Creative Project: #31DaysofHealing

In 2013, I started volunteering at Chicago Women*s Health Center. One afternoon, I was doing some filing, and I met a woman who was working the front desk. She was small and spectacled, and wrapped up in bright, striking colors and textures. She had a warm, maternal energy, sitting in a nook of the office at the phone and desk, among the brown wood paneling of the office; I have to say honestly that I didn’t take her face in that much in that first meeting. I was new and I was nervous. and my jeans were too tight; I wasn’t paying much attention. I wanted to get right the job I’d been given.

I was standing a few feet away from her filing away, and she was sitting with her back to me. At one point she turned around and said to me, “Are you a healer?”

I didn’t know what to say.

The question took my breath away. I absolutely thought the answer was Yes.

It was something I’d felt to be true about myself, wanted to be true, for some time. Working as a healer was the reason I was about to enter yoga teacher training; it was something I felt I’d experienced as a teacher of writing. It was certainly something I experienced as a student of writing, and I hoped to gift it to other students who were studying writing.

For someone who didn’t know me at all—at all—to recognize that in me so quickly, was astonishing. It knocked me out that she was able to see it in me; her powers of perception were so great,  she was able to look right at me and tell. I also wondered if it was shining right out of my face. I thought I was just a regular person hiding the ambitions of wanting to help others heal, but maybe, as is so often the case with my thoughts and my feelings, I wasn’t keeping a secret or hiding anything from anyone.

Healer is not a label I wear easily. Even as I reflect on this interaction, even as I want to (and learn to) work as a healer, I don’t identify as one. I feel like an apprentice. I don’t heal people, people heal themselves. I’m the person ushering the healing process, but I’m not actively doing what that person couldn’t do. I’m a witness to each person’s healing experience.

I don’t yet know what it means to be a healer in yoga, or in writing, or especially in women*s health. What I do know is that healing is fascinating. Healing involves pain, injury. It’s not all roses and crystals and chocolates, and luscious savasanas with incense wafting up to the heavens. It’s ugly, it’s painful, and it’s bloody. It’s hard work; you have to want to heal. There are so many people who don’t want to heal, who would rather remain in their misery and illness, in the painful, stunted familiarity of what they know, rather than take the leap into newness and wholeness by healing.

So what is healing, really? How do we pursue healing? How do we avoid healing? Do we heal in community, or only on our own? What happens when our healing is tied up with someone else’s? What happens when we try to heal, even though others are unwilling to?

I’ve been kicking around a new creative project lately, and I think this is it.

#31DaysofHealing

Starting this Saturday, August 1, I’ll use Instagram as a platform to share images that open this conversation around healing. Every day for one month, I’ll share a photo that I’ve taken with the hashtag, #31DaysofHealing. I’ve never done something like this before, and it’s probably clear that I’m a text-based creative type, and not so much an image-based one, so we’ll see what happens. But I’m really excited about this challenge and what it has to teach me. Wanna join me? Feel free. I’d love it if you follow me on Instagram, or check out the hashtag to see what kinds of stories I’m able to tell. Tag me in photos as we explore together what healing looks like, what it means, when it's thwarted and how it's realized.

My Parameters

I could call these rules, because I like structure. (All my Pitta-predominant people in the house, say “You’re not doing that right!”) But instead, I’m trying to look at it as a list of options. I don’t want to box myself in with a structure, to allow tight boundaries of a project like this to dampen my creative process. I want to show up with the tool and see what emerges.

• I'll post one picture a day, by midnight at the latest
• each photo will be labeled for its day, i.e. #Day1, Day12, Day24 and will bear the hashtag #31DaysofHealing (and probably some others too)
• whenever possible, I'm the one hitting the shutter button
• at least one portrait
• at least one landscape
• at least one still life
• at most one selfie a week (I'm not big on selfies anyway)

That's it! That's all the rules I'm giving myself: a theme, a handful of image suggestions, and whatever my little creative brain can come up with. I'm excited about what might happen. Hope you'll join me!

The Uniform

Warning: this is a post about fashion.

I love my jungle pants. They're my new favorite. I'm not really one to pull off patterned pants, so when I found them, I thought, I'm gonna do something fun and risky and fashion forward, and wear these pants.

I like not broadcasting YOGI in my look. I carry my mat around the city often enough, not because I want to but because  I need to, but when I can I try to wear street clothes to and from class. So most of the time I don't dress like I'm going to class. I'm not really the kind of person who thinks much about what I wear to practice yoga in, or to teach. I don't like to spend a ton of money on workout clothes.  I think about what I wear on the street, because I like to feel good about how I look in my clothes, but yoga clothes aren't that important to me. Will I be warm enough, will my body stay covered where I want it to, can you see my underwear through my pants; these are the questions I ask when I get dressed before I head out.

