story power.

My Mister likes to quote Akira Kurosawa, "The role of the artist is not to look away." I appreciate an idea like this on general principle; I like the idea that artists have a kind of responsibility to engage what's going on in the shaded, unsavory corners of our existence and use our work to shine a light on it, to comment on it, or maybe even do something about it.

For years, I would engage work around me with that kind of fierceness. I would check out movies or books or stories and think about what I was exposing myself to, and remind myself that it was all somehow fodder for the writing, that ultimately it was going to provide me with some tool or experience that would make me a better writer. I remember sitting (too) close to the screen at the Angelika and watching Irreversible with this idea gripped in my fist. 

(It's definitely a movie I wish I hadn't seen. But it has given me a lot to think about: namely the question of whether a work of art--a film, a book, an experience, a story--can be perfect and at the same time horrifying. )

But things have changed. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but somehow I became less enamored with the idea of exposing myself to as much as possible, especially to the stuff that is emotionally or psychically challenging. I remember, not long after my Mister and I moved in together, we started watching Mad Men. We'd get the red envelope that had three or so episodes on DVD, and we'd set aside an evening to watch them together. It's important to know at this time, I was wrestling with a lot of religious guilt around moving in with a man (a phenomenon I lay at the feet of my conservative upbringing) and I was panicking about whether or not I wanted us to get married. I loved him, and I wanted to marry him, but we weren't talking about it. And if we did talk about it, what would it be? Would it be me in an apron an pearls mixing martinis and basting pot roast? Or would I be the employed black woman, married to an unemployed shiftless man who was content to stay at home and play online poker all afternoon? (I seriously pinballed between these two extremes for, like, months.)

So we'd sit on the couch watching this show with its impeccable production value tell stories of tortured and complicated (white) people and I would freak out, sometimes internally, but mostly externally. Is this what marriage leads to: a general malaise, a need to self-medicate, dishonesty, animosity and ultimate betrayal and alienation?

I only made it into the beginning of season 2.

No. It's not what my marriage has led to, so far. But the stories that I saw on Mad Men, even though I was totally engaged, left me feeling discouraged and frightened.  Same thing with Dexter. On a recommendation from someone, I checked it out, an M.E. in Miami with a special talent. It was amazing storytelling, really an actor's show that explored the psychology of character. At least, the season and a half of it that I saw. It became so flipping dark that even as I longed to know what would happen to these characters, I had to turn it off. 

So I paint myself with the wide brush of sensitive: I'm too sensitive for this kind of programming. But is that really what it is. I mean, yeah, I'm sensitive. I don't get sarcasm, I don't laugh easily at myself or at others. Just ask me sometime about why I didn't like Before Sunset. But I'm not sure it's as easy as I'm a Nervous Nelly. 

One of the ideas I sit with is an Ayurveda principle that everything our body takes in is a kind of food. We ingest our lunch, our terse email from our supervisor about the most recent project, coffee coffee coffee, any number of medications the docs have given us, free radicals, bad music, pesticides, violence, trauma, just as often as beauty, affection, green smoothies, quiet and peace--and more likely more often the former list than the latter. Some of this stuff is fortifying, and some of it is junk. So often there's energy around what we put into our bodies through our mouths. But what about our pores, our ears, our eyes?

This has been especially challenging for me as I consider images of bodies of color in the news. I've been wondering for some time now what it means that the media--social and mainstream--is willing to show and share such difficult images of bodies, often marginalized bodies, in positions of trauma and violence. I recently read this piece in ForHarriet.com and wondered what it meant that we were all engaging and sharing such difficult imagery without considering its effects, especially on those of us who identify with the citizens being photographed, being humiliated, being murdered. 

Based on the images we've been consuming, pics and video, what is the story we're telling of our country, our culture, our time? What is the story of Black America? What is the story of Trans* America? What is the story of government in America? The stories we're telling each other about ourselves feel oppressive, devaluing, and frankly make me wanna shut it down.

What happens to us when we share image, when we tell story, that is triggering or trama-provoking? Do we create a kind of psychic ama for ourselves, that colors our relationships and interactions with others? Do we compromise our digestive fire? What does it mean for a story to be good: to be compelling, engaging, and well-crafted, and to still make you feel like shit? I'd be the first person to tell you that the job of good story is many things, but making you comfortable is not among them. But still, I don't know what happens to our individual or collective humanity when we take in stories that degrade humanity.

I tried so hard not to view pictures of Michael Brown's body lying in the street. Then one day one picture got in. And now I'll never forget it. 

