbing predator in chief. #Metoo has brought important issues to the table - including bringing some perps to task, shaking up institutional hierarchies, and creating a platform for victims to speak out.

But let's not make the mistake of thinking it is entirely safe for victims to speak out.  Let's not think publicly sharing their story is the right thing for all survivors to do.  For many it's really not.  It's really, not.  

#metoo is a good thing.  But it isn't an answer to the problem.  Its just a collective howl.  

The language of this whole discussion still places the burden of proof on women*.   That language keeps us talking about how many women are assaulted per annum rather than talking about the number of men getting away with rape.  This burden is an inheritance -  the inheritance is generational, deep to social structures, possibly foundational .  It's a heavy weight that shames girls and diffuses accountability.  The burden of shame distorts real vulnerability to 'men are bad' and 'women are angry'. The truth is not that men are bad, but a small minority of abusive people get away with harm over and over again.  The issue is not that women are angry but that women are targets.

This pervasive atmosphere threatens even those women and girls who are not personally targeted and it confuses the population as a whole about complicity.  This is the means by which fear can wound as deeply as physical blows, this is how the psychological damage of rape culture lays hold on so many voices, even those who aren't directly involved. Shame poisons everybody.  Shame dirties the whole damned culture.  It's a displacement of accountability. It's a way to think that 'it happened to me once' is the end of the story, when in reality women often live through repeated transgressions.  The transgressions begin when we are children. They range from unsolicited demonstrations of adult penises, to date rape, to a shame based gendered reality as working adults. Women will be objectified in school, in the workplace, by the media, and in public spaces while making less than a man for the same job done.  It's patronizing, pure and simple.  The difficulty is the way in which we're all participating in it.  

Dismantling the patriarchy means acknowledging the ways in which we lie to ourselves.

Gurus and cults

Spiritual, physical, and emotional power over others creates abuses of power.  Yoga is no exception.  We've got ourselves a long litany of known, suspected, and occasionally outed abusers.  The current manifestation of yoga is shallow: social problems breed in its atmosphere like fungus.  Things are positioned to get worse, not better.  

These practices call to people who are lost.  Yoga is marketed as a balm for physical and emotional pain. We all come to yoga as clients or students, which makes us vulnerable by definition. There is zero accountability and a high expectation of charismatic teachers.  Projection and transference run high.  I am not interested, here and now, in naming the names of the patriarchs or the revered saints who turned out to be assholes.  That work is important.  But it's not the work I'm doing right here. Right here I'm simply establishing the background:  like #metoo, ours is not a culture of isolated abusive incidents, it's an atmosphere in which harm thrives.

I have never been hurt by a yoga teacher.  My traumas preceded yoga; yoga was the thing that helped.  So when criticisms of yoga come up, I tend to distance myself from the crazy.  I compromise.  I trade off a little insanity in order to keep what is dear to me close.  

Although the cliques and scandals of the yoga world didn't have anything to do with me personally, I was always aware that they were there.  There have been teachers who were inappropriate.  There have been weird moments, too much skin, too much touch, uncomfortable spaces.  There have been studios and schools in which the relationships between students and teachers, insiders and outsiders, were clearly unhealthy.  But this always existed just outside my personal orbit.  

This is my point: misogyny and abuse of power are systemic issues. They are old school and endemic.  It shouldn't come as any surprise, then, that the same issues exist in yoga.  

But when it comes to yoga, I'm (and I'm means we're) oddly disinclined to do the right thing.  I'm prone to selective listening.  Sometimes this expresses itself as spiritual contortion, a kind of dichotomy between yoga and real life.  Oddly, this also shows up as unity talk, a kind of everything happens for a greater purpose and therefore acceptance, trance.  Personally, and this is important, there is a renunciation of responsibility.  I lean back into the safe distance of theory and philosophy.  Again: I, and I mean: we.

My first exposure to yoga was the Bikram school as taught in New York City in the mid 2000s.  I was new to the whole shebang; my experience was limited to local teachers and a room that shook when the train passed below.  I never came anywhere near Bikram himself, nor his inner circle.  I heard the stories.  I knew what went on at trainings.  I was familiar with his outlandish 'script' and heard each and every one of his lecherous jokes second hand. I saw pictures of his throne and his body, nearly naked, mounted on the nearly naked bodies of his students.  I knew.

But I wanted the yoga.  I needed it.  And so, as millions of others have done in similar scenarios, I rationalized.  I figured it had nothing to do with me.  

Accountability and complicity

The 'none of my business' response is familiar.  It's how most people respond to domestic violence or campus rape.  It's also how we respond to abuse by the upper classes, as if rules and ethics no longer applied, there.  Like middle ground Americans dumbfounded when someone like Trump is elected to office or confused by the urgency of Black Lives Matter, ‘none of my business' is related to 'I had no idea'.  It's an attempt to focus on a rare and evil individual so that we don't see how pervasive the bullshit in the atmosphere has become.   

By ignoring the broader implications, 'none of my business' shores up the status quo.  It's complicit, but banal.  It's only ever guilty of having had really good intentions and really bad information.

This is how #metoo has been effective: Hollywood suddenly refused to be complicit.  It outed Harvey Weinstein.  Hollywood kicked him to the curb.  Charges have been brought against him in multiple countries.  The press ran and continued to run the story.  Other power brokers refused to work with him.  Once the ball got rolling and other men were accused, they too were canceled from programming, dropped from studios, contracts were ended and charges brought.  The tech industry did the same.  The media followed suit.  With Roy Moore, the good old boys themselves came under fire.  

#metoo is a rare case of society holding perpetrators accountable.  

I watched all this with a kind of guttural, primal, deep satisfaction.  It was as if all the ancient rage of wounded sisterhood had finally, finally landed a blow. My oldest, deepest, personal and ancestral wounds flickered in the dark. The fall of the patriarchy seemed a plausible, and a tremendously beautiful, and a completely earthly season whose time had come.

And I started to wrap my mind around something I'd not been able to, before.  

To say 'it has nothing to do with me' is complicity.  Generally speaking, even if a man in a position of power is known to have committed an assault, he'll not lose his backing.  He won't lose his job.  People will still buy whatever it is he's selling.  So long as we buy in, we're part of the problem.  I don't say this lightly.

As some of accused are seen as heroes, there is pain associated with realizing their behavior is less than heroic.  That Bill Cosby could be a serial rapist blew our everything is happy here stories out of the water.  But disbelieving a charismatic and powerful man has targeted an individual women belies an ignorance of how this kind of abuse works.  Behaving like a hero in public is part of it.

In those first few years of practice, one of my teachers used to tease about how slavish we were to the practice.  We're a cult, you know, she'd say.  She meant this as a joke.  I took it as a joke even as I knew, more or less, that it was true. It spoke some ugly realities about the things I was doing and the people I was associating with.  But I couldn't admit a flaw to something I loved so much.  I didn't know how to question the system without dismantling the system.  

So instead of questioning, I said it was none of my business.  That is, I said exactly what society taught me to say. It's slant talk, proof of the ways we're taught to believe it's in our own interest to undermine victims.  So long as ordinary human beings are complicit, rapists won't be held accountable.  If it is in our interest to uphold the system, accountability is impossible. Rape culture, thrives.

I said scandal in the yoga world didn't concern me, although it very much did concern me.  It was everywhere around me, at every single stage of my practice.

Separating the 'teaching' from the 'person'

I was so addicted to the practice I was willing to ignore the glaring defects of the subculture.  Sometimes we dismiss the problem by trying to parse 'the teaching' from 'the man'.  The movie business does this with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski;  offense is acknowledged, then  excused in the name of art.

This is a hard, inquiry, but it bears asking: what do you do with the art?  Do you watch Annie Hall?  It is hard, but I think human beings can do hard things.  I have to believe human beings are capable of that much discernment.  I think we can both take Woody Allen to task and talk about cinema.

I imagine Catholics faced with this same, mildly sick in their center, feeling, when the question of diddling priests comes up: how do you maintain fidelity to God, when God's earthly works are evil?

In feminist studies, it's said complicity in a culture's wrongs reflect our own self-hatred.

This is a challenging premise.  It posits agency, but most of us would argue ignorance of having any.  How are we responsible for the whole of a system?  Who are we to disparage the great works? How are we to assume ourselves responsible for something we stepped into ignorant?  What does an ordinary Catholic have to do with sexual abuse in the church?  What did Americans know of what was happening in Hitler's Germany, or Stalin's Russia?  Am I my brother's keeper?