Warning: this isn't a post about fashion.

The other day when I leave my house north of 6 am to teach, I don't wonder if my yoga clothes are particularly attractive or provocative; I'm on my way to work, and I figure I'm in my uniform. I'm not thinking about wearing my jungle pants, a tank top and a cardigan sweater. My mind is on the sequence I prepared, on how I can warm up sufficiently before class starts starts, on how to be present for the students effectively.  Plus I'm commuting to class in my car. I'm not considering I'll be seen by  anyone. So when I get to work, I'm ready to teach. I feel awake, I feel present, I feel ready to great the class and offer them my best.  I get out of my car to move a rock the size of a brick out of my parking spot.

Then a car in the street stops beside me and a guy rolls down his window.

He's a guy I know. He's never taken my class before,  but he's around the space where I teach, and I've seen him through the class door of the studio, rubbernecking through the glass door. We are friendly with each other, on a first name basis, even. Every person I meet is a potential student, an opportunity for me to share an amazing experience with anyone who's interested. (Not to mention that friendliness and approachability are (yick) company policy.)

I try to ignore the fact that he's pulled up behind me in his car and rolled down his window with me, and how uncomfortable that makes me. We chat briefly. I assure him my absence is not due to permanent departure, only a temporary sojourn.  He promises that when he returns from a long weekend he'll consider taking my class.

As I am turning to back to my car to finish parking, I see him give me the elevator eyes. You know, the look one person gives another when they're inspecting how your clothes fit? When they're evaluating your body? The look wherein one person objectifies and dehumanizes the other? That look. He is taking in my torso, my hips and thighs, noticing how I fill out my green-and-black jungle pants. 

It happens fast, so fast I'm not completely sure it actually happens. Well, not all of me is sure. The part of me that recognizes how it feels to receive unwanted attention is sure. But it's a fast moment, and quiet, and I'm on my way to work, and by the time I know what I am feeling, I'm back in my car and he's at the end of the block.

I want to say, Really, guy? I'm on the job. You really wanna look at my ass? It's not even 8 am yet, gimme a break. But he's gone, and it's over. I pull my bags out of the car and head in to work.

All day, this interaction sat at the back of my mind, like a tag in something I was wearing that was vaguely uncomfortable, but I couldn't entirely identify what or why.

Later, I brought it up to my Mister. It was an awkward conversation and the whole time both of us were confused by what I was trying to say. I found myself apologizing. The yoga world can be blurry and undefined, I found myself saying, and my intentions as a teacher are always clear: I never want to lead anyone on or suggest anything inappropriate. But I can't control the way students treat me, what kind of baggage they're bringing into the room, what they might project on me, etc.

Okay, he said. But I'm not really sure what you're apologizing for. It sounds like you didn't do anything wrong.

The more I talked, the more I discovered that I didn't have anything to feel bad about. I'd worn my favorite pants to work and some guy, a guy I barely know, ogled me and made me feel sexualized and objectified. My jungle pants hand't been an invitation to the elevator eyes from this guy. Neither had my smile or my friendliness and openness. I'd talked to him like I talk to everyone, and he'd given me that creepy-ass look. But it had nothing to do with anything I'd done or anything I was wearing. 

It bummed me out that I'd worn my favorite pants and gotten this response. It made me angry that I'd internalized this oppression so profoundly that I felt guilt, shame even, just for doing my job, for doing life. 

There's a lot of focus in the yoga zeitgeist about the body. For many of us the focus is on the physical practice. We've all been heard plenty about the sexual misconduct in various communities and traditions. I think that has to do with the relationship between student and teacher, and blurry boundaries and taking advantage of people who put themselves in our trust. 

I think what I haven't considered, what I wasn't ready for, was the possibility of being objectified by others as a teacher. It's not street harassment, thought I've had my fair share of that. It was the idea that even in the context of teaching yoga I can't be free of being objectified by someone who could become a student. For all I know, some of the students I have objectify and sexualize me even now, and I have no idea. 

I've never thought to myself, is this too sexy an outfit to wear to class? Is this outfit going to distract students from their practices, and instead cause them to think about my body? I hate questions like this, and resent them to my core. It sounds like the same rhetoric from the conservative, religious right that tells women not to dress a certain way because it "causes men to stumble". I want to throw something when I hear that language. 

But it came out of me. Effortlessly, while I was talking with my Mister. This shame, this internalized oppression, this misogyny, came out of me without even trying.

I don't really know what else to say about this really. The thought occurs to me that I might be violating this person's privacy by telling this story. Am I wrong to shine a light on this, should I just process it quietly, internally? I don't want to shame him, I'm not after a public flogging or anything. 

