At the start of the month I said I’d be donating a good chunk of what I made from my February classes to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. With my employer match program the tally currently sits at $310. If you came to class when you would’ve rather stayed in bed or gotten caught up on your to do list, thank you!!! I’m teaching 5 more times this month (maybe more if some subs pop up) so if you want to help bump that donation a little higher, I’ll see you there 🫵
Ok on to the studio notes.
LOVE!
It’s a long one this month! Pop the February class playlist on while you read.
Divine love
In Bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion,1 we nurture a personal connection to divinity and come to understand the divine as something within us, not just as some unknowable, unattainable, abstract force out there. This entire concept is one I resisted for years. The slightest whiff of god sent me running, like the boogeyman of my Catholic childhood would pop up and drag me hell if I even let the word “god” enter my mind.2
But over the years I learned to come at it from a side door. When teachers would talk about god/s, the divine, deities, etc., I would instead think of a time when, out in nature or deep in a flow state, I felt some kernel inside me respond to or harmonize with the immensity outside. Brief glimpses of something beyond myself. Reminders that I’m connected to something bigger and unknowable (but somehow also knowable if something within me recognized it). That feeling — and the feeling of reaching toward that feeling, reaching after that feeling — is my stand-in for god.3 I’m still not great at it but I’m less spooked when it comes to faith these days, much more curious.
So this kernel within ourselves (of the divine or whatever you want to call it) is what bridges the gap between who we are and who we could be, even if that idea of who we could be seems totally beyond us. We can’t help but be human, bogged down in our day-to-day dramas and setbacks and pettiness. But this is also part of what makes life worth living! Part of being human is learning to relish rolling around in the mud — the mud feels amazing! But another essential part of being human is this aspirational reach up and out beyond the mud, toward something more, something beyond our limitations, even if we don’t know what exactly that is or what exactly is driving us.
I can’t say I really know what divine love feels like. Love entirely for love’s sake, love without expectation or demand, love without power struggle, love without fear, love entirely without motive. Unconditional, uncompromising love. I have big love in my life. But is it totally without limitation? Is it truly unconditional? Truly — one hundred percent — unconditional? I don’t know if I’m capable of that or if I expect that in return. But I know that I can reach after it and that I would rather spend my life failing in my efforts than turning my back on it entirely.
So this month was all about that reach. Even if we don’t know exactly what we’re reaching for or why. It was all about asking ourselves: even if what we’re reaching for is ultimately unreachable…isn’t the act of reaching still worth it?
Agape, nonviolence, and the Beloved Community
After setting that groundwork for the month, we talked about divine love in relation to nonviolence and Martin Luther King Jr’s concept of the Beloved Community.
Agape, as King referred to this type of love, is what makes nonviolent resistance so courageous and so radical. It’s what catalyzes the individual’s transformation, so it’s not just their actions that are nonviolent, but that they themself become nonviolent. The desire to meet violence with violence or hate with hate disappears. This requires deep commitment on the individual level. And this deep individual commitment, when enough people take it up, is what makes the Beloved Community possible.
The Beloved Community is a vision of how we could live, how we could organize our communities and the systems meant to serve us. It’s a community based in redemption and true reconciliation, not retribution, not vengeance or fear, not an eternal power struggle. The vision is not one of defeating your aggressor (thereby becoming the new oppressor yourself) but of transforming them. Dr. Reiland Rabaka describes it this way in his podcast: “It’s a disciplined dream, rooted in history, sharpened by struggle, and sustained by love with a backbone…It gestures toward a future while demanding action in the present. It lives in the not yet, but works in the right now.”
Defining the Beloved Community means asking ourselves what we’re truly for as well as what we’re against. What do we really want for ourselves and our communities? What do we really want for the people we find loathsome, the people we know delight in our own suffering? Can we find it in ourselves to want more? Better? Realizing the Beloved Community means nothing short of total transformation. It takes work! It’s not fast or easy! And it’s definitely not passive!
I don’t know if it’s possible. It seems like without some superhuman effort, without some superhuman love working through us, we’ll be trapped in this cycle forever. But Dr. Manuel Chavez, in another conversation I listened to, responds this way when asked if he thinks love is enough at this particular moment in time: “Maybe love itself is not enough, but without love we cannot save ourselves.” And so it’s imperative that we try.
The death of love, the birth of poetry
Last time I was visiting home I caught a class at The Moving Galaxy MKE (Anna A). Anna told the story of the Sage Valmiki and how he came to be the world’s first poet. I’ve been coming back to it in the months since and thought, what better time to share a story about the tragic loss of love than on Valentine’s Day? (I swear I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened, apologies!!)
So, one day Valmiki comes across a pair of cranes. He stops and watches them as they coo and preen and do their little bird things. These cranes, Valmiki knows, mate for life and as he stands there he’s witness to a very pure, wholly good, bright spot of love in the world. And as he watches, basking in the glow of this love, an arrow flies in and pierces the heart of one of the cranes. It dies on the spot. Its mate lets out a terrible cry and Valmiki knows it will likely die soon after. With its mate gone, it will lose the will to live, lose the ability to care for itself, totally consumed by grief.
Having witnessed what he knows will be the death of two living creatures as well as the extinguishing of a pure, radiant love, grief floods through him. As it does, the hunter emerges to claim his prize. Valmiki turns to him and as a curse spills from his mouth he notices that the words feel strange on his tongue, sound strange to his ear. Feeling confusion now as well as grief, he turns from the scene and returns home, where Lord Brahma — god of creation — pays him a visit.