In the first few years of my practice I was certainly naive.  I was ignorant.  I kept practicing because I needed the practice.  But when the John Friend scandal broke a few years later, I was a teacher, and I did feel a sense of responsibility.  I spoke out even when I knew it put my job on the line (I lost it).  I trusted what I was doing more than I needed the system.

It's only in retrospect that I can see the differences between the two periods of my practice; other than my response, there is very little difference between the scandals in the two schools.  So why did I respond differently? Where did that confidence, come from?  Why did I feel compelled to resist as a teacher when I hadn't as a student?  

Maybe this is just the gift of love and relationship: a parent will take personal risk to protect the vulnerable.  

Maybe it was just enough time, a few years, to move me from self-hate to something beyond it.  Here’s another thing feminists say: you can't 'empower' anybody, women included; women already have power.  

Maybe self-hatred and  self-ignorance are the same thing.  

So how do we move from disbelieving it has anything to do with us to shaking the system down?

I don't have a terribly hopeful answer, other than to say it is possible.  Hard inquiry is valuable.  If we feel empowered enough, we won't have a problem disparaging the system.  

That's easy to say and hard to see happening.  While I and lots of folks I know have dismissed the astanga system, for example,  I have a hard time imagining a time when yoga as a whole says, let's just end astanga yoga.  

Too many people still feel the system is beyond repute.  Too many people still want it.

In other words, too many people don't believe themselves, or us collectively, capable of anything better.

The false narrative of karma, the problem with trauma

One of the gifts of this practice is the way in which it changes our perspective.  Only when we realize we've been seeing things from a very specific point of view are we able to take in the possibility of there being any others.  You wake up one day and realize you've been stuck in a story or an old tape.  You observe your own thinking and behavior in practice, and suddenly understand that this is the way you think and behave all the time.  Only then do you have the option of doing something, different.

It’s important to realize the dominant narrative is not the only narrative.  It's important to challenge the stories we've been taught.  The familiar and well worn story of compassion fatigue, of doing the best we can, the idea that some things will never change aren’t the whole of reality.  These are just stories like other stories.  To say that this is just the way men are, or society is, is like using karma to argue powerlessness.  It’s bigger than me, therefore I can do nothing.

I don’t think karma works that way.  I think karma says here’s what you’ve been given, now what are you going to do?

Our use of the word trauma isn't much different.  Indeed I think there is a danger to habituating language, medicalizing it, or abstracting it away from ourselves.  These days it's become popular to talk about trauma, victims, even a need for 'trauma sensitive yoga'.  I'm not saying trauma sensitive yoga is a bad idea.  I'm just wondering if yoga without trauma sensitivity means anything.  I’m wondering what trauma is supposed to mean.  I wonder if there is any one who isn't touched and impressed and wounded.  Nobody gets out of here without a broken heart.  And I don't think a broken heart is the end of the story.

The cultural exchange between east and west had some problems, and yoga as we know it today has some major character flaws, but I don’t think it has to be this way.

To look for psychological, rather than cultural, reasons for rape culture and make victims of survivors might be causing us more trouble.  It slides dangerously close to the idea that men are aggressive, predatory, and irrational when aroused (read: ''men are bad").  It also comes dangerously close to dismissing  victims as damaged (read: "broken humans can't be fixed").

If we look carefully, alternative threads to this story are readily available.  I'm partial to the one that says not all men are predators; those few who are abusers tend to have been abused; the opposite, however, is not true: most survivors of abuse do not become abusive.

Read that five times slowly.  Most survivors of abuse do not become abusive.

I'm partial to the story that says healing is possible.

Forgiveness, redemption, and accountability

We conflate forgiveness, redemption, and accountability.  I was once asked if I had done the work of forgiving my rapist.  I shot back something snarky.  I said the suggestion blamed me, rather than my rapist, for the pain of rape.  I said some things are unforgivable.

I don't know why, other than ignorance, we find it so hard to hold sexual offenders accountable.  Why we should excuse the founder of a yoga school, or Picasso, or the college kid who rapes an unconscious girl behind a dumpster.  It's as though we fear holding people accountable would make everything fall apart: life as we know it would end, where would the accusations stop, men would no longer be men, we’d never understand each other or get any sex.  

But this is conflating accountability for redemption.  They are distinct, not either or.  We can both hold offenders accountable and redeem things like yoga, hollywood, politics.  

Which brings me back to forgiveness.  I don't know if I can say I've forgiven.  I don't know that any one should.  I don't even know how possible forgiveness, is.  I think trying to forgive prematurely, or being told to do so by others, means we're not really doing the work of healing.  I think the work of healing is hard.  But when we do that work, something happens.  Maybe it's not forgiveness, exactly.  It's not like the pain ends.  Nor does the shame.  Nor the need to be very careful indeed about who you share your heart and skin and pussy with.  

But I do think something happens.  There is a new thing in your experience.  This new thing both remembers and no longer has to.  It's rather wild, far beyond what you think of as you, but when it speaks it speaks with your own voice.  Forgiveness insists on having a life with love in it.  Forgiveness has fuck all to do with the people who cause harm. Forgiveness has to do with the folks who vow no further harm, not from this point forward, not in my name and not here and not now.  Forgiveness is wild.  It's brave enough to be vulnerable. Forgiveness recognizes that the system can and should be dismantled.  We can do better.

*when I say women, or indicate women are gendered targets of sexual violence, I understand and imply that sexual violence affects people of color, GLBTQ, immigrants and children as well.  I understand that this is systemic.  These issues are intractably related.

Yoga when the world's gone to hell

The news is relentless.  There is a sick taste in my mouth.  I oscillate between avoiding news and bingeing on it.  I oscillate between desperate, trembling activity and absolute apathy.  I forget myself: I teach I protest I aunt I wive I write.  And the self interrupts, selfish: I whine I dither I am needy lonely ugly and afraid.  I want comfort.  I want answers.  I want change.  And I want it all to just fucking calm down.  I want some sweetness in my life, the celebrations, time with the folk I love, time to do something other than crisis management and grief.  I dearly want to sit and watch as the sugar maple changes her clothes, gussies up, stuns, and lets go.

It doesn't stop.  The news is relentless.  Now this.  Now that.  Heartbreak.  Anger.  Fear.

There are days I desperately need my practice, and it feels desperate; starving, needy, heady, grabby, longing.  Then there are days practice seems utterly irrelevant, selfish, not good enough, unimportant, a waste of time.  On those days, everything in my body recoils from sitting.  Nothing in me wants to move.  Awareness is just too goddamned uncomfortable.  Nothing can tear me away from the twitter feed, the images, the debate, the body counts.  Or: nothing seems so urgent as uninterrupted time with my niece, far from news, away from danger.  

In recent days I've wanted the solace of my teacher.  But he died a few months ago.  I could go back to his published words or his voice in a podcast.  But I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to his voice yet.  It doesn't feel good.  I can't.  So there is silence.

I wanted the release of a practice and a community so I went to a class.  But I kid you not the teacher said 'feel the burn, it's goooood' and 'yoga bliss' and I wanted, a little bit, to sit bolt upright and stare at her in outrage.  I quietly left.  I wept in the bathroom.  It was an ugly, heaving, snotty cry.  Etheric music and wispy incense drifted around my head but I cried and I cried.

In the early stages of my practice, the first few years, it was all about that burning.  It felt, good.  I practiced, obsessively.  Every single day there was some new thing learned.  Every time I practiced was a revelation.  It was like learning a new language, an immersion.  I immersed. The words of this language were freedom, liberation, an end to suffering.  It rang bells inside me.  It lit fires.  It seemed true.  

It isn't like that these days. The world has shifted.  Those very words - freedom, liberation, an end to suffering - ring discordant. 

There are times this feels like the yoga isn't working any longer, or maybe it was always a hoax.  The very definition of spiritual by-pass and self-indulgence, delusion, empty promises.  I've heard a lot of people say very similar things: It spoke to me, but then in the light of things, what it said wasn't true. 

Another teacher of mine says: these practices have never been more important.  People need a yoga practice now, more than ever.

As a teacher, I've been banging drums for years.  Look at the world.  Look at the world.  Look.  But recently I've been torn. Part of me needs to emphasize yoga as social justice.  Another realizes my teaching needs to sooth.  It is my job to provide the necessary intervention of care.  This latter feels more urgent: come here, rest.  Pause.  Re-source. We need to take care of ourselves, each other, our loved ones and our students.  

And, we need to change the the world.  Children are watching.  People are dying.  The maple tree rattles in the early morning dark.