I sat on this post for weeks. It makes me feel really vulnerable to share,  and as troubled as I am by this guy's behavior, I want to treat him as a human--though I'm not sure he's able to do the same. But I believe in the power of being vulnerable, of sharing, and perhaps at the risk of oversharing. So here it is.

I don't know what happens next. I know I keep wearing my jungle pants to teach in, and the next time I catch someone looking me up and down in them, they get a potent, considered earful from me, and a Namaste to finish it off. 

I also do the work of pulling this internalized oppression out by the root, so I can be rid of shame that isn't mine. 

Teach to the Room

It had to happen eventually.

I went to teach class with my mat and water and lesson plan, and no one showed up. 

I sat on my mat for a short time, trying to exude welcome-ness--which just looks like me with my eyebrows raised and a bit of a goofy smile on my face--and when it became clear that I'd be alone, I turned off the obnoxious fluorescent lights and I practiced by myself.

I'm a young teacher, and I'm learning what it means to teach, and how to teach, by teaching. I'm new, and I don't know a lot, and I'm still crafting.

So I wasn't destroyed by the fact that no one came to class.

During my study, I asked Elesa Commerce what it meant to hold space for people. She blessed all of us, her students that day, and called us healers, medicine women and men who had a powerful responsibility--and maybe calling?--to provide room for healing, support and presence for anyone who'd ever step into our classroom. It is a big deal, what you're doing, she told us. When you cross the threshold of the classroom, it becomes your space. You're the container of the energy of class, you need to hold it with great consistency. Part of what you're doing as a teacher in this room is feeling people, she said. Teach to whoever shows up in the room.

This is the energy I'd take with me into the room. When I was so nervous I couldn't breathe or swallow, I'd tell myself, all you have to do is put the work out there, Jess. Prepare thoughtfully, teach compassionately, detach fully from the results. That's it.

I think an attitude like this makes it easy to receive an empty room. If you wind up being the only person in the room, then you (or I) can offer the same compassion, consideration and detachment to ourselves that we would to our students. 

The other side of the coin, of course, concerns, well, coin.  We're all trying to make a living, even those of us who teach yoga, with or without the glitz and  sex appeal. It's my understanding (and I don't know much) that in some corners of the industry, teachers get paid based on how many people show up to class. So if you're lucky enough to land the right spot in the schedule and draw, eight, 10, 17 students a night or week, then you make good. If you're in a less attractive slot, well, good luck. This phenomenon makes me kind of anxious. I'd really like to think less about filling the room with bodies, and more about preparing the students for a fruitful journey with their breath, their mind, their body, their consciousness. I wonder, is this the way it has to be? What's important about offering yoga as a service or experience, and what to we teach ourselves and each other about its priority when we price it this way? I'm not sure if this is a question about yoga or integrity or capitalism or what. I just know that when I begin to think more about how to draw people into class so I can make a decent wage, and less about how to use postures, breathwork and attention exercises to work mindfully with the bodies in the room, well, it bums me out. 

I'm privileged in that if no one shows up to my class, I don't have to worry about how I'll make rent or afford to buy medication. I'm fortunate to have learned to offer a great, grounded experience to a room whether it's filled with many people or few. I see the ads about how to "live the life I've always wanted as a yoga teacher!" on FB and I get twitchy. But I think of the running ragged and the jumping at every chance to teach that I assumed I'd have to do, and started to do, and I want to stay home, eat potato chips and watch Big Bang Theory reruns. 

So it would seem that, at least for now, the work in front of me is to continue to prepare, to continue to offer mindfully, without taking attendance, to continue to teach to whomever shows up, even if that's just me, and to trust that, as friends have said, my students will find me.

In the meantime, extra time to be still and quiet is always a blessing. 

Religious Traditions

I am not a Hindu. It's not a label I wear: I've never observed a puja or attended temple and engaged in whatever ritual takes place there. I don't know what it means to be a Hindu or to observe Hindu traditions. It's not a tradition that I can claim, I think. My yoga practice seems to require of me, though, more than just engaging a tradition without examining its roots. That is to say, I can't participate in yoga blithely and ignorantly without considering the subtle, esoteric and religious connections it shares with Hinduism and Buddhism. I have no illusions about the overlap--or maybe line of connection--between my practice of breath, movement stillness, and connection, and the yogis' search for God.

When I think the history, the religious history that I was raised in, this history I participate in complicitly or explicitly, I think of something I heard the Dali Lama say in a talk online. He was asked by a Buddhist student who was also Jewish if he, the student, should leave behind his tradition and convert to Buddhism. The Dali Lama said, if you are not a Buddhist, don't leave your tradition to join Buddhism. If you are a Jew, stay a Jew. If you're a Christian, stay a Christian. There are all kinds of Buddhists.

And so I am not a Hindu. My practice doesn't require me to convert. I was born into a vaguely Christian culture and raised in what became a sincerely and seriously Christian family. That's my tradition.

