Do you feel me?

After taking a few of my favorite Restorative Yoga classes with a truly gifted and sensitive teacher a some time ago, I picked up a book he'd read from, and also borrowed his deeply moving habit of reading to students occasionally in the Restorative class that I teach. I was reading recently from Fire of Love, by Aadil Palkhivala, and shared this from his chapter on Feeling:

Feeling is the essence of life. Without feeling, we are not quite human. The real value of our asana practice is that, as we do pose after pose with awareness, we are inviting more sensitivity into our bodies and our lives. We are learning to tune in and feel. So we not only feel better, but we feel better. 

It makes a lot of sense to me, but I'd be lying if I said that there aren't times when I wish I didn't feel quite so much. Truth is, I'm a big, ol' feeler: whether it's joy, terror, anger, confusion sadness, or anything else or in between, when I feel a feeling it's almost always an 11 on a scale of one to ten. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm more than a little expressive about my feelings, too. I sometimes wish that I moved through the world with more equanimity: I think it would spare me a lot of lost energy and heartache; but I just don't. What I feel, I feel deeply.

For better or for worse, yoga--and by this, I mean not just asana, but the eight-limbed practice of yoga, the gritty, tearful moments of svadhyaya, the struggle to soften into ahimsa when I'm frightened and irritable, the fleeting moments of pratyahara that I pursue even as my monkey mind is crying out for more Netflix--this practice has taught me to feel more. Practicing yoga is what clued me into the fact that I feel lousy when I eat meat; it's what has given me the bravery to end toxic relationships; it's what has shown me how much it matters to me to offer what I study, what I practice, to others. 

But sometimes I really hate The Feels.

You can never un-know a thing, can you? Even if you choose to feign ignorance about how that chicken thigh made its way under the mushroom sauce on your plate, or what your uncle did to your little sister, or that you just aren't in love with them anymore, that feeling will find a way out. It'll manifest as a nagging pain in your neck, or as acid stomach, or nightmares. The truth will out. The truth doesn't really have a feeling. If your hamstrings are too short and your hips too tight today for you to put your feet behind your head, well, that isn't great and it isn't terrible; it just is. Likewise, if that person doesn't love you the way you want them to, that isn't inherently bad or good; it's just a fact of the nature of your relationship with them. If you try to do dwi pada sirsasana in light of the truth about your hips and hamstrings, I promise you, you will have a feeling. If you try to make someone love you when you know they can't, oh Honey, take it from me, you'll get a boatload of feelings as a result of that ill-advised action.

The feeling comes in our reactivity. This retrograde/eclipse season is really revealing to me some things that were hidden. The waxing and waning light of the moon has a way of doing that: at night, the shadows are long and exaggerated, and we're not sure what it is we see. Things can look scarier than they are; sometimes people we thought were there, aren't there at all (which could be good for us, or bad, depending on how we feel about who we thought was there in the first place). Sometimes relationships we counted on are revealed to be shallow, and we're faced with the choice of investing or cutting our losses. 

Feelings seldom feel like a choice, though. I don't know about you, but I often give my feelings such privilege that it's tough to remember that they're fleeting, that--like the shadows of the moonlight--they may not be an accurate reflection of the truth. I don't believe feelings are a choice. I've heard that before, I just don't buy it. But I am learning (often quite painfully, as the princess of The Feels) that feelings don't have to be in charge. My anger, my pain, my disappointment, my loneliness, my lust, my resentment, my yearning: none of these need to be in charge of the decisions I make. They have useful information to offer, but they may not be there when the sun comes up. So even though my feelings aren't a choice, how I hold my feelings, and how I act in dialogue with them is a choice.

Damn, it's beginning to sound a little Multiple Personality up in here. 

Feelings come up a lot in my physical practice. I've never been the yogini who laughed, or cried, in ekapadarajakapotasana, but I have been the yogi furious with the teacher for asking us to do another balancing pose, or furious with her flat feet for not supporting her in said balancing pose; I am currently the yogini walking a tightrope of encouraging myself to be brave in dialogue with postures where I've hurt myself before (bravery, excitement), and not being so caught up in my ego and in grasping for postures that I hurt myself. Again. (fear, discouragement, laziness?)