Yes, no doubt there is a difference between true story and fiction. But I'd argue it's not the fat bright line that we all want it to be. Good story is good story, whether it's political intrigue and corruption, the disappearance of young women, or procedural law drama. I have a friend who will argue the structural perfection of Anna Karenina and compare it to The Bold and The Beautiful. Craft is powerful. But is craft, is good story, more important than the effects of good story? I used to think yes, but I don't know anymore. 

This matters to me because I like to make good story. I think often about all the things I put into my body. This matters to me because I think that the line between truth and fiction is shifting, in a way that doesn't serve the truth, in fact in a way that devalues it. If we can look at a photo of hundreds of Kenyan college students murdered, and it provokes the same reaction we have when we see a still from a Quentin Tarantino film, we've lost something, and we've robbed those college students of something. If we can the abduction of a street organizer in Baltimore, and it reminds us of some new film opening, we suddenly become a spectator in our own police state. Our agency as citizens evaporates, and we're entertained, or horrified, but whatever we are, we're distanced from the fact that that street organizer could be any one of us, and might be every one of us.

As a yogi, it's my responsibility to think deeply about what I put into my body because it has a profound effect on what comes out of my body. It changes my practice, my ability to seek and to manifest quiet and stillness. What I ingest becomes what I make, what I do, what I am. I want the craft of the stories--fiction and nonfiction alike--to be really solid. I also want to feel good after I take it in. I want to make the world good based on what comes out.

P.S. Can I say one more thing here? I am not in favor of turning off the tv or the computer and escaping to my mat, where life is all inhale and fairies and the light in you and the light in me.... That's not my scene, and I think to use yoga that way really devalues what it is, and sells all of us short. I believe in self-care and self-preservation. But I don't believe as using yoga as a narcotic. I don't know my sutras well enough, but there's some verse that talks about yoga being a tool for tolerating and engaging the world as it is, the reality of what is true. What is true can sometimes suck: whether it's tight hamstrings that won't let you move the way you want, or it's the continued and devastating loss of a fellow human. Yoga is a tool for staying present with the sensation, whatever it is. It's not a vacation. 

body language*

A surprising thing happened to me the other day. I was in a shoe store trying on boots and wanted to make sure that they fit okay. You know about the weird dance you do when you're trying out shoes, right? You walk around trying to imitate the way you really walk, to feel if the shoes rub or pinch anywere; you tap your feet to make sure the soles feel okay; you jump up and down to see how flexible they are. So I was doing this dance around the store and I did a kind of one-legged short lunge to see how stiff they were. Imagine standing on both feet, and stepping your right foot back, bending the right knee and lifting the right heel, like you're going to bend down on one knee, and then pressing into  your right foot to stand up again.

I did this with both feet, down and UP, down and UP, when a woman beside me exclaimed, "Wow! How did you do that?"

I laughed and explained that I was just trying out the shoes.

"Do you know, if I tried that, they'd have to get a crane in here to lift me back up, and they'd have to counterwait it just to get me off the floor."

"I'm sure that's not true," I said.

"That was incredible, where do you dance?" she asked.

I answered without thinking, "I'm not a dancer, I'm a yoga teacher... I do a lot of yoga."

"Oh, well that explains it," she said, and continued on her pursuit of her own shoes.

So the encounter itself wasn't that remarkable. A short, low lunge is a move that happens with some frequency, and chatting with strangers is something I do a lot. But I definitely had a feeling when I told her, "I'm a yoga teacher." A voice inside me said, really? That's how you're describing your work? Which is why right after I said it, I verbally took it back by saying, I do a lot of yoga. She didn't know I was walking it back, but I knew.

Yoga Teacher isn't a label I wear freely, it's not how I introduce myself to people. When they ask, "what to you do?" I say things like, "I write for a couple of online magazines, I work with a feminist health collective called Chicago Women's Health Center, I make stories." Sometimes I say that I teach yoga. 

Notice the verbs here: write, work, make, teach. Defining myself with verbs is totally okay with me: I love a wonderful man; I cook gluten-free, vegan cuisine; I watch too much television, and only some of it is good; I listen to amazing humans share stories that foster connection and growth; I help young people discover their voices and harness their creative potential; I create space for the willing and the interested to connect to their bodies and their breath. I like verbs; they demonstrate action. And here I'm going to show my etymological ignorance, but they don't have the same kind of ownership that the noun-labels have: I write stories sounds active and engaging; I'm a writer can be engaging, but it can also be pretentious, and I'd love to avoid that.