*

Yoga isn't enough.  It isn't an answer to atrocity any more than prayer is.  Neither are an appropriate response.  Prayer is not an answer to a broken democracy cracking in racial violence and underlying fear.  Prayer is not an appropriate response to flood, storm, thousands of displaced and hungry and needing help lives.  Prayer is not an appropriate response to domestic terrorism.  And releasing our own tension, feeling our feelings, gleaning insight is not enough. Children are watching.  People are dying.  Do I repeat myself? Or am I making my point? 

This isn't anywhere near, over.  More people are going to die.  Because hospitals don't have power and there isn't food or clean water.  Because police brutality and gun violence.  Because we haven't really answered the questions of race and sex and gender or democracy, of civil rights, of justice.

Which is not the same as saying either yoga or prayer - or whatever mental health and spiritual tools you've got - is irrelevant.  They are, relevant.  They are relevant as tools. They are tools for our own sanity.  They help us quell anxiety, reactivity, splitting away from our body and our feelings.  They resource our autonomy, our responsibility, our inborn capacity to choose and a renewed determination to choose well. These practices light fire, tend fire, inspire hope.  These practices empower the self, little as she is in the great scheme of things.

Little as she is in the great scheme of things, her empowerment is vital. 

I swear, the maple this time of year seems less a tree and more a poem.  I can feel the red drawing up, in my arms.

*

This is where paradox, the nature of two things being true at one and the same time, comes to a head: I know of nothing, other than my prayerful practice of yoga, that both empowers the pray-er and acknowledges the reality of suffering.  

I call this, hope.  It isn't what we'd expected and it is not, most definitely not, the way we want it to be.  Hope is surrender, and commitment.  Not one or the other: both.

In the beginning, yoga was all about me.  It had to be.

It isn't about me anymore.  It can't be.

My students have asked, in the last year, over and over and over again: what, now?  How do we not burn out?  How can we possibly keep feeling into pain, and suffering, and injustice, when it just keeps coming?  The question is on point.  How do we find the energy to take up a problem that is bigger than us?  How do we not lose heart in the face of such toxic realities, the unanswered questions, the big things like racism and immigration and climate change?

I've said: I have to remember these things are bigger than I am.  If I can believe that history will judge these moments, then it doesn't matter so much that I am tired.  If I realize that future generations might take up these very issues with more grace and possibility than we do, that my frailty is irrelevant.  That these questions are old, they are ancient, they are chronic like pain, simply doesn't matter if I realize there is some small thing I can do.  It doesn't solve the world's pain.  But I sleep better.  I recover, sanity.  If I believe in beauty, and justice, and the preciousness of children, than my fear isn't terribly important.  

Sometimes, I have to step back and let others bang the drums.  Sometimes, I listen for my teacher's voice, even when it isn't there. Sometimes, I speak and realize I sound like him; this gives me goosebumps.  Sometimes you are crabby tired and overwrought but then a child asks for a snack; of course you make it.  Sometimes, you'll hate yoga but then some one asks for help; you'll say yes.  No one of these things is the answer, and no one of these things is not part of the answer.  

It's okay to be angry, to grieve, to burn out if you realize it isn't about you and you're not alone.  The relative smallness of actions becomes tolerable. 

Pray as hard as you can, as often as you need, with whatever tools you've got.  

Pray, so that you can get back to work.  The news is relentless, and that's okay; that means it isn't over. Yoga is social justice.  Come, and rest.  It does something like red does to maple trees.  But it happens inside your own chest.   
 

American Symbolism

Driving home yesterday, I was passed on the highway by an enormous white pickup truck.  It was raining.  The sky was mottled: now fuzzy, now slick.  Hitched to the truck's tail were both an American and a Confederate flag.  The truck was covered in Trump propaganda: 'the silent majority has spoken', 'God Bless Trump', and 'Trump 2020'.  He splattered my small car in a wash of kicked up rain.  I felt my whole body recoil.  This was Sunday morning.  On Friday night, a Neo-Nazi rally had gathered in Charlottesville Virginia.  With three dead and torches burning around a black church, it spilled over into Saturday.  By Sunday, the president of the United States had finally been pressed for a statement.  He prevaricated. Far from Charlottesville and alone in the rain, I wondered when this guy had gotten his truck done up.  Was it post election?  Was it more recent than that?  Was he out joyriding and fear mongering precisely because of the events in Virginia?  Where was he going?

And where had he come from?

This is part of the fear, isn't it?  The knowing there is danger in our midst?  We've known racism is endemic and systemic (different things, synergistic to each other); but for it to be so bold as to gather in public and shout Nazi slogans, for it to be endorsed by the silence of the White House, is terrible. It's terrifying.  As in: terrorism.  And yet, the seconds keep ticking by, unaffected and unnoticed as drops of rain.  Days, pass.

As soon as the protest or rally or whatever the hell it was was deemed illegal in Charlottesville, it was effectively shut down. This took less than 20 minutes.  However, I don't know that it was effectively 'shut down' so much as the Nazis disappeared.  No one knows where they went.  Through the veins of undercurrent, fringe internet chat rooms, and outlier fraternal gatherings, these people are organized.

Meanwhile they are neither so fringe nor outier as our sense of decency wants to believe. They are not quiet about their intentions. And however and whoever they are as 'organized' is perhaps less concerning - since they are really ego maniacal idiots who could be identified and held accountable - than are their counterparts outside and inside.

Outside: individuals who are alone are emboldened to act; the erroneous rhetoric of white supremacy and 'reverse racism' start to bleed all over the media, family gatherings, school playgrounds; events in Charlottesville are both horrifying as an incident and indicative of a swelling, global, atmospheric shift.  The environment has changed.  It tilted. Distortion seems to warp pubic spaces. It is toxic. It only takes one person, in a split second, to cause enormous and irreparable harm.  We live in an environment in which guns, slurs, and violence are everyday threats. We are waiting for the unspeakable to happen.   As has been pointed out elsewhere, the people at the rally are supported by the 52% of white women who voted for Trump seven months ago, anyone who is swayed by the rhetoric of 'shaking things up', everyone who is willing to tolerate sexual assault, bullyism, and vitrolic rascism in exchange for a mythic 'great America'.

And above: the people who act on these dangerous premises are backed by the executive branch of government.  Yes, by Donald Trump.  He's the front man.  He's provocative. But the ideology and power for this state of affairs lies in the hands, the heads and the history of the people behind him.  To say that white supremacy and violence are not endorsed by the president of the United States is to deny that office's entire platform. This is exactly what Trump asked for - and promised - throughout his campaign.  This is explicitly the polemics espoused by Steve Bannon before, during, and after the election.  Social recusal of the White House comes both from the blurring of reality that is the linchpin of totalitaritanism and abusive relating - we're dealing with the absurd here- and an earnesty of heart that does not want to believe racism could exist in such a sacred space, in the heart of government, where it matters most. Not at this point in history.

History is suddenly so present.

The white pickup was not the only one I saw in my forty five minute drive down the interstate.  There were three others.  None so provocative as the first, but all of them disturbing.  When the first passed me, I felt rage.  I wanted to scream.  I wanted to deface that truck.   I wanted a baseball bat and a can of spray paint.  I visualized getting close enough to spit, or at least flip the guy my middle finger.  But I realized: I could, maybe, possibly, get away with that ( being a middle aged white woman.  And the fair enough assumption that the driver is more swagger than action), but I might be hurt if I tried.  It is my privilege - and a personal dose of fuck you bawdiness - that would allow me to even dare.

After the fourth truck I pulled off the freeway.  The rain alternately stopped and began again.  It began so subtly you wouldn't notice. It was not raining and then you'd realize it was, and had been.   The long low sloping hills and fields and lakes were heavy with a green spiderweb of mist.  I was lulled by the somnulant metronome of windsheild wipers.

But it kept going, this confusing ride home.  All over the place, out in the countryside, people had decided to put out American flags.  I would just start to daydream and think of other things when I'd come around a bend and there would be another flag, rising up out a barrel of geraniums or lilting over a mailbox.

I realized I had no idea what the flags meant.

The symbol has been used and misused and bandied about so egregiously that you can't know what people mean by them.  Were these flags a stand in for a swastika?  Or were they an image of resistance?  It's terrifying to realize they mean both.  The Johnson's are proclaiming one thing while their neighbors the Swanson's are endorsing the other.  The empty mailboxes and soggy fields in between become just as mysterious.