The practice never lies. Never. How we react to it, our ego, (source of The Feels) lies all the time. What I discover about yoga, in the subtle practices of pranayama, pratyahara and dharana, is that these practices lift up The Feels. There's no vinyasa to rinse them away like sorbet between sequences, there's no second side to try it again and see what happens this time; there's only me and my breath and the feeling, and the floor beneath me, and sometimes I forget that last part. And so I sit with the feeling, I hold it and interrogate it, and I don't try to make it go away. On a good day, this is a wordless experience, and then maybe some clarity lifts up within me, and usually that is language-based. On most days, my cognitive mind takes the reins and acts like some kind of ethnographer, and I have to keep telling myself to shut up. On a bad day, the feeling wins and there is no clarity, there is only the glaring feeling itself, and I have to work not to step off the mat in a totally triggered state, I have to remember to leave my practice behind.

Being a grown-up is not easy. When you're six months old and you have a feeling you don't know what to do with, you wail about it until someone puts something in your mouth, or cleans you off, or puts you to bed, and you feel better. Something similar happens when you're three or six. But when you're fourteen, twenty-two, thirty-six, fifty-seven, it isn't as simple anymore. The feeling itself may be as "uncomplicated" as fear, fatigue, hunger, loneliness, but man, how it manifests in our world of relentless cell phones and mortgages and climate change and Black Lives Matter and guarding borders is a giant snare, and how adults deal with their feelings has huge consequence on one another's lives. 

And so I unroll my mat and I practice. I move my body through space, and I try to examine my feelings without attaching too much to them, even when I'd rather just put something in my mouth and clean myself off and go to bed. I sit beside myself. I imagine myself sitting beside me, laying my head on my own shoulder in a gesture of compassion and generosity that I want to show someone else, that I want to receive from someone else. I say to myself, it's okay, Jess. You're here, you're safe, and I love you. Sometimes that makes it better, sometimes it feels like it will be hard forever. But I'm in it. I don't run away from the feeling because I know it won't last, and I know that beneath it there's a truth I need to know.

Mindful Transitioning

“The intensity of practice reveals yoga’s nearness. ”

— threads of yoga, matthew remski

I had just turned 27, and everything was changing. My roommate had moved out; she announced at the beginning of summer that she was leaving Chicago to attend grad school in Philadelphia. I never said this to her, but I felt abandoned by her. I had connected with her in a way I never had before with another woman; despite being vastly different, I felt we understood each other. I learned so much from her. She challenged me, she encouraged me, and we had so much fun together. When she unplugged herself from my life, with as much effort as unplugging the toaster, I was heartbroken. I moved out of our beautiful three-bedroom apartment in East Humboldt Park and away from the spiritual community I'd built, into the only place I could afford, a tiny studio apartment.

I was awash in language. It was my last year of grad school, and I was completing my master's thesis, a collection of short stories about people I knew, people I didn't know, relationships and ideas and connections that fascinated and troubled me. I knocked around my hovel of a studio apartment in Uptown, dark, dingy, utterly unromantic, from bed to desk to stove to sink and back again. I bounced out the door once a week to a classroom in the South Loop where I taught a roomful of undergrads about what fun it is to make story. I bounced around the country teaching children, teens and adults the transporting magic of reading. I occasionally had brunch or looked at art with the man I'd eventually marry. I tried to go to yoga class, because there was no place to practice in my studio. And I spent every waking moment with my journal or in front of my computer making stories. 

I love writing. Crafting language is the first, last and best way I know of understanding the world around me, of celebrating what is marvelous and understanding what is frightening and untangling what is painful. Constructing language, when crafted without too much self-aggrandizement, with sincerity and beauty and simplicity, can be a spiritual practice. Language is what I use to practice compassion and vulnerability, two qualities I come more and more to believe are intrinsic to the human condition, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But at the time, when I was 27 and adrift, there was just too much language in my life. Lines from the story about the two kids who found the dead body, lines from the story about the housewife's meltdown, lines from the story about what I imagined my grandparents' marriage could be like: they were all over me all the time. They were in my thoughts, under my fingers, in my mouth, it was like living in alphabet soup.

“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”

— The Bible

I didn't know I was seeking silence when I started going to yoga class in Edgewater; I just knew the studio was close to my boyfriend's place and the Sunday night community class was half-primary, which I had a crush on at the time. I found silence. I would go to class, and once we started moving, there was a lot less talk, fewer words. I remember at one point, sweating through parivrtta trikonasana and parivrtta parsvakonasana, and realizing all I could hear was my breath. I was grateful for the silence: no music, no drums or kirtans, just my breath and the sound of my limbs on the mat, and whatever quasi-verbal sounds came out of me in a particular shape.

