A former student and forever friend messaged me out of the blue yesterday. We played a little bit of catch-up and back-and-forth updates and after a bit, I razzed him for his departure from Asana practice in favor of other athletic pursuits. I was really only giving him a hard time out of love and not in earnest; he got what he needed from his time on the mat. The attention, the care, the breath. All of those lessons are alive in the way he works both his body and his mind now. So, success! Really, in my estimation that all is a massive triumph.
But really, what it stirs up for me is what has become a much larger consideration of my own life within the sphere and scope of yoga. I am coming more and more to believe, and more deeply understand, the way in which I was indoctrinated into a false belief of the promise of yoga. Its benefit, its purpose, its wholeness. And before I begin to relay some of this growing awareness here, I by no means want my tone to be mistaken as bitter or broken in any way. I am simply disillusioned and in the process of embracing a new and evolving perspective.
I am also not leaving yoga. I don’t think so. Even while the hierarchy of movement and exercise and wellness is reordering itself inside of my understanding, yoga is still what I have expertise and proficiency in, and also what I am most capable of sharing with others. I am still with this, just hopefully with more honesty, transparency, and accountability than I was brought up with. I no longer see through the rose-colored lenses that had me seeing yoga as the number-one, top-notch, perfect-for-all, movement practice, and spiritual modality that I was so certain it was once upon a time. Nope nope nope. It feels absurd in many ways to even confess how wholeheartedly I was entrenched in that sort of dogmatic thinking. The distance between then and now feels so wide and far and yet like any path away from one thing and toward another, it was built by mostly small steps accumulated one by one over many seasons. Suddenly you arrive in a space where the view is completely transformed from the place you started and it feels simultaneously like everything happened all at once and also the journey of ages.
Cuz truly, none of it was sudden. There were sooooo many breadcrumbs early on in my resistance to locking arms with any formal system and then in my desire to give my attention to what felt best and worked well for me and my own sensibilities above and beyond any trend or teacher. It was also quite a while ago, like maybe a decade, that I began to really steer myself toward longevity in practice and away from advanced postures that took me too far out on the skinny edges of branches. I realized I could either practice in a way that might break me or I could practice in a way that would set me up for a life of practice, one which I could sustain for the long haul. And I turned this way.
It was natural that this in turn led to a consideration of what movements and actions are absent from an asana practice, which is something I had been adamant that for many years was not a thing. And yet, I could not do a pull up- because I never practiced hanging or pulling from anything. I could not lift anything with much weight, on the ground or overhead or on my back, because I never practiced it. It occurred to me then that if there was something that lived outside the scope of possibility in terms of my movement, then what I was doing was incomplete and would not move me in the direction of long-term vitality if I kept only doing the same things.
Somewhere in this window of time, I was also diagnosed with high blood sugar, right on the edge of pre-diabetic. I needed to do something about it and the easiest and most natural answer was to get moving, fast and hard and with a good amount of sweat involved. And so I did. I popped into the CrossFit gym that had just opened in our town and started doing all of the things and I loved it. Not to say, by any means, that I think CrossFit is the thing. I think the thing could be anything that involves weights, sweat, hard work, and a great coach. For me, this is just a sweet option because after years and years of engaging in a practice on my own the community and camaraderie of a group class is just super fun.
My time in the gym has gone on from there. With lots of ebbs and flows and a pregnancy and a cross-country move and a pandemic. All of which resulted in an over three-year window away for the most part. In many ways, the lapse was excellent because I was able to accumulate my own data in terms of my mental and physical states in contrast. My mental health tanked and my body felt the strain of a system that was working hard but in more limited ways. Good to gather info! And really, that stretch of years was different in that I was still lifting lighter weights on occasion at home along with riding the pelo and hiking lots in fair weather. I also continued to inform myself in a variety of movement circles via books and podcasts and conversations (and all the media I consume- for better or for worse).
Blergh but I am not here for the personal recap! I am mostly here to make a claim that yoga is good, but incomplete, and that if you have to choose one thing it seems like the science would say that lifting weights, or resistance training, is the thing. I recently heard my friend and teacher Scott Lamps say that if everyone added pull-ups and squats to their practice it would be life-changing. He knows. Yoga is becoming something that, when separated from history and lineage, looks a lot like mobility and mindfulness, two things that are alive and well in many strength spaces. In fact, I am surprised to see more mindfulness practices alive in gym environments than I do in yoga studios these days. Often referred to as “mindset”. Not to say that it isn’t in yoga studios, but it is often so heavy with all of the pseudo-academic, quasi-posturing, of teachers and practitioners so embedded in a particular tradition or style, that it can get lost and misunderstood or misrepresented.
And listen, I am into history and lineage when it comes to yoga asana. I do not actually think that you can effectively parse them out from the practice. However, I do think we can weight them accordingly and be subtle, and also confident enough, to know that very few if any folks who drop into a yoga class on any ‘ol weeknight need to be plied with any of it. In fact, for most of us the stillness, the breath, and the focus are more than enough to connect us deeply to the space inside that is consciousness, compassion, and grace. Yoga points us in the direction of the infinite, and I think that any way that we choose to relate to that for ourselves is good. Maybe it means learning more about the history, or a particular lineage that resonates. But for most, it means tapping into a feeling and making our own connections from that place. It is also important to recognize, and this is my growing belief, that yoga asana practice does not hold claim to that feeling. It is not the only discipline pointing us in the direction of our true selves. We can access it anywhere. And not just through the body, but if possible the body is an excellent and brilliant way.
So here is what I know today: it was not so much that yoga is the HOLY practice. It is really that the body, in all of its intricacies and sophistication and central nervous system, is the HOLY one. And how we live and move and exist in our bodies is what either exalts or diminishes that holiness. The choice of what and how is ours to make. I am thrilled to be practicing and teaching yoga from this perspective. You can find me teaching in my beloved local gym, beginning tomorrow, and also online. Maybe I’ll teach in a yoga studio again sometime soon, but it really depends on the studio ya know? I gotta keep it real and inclusive and right now this is how. So you’ll see squats in my classes, and lots of functional range work, and some poses for sure. Maybe broken up into component pieces, maybe delivered as an entire shape. Who knows really! I am after a feeling of ease and a sense of connection to self and others, along with work that translates well into all of the other ways you or I long to move our one precious body.