Symbols are important.  They are the definition of human meaning.  By symbolism, fabric and metal and geometric shapes become more than they are in themselves.  They are dense and alive, laden, portent with history.  Symbols evoke god, justice, and identity. They refer to blood. Both the most senseless of pastimes - like sports or commercial branding - and the most bitter aspects of history can be tripped by a symbol, instantaneously. The response is visceral, organic. It's stronger than words and faster than logic. Start fucking around with symbolism and you're messing with the sacred and the profane.  Use an image, and you touch people's hearts. I mean people's souls.  This is precisely why oppression works: burn an effigy and you threaten millions of lives.  You can make a joke or excuse a thing as colloquialism, but you directly invoke slavery, condone rape, whisper that you and a whole culture behind you would be okay with your death, deportation, or lynching.

Language is nothing but symbolism.

So long as a certain language is established, the vast majority of the population doesn't even have to participate: their silence is enough.

So long as we have a president who deals in silence and false equivalencies, using language intelligently is a profoundly political act.

Like so: Neo-Nazis are responsible for events in Charlottesville, including both terrorism and murder. The president of the United States is on their side.  See? This is both true, and it is treason.

I stopped to visit my mother and father.  I told them about the flags.  My father shook his head.  He said he wished there could be a reclamation of the flag.  A movement to take up the ideals it once stood for. A strong and colorful affirmation of it's meaning for the future.

Reclamation and revision are part of symbology.  There is a long, long history of reclaiming the curves of the body, and hair, and sex, The righteousness of anger and the food on our tables has had to be recovered. The voice has to be reclaimed. Social justice, by definition, reclaims space.  Reclamation is a vital thread to feminism, black pride, and indigenous rights. Interestingly, revision often cuts past the objective to the vulnerable underside of the symbol: justice goes under the abstraction of geometry or slur directly to the flesh, to buried bones and politicized wombs.  This is why it matters, why it hurts: symbols mark identity.  This, again, is exactly why oppression is possible - by a magical process of abstraction, bodies are made invisible, history and civil liberties are denied, threats to children and communities are made clear. To un-abstract them is revolutionary. Social justice movements reclaim symbols precisely because symbols reveal the body's primacy.  I mean the desperate urgency of one's right to exist.

I burned a flag at the tender age of thirteen or fourteen.  I don't remember exactly when, other than junior high. I do recall that we had to first buy a flag, my buddy and I, at the local hardware store.  Made of synthetics, it burned poorly.  It melted and dripped, burning my hand.  We did the thing covertly, with hot whispers and a sense of adolescent blasphemous thrill.

You might ask what the hell I was doing.  I don't, and didn't, know.  I am not, in telling the story, saying I did right or saying it was okay.  I was hitting puberty.  When I say that I mean more than hormonal fury and testing of boundaries; I was coming to realize that my body was female, and by it's female nature it was as much an object and a target as it ever was subjective.  This wasn't hypothetical. Even if it were, it would have been harmful. I was also reading Howard Zinn for the first time. I was in love with both Walt Whitman and J.D. Salinger.  I read something called American Holocaust, the cover of which I remember vividly though I couldn't tell you today who the author was.  In that book, I learned the forests and lakes I loved were haunted and stolen.  And I was hanging out with a kid named Matthew Brown, who was Indian, and this somehow made me realize that history wasn't ghosted so much as it was denied.  Indians didn't disappear any more than I did.

The original act of resistance is knowing: reality is not the same as the dominant narrative; the dominant narrative itself is woven of lies.

I never burned another flag, but my resistance was early born and for decades turned in on itself. It was much later that I crawled out of the ugly roiling mess of self-hatred, self-effacement, complacency and alcoholism.  It took me a very long time to say things like 'my body' without simpering.  My body.  Mine.

A few weeks ago I saw an Audre Lorde quote pop up on my social media feed.  It's a popular one; a recurring meme in a world endlessly trying to find authenticity (sic).  The quote reads:  "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."  As I say, the quote is popular; but the final phrase is usually hacked off.  It's rote to speak of self care only as self preservation.  This is comforting, enough.  And it's benal. That is, we bandy about this idea of self-care or equally ubiquitous ideals of love trumping hate, all being one, yadda yadda.  But we are rarely brave enough to follow these things to their logical end.  We so often espouse ideals without being able to embody them.  Ultimate, absolute truths displace relative truth, current truth, this moment in time truth. It's one thing to say all are created equal; but walking down a street as a black person is not the same as walking the same street as a white male.  Even if people do know who Audre Lorde is, they couldn't recite her.  They couldn't say for sure whether she is alive or dead.  I'm not suggesting we all need to bulk up on our poetry; I'm suggesting our understanding of ideals and philosophies and history, the greatest and most beautiful things, is too often superficial. I don't think we're doing it on purpose.  After all, understanding takes work.  As I say: honesty is threatening.

But what of this: "caring for myself is an act of political warfare"?

Being objectified is painful.  I do mean physically, but I really mean psychologically.  Being made into an object is a violation of one's innermost reality and the superficial and forceful imposition of some other 'reality'.  Healing from such a deep psychological wound has to involve a realization, somewhere along the line, that the 'ism' and the pain were not personal, even though they took place on your body.  You realize your problems are not yours - in cause or in consequence.  They are a part and function of a social wrong.  Therefore: to affirm yourself is political.  To speak the truth is political.

In the wide narrative of racism in America and the narrower one of events in Charlottesville, this shows up: white people believe that calling things by their name is somehow a personal threat. Trump pretty much said so in his first- belated and reluctant- public statement: by blaming 'all sides' he simultaneously portrayed the resistance as threatening, and dismissed the legitimacy of resistance.  To say nothing of excusing the racism. You hear the undercurrent, the shadow, in the wider dialogue of white supremacy: renouncing privilege feels like losing something.  The removal of confederate memorials is 'erasing history'.  Any conversation about race or gender is harking on old resentments.   The left and the media are lying. Success is getting what you want, generally out of somebody else's pocket.  This is the natural order of things. Strength is force.  The mythos of white supremacy depends on a false narrative in which 'white male' is or at some time was a majority, and greatness is an outcome of dominance.

But America is and has always been indigenous, black, female. Brute strength has never been our greatness, but our shame.

Calls for letting symbols stand and moving on, or that we 'remember, never forget', are distortions of history rather than commemoration of it:  'moving on' suggests that white supremacy is a thing of the past; 'remembrance' is a distortion of when and why Confederate memorials were erected in the first place.  Confederate memorials are the works of Jim Crow America, not honor of the dead.  This is not 'like' historic preservation of Auschwitz.  The intent of maintaining Auschwitz is to honor and revisit tremendous grief; to keep woke to the danger of acquiescence and silence; to elicit not pride but mourning.  The intent of confederate memorials is not mourning, but pride.  Threatening, inciting, pride.

Later that evening, my husband and I went to a candlelight vigil at Bde Maka Ska lake.  Most people around here call it Lake Calhoun.  The place was purposely chosen as a local example of placemaking, unmasking the inherent racism of our landmarks and civic structures.  Before it was Lake Calhoun, it was Bde Maka Ska.  Bde Maka Ska is Dakota for White Earth Lake. In 1817, the United States Secretary of War John C. Calhoun sent the army to survey the area.  He'd previously authorized the construction of Fort Snelling.  The lake has gone by the name of Calhoun ever since.  Reactions to calling the lake by it's name, per the local paper: this is pointless; it will always be Calhoun to me; so tired of this PC bullshit, where does it end; Minnesota is the land of common sense, if Lake Calhoun offends you, leave.  No one will miss you; so very, very tired of the PC police and endless looking for things that might offend them or melt their snowflake; everyone will still call it Calhoun so cute but no cigar.

See: every single one of the comments feels burdened or imposed upon, threatened. Change is dismissed as nonsense, childishness. The problem with these reactions is not their ignorance of history, but their denial of the present. The White Earth Tribe still exists.  The Dakota still exist.  We are not talking about relics and archaeology; we are talking about children.  The great failure of the American Dream is believing that history is over.  The civil rights era ended.

It was still raining.  People gathered under a mass of umbrellas.  One woman carried an American flag.  I was touched.  It took a long time, and much work, but I have come to be deeply proud of being an American.  I love the magnanimity and the hope of it's oldest ideals.  I love the noisy, dynamic, vibrant reality of who and what the United States of America actually is. The flag hung limp in the rain. Two women next to us whispered the same questions I'd had earlier; why is it the sight of the flag is riddled with complicated emotional and physical reactions?  What does the American flag, mean?

It seems to me this confusion is related to another: how do we engage with a problem that seems so intractable?  How do we make sense in a world that seems so depressing?