When I was training to teach yoga, it was really important to me not to label myself a yoga teacher. I don't have any problem with the label on G.P., and it's how I define many of the people I practice and work with. But wearing the label myself felt too tight and too heavy. I've been practicing and studying yoga for a while, but I feel right at the beginning of learning what it means to take the seat of the teacher in a yoga practice space. I might be a Yoga Teacher someday, but not today. On top of which, I've come to discover that I tend to view any classroom as a transgressive space, by which I mean that I might be at the top of a hierarchical pyramid, but my preferred learning shape is more of a circle, with no top or bottom. I can say that I teach yoga. Saying that I'm a yoga teacher is much harder to do.

Which is why when it fell out of my mouth so easily the other day, I was startled by it. It felt suddenly like I'd built a sandwich board onto myself and was walking through the world with the words YOGA TEACHER in dripping black paint on my chest and back. As if carrying my yoga mat wherever I'm working isn't ubiquitous and obnoxious enough. 

I don't know what I look like from the outside when I'm teaching. Part of my evaluation was an on-camera (!) class I co-taught followed by a group critique from my teachers and cohort. Sounds gruelling, and sometimes it was, but the review and reflection was both honest and compassionate. Aside from that 20-minute video, I've no idea what my face looks like when I'm demoing or adjusting, if my smile is as genuine as it feels, if others can read the confusion I sometimes feel as I'm teaching. 

What I mean is, I don't know if my physical appearance exudes teacher. I know I have a loud voice, and I'm comfortable enough giving directions, even when I confuse my left and right. I know I will get beside someone and show them what I mean if they aren't getting a move or adjustment. I've been in this body so long, I know a large portion of what it says. When I'm sick, or angry, you can feel it from feet away. When I want to be left alone, my quick pace and darkened brow say, back off, Jack. When I'm interested, I make eye contact. When I'm thinking quickly and also nervous, my hands are two birds drawing pictures in front of me. 

On top of all this, my body says a lot as a black female body in America. Sometimes I can turn up parts of it, or turn down parts of it. In college, I wrote a thesis on black visibility that argued there were practices, clothing, language and other qualities that I and other African-American students could use that would be tantamount to "performing black." We could do things to remind people that we were black, or to help them forget. I absolutely know that what my black, female body says and what others think it says are two different things, and if I ever forget that, all I have to do is turn on the news, and I'm reminded.

Until that day in the shoe store, it didn't occur to me that my body might say, I use my body to earn a living, and I ask it to do things that not every body can do. It didn't occur to me at all that anyone else would look at my body and think anything about what it could do. I had no idea that my body might say yoga-teacher body.

There's a lot of scrutiny in the yoga community (is there? Or is there maybe not enough?) of the prototypical "yoga body" in our country and culture, and what it is and is not, according to the media. If you ask me, I'll tell you the yoga body is often thin, white-skinned, tattooed, and female. I feel it when my body fits into this paradigm, and when it doesn't, which often happens at the same time, given the nature of my body, and where I practice  yoga and with whom. I feel it when my body frame and gender identity is a privilege for me that others don't have, and I feel it when my racial identity sets me apart from the group. I am a woman of color and I have a yoga body, right down to the ink, but I was stunned when some part of me labeled myself as such. I might not see myself reflected in the yoga zeitgeist, but I know I'm there, and I know it so thoroughly that some part of me is ready to connect my body to yoga teacher body. 

It feels incredibly introspective (and not a little insecure, maybe?) to spend this much time considering what I look like from the outside, so I'm about ready to be done. But I think I will continue to hold the label yoga teacher back from my verbal C.V. for a while. I have some control of what I put on my body, and the energy it shares with the world, but what others project onto it has nothing to do with me. So I suppose I have a yoga body, and a yoga teacher body, and a couch potato body and a story maker body, because these are the things I do with my body. 

taking a sick day

WARNING: I'm plenty pissed off in this post, and when I have big (usually difficult) feelings, I swear. Proceed with caution and skip this post if the F-bomb isn't your thing.

Attending class is one of my favorite ways to study yoga. A good class takes me out of my head and into my body; it provides an opportunity for discovery of postures and sequences I'd never considered or practiced before. It gives me the chance to take a crack at another pose, and to stay humble and detached from whatever result; and it's a pretty powerful way to connect and commune with other seekers in my community.

But some days I can't go to class. Some days I'm too busy trying to get work done, or get ready for something that's happening. I have to work, or I'm sick, or exhausted, or overcommitted.

And some days, the yoga classroom doesn't feel like the easiest space. Sometimes I feel like I don't have it in me to be a part of all the energy that's zinging around in the room. Some days, I feel heavy hearted and furious, and what I need to do is sit and cry a little, and to want at once and the same time to remain nonviolent, to hold compassion for all of us, and to burn the motherfucker down.

