Maybe there will be a whole thread of these at home posts, yes? It seems to me, that as this all continues to unfold, that we will all be here for quite some time. As someone who is often always at home anyway, I find this incredibly difficult and can only imagine what this adjustment must be like for those of you who have not always just been at home.
There are lots of things to say, but I think that most of those things in this moment belong in my personal journal. What I am chewing on for sharing in this space, which, as ever, is far from fully formed and will be spit out here just as in process as anything, has of course everything to do with home life, home school, home practice.
I will begin with homeschool. The governor of Vermont just announced on Thursday that school would not resume at all this year. Which in effect, pushed the working return date from April 15th all the way out past the end of the school year, June 15th. That is 2 whole months. Not that you needed me to tell you that. Which, tells me that we are in this mess for the long haul and that the energy of mine that is tied up each day in how long this will all go on anyway is, again, wasted energy.
Maple seems built for this type of schooling. Schooling-at-home. Completely independent and autonomous. She checks in with her class online each morning and then just gets to it. Making more work and projects for herself as she sees fit. Per the nudge of her science teacher, she is also participating in some homeschool 4H groups for more learning opportunities. For fun.
Public school. At home.
As I shared in my last post, Eider’s homeschool rhythm is much the same, however now we are beginning to really feel the deficit of the out-of-the-house activities that broke up much of our week and provided him with contact and connection to his community. His struggle in particular right now makes me aware of how immense this to home transition is for so many, especially those of you whose children’s classes have not moved on-line. The younger kids who are perhaps trying to navigate the abrupt transition to learning from Mom or Dad. That is not an easy transition, even if you were preparing for it. Like I said, as a 3rd grader it took Maple a good 6 months to detox the classroom before we were able to venture into at-home learning. It was tense. Especially because at that point she and I were both bought into the idea that she would, that she could, fall behind. In retrospect, we should have been focused primarily on her emotional and mental wellbeing as we so radically changed gears. We got there eventually. Thanks in big part to her life-long propensity to craft and create all the livelong day.
and on online meetup for Bear…
So, that would be my big piece of advice for all of the suddenly at home schoolers. Just relax about school. There is enough other bullshit to be stressed about right now and no need to add that to the mix. Your kid is not going to fall behind. Focus on creativity, read aloud together, spend time outside, play. And maybe give them a math worksheet once a week and have them do a piece of copy-work, but beyond that… just be together. Our kids are going to be fine so long as we, as their parents, manage our stress and the rhythm of our days in ways that take each member of the family into consideration.
Ok. Moving on. The other interesting piece has been to watch all of the yoga move online. I understand the economics of it, certainly. When we moved to Vermont last summer I needed to move my teaching online in order to maintain any income. So, I get it. But I cannot help but reflect on this movement to recreate the yoga classroom or studio space in our own living spaces. And it is not just because of social distancing- this has been a trend of the last 10+ years, it is just now that everyone is doing it. I think it is great in terms of access and maintaining connection as well as the viability of beloved yoga spaces across the country, but I cannot help but feel like we are also missing the mark a bit.
When I began taking yoga classes in the late 90s, and on through 2005, I understood taking class to be the way to learn how to practice on my own. It is how I was educated from the very beginning. In the summer of 2001, I was a fire lookout on Bear Mountain with my at the time boyfriend, a copy of Light On Yoga, a long list of postures- all in Sanskrit- call The Practice, and a thick mat that I would throw down on a piece of plywood. Every day, I would get on that weird surface and work my way through those lists, looking up the poses as I went, all the time listening for the voices of my teachers to come alive in my head and point me in a direction.
From 2002-2004, I lived and taught in Tucson Arizona and three times a week would go to what was called “open practice” where I slowly learned how to do my own practice on my own mat while others were doing their’s. Again, recreating the voices of my teachers in my head. It was many hundreds of hours of practicing in this way, in addition to moving across the country away from my yoga home and any regular public instruction, before the cues that I could remember about how I was supposed to feel in any given pose bleed into my own experience of what I was actually experiencing and the wisdom that I could impart from that.
That is perhaps just a really long winded way of saying that it has always been about cultivating and exploring a home practice for me. It has informed my primary approach in teaching and fueled my passion for group practice- which I think of as the bridge between class and home. It is how I have attempted to instruct in private lessons as well as on-going mentorship. And it is why, my online programs are still centered around building the muscles for taking ownership and agency of your own practice. Learning to trust the voice of your own wise teacher.
All this to say, mentorship begins again this next week. And with a few changes to the previous format. I am hoping to allow for more opportunities for personal connection and community among the larger cohort. I want to see the ways in which our experiences can inform ourselves and one another into deeper insight and wisdom. I am also efforting to streamline my delivery of information and support so that we can focus our energy on content and caliber as opposed to navigating computer-based systems. There is an updated description over on the Life of Practice Mentorship page if you’d like to learn more about what this is going to look like. I still have a bit of space open for the April- June term, and with options to extend into July and August.
So, if you would like to explore a life of practice without exclusive dependence on the screen, in the privacy of your home and your own heart, I would love to serve you in this way.
I think that is it for now. More soon. xxx.