I kept going, because I needed the silence. Moving away from my spiritual community, losing my best friend, these things had left a hole in me, and even though church in the traditional sense was still available to me, it just felt too language-based. I wanted to be close to the G_d that lived in the space between words, in spaces: not the God of edicts and rules, or rhetoric, or even worship.  Yoga felt like a spiritual practice, as much as attending church, reading holy books, even praying, ever had. I was moving into a new place where my physical practice felt like prayer. 

I've been reading threads of yoga lately. It's slow, dense, something you need to digest in small bites because it features words I don't understand clearly, like "ontological" and "praxis". This isn't a judgment of the text, only a statement of how slowly I must engage it to understand. But when I engage it slowly, it hits me fast and heavy, the way a rainstorm blows in, soaking everything, threatening a flash flood. The text helps me consider what yoga is: is it something I do to keep my blood pressure low, is it something I do because I like touching my toes; is it a Western subculture largely dominated by a energy of privilege and homogeneity, that for all of its talk about union and spirituality, is in staunch denial of its shadow side, and the ways in which that manifests oppression; is it more than exercise, or not more than cultural appropriation; is it prayer...

My practice feels as though it moves not linearly, but in concentric circles. Rather, it moves linearly when I consider only what can I do with my body. When I  consider that I can touch my toes standing and seated, when a bind in half-lotus feels not so tight and impossible, when I can move my body through the transitions my teachers ask me to with a tiny bit more grace than I could a few months ago, then my practice moves linearly. This is interesting, but only for a short while, if I set my sights on the next pose, the next vinyasa, the next physical feat.

But when I consider the practice that feels like home when I can't make words, when I step to the mat--tired, confused, frustrated, alienated--and it feels like a prayer rug, when I touch the tide of yearning that rises within me wanting to dive deeper into the practice that, beneath all the commerce and homogeneity and (I'll say it again) oppression, beneath all the acting out and the ego and the missteps of humans, is something healing, even holy: Ah! Then it feels like a spiral, a cycle I move through ever deeper toward Divinity.

I bring this up right now because I feel in the midst of another of those transitions, those moments when I have the opportunity to choose whether or not to move deeper. There's a lot in my life that's making it difficult, but the call to move nearer, to engage in the practice more deeply, is so strong. Yoga lifts up parts of me that I don't really want to look at, that I'd rather pretend aren't there, or that I've "overcome". It is a fine mirror, accurate, honest, surgically precise, in shining a light on the things I have sought to keep buried for so long. If my physical practice never changes, that is still a reason to step to the mat everyday: for the spiritual work the physical practice bids me do.

Surrendering to Road Blocking

I like to go fast.  The one time in my life I was on a motorcycle, I instantly fell in love with it.

I was young, it was my birthday, and a friend, a master carpenter, took me for a ride around the block because I'd never been on a motorbike before. We probably didn't go faster than 30 miles an hour; I wasn't wearing a helmet; the ride had all the things I love: power, rhythm, freedom and speed. It was amazing. It was a good thing I only had one ride, because if I had the chance to ride a motorcycle, I'd want to do it all the time, in deeply reckless ways, and I'd wind up smearing insides all over the pavement.

I like to go fast. 

Sometimes when I'm driving, I wonder if my car is glowing, or if it has some kind of giant arrow pointing to it that says, Cut me off! I'm not in any hurry, and I don't care at all if you treat me like shit! Because I always get stuck behind people who are driving slowly. They rush past me, seeming to have all kinds of speed, and then get in front of me and suddenly get distracted by a bird flying by or something and they slow down, and I'm stuck moving slowly behind them.

I hate it. It sends my blood pressure up. It is as if the universe has picked up a giant boulder and dropped it right in my path.

I think my car does have that cut-me-off glowing arrow pointing at it. I think the universe knows I like to go fast, and so it puts obstacles in my path.

Obstacles make me nuts. And that's precisely why I need them.

Every time I get cut off by a BMW (because, let's be honest, it's always a BMW), I get the chance to take a deep breath and make a choice about how much this matters to me, and how much energy I'm going to let this take from me. I get to decide to let it go. It's not always an easy choice for me, but it's a choice I always get to make

I've learned from Elesa Commerce that the practice of meditation is not the moment of sitting and chanting or visualizing or whatever; instead, every time you pluck our awareness off the monkey-mind road it ran down (what am I having for lunch... I can't believe she said that to me... don't forget to deposit that check, you're going to need the money to--OMGJessshut theFup--Ooommmmm...) that quiet space in between the thoughts, however brief, that returning of your attention: THAT is the practice of meditation. 

