Vol. 88: What I’ve been teaching in yoga lately

I honestly don’t know what to say following this weekend. Reports of forthcoming mass deportations. TikTok was banned and then it wasn’t - and it’s thanking Donald Trump. Blatant transphobia in the inaugural address. Tech billionaire cronies and Nazi salutes.

Like so many of us, I’m trying to strike the balance between not normalizing Trumpism, with not turning away, and with not being so overloaded with outrage and anxiety that I burn myself out on political news, ending up dysregulated to the point that my head is in the sand.

All this to say: this isn’t a newsletter on my thoughts about our current state of the world (though I hope that will come). But I didn’t want to hide in silence in a moment when reaching out for connection is critical. Today, I’m offering you some art from others that I’ve shared in my recent yoga classes. I love offering a reading as I invite students back from savasana, or corpse pose, the final pose of class; I hope it may help ground you in this time, too. For extra credit, you could even do a brief yoga sequence or maybe some breathwork prior to reading. Box breathing is a great place to start.

adrienne maree brown’s “trust the people” from Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry. It is available for you to read on their website here. When it’s appropriate, I love to offer an intention at the start of class that then ties into the closing poem. For this class, I offered the yogis the intention of trusting themselves.

From Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal, Chapter 5, pg. 96

“Composting taught me the most, though - how the discards, the rotting parts, could become fertile ground for the next year’s harvest. I’d visit the compost bin when someone came to me with a seemingly intractable conflict, or when I otherwise felt at my end. How, I would ask, can this mess become soil?

. . . It taught me a lot: namely, that you begin with an idea, a vision, but it’s the everyday work that produces the real lessons and the real change. The space between the inspiration and what we might call the result is where things become surprisingly unwieldy, and beautiful, painful, and miraculous. Mainly, it’s where we become someone different from who we were when we began.”

Mary Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter,” which I read online here.

Joy Harjo’s “I Give You Back,” which is available in a number of her collections over the years but I read it most recently from Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light. You can read it online here.

And if you’re still needing some thoughts on our current political moment, I really liked this video (yes, I’m still on TikTok as of now - TBD where I’ll end up) and this post (below) from Camonghne Felix.