There was a moment when sudden noise - loud noise, sudden - caused the speaker on the podium to stop and the whole of the crowd to turn.  It was a moment of fear.  There had been talk; white pickup trucks might show up.  In that moment I thought: the violence isn't done, yet. I thought: this isn't over.  But the noise was only a party bus, circling the lake.  The speaker on the podium half grinned, and then he continued.

This isn't, over.

It may be- and this might be treason again, but I'm over that - that we need a new flag.  Something that references not only colonies and states, but the Mexican and the Indigenous. We need something that acknowledges both slavery and Jim Crow.  Something that celebrates immigrants.  This rag would have traces of blood in it and threads of deep song.  I think it would be woven of hair.  This flag would ripple like a dancing body and it would sing in the wind.  It would sing.  It would sing not because the race issue went away but because the race issue endured.  It will dance not because the civil rights era failed, or reconstruction did, or the ideals of America are and have always been hypocritical; this flag will fly because the ideals of America still have a chance of coming to life.

If the America of the future is not black, not native, not hijab wearing and spanish speaking, not female, than there is no hope.  America will kill itself.  We are lost.  Humanity is lost.

At the vigil, we sang.  People lit candles in the rain.  Others carried LED lanterns.  A tall, white man standing in front of me wept.  I wept. The woman with the flag switched her grip. The flag leaned left, then right.  I kept looking at her out of the corner of my eye.  Lots of people talked to her.  I took comfort in this.   I thought of that stance, holding something aloft in the rain.  I though of beacons, and beckoning.  I thought of the Statue of Liberty and her relationship to abolition; she wears broken shackles. It seems that the great, the terrible sadness of this moment is not just sadness, it's also the only hope we've got.  It's an indication that we care.  Care, as Audre Lorde taught me, is not merely preservation.

We can only make sense of this sad and ugly world by understanding and believing that the race issue endures, and that is it's greatest and only hope.  It is black communities that will bring us out of moral turpitude; it is Somali women and indigenous women who will ignite our government; it is children who will judge what we do as history.

Sacred Rites

Michael Stone died yesterday. He was one of my most important teachers.  He was my friend. Death is so incomprehensible.  It's unfathomable, and at the same time everything goes on like before.  When someone we care for dies, our lives are broken and will never quite be the same.  And, people are dying all the time.

I don't know anyone other than Michael who could make these things feel true and beautiful at one and the same time.  He himself was so beautiful.  As I numbed myself with internet feel-goods in the last few days I came across a documentary of a Syrian ballet dancer. When the war came, he said, we all lost someone.  The terror went into our hearts.  I thought of Michael. He talked of our crooked world as important, and as personal.  He never lost the deep suffering of the world to the merely political, economic, or historical.  They remained - or became - human. And we were rendered more humane.  Michael insisted we believe in ourselves.

A friend sent me condolences on social media: "I'm sorry you lost a believed teacher", she said.  Auto-correct is so Fruedian.  I knew she meant beloved, but I liked the mistake.  I believed Michael.  I suppose that's what makes a teacher great.  They don't trade in bullshit.  They speak to those parts of ourselves that need to believe, that ache for it.

This morning's class was lovely, heartful. My voice cracked at the ending chant; others took up the chant for me. I thought: well, isn't that just the point. But it wasn't thought, it was felt, it was grateful and besmitten and so tired. I came home, slept, woke and couldn't do anything but steady, constant, pointless things. It was like cleaning but wasn't. It was like unearthing closets but was more a dishevelment of them. It was sort of like gardening, for a few hours, except I'm not a gardener and it was just an attack on weeds and vines and creeping into the yard trees. I stood up with dirt up to my elbows and sweat down my spine. It was baking, sweeping, dog bathing frenzy. It was in and out of the writing. It was like reading twelve books at once, a sentence from this, a phrase from that. I dug out old journals from retreats and trainings with Michael. I read through my own years. I dug though the texts he's guided me through, others he pointed me toward, the mass of sutra and Sanskrit that became my own work, largely because he encouraged it. I reframed, tore out, rephrased. I scattered them, threw them away, brushed off a few scant pieces that roughly hold together. I put them on the wall. Just now, I cried for the first time. It was short. It was rubbed away quick. And then I came back up here to this pacing. As my teacher leaves the world, I am mad with a need to write. Poems, psalms, explanations, apologies. Questions. Emotions. Salt and adrenaline. There is urgency.

A post shared by Karin L Carlson (@coalfury) on Jul 16, 2017 at 7:03pm PDT

I call him 'my teacher', but he wasn't mine.  His family has a wholly different claim to his last hours and his body than I do.  That privacy is sacred.  I cannot imagine the pain and tenderness they feel. I can't do anything but offer them my love. Thousands of people across the world are gathering this evening.  I am awed: one life can do so much.  And I am sad: now that he is gone, there is so much that won't be done. So much needs to be done.

I haven't seen Michael in over a year.  There were times he was teaching nearby but I always had other commitments.  He does an annual retreat to France: I'd always wanted to go.  But I put it off. I assumed I'd go some other time.

Last week in the techniques session I mentioned time as one of the four parts of learning.  We're quite neurotic about it.  We don't take time to say I love you. Or, we say it but don't feel what it is we're saying. We act as though there will be a better time to meet our neighbors or try in some way to make a difference in our community. We put off the important and beautiful things while our lives are mostly routine and spent in the earning of a living.  We're busy.  We're so tired. We whine about not having time but we don't take the time we have. People often ask me, as a teacher, how to find the courage and the energy to take on the really big problems.  Why is it we know what it is we need, but can't do it? How do we possibly take on the problems of race, violence, and fanaticism without losing heart? How do we finally find the courage to do the great and beautiful things we really want to do?

I think we need to do more great and beautiful things.  Life is so hard.  It needs great beauty.

I think the only answer is the jnana or wisdom of time.  When we really feel the passing nature of things and the uniqueness of people, we're moved.  I don't mean intellectually; it isn't an idea. And I don't mean mere sentimentality, either. I mean we're rocked to our soul. An urgency is born.  Clarity and courage come that we didn't know and couldn't have known otherwise.  We don't have to be good enough or ready enough or prepared.  We don't need answers. We realize there are many answers, and no one answer is perfect.  We don't have to be anything at all because the urgency itself carries us and we are left changed.  I think we misunderstand the nature of change.  We spend so much time thinking we have to orchestrate it or fearing the pain of it, disbelieving it's actually possible. But it isn't something we do.   Change is something we allow to happen to us, something we finally allow in.  This isn't easy.

When I heard Michael was dying, I understood something for the first time.  I've known dozens of very good teachers.  Some opened doors for me along the way.  Others helped me understand an aspect of teaching or the dynamics of backbends.  But none became so intimately woven into my way of thinking and feeling that my life itself was changed.  Michael had, and hearing that he was gone I knew my life would never be the same. I understood: some teachers speak to your heart. No other teachings last.

I met Dharma Mittra once.  When I asked him about teaching, he said teach spirit.  If you teach spirituality, people will come back.  Even if you never see them again, they will come back.

But the holiest things are unspeakable.  Michael taught me that.

I had a whole plan for this week's session, a meditation involving birds.  But I think it's more important to be with this.

Love, Death, and Glitter

I haven't written here for months.  I have an excuse: I didn't write because I didn't know what to say. The studio closed.  I moved to Minneapolis.  I got married.  The world, the social and political world in which we move, has taken quite a few upending turns.  I haven't had words to address any of this. People ask questions: where can I practice without the studio? What will Return Yoga look like, now? Where will you teach?  Will you teach?  These are all reasonable questions.  But I've deflected them, or answered with dumb silence.  I haven't had an answer.  I simply didn't know.

I still don't.  I was married and am calling myself Mrs. Carlson these days, but I'm carrying a driver's license that says otherwise.  My signature has become an exercise in attention and confusion, an ostensible proof of the whole neural-patterning thing.  You wouldn't believe how many times a day one has to sign a thing, or introduce oneself, or log into a bank account.

I spoke to one studio about teaching.  I was interviewed (interviewed?  Is that the word?) by a woman who had her two hundred hour certificate from Core Power and no idea what I was talking about with all my anatomy is psychology, movement is a question, talk.   She didn't recognize my teacher's names, though they are big names in yoga studies. She didn't know my name, or Return Yoga, though I'd like to believe these things carry some weight. So I stopped talking.  I just shut up.  Though I'd brought them with me, I put aside all of the curricula I've written and courses I've taught, the interviews I've done and the publications of my work. I pushed them under my chair with my foot.