And so an obstacle is an opportunity to cultivate that space, to practice snatching my attention away from grumpy and uptight, to practice stepping away from the distraction, and to come back to myself.

Obstacles allow us to practice patience and slowness. These are important qualities to practice. They make us safer and smarter. They give us the chance for a better idea to occur to us. They allow reflection, consideration. Hopefully, we mellow as we wait, we don't stew. We can consider our own mistakes, and attempt to make right what we can, what we need to.

Obstacles allow us to cultivate creativity. If we want to take a direction or solve a problem, and suddenly we can't because there's a giant fire truck blocking the road, or because we're injured, or because there's an uncooperative person in our way, well, we gotta suss out how to get unstuck and find another way where we're going. So we get creative: we carefully reverse down half a city block; we take the sequence lying down instead of on our feet (and realize we're still working just as hard); we learn to work with others, or to let go of baggage that doesn't belong to us. 

What I find most compelling is that when I encounter obstacles in my path, I first feel fear. But if I'm lucky, and if I try really, really hard, it doesn't stay fear. It becomes bravery. An obstacle offers me the opportunity to cultivate bravery. It says, Are you going to let this beat you, Jess? Are you going to give up on this obstacle because you can't get over it or around it? Are you going to quit because it didn't go your way today? (It doesn't so much sound like a gruff gym teacher/sports coach; it's softer, more encouraging.) I decide: I'm not scared of this obstacle. I'm going to pursue it, wisely, compassionate with myself, and as egoless as possible. If I don't blast through the rock today, well, there's always tomorrow.

So this is where my man Ganesha comes into play. Ganesha is one of my favorite deities to work with: I love his devotion to his family, his sense of humor, his big belly and his swinging trunk. As a person who is always seeking more grounding, I appreciate the solid, earthy energy I cultivate when I chant the Ganesha mantra. For a time, I would cling to it, feeling that my day-to-day was so obstacle-ridden I could hardly move. I felt really graspy in my practice, cold with fear and desperate for something or someone to take all these obstacles out of my way. 

A teacher recently said to me that Ganesha is the remover of obstacles, but that sometimes in order to grow, there are obstacles that need to go up in your path. Sometimes you need an obstacle to get stronger, to improve. I've said before that musles don't get stronger if you don't add resistance.

Sure there's a difference between having an obstacle or two that makes you stronger, and having a life so replete with difficulty that you feel you can't get out of bed. I'm definitely not suggesting that we seek out struggle for the sake of struggle. I think what I'm saying is that surrenduring to the occasional struggle might benefit us now and again. Getting angry about struggle just makes for exhaustion and frustration; but when we can give in to struggle, and use it as a means to cultivate bravery, or compassion, patience and creativity, we're better for it.

What's Living Inside

I want to start this blog post with language about what an amazing and also incredibly difficult time it is to be alive, about how all over the world imperialist, colonizing chickens are coming home to roost, to say something clever and arresting, but I've got nothing. 

Or rather: I have this post about how easily racism moves in the communities of the majority culture; and I have this post and this post on what white allies can do to understand and work toward eradicating systems and laws that have oppression and destruction of others, their homes, families and properties built into them;  and I have Netflix reruns; and laughter; and Rose Hydrosol and kombucha and a partner who will hold me and make me giggle and engage with me around experiences that are difficult. 

And I have yoga: a (near and far, digital and in-person) community that I love deeply and challenge continually; a philosophy that I wrestle with even as I am astonished by its beauty and profundity; a spiritual tradition that echoes in my heart; and a physical practice that doesn't desert me, even when all I can do is lie face-down on my mat and struggle to draw breath.

Last few weeks, I've thought a lot about what kinds of platforms we have to engage what happens in our world: what we say and don't say about tragedy, about racism, about violence, about injustice; what lives in us, what we are able to shed, what we are continually burdened by. On Thursday when I went to work, I didn't know what to do with myself. At work, I realized that the one platform that I had, that I could use pretty quickly, is the space I create as a yoga teacher.

So I built a sequence. It isn't gentle, but it isn't the hardest, most vigorous practice you've ever seen either. It starts on the floor, because when you are so charged, so traumatized by the senseless destruction of life by those tasked with the protection and service of others, or by faceless strangers with automatic weapons, you need to remember that gravity is something you can count on, that the floor is still under your feet. It focused on the breath, on cultivating deep inhales--which was hard for me to do for days last week--and smooth exhales. I encouraged a brief pause at the top of inhale, to build resources for when you feel you're being emptied by things around you. Grounding standing postures, heart-opening back bends, and lots of chanting after savasana.