The words felt strange, Brahma tells him, because you’ve created a new form of expression — you’ve created poetry. You’ve birthed a new art form, a new way of harnessing the human experience, a new way of articulating the enormity and complexity and mystery of human emotion. And, as any good creator must, you must now tend to it. He tasks Valmiki with telling the story of Rama. And so Valmiki goes on to create the Ramayana, a massive Hindi epic that culminates in the triumph of good over evil through the power of love.
In a nutshell: Lord Vishnu (another one of the big 3) is born into human form as Rama because demons are running amok and causing all sorts of chaos. Rama sets out to restore balance by battling and defeating these demons. The Big Bad demon captures Rama’s wife, Sita, and hides her deep in his kingdom, attempting to woo her. Rama enlists the help of Hanuman who, upon hearing their story, grows to many times his normal size and begins running to the far corners of the earth in search of Sita (his urgent, massive strides are where we get hanumanasana, or full splits pose).
Eventually he finds her and acts as a sort of divine messenger. He assures her that Rama has not been killed or captured and is still searching for her. He returns to Rama and assures him that Sita has not been wooed away and still very much wants to be found. Emboldened, Rama leads his troops onward and a massive battle ensues. Ultimately, he’s victorious and the two are reunited. Their love (and Hanuman’s devotional love for Rama) saves the day.
To know love is to eventually know heartbreak and pain and grief. We all carry grief and we grieve all sorts of different things — people, places, countries, ideals. We have grief in spades. We have pain and suffering and loss that can never be remedied. To me, what this story of Valmiki and the cranes and the Ramayana asks is if we’ll let that grief destroy us, let it be a curse and nothing more, or if we’ll let it move through us and hear it as a call to create something new.
And maybe it’s not an either/or proposition. Maybe it utterly destroys us and it leads us to create something new. When this type of shattering grief visits us, it really does kill the old version of our selves and what we thought our lives would be. Creation doesn’t always feel good and sweet and tender. Sometimes we forget that. And so we practice sitting with the complexity of love and how sometimes the most loving thing we can do is witness each other’s pain and allow others to witness our pain and still, in spite of that pain, reach toward each other.
Love as action
And finally, we’re closing the month out by talking about love as verb, love as action. Love as something that might even be inconvenient. As something that can be super annoying and tiring when you’d really rather just be left alone.
By this I mean those days when you’ve let the dogs out 100 times already. You’ve just finished folding the laundry and cooking dinner, you spent all day working and then getting groceries and picking up dog poop and picking up the car from the shop and cleaning the house and dealing with the millions of things you have to deal with. And then you finally finish doing the dishes and — at last! — sit down on the couch. And it feels sooooo good. And you sink into the cushions. And your lower back relaxes, and your shoulders relax, and your feet throb pleasantly, and you sigh a deep, contented sigh. And then the dogs whine to go out again. And so you heave your tired body up off the couch and you let the dogs out for the 101st time that day (and probably not the last) because you love them and this is what you signed up for when you took these needy, demanding, willful creatures into your heart.
Caretaking. Ritual. Duty. The things we do because we’ve decided something or someone matters to us. The things we do to tend to our relationships over time. When the butterflies have flown away and romantic love becomes about something more than that ecstatic buzz you get from feeling your crush’s skin on your skin. When we show up to the dumb thing we don’t want to go to because we promised someone we care about that we’d show up to the dumb thing. Or when we help someone with a really annoying task because we don’t want them to have to do it alone.
Weeding the garden. Cleaning the toilet. Lighting the incense. Making a coffee. Preparing the morning meds. Changing the diaper. Saying the prayer. Checking the math homework. Making the call. Doing the PT exercises. Packing the lunch. Feeding the sourdough starter. Cleaning the lint trap.
The daily act of tending to this body, which we know will ultimately fail us, but which we try to love anyway. The phone call to the friend we know is suffering when we don’t really know how to sit with their pain. The visit to the family member who specializes in getting under our skin but who we know is achingly lonely.
Our lives are filled with seemingly thankless things that make us think, oh what’s the point. But they’re also filled with seemingly thankless things that make us think, this is the good stuff. Sometimes difficult, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes both at once. These small, daily acts of devotion may not always feel like love in the moment, but when taken together over the course of a lifetime, what else could you call it?
Mantra
Aham prema / I am divine love
Asana
We tried to embody the feeling of reaching toward something more, even as we felt anchored in the here and now. We worked toward crane pose in honor of our fallen love birds and toward Hanumanasana in honor of Hanuman and the power of devotional love. We also worked with some more subtle heart openers, of course, bc we can’t have a month-long theme on love and not do some heart opening!
Ok that’s it this month. Take care of each other <3
There are 3 main paths of yoga (and about a million sub-paths and combinations of paths). Jnana: the path of wisdom, study of the yogic texts and philosophy; Karma: the path of action, how we move through the world, acting without expecting reward; and Bhakti: the path of devotion, chanting, prayer, and personal connection to the divine.
How Catholic of me.
There are almost certainly teachers out there who would say I’m wrong about this and a relationship to a literal deity is a requirement. I get that, and I get that I might never truly get Bhakti, but we do what we can.