loops

I am a slow learner. I am also stubborn. And forgetful. I learn and relearn lessons on repeat through the eras. So, when I am of a mind to make a statement such as the one that has been rolling around on the back of my tongue for the past few days it is very likely that I have made it, aka learned the lesson, a time or two before already. So it goes I suppose. This transient-minded life. Or perhaps it is just that everything is on a loop and I keep turning back and back and back each time, I can only hope, unearthing a deeper and more meaningful recognition of the lesson at hand. 

So, here is what I know right now. Multiple days of yoga, in the hot room, surrounded sometimes by friends, sometimes not, with instruction delivered skillfully, is familiar in the most beautiful way. Like a language that every cell of my body speaks. It also has a progressive impact. The third day in the hot room was far better than the first, with more of me receptive to the ask. It was a lovely remembering for me, this mini immersion. The postures, supported by the wisdom of my breath, feel like light in my body. Expanding luminosity. Like all of the threads that make up the entirety of my physical self are all turned golden by the light of what animates the me that is most me.

Over the past year or so, probably much longer, I have been sitting with the bleak expanse of loneliness that yoga has become for me since my departure from regular teaching and practice in community. Covid offered this hopeful, albeit incomplete, respite from the loss. Renewed contact through all the zooms was a lifeline through a dark time, but was far too etheric to fill the space left in the absence of the physical pleasure of moving, breathing, and unfolding, bodies.

In an act of deep self-preservation I have turned to where the people are. In the strength spaces. I have moved away from the grace of the practice toward the push and pull of building muscles. I do not mean to imply that it is one or the other, a this or that thing. It is just that I have been untangling some longstanding beliefs regarding what yoga is capable of providing in terms of longevity and healthy function. I have been learning the value of progressive overloads and resistance training on my not getting any younger body. And also soaking in the clarity that these efforts have on my mental, emotional, hormonal wellbeing. If yoga makes me feel like Light, building strength makes me feel like Power. Dense with the fibers of my expanding strength. 

Even though I am well-learned in the dance of both/and I find myself still so tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I can think and process with some degree of nuance, and yet… there is a part of my mind that wants to discard my knowledge of the potency of practice. It would perhaps be easier. Save me from this lonely efforting. For the past 20 years, I have lived in places with no teacher proximal that I have wished to yoke myself to. I have traveled to study and traveled to practice. In both Viroqua and then later in Madison, I took it upon myself to make my practice all the way my own and also to train people to practice with me. Through classes, through mentorship, through regular group practice. I loved both the effort and what it yielded. It is still something that I feel such a mix of pride and gratitude around. 

I haven’t wanted to make that same effort in Vermont. Even as I suffer the absence. It is sad and also is its own self-fulfilling prophecy. I am where I am for a reason after all. Maybe it is that mix of rural lifestyles and motherhood’s code switch, but each path I have begun to dig out in the direction of group practice has flopped in on itself. It is strange how mothering inside of a life of practice has an inherent loneliness. I think it is probably akin to motherhood in America in general. Outwardly exalted and revered and then abandoned and left out to dry in real-time. I have always held two communities, my mom one and my yoga one. What a loss that has always felt like. No mama mentors walking the path of practice before me, at least very few within my reach. Some of my students have become parents over the years and I love that so much. I strive to be there for them in ways I longed to have someone for me. Even if it is from a distance now. 

Just yesterday morning in Wisconsin I took a gorgeous 60-minute class with a well-seasoned teacher and mother of four. We flew to each other like moths to a flame, magnetized by the depth of that shared, impossible to articulate, understanding of the dance that makes a mom a yogi and a yogi a mom. Those contacts do happen. As rare and hard to hold as they are. 

And so, I do not give it up. I won’t. How could I? When I am on my mat, 90% of the time it is me slogging through a plan I laid for myself in a moment when I must have trusted my deeper knowing. But there is maybe 10%, probably way less, where I am on my mat and in my body and in my breath and I am sublime. I am inside the heart of my own awakening. Even as so much else has caught my attention, the truth of that is still just as crystal as ever. The practice of yoga alights a path of deep and fundamental recognition. It is not the only practice to do this by any means. But for me, it has perhaps always run the deepest. It does even still. And yet, I will forget this and remember it again, as long as there is life in my blood, most likely. I am so forgetful. Making loops back into myself. I still love yoga. It still tells me the story I most long to hear.