Blog
Why I Can't Just Stick to the Yoga, or, All Yoga is Political (Part 1)
A few weeks ago, a longtime student sent me a note.
“Stick to the yoga, Beth,” she wrote, in response to a message I had shared with my email list. “I enjoy your class, but I don’t need to hear your political views.”
I thought long and hard before responding that I didn’t think I could do that.
I didn’t think I could just stick to the yoga, and if that meant she needed to unsubscribe from my list, I would be truly sorry to see her go, but I would understand.
Since then I’ve been thinking about what it means for me, as a yoga teacher and as a business owner, to speak out on social issues that I feel strongly about.
How To Restart A Yoga Practice, Even (and Especially) If You Have Chronic Pain
In the past months I’ve heard so many people talk about the difficulty they’ve had restarting a yoga practice.
If that rings a bell, please know that you are not alone. And if coming back to yoga feels very daunting, even just the tiniest shift in your world may help you find your way back, maybe sooner than you think.
In this post I’ll share a little of my experience of stepping away from yoga, and how I’ve managed to keep coming back.
Yoga is Magic
Born and raised in a family of intellectuals, I am hardwired for uneasiness when it comes to talk of spirituality or anything approaching the unscientific. (This orientation can be something of a liability in the yoga world, but that’s a story for a different day.) So I was surprised, when, after a year or so of enjoying yoga for its stretchy exercise benefits, the practice began to deepen for me, morphing unexpectedly into something much more intense and slightly destabilizing, something for which I had no useful frame of reference and no adequate language to describe.
Worth A Listen: Perspectives on Yoga's Complicated History
What is yoga, really? Is it, as we often hear, a timeless practice handed down to us, intact and unchanging, from teacher to teacher, over thousands of years? A growing body of research reframes yoga as a living practice, evolving from its very beginnings, with a rich and deeply nuanced history of adaptation and creative innovation across time and geography. Does this view diminish its authenticity? To my mind, not at all - the twists, turns, and nuances of yoga’s complex history just make it all the more fascinating and powerful. If you’re interested to hear a few perspectives on this topic, you may enjoy these two radio interviews.