Path Of A Teacher: My Story

(Down Under Yoga)

Most of us don’t come to the mat because life is peachy. We’re drawn to yoga because of an ache in our hearts or our bones, or a mind that won’t quite stop racing. We come and just practice staying; staying and not reacting, staying and realizing the chaos is not us, staying and realizing we are clear blue sky.

(As Pema Chodron says: Everything else is just the weather.)

It was suffering that brought me to the mat and kept me there, too.

It’s 2002. I am 23, standing at a payphone on the beach in Malaga, Spain when I get the call that will change my life forever.

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Six Yoga Poses For Gardeners

(studio BE)

Spending hours outside in the hot sun with your hands in the dirt? All that digging, planting, and weeding might mean that your shoulders, hips, and wrists need a little love.

That’s why we’ve created this series of six yoga poses for gardeners.

Move through this gentle, beginner-friendly sequence to unravel any lingering tension you might feel in your body or mind. Hold each pose for 5-10 full breaths.

As always, feel free to modify anything that doesn’t feel safe in your body today. Most importantly, remember to be gentle with yourself — and don’t take yourself (or your yoga practice) too seriously.

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A Zen Yoga Teacher Gets Real About Postpartum Depression

(Washington Post)

My son was born on my birthday.

February 22: George Washington’s birthday. Drew Barrymore’s birthday. And mine.

My phone pinged with Facebook notifications as I stood over the hospital trash bin and retched. Three times I emptied my stomach of the apples and peanut butter my husband had lovingly sliced a few hours before. Once into the trash can. Again. And then again into the birthing tub laced with lavender essential oils.

Fiercely feminist, I’d always been ambivalent about having children. I’d watched my peers spawn with nary a twinge of jealousy, content with my books and my yoga. I told myself, “If it happens: great. If it doesn’t: great.”

On our first date, I teased my future husband, Robb, that I’d likely go the way of Sylvia Plath, making the kids sandwiches and sticking my head in the oven.

Six months later, drinking champagne on a pier overlooking Tomales Bay, we were engaged.

A year later, I was pregnant. Robb promised parenthood would make me a better yoga teacher. I rolled my eyes and took a swig of my chai, wishing it were vodka. He was right. Motherhood has made me a much better yoga teacher.

But I was unprepared for the shattering.

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10 Ways To Make Friends With Your Body During A Hot Yoga Class

(HuffPost)

Friends, friends: it’s that time of year.

Every December folks roll into my yoga class ready to sweat out all the canapes and martinis they half-drunkenly inhaled the night before. Sometimes they’re wearing six layers of clothing in a 99-degree room so as to “detox” all the pinot and the feta and the gingerbread, armed with liters of coconut water and a couple of big towels for mopping up the evidence.

This always makes me a little bit sad.

I mean, I totally get it. I remember countless hazy, hungover twentysomething mornings spent rolling into Bikram classes feeling like I needed to do the same thing. Too many yoga practices that felt like atonement for the night (or the week) before.

A decade later, as a heated vinyasa teacher myself, I cringe to think that my class could ever be complicit in my students’ self-abasement.

So here I am to remind you: hot yoga is not a punishment.

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Debunking the Myths of Yoga

(studio BE)

September is National Yoga Month, so what better time to quash some of the most common misperceptions about yoga? Join us in debunking the myths of yoga together — starting with perhaps the most famous:⁠

  1. YOU HAVE TO BE FLEXIBLE TO PRACTICE YOGA.

Simply put, this one is a big NO. ❌⁠⁠ Yoga invites you to come exactly as you are: tight hamstrings, stiff shoulders, achy low back, creaky joints, busy mind, strained Achilles.⁠ If your muscles are tight, you’re in just the right place! Yoga was designed for you — and it will meet you where you are.⁠

Pop culture representations of yogis tend to overemphasize already-flexible models performing flashy, bendy poses. Don’t let those fool you. ⁠Yoga is just as suited for the couch potato middle-aged dad who can’t touch his toes as it is for the ex-ballerina whose foot slides easily behind her head.⁠

As you unroll your mat for the first (or 50th) time, trust that you’re in exactly the right place.

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I spent Election Night with Sally Yates. Here’s what I learned.