What this woman wanted was a group exercise instructor, someone to guide a work out two or three times a week.  I can do that.  I can push vinyasa flow til you tremble just like hundreds of other yoga teachers in the metropolitan region.  Maybe (probably, one would hope after all this time) I can do it better than the most of those teachers.

But I don't know that I want to.

I came home and told my husband - who wasn't my husband yet - that it feels a tremendous step backward.  I don't know how to make the transition from running a community studio (let alone the teacher training, the outreach, the sum cumulative body of work that is what I've learned), to being just one amidst hundreds of 'yoga teachers'.  Not to cast aspersion on any one of their individual skills, but they are a dime-a-dozen.

Meanwhile I was asked, now that I'm not running a studio seven days a week, to work with the recovery community. Strictly therapeutic work.

One of these gigs is an addictions treatment center specifically for the queer community. There is always glitter on my mat.  This pleases me.  There's something redemptive in being fabulous at the darkest moments of your life. The last time I was there, the glitter moved from my palm to the air, and then to a woman's cheekbone.  I noticed it like a drift of thought as I spoke and bodies breathed. After class, we had the most profound conversation about savasana I've ever had: there was a genuine inquiry, a pale open honesty, to the conversation; a straight look into how we're living and how we'll die.  Because these folks don't have any preconceptions or ego investment in things like headstand, it's all inquiry. The questions, the fear, the novelty and exploration of experience is front and center. I can have them wiggle toes and roll around on the floor the entire time and call it 'yoga'.  No one would challenge me. This is a blessed relief after trying to teach drop in classes seven days a week for years on end.

Yoga therapy is a contested topic:  Do we mean physical therapy or is this some kind of mental health practice?  Do we teach a different 'style' of yoga if trauma is involved?  To apply clinical language to the thing raises questions of validity and measurable outcomes; it leads directly to insurance and all the other problematic issues of the medical industry. Furthermore and in the first place, is any of this provable?  As much as I balk at group exercise, I'm also uncomfortable with the concept of yoga therapy. It has a weird, greasy smell to it.  It has a vaguely fraudulent texture.  Alternative is not a good word, when it comes to health.  Just as alternative facts are lousy politics.

I tend to think 'yoga therapy' is a redundant phrase.  More: the word 'yoga' and the word 'therapy' cancel each other out, making it a downright illogical phrase.  It's a phrase hinting at cognitive misfire. To call anything yoga therapy is like saying 'medicine-pills', 'apple-fruit', or 'car-automobile'.  It's not that these phrases are false; it's the troubling way they belie any context.  Given context, reasonable people don't speak this way.

All this begs questions rather than answers them. So I contest and subvert and am never teaching what people expect.  Teacher training isn't what people thought, but a startling exploration of one's place in the world and relationships.  Inversion workshops end up being a lot of laying on the floor.  Emotional health classes spend the whole time exploring the hip socket or the way the knee glides.  It isn't that I object to yoga therapy so much as I am trying to do it:  we all have physical issues and a broadband of mental health.  You can't have sensation without emotion.  Mental health, belief, and experience are physiological realities.  Go ahead and try to parse the body from the mind.  Mostly, I'm trying to discern and help us get a greater feeling for the context in which we're living and the choices we have.

But here I am teaching yoga -therapeutically- in clinical scenarios.  Most of these folks have never done yoga before; they are not good at self care; their lives are troubled.

I'm loving it.

I love it except for the fact that it is a closed opportunity.  It's an inherently limited experience: sooner or later it will end and it doesn't lead to anything. People can't just walk in to these classes, though I know a lot of people in the world who crave this kind of intimate practice. I came home and told my husband - who again wasn't yet my actual husband - that I love the work, the people, the feel; but I can't imagine staying in such a small space.  I said this while studying a fleck of glitter on my forearm.  Rubbing didn't dislodge it.  I blew on it like dandelion fluff. It lifted and disappeared into the air.

What I'm personally trying to suss out as a yoga teacher is only a small - albeit privately urgent - version of what is happening on a broader scale.  Small independent studios are closing.  Seasoned teachers tend to start to teach things that don't 'look' like yoga.  They weary of the workout and the stretching.  Difficult questions inevitably come up, often in the form of their own bodies or the bodies they work with.  I've watched a handful of teachers in the last year quit teaching because their own chronic health issues don't allow them to teach 'yoga' any more.  Others simply  can't stand the one-size-fits all, get-as-many-bodies- in- the- room- as- you- can approach.  The festival and advertised aspects of yoga aren't as appealing as they looked from the outside.  The Yoga Journal conference is cancelled until they decide what 'direction' they are taking. Online subscriptions are selling more than in-studio classes, although to look at Meghan Currie and Dylan Werner I'm not sure what it is we're practicing. The Observer notes that for every yoga teacher there are two in training. But a rumor reached me that Core Power - whose whole model is teacher training programs made to the order of puppy mills - is verging on bankruptcy.

This mass identity crisis isn't all bad.   At some point we have to let go of childish illusions.  Yoga is no different.  Some yoga teachers become  psychiatrists and social workers, others take up other systems of body work or cross disciplinary lines.  I know one former yoga teacher who is calling herself a death duala these days.  I know someone who dropped teaching to go into seminary.  Others leave teaching in order to reclaim their own 'practice' and go on with their lives.  There is so much more than yoga practice and teaching.  There are relationships.  Study.  Work.  Far from being a failure, I see this as proof: unless yoga resolves to a changed life, somehow informs our most intimate choices and important questions, it doesn't mean anything at all.  It's just a hobby.

I watch this happening, over and over again: generally yoga is a phase and is dropped the moment shit gets real or a new shiny object comes into view; but occasionally, yoga seems to be the common but largely silent thread behind beautiful expressions of the human heart.  Often this is exactly what happens when people stop coming to yoga after a year or three: they've changed, for the good, and the yoga served it's purpose. You see a glint of it, behind the story.  But the story isn't yoga: it's about cancer or dancing or school children or oceans.  It involves justice, and the meaning of a human life, singly and by the millions. It's the detritus of history, really, and the vague outlines of hope. The best stories are about death, or love.  They are prayer songs or glittering star poems in the hot night, plain speak about the terrible difficulty of the beautiful world.

None of this answers the question of what do I, do.  Not directly.

Someone said, a few months ago, that this is a transition and she's okay waiting until I get new gigs set up.  No matter what, I'll be teaching yoga, she said.  She said this with her face cast down but her eyes looking up at me from under her hair.  I didn't answer as quickly as she might have wanted.  I spent months not writing precisely because I didn't know, I wasn't sure: will I be teaching?  I didn't even know that I wanted to, let alone 'should'.

Of course my students have a hard time parsing 'yoga' from my identity - they've only ever seen me in the context of teaching. Occasionally they run into me in grocery stores and don't recognize me in my street clothes.  But I wasn't born to be a yoga teacher.  This is is not the fulfillment of a life long dream.  I've spent the last decade of my life objecting to the yoga industry, not aspiring to it. When people come to me for yoga therapy I send them forthwith and with alacrity to a mental health professional or medical intervention. This isn't a personal dream job.

It does happen to be the best thing I've ever done.

That isn't saying much: my life prior to yoga was a long eulogy, a kind of fantastic record of causing harm.  My teaching career is proof that I can do better: I can be responsible, authentic, make a difference.  Behind that, prior to that: I can be healthy and happy, I can be intimate and embody my own days, all the things necessary to entering a more meaningful life.  But my identity is no more tied to teaching than it is to the surname I've just dropped.

I admit this is confusing.  Reference the above difficulty in going through the day.

Everything happened so fast and simultaneously.  It all happened at once: My high school sweetheart asked me to marry him and I closed the studio.  These were different and independent things - correlation is not causation and all of that - but they happened at the same time. So I celebrated and I grieved, the one within moments of the other and often with snotty, blind and inchoate crying jags. Trump was elected.  I bought a gown and began to think in terms of flowers. The government splintered between yes-men and rogue dissenters.  The country splintered between swaggering bullies and the offended, the outraged, the in the end overwhelmed.  The fourth estate came under fire.  The judiciary came under fire.  Old fires we thought dead roared into open spaces, licked into private ones. Civic and humane gains that took generations to make law have been attacked, undermined, and retracted. Formerly taboo racism came into the streets. Schools were plastered with racist epithets.  Dreamers were deported and doctors, scientists, teachers were detained. Queer folk were targeted.  Black people expressed mortal fear. White liberals were devastated with the revelation of their privilege. The Klan gathered in public spaces.  My heart broke.  Women marched, radiant with love and dissent.  Scientists marched.  Social workers, poets, and nurses marched.  My heart swelled.