Today was one of those days. Rather than experience a continuous level of seethe at my classmates who aren't wearing their dissatisfaction of our social systems on their sleeves like I can't help but do, I decided to stay home and practice alone.

One thing that the last year of training, and the first few months of teaching, have given me is a kind of discipline. The requirements set before me, coupled with the (often difficult) choice to prioritize my study, gave me the chance to spend a lot of time and energy on the physical practice of yoga, as well as to study philosophy, Sanskrit, Ayurveda, samyama and even a bit of what I would call theology. It was a great gift, and an enormous privilege, to be in such deep study; now I am required to continue the study with my own energy as a motor, with my own goals as requirements. 

It is not easy. I grew up believing what I was told about myself, that I was undisciplined, even lazy. It seemed true: I burned out easily; I got frustrated when I struggled; I overcommitted plenty, which would leave me rundown and irritable; and I often forgot the simple tasks that I was given. From the outside I must have looked scatterbrained and tetchy. 

But I look back and I wonder if that rumor of my un-disciplinedness was true. There's plenty in my life I wouldn't have accomplished without a fair amount of discipline at my disposal. This year, I learned that what some people call discipline really just meant doing what they wanted me to do in their own time frame. Not the same thing at all.

So there's a voice in my head that says staying home from asana class feels is bit of a cheat, but I know it's actually doing the hard thing. The structure of class makes it easier for me to practice, and feel less alone in it. I am buffeted by the collective energy, by considering the sequence, by how cute someone's outfit is. My brain will throw up anything to distract me, and I'll take it. Without the voice of my teacher and the willing bodies and hearts of my colleagues, it's just me, with my practice, on my mat. Whatever I'm feeling, there's no distraction from it; whatever I want to hide from comes into the room with me and stares me in the eye until I acknowledge it.

My friend Adam wrote on social media today, "... the work of peace is something different: work is not abstract, and must respond to conditions in which one is working. Those of us who aspire to peace need to practice social awareness -- what are the circumstances that allow me to enjoy peace, and to lead a life that feels peaceful? more directly: why don't I have to riot?..." I find myself wondering, when will enough be enough? I want to ask my friends in the majority culture, when will you be so done with the murder of unarmed Americans that turning off the news isn't enough, and you have to stand up and demonstrate? I consider my eyes in the mirror, and ask, When will I be in the streets with my fist in the air, and when will my friends be beside me, chanting Om Shanti Shanti Shantih with as much passion and vehemence as we'd chant Hands Up, Don't Shoot? 

This morning, I was alone with my confusion, my sadness, my rage, my solidarity. I thought it was best, given those attitudes, that I spend the day inside. In a short while I will travel to another part of my favorite city and humbly set a practice before my students. I will create space for them to wrestle with, or to ignore if they choose to, the feelings that are riding in the air from Baltimore, from Brooklyn, from Ferguson, even from the fucking West Side, into the city center. I will make space for breath and movement, and when we're done, I'll sit and chant, and I'll welcome anyone who wants to stay.

When I leave class, I'll draw on my discipline to remember that working and fighting for change in a corrupt, flawed, ruinous (economic and social) system that has destroyed millions of lives for centuries takes a compassionate heart, long-range vision, and unwavering pursuit of justice. I will be thoughtful and I will be vocal.

And I will keep returning to my mat.

Spring Round-up

I often am pretty serious, but from time to time, you can count on seeing some lighter fare here too. Here's hoping we've finally seen the last of snow! Spring has finally arrived in this part of the world, and in that spirit, I thought I'd collect a list of resources to look to prepare for the season. Here's your Spring Round-Up!

• one of my teachers, Karen Klutznick, has compiled this list of useful, Auyrveda-inspired choices to help cleanse for the spring. 
• This Spring, I did a five-day kitcheree monodiet. My teacher's recipe is my favorite, but this one looks pretty good too. Beware, it makes a ton, and it thickens something wicked when it cools.
• Some interesting tips from Chalkboard Magazine, and no juice diet!
• This page points out the importance of a tongue scraper. I use one every day, not just for detox seasons.
• From Everyday Ayurveda, a list of foods in season, and how to adjust your diet. 
• A Spring detox is a great time for a digital detox, not just a phyiscal one. Check out here and here for tips on how to unplug. (Oh, Popsugar... I mean, the name says it all, really. It sounds like something I should detox from. But still, every now and then there's something to what I find there.)