(HuffPost)

Last Tuesday night, while voters across the country were surfing a big blue wave, I settled in for a hot date with Sally Yates. She was in conversation with Associated Press national political writer Lisa Lerer at Harvard’s Kennedy School Institute of Politics, and the room was packed. Security tape wrapped the entrances; police officers stood guard along the walls.

I haven’t been so fangirl-excited in a long time.

We’re talking SALLY YATES, PEOPLE.

She of Muslim-travel-ban-smackdown fame. She who schooled Ted Cruz on the Constitution. She who “nevertheless, persisted” in the face of religious bigotry.

As moderator Lerer quipped, “Sally Yates might be best well known for what she didn’t do — which was defend Trump’s travel ban.”

So what’d I learn?

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Me too. All of us. Yoga is no exception.

(YogaDork)

I don’t know a single woman who’s never been sexually harassed, or worse. “Me too,” of course. Duh.

It is a part of growing up female.

You learn to clench your jaw and walk faster and stare straight ahead and just get away as quickly as you can, before the cat-caller or the construction worker or the guy following you can catch up.

And it’s as endemic to the yoga world as it is to the film world, or the political world, or the finance world.

When I teach the history of yoga, in particular the evolution of yoga in the 20th century, it’s a history of sexual predators. (Overwhelmingly) male gurus who employed their social capital for sex, manipulation, emotional abuse, you name it.

The last time I taught it, as I flipped through slide after slide of influential contemporary teachers, Pattabhi Jois and John Friend and Bikram and others whose abuses of power are still less public-knowledge (for now), the students just shook their heads in disbelief.

(“Him, too?” “Yeah, he’s in trouble for sex scandals, too. Next slide. Oh yes, him, too.”).

The shadow is real.

I have seen it myself.

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Preserving Summer

(Yoga Journal)

Yoga is often defined as the union of sun and moon elements, a balance between opposites in a marriage of seemingly disparate realities. A yoga practice can bring stillness and sanctuary to scattered urban lives, bridging the gap between cosmopolitan and rural, modern and traditional. Kitchen crafts like making jam can be another way of bringing together what has been separated, honoring natural cycles in the preservation of a season, and reconnecting you with your food through the work of your own hands.

Activities like canning and pickling encourage living simply and sustainably, finding a balance between excess and adequacy. They can be a reminder to practice aparigraha (non-grasping) by encouraging an appreciation for the seasons and a bittersweet respect for the coming and going, the growing and dying, the blooming and fading that are part of being alive in the world. Just as yoga encourages us to pay attention, so urban homesteading teaches us to see the resources that surround us with new eyes.

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The Joy of Baking

(Yoga Journal)

As an adult, I rediscovered the practice of baking heartfelt gifts in my new community in San Francisco. At one point, I decided to devote a year to baking cakes as offerings. Every Saturday morning I’d roll out of bed bleary-eyed, fill an empty bundt cake pan with batter, and give the resulting cake to someone in need of comfort or a little celebration. As I listened to the city wake up, I counted and chopped, mixed and measured. And in the process, my mind became still, my breath slowed, my body felt balanced and at peace. What I experienced was more than mixing butter and eggs — it was a practice in baking and giving from the heart.

Some 60 cakes later, I see now how my “bundt cake Saturdays” have given me a creative outlet that, among other things, reminds me that compassion can transcend urban boundaries. Strangers on the street soften at the sight of my cake caddy, asking if that’s a cat I have hiding in there. Even the bus driver will wait patiently for “the cake lady,” going out of his way to drop me off at work, where my colleagues light up like children at the prospect of a new flavor to sample.

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Go To Your High School Reunion, Dammit

(Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)

My 20th high school reunion is coming up next week.

How did THAT happen? More importantly: Should I go?

It’s in Nebraska, so I’d have to book a flight (with connections), rent a car, haul my kid across time zones, and find something decent to wear. Not to mention all that torturous small talk once I actually get there. As an introvert, trying to catch up on two decades of relative strangers’ lives over cocktail weenies and cheap wine is perhaps my worst nightmare.

There are a million reasons to just blow it off, not the least of which being that reunions in a post-Facebook world yield fewer surprises than they did before. Most of us are familiar with some version of one another’s lives, even if it’s a glossily curated edition.

But there’s a reason Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion became a cult hit. It articulated something most of us don’t say out loud: it can be so damn hard to go back.

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