I stepped away from teaching just as people most needed community and a modicum of stress management. I hit the end of my own endurance just as the shit hit the fan.  While things fell apart, my not-yet-husband and I adopted a puppy, bought a house, got a license to wed.  My heart sang, and it busted.

A week before the wedding, I was at the florist. Surrounded by the dank breath of flowers, carrying an assortment of nominally crucial but mysterious to me wedding things, my cellphone rang and I learned someone had died.  I was talking of bridal bouquets, but noticed the funeral arrangements.  This was poignant enough to make me snort.  The man was family, if we can call the divorced years of our lives still meaningful; he was my first husband's father.  He was a man I used to dance with at Christmastime, drink coffee with on ordinary mornings.  I remembered, in particular, a long drive in an old pickup truck across Wisconsin, toward Chicago.  He smoked perpetual cigarettes.  At that point, so did I.  I imagined trails of tobacco breath and wisps of folk music, drifting across the long green hills and miles deep distance all these years later.  I could smell his kitchen and taste Irish whiskey in my dry mouth.

More importantly - since death as far as the dead are concerned never worries me too much - I loved his son.  I love him still, if love is a thing you can do years after parting.  I wanted suddenly to catch him, my ex husband. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and lay my chin on his head.  I could suddenly, presently, stronger than musk of roses, smell his hair.  I know his skin.  I didn't want him to hurt and knew he did hurt.  Something private and tender in me burned. I thought: We walk around empty handed.  Or with nominally crucial but mysterious things.  Death shouldn't be a surprise, yet is always is.   I don't have words, he was saying, for how bad this hurts.  Standing like a bird bath in the flowers, I flushed with the phone to my ear, my knees wavered.  I didn't want to hold him, I didn't want to protect him; I wanted to shelter his grief.  It's so wild, grief is.  And it is so vulnerable.  Grief can be dangerous.

I was thick with an urgent love and a need to promise, something, to the man who was not yet my husband; and frail with sympathy for the one who used to be.  Here are roses for the hot blood of vowing; lilies pale like the innocence returned by death.  All of this was green.  It's all fleshy.  I found myself touching every nearby bloom, covertly tracing stem and fingering soil.  I wanted to stick my face in flowers, ear deep, to weep and breathe green gratitude, white happiness, plain sympathy.

I came home and told the man I was about to marry that my ex-father-in-law had died, my ex-husband was grieving, and that I'd offered to bring food or comfort or just take him for a drive, help with the idiotic normalcy of funeral arrangements if he needed me to.  I watched Gunnar's face as I said this, trying to decide if this was wrong, how to be delicate, if this was okay.  I know the timing is ridiculous.  Gunnar nodded, and I spent the evening with my ex.  He collapsed, drunk into my arms, in the middle of the afternoon sidewalk.

Then I got married.  My gown was encrusted with iridescent beads and structured like an architectural wonder.  I called it my Empire State dress.  It sang of monumental things and poured over me like throaty jazz.  It glinted so that I myself shimmered: I bent and scattered the light of diamonds, walked and rivaled moon light on water. Glittering became a subjective experience, rather than an objective one.  One piece of stray glitter is a surprise, out of context.  To be glitter, glittering, itself, changes everything.  I don't know when it was, exactly, if it was the signing of the paper or the kiss or the I do, but at some point that evening the man I love became my actual husband, and I became a wife.

But why, asked someone close to me, was I taking his name?  Aren't I a feminist?

Yes. But my maiden name carries just as much patriarchy in it as a husband's name does.  And then my husband is a feminist; in the months leading up to our marriage he repeatedly said he was willing to take my name. He further pointed out that his name isn't even his father's name, but his younger sister's father's name.  Further still, as a rule, a black American surname goes back to a slave owner, at least the time of slavery, not familial identity.

These weren't my reasons, though.  I took his name because I am willing to be changed by this relationship.  And I am uninterested in going backward.  Context - all of it - matters.

It means so much that I was nineteen years old. And, it means so much that I am not nineteen anymore. It's so important that I got sober, that Eddy didn't, that time has moved on, that Trump was elected, that people die, that we go on, that there is such suffering happening all the time, that the very planet is hurting and the ocean moans, the ice melts, the sky breaks.  I have to believe these things mean something.  And - more important - I have to believe that from all of this we can be deepened in our sympathy, have insights, become better lovers, discern the tools necessary to affect our own lives, touch gently the lives of others, change ourselves and our society in ways that, as of here and now, we can only imagine.  I'm not talking about politics, or grief, or relationships and personal life.  I'm talking about yoga.  I'm insisting that contextually, they are exactly the same thing.  You can't parse them.  If you do, than yoga is nothing more than a hobby.  If it's ever going to be anything other than a passing fad, it has to speak the language of our actual lives.  When it does, lives change.

I still haven't answered the questions of what do I do, now.

I have to change my driver's licence, my bank account, my website.  I had to order new business cards.  I have to, in some way, decide and announce what it is I do.

I ended up with the words 'yoga therapy', in red text, across the bottom and under my name.  I wondered at this, why I should choose something so provocative, what it means and if I'm not begging questions rather than answering them. But in the end I just went with it: I prefer to take up the questions and insist on context.  This seems to be the best part of the process.

This morning I swept the floor. In the dusty browns and flecky dirt there was a rogue bit of glitter.  I knelt and cocked my head at it, lifted it on my forefinger towards my face.  I don't know if it came from teaching or from my wedding gown, or how it ended up in my dustpan.  I realized, or was able to finally verbalize, a thing I've been trying to articulate for weeks: context is what makes yoga therapeutic. I can't teach pop culture yoga anymore; I think there's more to it than that. I think it's the glitter in the dust.

If there was ever a time when the deeper practices of the yoga tradition should be taught, it is now.  I'm actually teaching more than I was in the studio, but quite differently.  I'm working with people in a more intimate, on going way online; I go on mentoring other teachers, and can be found Thursdays at noon teaching at Tula Yoga in St. Paul.

You're Not Lost

There are moments when it all seems so easy.  Things fall into place without effort.  You seem to float. Only later, when it's not like that at all, do you start to wonder what it is you did to make it so easy.  Where it is you lost track.

The answer is usually, nothing.  You did nothing.  It just happened.

The middle of winter, the turning of the year, the newness of the moon, social upheaval and exhaustion around us do not make for smooth sailing.  I've always wondered at how - at why - the new year should be such a collective time of goal setting.  Of longing to start over.  Why we should collectively ask for resolve, just at this juncture.

I think it comes from being uncomfortable with where we are.

It's an uncanny transition.  It's clearly time to let go and move on. But we don't know where we're headed.  It's chaotically uncertain.  When the festivities of the year past have ended, going back to work is unsavory.  When New Year's is finally run in, there's a kind of discontent in having months of winter left to go.  We're stretched thin between the physical and emotional strain of the past and scattering our selves all over the place moving forward.

We're flailing.  Flailing - this determination to list things, change things, rearrange and grab or finally and emphatically renounce them - is a symptom of feeling lost and drowning.  Flail is opposite of float.

This year suffered enormous losses and deep social strain.  We're going through a collective grief.  We're trying to say goodbye to the Obamas.  We're trying to wrap our minds around a United States operating in ways the United States have never, ever behaved before.  It's hard to wrap our minds around this.

After a moment - the ringing in of the new year, the flipping of a calendar, or the inauguration of a new president - we tend to lose the poignancy of reflection and slide into the mundane.  I think it's important to realize that the clarity itself came from a deep dark place, rather than a fresh springtime one.  We work with intention exactly when times are hardest.  Intention only means anything if it works with our barriers.  It's culling patience and skill in working with obstacles.  It is a level, honest way to address things as they are.  We have to direct ourselves exactly when we feel most lost, ground when we feel most vulnerable, and move when we most feel lethargic, uncomfortable, and unable.

Over and over again I'm hearing how deeply lost people feel.  We have lost hope, lost direction, lost connection with where we were going or why.  Relentless work or moving on or dealing with the next crisis and week are fair enough coping techniques.  But they aren't effective healing.

In previous weeks I've been leading deeper practice through some work with intention.  The tradition calls this Sankalpa, or intention that arises from the depths.  Sankalpa is direction that arises from the unconscious, from the body itself, from experience and stillness.  It is not about goal setting or ultimatums.  This isn't productivity boost so much as it is a discernment process.  With that discretion, force and impetus arises.  An energy sourced from a deeper well.  Sankalpa is direction that arises naturally from the heart of awareness.

