I like to keep the barrier to entry pretty low in my classes and offer as many on-ramps as I can to these practices. Often that means I keep my themes broad and abstract, or I talk about things in the most accessible terms I can. But there are also times when I feel I have to be more explicit. Yoga, as I know it and as my teachers have passed it on to me, is not a neutral practice. Neutrality is a technique we can adopt to help us find a new perspective or subvert our usual thought patterns. But the broader practice? Truth-seeking, deep compassion and empathy, liberation for all beings, nonviolence (to name just a few) — these things are not neutral. To those in power, who stand to benefit from us turning the other way, these practices can be quite radical.
My role as a yoga teacher is not to make people feel good. I certainly like to do that. I like helping people feel more comfortable in their bodies, I like helping them find emotional release, I like offering respite1 from the ongoing horrors, I like reminding them of how good it feels to be creative and goofy and to play and to try new, weird things. But it’s also my role to introduce the aspects of yoga that don’t usually feel good at all, at least not in the short term. The things that ask us to sit with real discomfort and uncertainty, the things that ask us to remove our delusions and see the world more clearly, the things that ask us to turn toward the ugliest most painful truths — about ourselves, our communities, our world — rather than away.
I’m sad, I’m scared, I’m still (somehow) shocked. I desperately hope I never have to find out if I have the bravery we’ve seen from regular, normal, everyday people all over the world. People who just want to live their lives. I’m in awe of them. My heart breaks for them and swells for them and breaks again a million times a day.
Yoga has changed me profoundly over the years and is the closest thing to a vocation I think I’ll ever have. It doesn’t feel like enough when weighed against people being brutalized and killed by their governments. It’s not enough. Who needs another white lady in some cushy lefty bubble talking about how much they love yoga? I know. But it’s the thing I can do and so I do it. Every time I go to the studio I’m strengthening my bonds with my community — and we’re seeing how powerful community bonds can be — as we practice a different way of being.
On to the studio notes.
Thresholds
January, moreso than December, really feels like an in-between month to me. December is too busy and hectic. January is when we catch our breath and actually step into the new year, which doesn’t feel like it really starts until the middle of the month anyway. And so this month’s broad theme was: Thresholds.
Janus, god of thresholds
We started with a nod to Janus, the ancient Roman god who lends his name to the month and inspired this theme. He’s the god of many things, but for my purposes I was most interested in the way he presides over transitional states. Gates, doorways, passageways — thresholds. Not the before or after, not this or that, not us or them, not here or there2 but the in-between, the threshold itself. The transitional space where one thing becomes another but is, at present, neither. Or both. Simultaneous destruction and creation, past and future and present. A fluid, amorphous, ambiguous space. This space, this process of becoming something new, can be quite painful and exciting and generative all at once.
Parable of the sparrow
Imagine a vast hall, brightly lit from within against the dark of night. This hall is filled with people from every walk of life, at every stage of life. The hall is warm and the darkness outside is deep, inky, impenetrable. With your face pressed to the glass, you can’t see outside. No one knows what’s out there. But inside the people are doing everything it is that humans do: drinking and eating, fighting and fucking, plotting and scheming, dancing, praying, crying, singing, grieving, creating, healing, dying — everything. And then a little sparrow flits in through an open window. In from the darkness, suddenly bombarded with all this life. It flies over the peoples’ heads, and then just as suddenly, it flits out another window, back into the dark.
We used this parable3 to remember that we are both the people and the sparrow. We’re here to live our lives, to get caught up in the daily drama of being human. The pleasure, the pain, all of it. But we’re also only here for a flash, and no one knows what came before or what comes next. With this in mind, can we understand life itself as a transitional state? Can we allow ourselves to really know that this is all temporary? And does this understanding help us redirect our energy and time and attention in any meaningful way?
Boundaries and thresholds
Lastly we talked about the difference between boundaries and thresholds — two things that may look very similar, but one is meant to maintain separation and one is meant to be crossed. Boundaries are healthy and necessary, they grant us the safe haven we need to do the difficult work of healing and growing. But if we’re not careful we can also run the risk of walling ourselves off. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, usually it changes entirely based on context.
Is that closed door a firm boundary? Or is it a door that’s meant to be opened? Do you need to barricade it, lock it, and throw away the key? Or is it time, after a lifetime of standing guard, to leave it ajar and see what happens?
Monthly mantra
So hum. I am / I am that
The mantra of the breath. Maybe my favorite mantra, the one that cracked mantra practice wide open for me. I find it incredibly grounding. All it asks of you is another breath. And each breath is a tiny declaration: I am. And that’s all. It doesn’t ask you to explain or define who you are, or why you’re here, or what you’re doing, or where you’re going. I am. That’s enough. Sometimes that’s hard enough.
I chose this mantra for this particular theme because at the same time that it grounds us within ourselves — I am (me, I, a specific identity) — it also dissolves that particular “I” into the whole — I am that (“that” meaning, well, everything). Every single breath we take, whether we’re actively chanting this mantra or not, tethers us to ourselves and to the people around us, to the world at large. Every single breath is an invitation and reminder of this connection.
(Also the version of this mantra I was taught just sounds soooo mystical and enchanting and I love it so much. After class one night a student said they felt like they were in Dracula’s castle (complimentary). It’s my favorite.)
Asana
We slowed way down and lingered in the transitions this month. We gave the movement from one pose to another the same attention and care we gave the poses themselves. In a vinyasa class we often cruise right through these transitional beats and so by slowing down and intentionally making it a bit harder we introduced a lot of instability. We gave all the little stabilizing muscles we tend to pass right over time to wake up and do their job. There was lots of wobbling and shaking and falling and LAUGHTER, which was beautiful. I’m serious, it’s beautiful to see a bunch of adults come together and do weird, challenging, unfamiliar things with their bodies in front of each other and laugh about it. It’s not easy!
(And for any students reading this, I promise next month we won’t even think about side plank.)
Ok, that’s all for this month.
<3 Take care of each other.
Respite, not escapism.
Or maybe not just the before or after, etc, but the in-between in addition to the before or after.
Adapted from Bede the Venerable and the intended interpretation, which is along the lines of ‘Christianity has more to offer than paganism’, and which I obviously take a different approach to.
lovely, lovely read--a great reframing of what this time of year feels like, and a perspective shift for the remainder of it. i'm looking forward to taking these reflections on with me.
(also, Tess Gallagher's poem!! so gorgeous!!)