#31DaysofHealing: Results!

Two months ago, I began a month-long creative project exploring the many faces of healing. I wrote about it here, and invited anyone interested to check it out on Instagram. If you're familiar with this space, you know that as much as I enjoy image and photography, I don't identify as a photographer or visual artist, and so it was a step into a space of vulnerability for me. It was exciting and interesting, and gave me the chance to explore some powerful ideas of why we hold onto pain, why it's hard to let go of suffering and how we participate in it, what relationships and practices in our lives are healing, and how we are agents of our own healing. Enjoy.

Bonus: dance video at Millennium Park.

Healing Everywhere

Healing's been on my mind for weeks, right? I spent all of August considering how it was manifesting around me and trying to capture some of that in image. 

Right this second, I'm thinking maybe a better word for healing would be balance.  Pain is a part of our human experience. We can recuperate and recover from an injury--say, a physical one--only to be laid up by emotional injury or trauma as soon as we think we're well. To be healed often means that we are pain or disease free, but our bodies are in a constant state of wear, even breakdown, even when were at our best.  

I had the great gift of the opportunity to share space with a group of people who are actively engaging their own healing recently. It was a special day. I learned how much internal pressure we put on ourselves to be well, how deeply we feel our physical illness, and how inspired and motivated we are to care for ourselves and each other. It was pretty amazing.  

I wonder if that's what happens every time we step onto our mat. What if we viewed our day-to-day choices wig as much intention and import? What if we considered how each of our actions contributes to our individual and collective healing, or to our illness?  

Meditating on Contentment

Right around my 35th birthday a few months back, I had a kind of epiphany on my mat. (This happens pretty frequently. Sometimes during my physical practice, I can get out of my own way, and the solution to a problem will lift up like a lotus flower sprouting out of the mud of my mind.) This time it was

Santosha.

Post-its all over the house to help remind me to practice contentment.  

Santosha (Purists, please forgive the spelling absent diacritical marks, haven't quite figured that out here) is one of the niyamas the five internal restraints that are the second of the eight limbs of yoga.  Wait, what? You mean yoga has eight limbs, and not just the four that are attached to my body, you're thinking. Ah, jeeze, I guess I haven't talked enough about that. For the long explanation, any translation of the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali will give you plenty to think on. For quick internet resources, this one is pretty good; if you want the easy, breeze, 30-second snapshot, see the YJ explanation here. 

Anyway, santosha, I decided is the word of my 35th year. I imagined Pee Wee's Playhouse, and all the friends around me screaming and rolling their big googly eyes and waving their stuffed arms every time I said it. It means contentment; acceptance: making due and being okay with what is.

This kind of practice is a big deal, and a challenge for me. Part of what dawns on me right now is that I want so MUCH. I want so OFTEN. This leads to a lot of anger and ultimately a lot of suffering in me. When I let the reins out on my own wanting, I can get crazy with it. Turning 35, part of me sometimes thinks I should have been somewhere else by now. I should have traveled more places, I should have better relationships, I should have accomplished more, gotten further in my professional ambitions. That part talks to the part that compares me to other people, other standards. I'm not as fabulous as some rich superstar or as accomplished as my colleagues. 

I liked to imagine that I was content with my body, but when I turned 35 that fantasy went right out the window. My metabolism is slowing down, my ability to recover seems to take longer, and I find myself almost exponentially more critical of myself than I've ever been before: of my practice, my (in)ability to still my mind, of how long it takes me to learn a new skill; of how I look and feel in my clothes, even.

I'm not sure if it's possible to grow up a black woman in America and not have a complicated, even adversarial relationship with your body. I mean, any sister, yes; I'm not saying you have to be black to struggle with eating disorder/body shame/dysmorphia. I'm just saying you don't have to look very hard or far to see how little the black female existence (cis and trans) is (de)valued in our country and culture. We're smart and we learn fast.

So issues, embarrassment, shame, that's nothing new. What's new is shame about aging. 

I keep trying to remember that my body is not me. Our bodies move through our world with a lot of import. Your body is your home; your playground, your pleasure chest; your social significator, your lens, your vessel, your vehicle; it is and does so many things.

But my body is not me, right? It's just a flesh-consciousness suit. This idea isn't just in yoga philosophy. I remember an illustration from a kids' bible that I used to have, showing what would happen when Jesus returned and called his followers back to him. There were people-shaped ghosts and spirits rising out of their graves in the earth to be in heaven. Even in the afterlife, we can't get away from this flesh-suit paradigm. We're stuck with the body as the shape and form of our consciousness. Our bodies aren't our beings--we're energy passing time in flesh suits, suits that degrade and break down, and will one day stop animating. 

This is the first year I considered lying about my age. Up until this point, it was no big deal, but now, this year, I get it. Who wants to be 35? 

Earlier this year, I resented time as a thing I had no control over. ( I know, can you imagine? Ego!) It required that I do things when it said so, not when I said so. Since my birthday, I resent time for passing. I resent my body for time's passing showing up on it, almost as if I'm a tree big enough and old enough to have rings now.

I think I feel shame about my body, shame at the fact that it's aging. I feel like my body has tricked me, and now I'm looking at myself and thinking wait! Time can pass, but I should stay the same. 

I read this, and think I must sound so... naive. Ridiculous. Maybe both.

Our bodies move through time in a kind of straight line. Uterine bodies, I suppose, can move in both a line and a circle--the  phases of the moon, the building and releasing of the menstrual cycle--this is a circle, not a line, but even as our time is defined by revolution around the sun, June 22 this year is not June 22 last year. Each one has 364 days between it that makes it different.

If I believe that I'm not my body, then what do I care if time passes, and the passing of time shows up on my body? Is this resentment just borne out of an overblown connection or identification with my body?

But the body's important. It's not something to be ignored. Ask anyone who's ever received unwanted touch, anyone who's ever been injured. Ask anyone who feels their body is a traitor for responding when they don't want it to. Ask anyone who feels unsafe in their body; ask anyone who has criminalized for existing while black how unimportant the body is. 

I don't know how this will go down, will it be easy or maddening to pursue contentment with my body, with my 35th year. I feel like maybe I should write Santosha on Post-Its and put the on the mirrors in my house, in my closet, my bookcases, in my wallet, even in my underwear drawer. Maybe I will--whatever I can do to remind myself that contentment is a skill that will lead to detachment, which will ultimately ease my suffering. 

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.