potato potato

gonna teach more yoga but also not really

There is a difference between hanging out in a pose and going to work inside of a posture. I love to hang out. But when I am practicing yoga my focus is on the work inside of a pose. I am looking for something. Often I am not sure what, but I will know it when I find it. Sometimes it is a mood or some particular sensation; sometimes it is some sort of insight; but it’s always a connection. I am interested in diving my consciousness deep inside my cells, so I might bring conscious experience to the engagement of muscle as it moves over bone and of joints as they explore and expand their range and capacity. I want to know myself in this way; with fluency between my body and my mind.

It makes perfect sense that when I am at the height of personal disillusionment with yoga as it is alive in the world today I would also be choosing to recommit myself to the path of study and practice and teaching. Life is funny in this way and also not. I love sharing the practice with others. But I am more and more convinced that yoga is nowhere near the be all end all I once touted it to be. How I was brought up learning about it, in cult and culture, seems like a bigger sham than ever these days. I am older, yes. Wiser, I hope. And I am less and less interested in being convinced of anything, let alone efforting to convince anyone else. I see yoga now as an important, but relatively small part of a much larger conversation around embodiment. There is so much more to know. So much more to integrate into the practice of having a body that moves and grows and ages through time and space.

I am just as interested in the conversation as I have ever been. Probably far more. But as it relates to my own lived experience and not so that I can weigh in on whatever is unfolding in the mainstream. It has to make real time sense to me. No abstractions thank you very much. I am not getting any younger thank god and my way of understanding how to inhabit this body is growing and changing and aging right along with all of my cells. I love being alive and having a body, and along with that comes so much more space inside of me for not knowing. I am both grateful and curious. I am convinced that the correlation between learning and loving is the ultimate connection to make and I am making it most days. It seems to me that if you believe that love is limitless it is far easier to experience infinite love. Occupying this sort of expansive space is a doorway to increased curiosity regarding the what and the how and the who of being. I am interested in this particular conversation with far increased acuity than when I was a little baby yogi.

Little baby meg was so lovestruck with metaphysics, but she couldn’t figure out the why of it. It was hard to feel rooted in my young intellect and still entertain such a cosmic worldview. It was easier to give myself to the nuts and bolts of the yoga methodologies as I was learning them and let that be a doorway to the infinite. It was a beautiful starting point. I let myself be groomed toward a system whose limitations I couldn’t yet perceive until the stranglehold of my grooming came home to roost. I am not a joiner. And so, I seasoned myself in other ways. And started listening to the fresh beginnings of the voice finding its volume inside of me. I had to say no to a lot of things for a very long time in order to begin to understand how vast my yes is.

Now, most of my values find their roots in mostly metaphysical perspectives. These are feelings that can be substantiated by both lived experience and repeatable data points. I am no longer afraid of others perceiving me as anything other than bright and honest. This is a good place to be. I love getting older. If the majority of our family energy wasn’t being allocated to the growth and development of the collective vision of our children and this piece of land, I would throw my pennies into the pot of my own continued education in the sphere of exercise science. I want to take all the Functional Range Conditioning trainings and certs like nobody’s business. Joke is it’s not even my business in present day. It’s ok, it’s ok, cuz the patience and the waiting are only driving deep the clarity around a desire to study and know the body-mind connection at ever-expanding depths and continue to work with myself and others in ways that expand upon the inquiry that yoga ignited in me nearly three decades ago. I cannot believe my good fortune in getting to have a body along with the agency to shape and move it in all these ways that expand and deepen my connection to the infinite. How fucking cool is that? Nothing to do but keep going. What a crazy obsene gift this is. Better use it.

So, I am leaning hard into yoga again. I know it so deeply. It is a means to share a lot more and keep whole my love of the body, my love of movement, my passion around aging well and getting strong af. This lean comes with full awareness that I am no longer convinced that yoga is what I once believed it to be. Sometimes it feels like a completely irrelevant vacuum and that is a very difficult place from which to share. It is not what it once was to me. Like, maybe this would be helpful/good for you but probably these other things would be better. Especially if time is any constraint. My teacher echoed the sentiment recently with this great new marketing copy that went something along the lines of “hey come do yoga with me! it is not what you think but it’s probably valuable in some way if it doesn’t fuck you up!” Something like that. I mean, I’d sign up. Would you?

But yoga can be this amazing doorway. And if we are being honest, all of the component pieces are profoundly relevant if we can maintain the perspective of the whole. There is no singular, absolute, riddle-solved, path of practice when it comes to the body. We are full of detail and interconnection. Our modalities must mirror this reality. And so, more movement. More weights. More isometrics. More high-intensity sprint efforts. More stretching. More cardio. More yoga. More moving and resting and fueling with love and longevity in mind. I want everything in my life to be gathered up around these intentions. A map in which nature and the cosmos and science and love are each interwoven and revelatory. The truth of this small yet infinite existence in a single gesture and also in a radical action.

I realize this may read as me leaning even more interstellar and maybe that is true. But if so, I’m doing it through the lens of push this, pull that, contract here, lengthen there. So practical. So approachable. Everything poised for muscle and mind making contact and forming bonds again and again.  Just try to tell me that making intelligent contact with my own living tissue is all that unique from making contact with anything that lives and breathes or evolves or erodes or expands through all time and all space. I cannot understand the difference. I am designed for connection within distinction and variability. Not the opposite. 

So what does any of this even begin to mean? Bah. Probably not that much. Maybe everything. In the immediate it means I’ll be teaching more. Because that is where the bodies (housing minds, housing breath, housing magic) are and I want to observe them, inform them, and grow my understanding and ability to work with the bods, my own and others. It also means that I am part of a lineage but that is also rather loose. I am so thankful to continue to have so many incredible teachers and mentors and coaches and I am beyond thrilled at imagining everyone who I have left to meet. But I do not think I can ever be any one thing. No designation or certification is gonna sum this life up. I am not chasing. Instead I am choosing to pursue and digest and share those approaches to embodied experience that help to clarify and enforce my life’s values. Just that. ha. So simple. I am looking for something and I will know it when I find it. I nearly always do. At least by the tenth, or sometimes fiftieth, time.