I called it, Yoga for When the System is Trying to Destroy You. Aggressive language perhaps, I said to students, but also not entirely inaccurate for what we're seeing go on in our culture, in our country. It won't feel that different, and for some of us who don't feel any different, it may not change much for you at all. But for those of us who are feeling triggered or troubled, I've built us a practice that will help us deal with what we're feeling, create a covenant of witnessing one another's practice, and return to life a better version of ourselves so that we may manifest better in our world. 

It was a departure for me. I'm not often a teacher who does much talking at the beginning of class. I like to, but I don't always have a little sermon, or idea that I want to convey at the top of the class, and the students didn't come to hear me, anyway, they came to practice. But this time, I was different, I was changed. My black skin felt heavier in the room. To pretend otherwise would have felt dishonest for me, and I told them so. 

After cass a student came to me and thanked me for speaking up. She said that the anger and sadness and confusion had been on hear heart all week, and if it wasn't on the hearts and minds of others she engaged with, there wasn't really much for them to talk about. 

The sun keeps shining, the earth keeps spinning, and all around us, innocents and civilians are being killed because of ignorance and fear. The work that I do every day is colored by this strange dichotomy: it sucks right now, it just does, and yet there are so many things to be grateful for, to laugh about. I'm angry a lot (surprise, surprise), but not so angry that I can't still find a little joy or humor, even as I hold the rage and the pain, my own and others'. I think this is an important skill; but I do wish the world didn't give me quite so many opportunities to practice. 

I'm happy to create a yoga space that isn't so much a break from the struggles and sadnesses of our lives, but an opportunity to look plainly at them, even to name them, and practice holding them in a space that feels safe, feels big enough for that work. May all of us have these spaces, that make room for all of us to come as we are, grieve if we are grieving, to breathe deeply and to practice staying present with the sensations of our day-to-day.  

History Repeating Itself

My Ayurveda teachers have taught me that the body struggles with change, even positive change, and that even bodies that tend toward change have a hard time with it. One way to pursue peace in the body and peace of mind, one way to achieve ease  and grounding, is to pursue repetition. The body craves pattern and repetition.

Let me tell you about a pattern of repetition I see around me: Black people are murdered by law enforcement, often, but not always, white. 

Who is craving this repetition? Who is made more peaceful, easier, healthier, by this pattern?

Did you know another black person was shot and killed by the police yesterday? His name was #AltonSterling. He was someone's father; he was trying to make a living; and I haven't watched the video (yes, there's video, and if you watch it, I hope it never leaves you), but I read this account from the Washington Post--which contains the video--and it sounds like he was not trying to resist. 

According to this project, Alton Sterling is one of 505 people who have died at the hands of police brutality in 2016, and in some other sources that number is closer to 558. It has happened in all 50 states. There are 25 more fatal shootings this year than there were last year, so our numbers are up. 

And if you didn't go looking for what's trending in your Twitter feed, or if some woke soul in your FB echo chamber didn't share any info about it, you probably have no idea.

“Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police are able to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we will have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function in ours. ”

— Jesse Williams

Yoga texts and yoga teachers often talk to me about transcending the body, about the edges of the body falling away, so that the divine spark within me can be still and grow and connect with the Divine Spark around us all. 

I have yet to hear anyone tell me how to practice if my body isn't safe on the surface of the planet. How do I deepen my breath if I can't breathe? How do I unroll my mat if I'm not sure I can step foot out my door? How am I to transcend my body if existing in my body is a criminal offense, punishable by execution without trial?

Get the fuck out of my face with that rhetoric, yoga. If you can tell me that life is an illusion, then you probably have the privilege of seldom living in fear of losing yours. I will transcend my body when we live in a world where I am safe enough to exist without being threatened by soldiers who move through my community with impunity and weapons. Until then, I will take my black female body into every space I move through, demanding my right to exist, to speak, to breathe, to reproduce if I choose, and to live as free as the rest of y'all. I will demand that my physical body is not to be transcended, but instead is to be celebrated and engaged with, is as powerful and important a tool in my spiritual journey as any mantra, any mudra, any spontaneous descent of samadhi. I don't care what day in July it is, I don't care how many fireworks go off, and I don't care what songs are sung about our history. We are not a nation of free people. And if you think that you are free, yoga, if you think your freedom is not bound up in mine, then you have profoundly misunderstood the very rhetoric you posit.

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

— Lilla Watson