I was reminded of that, walking through Saint-Chappelle. I often forget my tradition. The vengeance, the hypocricy, the judgment that has become so much a part of Christianity, well, I don't like it. It doesn't resonate anymore. I needed my tradition to grow. Still, it was nice to look at these stories I've known for years dramatized in stone, and in colored glass.  It reminded me how much beauty there is in the stories of Christianity. 

I have an altar at home that has as icon of Ganesha and of Nataraja on it. I often wonder if this is negatively appropriative. But in the morning when I am praying, when I need a place to focus or I need my mantra to have extra power, I'm grateful for it. I don't feel like I'm borrowing a tradition or crossing a boundary; I'm just accessing the Divine in the best way I can.

There is someone who probably thinks I should be ashamed of myself, who would say I should stick to my own tradition: with its burning bush and child sacrifice, with its swallowing whales, water walking, cheek turning and death that only lasts three days. I suppose I should. I haven't forsaken that tradition. It feels rich and wonderful. But there must be enough space for a monkey who can leap over oceans and a whale who swallows reluctant prophets. There must be enough space for an archer to talk through self-doubt with his charioteer, as there is for a carpenter's son to wander the desert, wrestling with his demons.

I had a religion professor who said that maybe, in the time between Christ's 12th birthday and when he began his ministry at 30, he went off to India and studied with the Buddha. 

Maybe these traditions are one.

Meditation: on the edge of a broken mountain

Every morning while I was there, I would get up, and before breakfast, before asana, before I'd even brushed my teeth, I'd open the cottage door and walk down the path to the gate and just stare. The feeling was... really hard to articulate. It's like a kind of shrinking/flattening/squeezing feeling in your chest. The air feels so free and clean, but the gravity also feels so powerful. I would just stand there with my mouth hanging open and feel. There was seldom language in the feeling; all I know now was that I was contemplating flight and falling, air and earth, Vata and Kapha. 

Here are some pictures, but they really don't do it justice. I don't know how to offer you the physical sensation in  your body of wanting to fly, or to be absorbed into rock, or to hurl yourself over the edge of a cliff, just to notice how it will go.

Senses are powerful tools, and sensations are powerful experiences. I am the person who gets tired and then irritated when I don't eat on time. I cannot abide the texture of water chestnuts in my mouth. Whenever I hear "Let's Hear It for the Boy", I stop what I'm doing and sing along every word. Carmen, by Georges Bizet gives me goosebumps.

Also, I can absolutely remember the tightness in my chest and behind my eyes when my parent would shout at me, and the icy fear that gripped my lungs when they closed the casket on my granddad and I wanted to shout that they should leave it open, otherwise he wouldn't be able to breathe in there.

Sensation is a big deal, and often it rules us: our hunger, our lust, our disgust or fear. It drives us to respond to stimuli that may or may not be truly present. How often are we, on a given day or week, flooded with a sensation and responding to a sensation that may not be real? How often do we snap at a colleague or family member, or at a perfect stranger, because they've jumped on our hair trigger? Or maybe we spend our lives in a perpetual state of avoidance, defensiveness, reactivity.

It happens to me more often than I'd like, probably more often than I know.

One thing that I practice doing on my mat is feeling. I put myself into an unusual, or very usual, shape, and I take note  of what sensations lift up and announce themselves. I try to make this process as nonverbal as possible, to keep feeling out of the thinking space, but it often drifts there anyway. There's a lot that competes for my attention, and in the way of the meditation teacher, I coax my awareness back to present sensation like a puppy learning what it is to take a walk.

There was a lot of quiet in Thira (or "Fira", the real way of naming Santorini). There was little internet and even less phone convo, and all the space gave me the chance to tune into sensations. Not that the sensations were particularly subtle. I mean, look at that water, look at that hulking mass of volcanic rock. I spent almost a week on the inner rim of a blown-up dormant volcano. The earth, the water, the sky has a different kind of pull on you in a place like that. Just ask Hawai'i.

The tricky part in all that feeling is knowing what sensation is real, what is indicative of something you should do, and what is just a sensation masquerading as a catalyst. I don't know if waking and sleeping, walking and eating, loving and arguing, if doing life on a caldera, on the edge of a broken mountain, is actually different than doing it in a flat-plain metropolis, or if it just feels different. Vacation always feels otherworldly. And yet, our bodies are still made of the same fluid and sinew, water and air and space, and unless or until we start interplanetary vay-cay, we're still on the surface of a big, blue, (rapidly overheating) rock.

I know this feels a little wandery. Just a meditation on travel, and if you've read this far, I'm grateful. Travel is so formative for me that I'll probably be thinking and writing about it for a while. I'll try to keep it fresh.