Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I feel peace.
For the month of July, I focused intentionally on freedom, specifically the yogic concept of moksha, a universal human desire for liberation and a lasting peace. This week my practice will be focused on peace of mind.
Peace of mind can be hard to find, or at least hard to sustain, at times like these. A pandemic is hardly a calming influence. And, yet, part of what yoga and meditation offer us is a sense of calm amidst life’s turbulence.
I admit my focus on peace this week is at least in part self-serving. I have felt some angst about an upcoming training I will begin at Bluebird Yoga, a lovely studio in St. Charles, MO, at the end of this week. This will be one of my first forays back into a yoga studio since March; the other being a small group Yin Yoga training I completed in Kansas City earlier this summer.
Other than that, nearly all my practices for the past four months have been either virtual, outdoors, or with just 1-3 physically distanced students at my home studio. And I haven’t been back to Bluebird since my first teacher training. Wow–it’s been a minute!
Despite my initial misgivings about returning to public indoor classes, I have made peace with my “butterflies,” knowing that Bluebird has taken all the recommended precautions, including temperature scans and strict physical distancing requirements. So I am excited to begin training to teach Yoga Hour, an accessible, affordable, challenging yet doable practice that is not currently offered in the KC area. When I first encountered Yoga Hour classes while earning my 200-hour RYT certification in 2017, classes were PACKED! It was not uncommon for mats to be just inches apart and for someone’s foot to end up floating directly over my face during a Reclined Big Toe pose.
What a different time we are in now! This time around, there will be only 10 people allowed in the studio, including the trainer(s). Mats will be six feet, not six inches, apart and participants will arrive and leave wearing masks and will be required to enter/exit one by one, with only one person allowed in the lobby at a time. I expect this training may have a much more intimate feel, and that is not a bad thing! The addition of masks will also be a strange new phenomenon, as will the inability to work closely with fellow trainees. This training is bound to feel very different, indeed, but I am making peace with different and even with “strange.” I hope you are, too.
It is important to be able to make peace within our bodies and minds, no matter what may be happening in the world around us.
I have been reflecting a lot this past week on the courage and perseverance of remarkable Americans like C.T. Vivian and John Lewis. What a gift it is that Lewis left us not only a legacy of integrity and inspiration but also a final word of encouragement before his passing. If you haven’t read his essay, published posthumously in the New York Times, I recommend it to you.
It has me thinking about what exactly I am training for, especially if I don’t foresee a return to studio-based classes, at least as they used to be, any time soon. I keep coming back to what I learned during my first teacher training and to what I learn from yoga and meditation every day:
the practice is the point.
The devotion to the practice is what matters, not any particular yoga pose or style of “flow.” Yoga is an eight-limbed path toward healing, and asana is just one limb of this healing system. Yet, every time we show up on our mats or meditation cushions,
we have an opportunity to practice peace, an opportunity to train our bodies and minds to discover a sense of union.
In his final essay, John Lewis reminds us that democracy, and I would argue peace, “is not a state. It is an act, and
each generation must do its part
John Lewis
to help build…the Beloved Community,
a nation and world society at peace with itself.”
Lewis reminds us that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for; if we seek peace, we must act. Lewis encourages us to “continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe,” to yoke together those parts of ourselves and our societies that seem disparate.
As I begin training anew this week, I will take his encouraging words with me, along with a sense of connection with my own Beloved Community. I feel blessed to have so many good people in my life, people who not only support me at difficult times but extend themselves toward others I care about, including the GLOW community. You restore my faith in humanity and you lift my spirits when they flag–THANK YOU!
I just returned from my nephew’s high school graduation party and it is my prayer for him, for my nieces, for my GLOW girls and young women–for all beings–that their generation may, indeed, be the one to lay “down the heavy burdens of hate at last” and allow peace to triumph “over violence, aggression and war.” For that to happen, of course, we all have to start training for a different way of being in the world.
It takes preparation to heed Lewis’s call to “answer the highest calling,” to seek “the way of peace, the way of love,” and to build the Beloved Community that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many others envisioned and devoted their lives to creating. May Lewis’s admonition inspire us all to strap on a new pair of trainers and
“walk with the wind, brothers and sisters…
John Lewis
let the spirit of peace
and the power of everlasting love
be your guide.”