Tools of the Practice

Healing Justice-- a "framework that seeks to lift up resiliency and wellness practicess as a transformative response to generational violence and trauma in our communities."

You ever hear something like that come out of your yoga teacher at the gym or the studio?

Nah, me neither.

One of the places where I struggle with yoga is in its individuality. The rhetoric is often so personal and individual--at least it seems so from my eyes: what is my duty or responsibility; what are my established patterns that need reframing or uprooting; what karma (from this life or another) am I still dealing with.  I know the yamas can be externally focused, right? Don't steal from others, don't lie to others; but even then, there's an I/They duality hard at work. There's no We Space.

(I wonder how our current culture would be different if We was the only pronoun we had: we taught a class this morning at 6:15; we recently won (and also lost?) an election for Chicago mayor; we've been fired from our job after videotape surfaced proving we shot an unarmed black man. Some kind of clarity would need to evolve surely, to avoid confusion; but how would things feel different if We was really all we knew? There's some language about nonduality in the yoga zeitgeist, but what if it weren't just lipservice? What if it really dictated how we lived day-to-day?

(Also, I'm young. There's a lot I don't know. If you can point me toward a resource that will help untangle all this for me, I am all over it.)

One of the places where yoga fails me is in dealing with institutional and systemic trauma. I read a tweet recently at the Incite COV4 conference that quoted a keynote speaker: "I can't do enough yoga to combat patriarchy," they said. And my first instinct was to think, Oh, but Honey, doing yoga isn't about that, that isn't the point. All you can do is Do You.

But f*ck that. When the patriarchy wants to destroy you, when it wants to break you and grind you into dust, "Just Do You" is not enough, and it's a gross disservice to those who come after you, and don't have to be destroyed by the institution, if only you can rise up and dismantle it.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

— Audre Lorde

I have never resurrected anyone with the power of my asana, and I have tried. And the people who need to be on the mat as much of the rest of us do, well they ain't there: they're at City Hall, behind the bench, in The Capitol, but not on the mat. So what do we do, we who do not make law but are subject to it? How do we care for ourselves in a space where we fight the system? Maybe it's not even worth it.

Why, then, did I offer my time and energy as a yoga teacher at the Incite Color of Violence Conference in Chicago? If I really believe that my asana practice will not subvert the patriarchy, why engage it in such a radical space? Why not be content to work on the length of my hamstrings and the openness of my hips and be done with it?

I guess because some part of me believes that it ain't that black and white. I recently sat beside this guy on the Red Line who was all manspread out (for more about what this means read this and this). He was a thin guy with a wide, wide kneespan. I couldn't see his face, but the energy he put out said that he couldn't be bothered to move his coat from the empty seat beside him to the other empty seat beside him where his bag was. When I asked him to move his coat, he heaved a great sigh, and moved it on top of his bag.

I wedged myself in beside him. It was clear from his body language that he didn't want to share space. I tried to press my shoulders back against the seat, and ran into resistance. I held my mat bag between my knees so that it wouldn't fall onto the floor, which put hips-width distance between my knees. I sat this way for about 30 seconds, penned in by this guy's privilege. I felt his shoulder expand into mine with his in-breath. Oh-ho, I thought, you think you're the only one who can swell up with your breath? I took a deep inhale, expanding my ribcage, and sat there, breathing deeply.

In a couple of breaths the commuter got up and crossed the train car to another seat where he could pile his jacket and bag around him like a fort, and not be intruded on by a yogini with a powerful inhale.

When I wrote about this on social media, I used the hashtag #yogadefeatsmisogyny. It felt kind of miraculous--okay, maybe an exaggeration. But my inhale had stood up for me; the power and strength of my breath had been a force for dealing with a guy who wasn't willing to share with me. So maybe a handstand or Urdhva Dhanurasana won't eradicate hundreds of years of institutional racism, sexism or homophobia. Maybe it won't even feed me or someone I love who is hungry. Nope, there's no maybe about it, it won't feed me or anyone I know who is hungry. But my physical practice might equip me with the patience I need to sit beside the manspreader on the train who refuses to move and who continues to pin me in. It might teach me how to be compassionate and also determined to seek justice. It will certainly teach me how to provide a space for healing and restoration for others who are in the street, who are fighting and who need a space of peace and of rest. I don't know. The shape of yoga in our culture has a lot of problems, and it doesn't always feel like a tool I can use as a solution to problems. But #HealingJustice exists because we need it. As a student and a teacher, if I can show up with a tool for dismantling and rebuilding, then maybe this practice can exist, and can be useful, in a radical context.