Listening Within and Beyond; a bit on yoga complexities
Mornings with Myself // 32:40:2022
This feels like a longer essay in the making, but it’s what I’ve got right now. Let me know what it sparks for you, what questions you have, what you’re curious about or wrestling with yourself, what you might like to explore. If there’s interest, maybe I’ll take a deeper dive.
I still do movements that look something like my old asana practice. Especially when I want to exert a bit but there's something in the way. Something in my mind, not in my body - when I'm not sure what to do, or am unable to let go of expectations or shoulds, some of these flows are well-patterned, established in my body after long practice. Even though my body works differently now, I can flow into shapes without having to think or analyze. It's one of the many reasons why I'm so grateful to the tradition of yoga.
And, it's complicated. Which I don't mean as an avoidance. I think my relationship with yoga is necessarily complicated. I don't know that there is a way for me to practice asana without appropriation, or acknowledging the colonial roots of much of what we know as asana - and beyond asana, yoga as a whole and it's participation in privilege and status, the caste system. I decided some years ago that there wasn't a way for me* to ethically return to teaching yoga. It's also true that many of the movement and self development systems we know - more and more branded, argh! - have their roots in older, cultural or indigenous practices. Free movement and dance have been a way for me to move out of the linearity of my old practice - literally, the linear flows on my yoga mat, and metaphorically, a certain fixity of thinking - and a way to honor all yoga taught me about attention and awareness and accountability, and all it didn't teach me about following and honoring sensation that I somehow learned anyway**. It's been a way for me to tap into ancestry and the some of the earliest practices we had as humans to express emotion and commune with nature, with spirit - dancing, singing, celebrating the senses, listening within and beyond.
*for me & my own circumstances - I am not saying there's not a way for white people to teach yoga ethically, and I do believe these are important questions for white practitioners and teachers.
**To be fair, it - yoga - and my teachers may have tried to teach me this, but it may have been something I could only actually learn from from my own body.