The thing about resolutions - New Year's or any other kind - is that we tend to set the same ones year after year.  We have the same problem areas, sticking points and bad habits circulating through our lives like an undertow.  Over and over again we approach the same problems, have the same experiences, feel the same feelings.  Cue cycles of shame and resentment.

What if we were to inquire into the deeper urge and get to know it, rather than endlessly - and meaninglessly - work for superficial change?  When we do, we gain bright honest knowledge of the obstacles and ever greater skill in working with them.

I'm bringing us back to our intentions for the new year in this week's practice.  To be effective we need to work with them consistently, more thoroughly, with a resolve.  To re-ask a question from a different light illuminates the structures below.  Clarifies the obstacles.  Shows, with a steady and sane mind, that the obstacles are riddled with our own dysfunction.  The obstacles resolve themselves to the underlying clarity, like a camera lens coming into focus.

Physically, many of our dysfunctions tend to be in the upper trunk.  We experience chronic tension in shoulders, upper back, and neck and have a great deal of difficulty balancing strength with range of motion.  From a subtle body perspective, intention and personal obstacles are also upper torso phenomena, a kind of miscommunication between our pumping vital capable body and our feeble flimsy neurotic mind.  We end up trying to power our way through things or overthinking them, never able to smoothly sail betwixt the two in symphony.

People who have practiced with some consistency for a while tend to have more of a problem with this than neophytes.  That is, while the neophyte tends to be completely disconnected and unaware of upper body, a yogi tends to have driven dysfunction deeper with the way he or she practices.  As we start bearing weight on our shoulders, elbows, and wrists we develop tension areas we never had before while feeding a craving for more movement, more strength, more postures, and more sensational feats.  We're feeding our craving/disgust cycles rather than quieting them.  We get addicted to arm balances or have a very complicated and intervention-worthy relationship, with them.  (Read, we might summarily dismiss them as ever being possible).

I've been working with upper body strength with some consistency for weeks: this time of year means compromised immunity, gunked lymph, hunched shoulders, raspy breath, and layers and layers of clothing against the elements.  Upper body strength asks for a unique cardio-vascular and respiratory charge - a boon to midwinter - and is a reclamation of more natural and expansive ways of moving in our bodies. Psychologically, this tends to be more of a slap to awake than a stiff espresso.

Upper body strength is a kind of spooky, complex initiation.  For many, it's simply not a thing we've ever felt.  Strong.  For those of us who have leaned on our strength our whole lives, it demands a subtlety and mastery, a kind of flexibility and refinement, more challenging than brute strength.  And behind all this is a question: can we and should we be able to go upside down?  I'm flirting with 'inversions' in these recent sequences: if you are a headstander or handstander feel free to take the whole of the pose.  I'm cautious about teaching 'inversions' in an online format.  You should learn to headstand with a teacher nearby.  But the skill sets I'm teaching are the groundwork for the postures - they are the grammar out of which inversion language can sing and write poems.  And they are the skill sets - the basic grammar - that most yogis brag with and bitch about without being able to really command.

This wheels back to a concept of float - of being able to suspend judgement, worry, obsession. To linger in potency, tap the root of deep urges and pulse.  To feel for a moment that we aren't, actually, lost.  We can let this weird space be transitory, rather than forcing a change.

Deeper Practice

A number of people have asked in the last few months about what the studio closing means.  What it means for me, personally, and what it means for their own practice. One of the answers is the work online.  This happened fairly organically.  Providing asana teaching online has been something requested for years and years and I just never got around to it with the running of the studio.  And I began to have more and more students, at a distance.  Working with them became a question.  I also began to have more and more questions, even in the studio, about how to learn chant, how to really begin a meditation practice rather than just intend to do it, how all these various concepts and experiences are supposed to tie together.

I'm trying to tie them together in the deeper practice subscription.  I'm having so much fun with it.  It feels progressive and organic, where drop in classes tended to feel very haphazard, something used for sporadic workouts or stress relief.  When students want to start going deep, drop in classes aren't necessarily the best way to do that.

Anyway.  I upload to the subscription site every Friday.  Both a 90 minute sequence and a 30 minute guided sound/breath/somatic movement thing.  I recorded them already for the week and have uploaded them - but won't move them to the subscription till Friday.  So you can check them out for free until then.

Check them out.

December Techniques 1 from Karin Burke on Vimeo.

Use your practice. Let it help you.

I wasn't kidding when I said we should fully use our practice these days.  Let it sooth you.  Let it support you.  Let it help. If you can get to a class, great.

But your practice doesn't depend on that.  Your practice is a few minutes of shifted breath and attention, so that you can feel what it is like to be alive.  In this moment, and the next.

This felt like an important point to make, so this morning I recorded a jeans on, no mat, no sitting down, no weight bearing on the arms thing.  To get into breath.  To move for ten minutes.  So that you can sit, for ten minutes.

Share.

Feel from Karin Burke on Vimeo.

After the election

I have been quiet, but I am here. I was invited to a 'yoga and race' conversation. I paused. I am leery of 'yoga for', anything. In particular, I don't know that we should use our yoga to address systemic problems. I'm afraid that's whitewashing. Your yoga will not save the world. It might though, save you. That is the point and has always been the point. We need to work through and with our own, problems. Race was a white American problem, before the election results. Blaming, shaming, now says more about us than the country or republic. Do what you can. Use your practice. Use it to sooth yourself, steady yourself, see more clear. And then let it, and the safety pins, the facebook, the reactions go. Don't mistake practice for peace, social justice, or an answer. Just do it because it helps you.

A photo posted by Karin L Burke (@coalfury) on Nov 14, 2016 at 5:19am PST

Since the election, everything feels upended, volatile, and confusing.  I encourage you to use all the tools of your practice to help with this: use it to sooth you, to ease the excess of tension and fatigue riddled across the body, to find a bit of space around your emotions, actions, and social roles.  It is terribly important that we take good care of ourselves, now.

And, I encourage you to realize that your practice is not going to solve your, or the world's, problems.  It is only a tool.  Don't mistake it for an answer.

As a way to steady yourself, to not be alone, practice is a tool of non-harming.  As a way to escape, it causes suffering.  It too easily slides into self-righteousness.  It is too easy to forget that practicing  - especially practicing together - is a privilege.

The thing about privilege is its tendency to be forgotten or denied.

I raised some heckles about six months ago, when I said that yoga is not as inclusive as it claims or wants to be.  It uses a lot of words and ideals.  Often, it has given those who practice it a renewed or completely new sense of empowerment and connection.  But it is not inclusive so much as it is race blind.  And race blind (or gender blind, or social justice blind) is nothing but loud ignorance.

This is hard.  And, it's okay.

If we don't realize our privilege, its a tool of harm.  When we do realize it, we can perhaps wield it more skillfully.

So many people have been surprised by the election's results.  Angry, terribly disappointed, disillusioned.  We are mourning, and grief is hard.  Notice, however, that many people of color were not surprised.  Notice that newsworthy acts of racism have been perpetrated by children. Notice that race and power issues, gender, sexuality, and assault issues, gun issues, environmental issues, were real long before this election.  Notice that Donald Trump even running for the presidency highlights a virulent current in our culture.  The issue may not be that he won, but that he had support to run in the first place.  #notmypresident expresses tremendous rage, a sense of disempowerment, and revolt.  But it also denies the process of presidential elections: Trump IS our president elect.

The election was, indeed, a critical moment.  Don't fall into believing, I said in community discussion the other day, that this was an election like any other.

Go deeper, go closer, use the practice:

It can help you.  But it's end result is to send you back into the world.  Private, and public.  Real, time.

Don't shame others for their reactions, feelings, protesting or deciding not to.  Realize that millions of people voted for conservative, neo-fascist, fear mongering politicians across the ballot: if this is surprising, than we need to more realistically understand our neighbors, just as we need to understand who is vulnerable and what vulnerability means.  Wear your safety pins, but don't think them more than a gesture.  Post or do not post on social media.  Join, civic organizations.  And know that it's also okay to not join, everything.  Do your practice.  But go closer into understanding what these things actually are and what they are, not.

Practice is both self care and the cultivation of skillful, action.  It's the discernment, of one for the other.  Don't confuse your self-care for other people's benefit.  And don't become so active/passive that you lose all possibility of self-care.

Take very, very good care of yourself.

And act, skillfully as you can.  Knowing that skillful is sometimes this, sometimes, that.