August 2025: Stories of the Asanas, Bike Rides, and Deep Listening
Hey, Galaxy, I have about five days until the next time I hop on my bike and go for a long ride and a swim in Lake Michigan, so it’s about time I sent this dispatch out to you! I hope you’re enjoying August as much as I am. Right now, I’m trying to organize my life around swimming, running and biking. Like, when my daughter says, do you want to go for a sunset swim? The default answer is yes, and then I just rearrange my life around that sunset swim.
This was us last night, sunset swimming at Doctor’s Park.
And if someone asks me the question: “do you want to go on a bike ride?” The answer will almost always be an enthusiastic YES. A big part of it is that I love moving through the world and exploring on my bike. But another component of it is that being on my bike reminds me of being a kid, and the easy comradery that happens when you’re a kid with other kids on bike rides.
(Yes, that is 5-year-old me on the day I learned to ride a two-wheeler)
Maybe it’s something about being in close proximity, but not near or intimate enough to feel shy. Maybe it’s that just enough of your brain is occupied by pedaling and you can’t second-guess your conversational prompts or the things you’re compelled to say, but I feel like all the best, most wide-ranging, surprisingly deep conversations happen on bike rides. You share a little more freely, there’s amiable silence where no one rushes to fill it in, and then the real words get spoken at the real, right times. I’ve gotten to know people in the easiest, yet deepest ways on long bike rides, and I love the stories that naturally bubble up.
My Dad and I used to go on bike rides together through the metro Detroit area, and he would bike us out somewhere, and then pretend that he was lost, and I had to navigate us back. I always knew that we weren’t really lost, and that if I made a truly wrong decision, my Dad would jump in and help me navigate, but he wasn’t in any hurry to get us home. Then I would hear my Dad’s stories: about growing up in Detroit, and the places he would explore as a kid on his bike, how he used to walk to the store to buy his mom’s cigarettes, how his mom could stand out on the front porch and yell for her kids to come home at dinnertime, and they could hear her all over the neighborhood, how his grandmother got stranded on Belle Isle, had to swim the Detroit River back to shore in the middle of the night and then hitch a ride on a coal truck to get home, and how his favorite movie was Breaking Away - about townies in Bloomington who aren’t quite sure what’s next for themselves after high school graduation, but who love to bike to the local quarry to swim, and who work together to win Indiana University’s Little 500 bike race. Okay. Gotta pause and watch that movie again and wipe some tears from my eyes. I love that movie (and my Dad).
So, yes: I love riding bikes. I also love the way the conversation flows on bikes, and what I can learn about my little bike posse via that easy conversation and deep listening. I love hearing people’s stories and what I learn from those stories. At least as far as I have been able to brainstorm, I cannot make a studio theme that’s about bikes, but I CAN make a studio theme for this month that’s about stories. So we’re diving in again to the stories of the asanas. We’re going to be sharing the stories behind the poses all month, and hopefully getting to know those poses a little better through stories.
The first class I taught this month was about the idea of deep listening, which I feel we’re losing our ability to practice. Whether we’re listening to ourselves, or listening to ourselves in the yoga poses, or listening to another human being, I think most people are some combination of impatient, guarded/shy, and caught in their inner worlds. I think social media trains us to simultaneously be passive consumers of information and interaction, while affirming that our inner experience/monologue/mind chatter is the most important reality, or maybe the only reality.
Deep listening asks us to de-prioritize that inner monologue, and hold space for someone else’s unique perspective, heart and soul. If this month is a chance to share the stories of the shapes that make up our physical postural practice, it makes me think that making space for the stories of the shapes creates a real symbiosis between ourselves as practitioners, and what the poses have to tell us and teach us.
I can’t say that I love practicing the sage poses - they’re hard as fuck! - but I love hearing the stories about the magical, mythical Saptarishis, who are said to have brought us the practice of yoga, channeled and disseminated the knowledge of the philosophical texts, and set the standard for devotion and studentship. Practicing the poses named for them, with their stories in my heart and mind allows me to experience a deeper immersion and greater appreciation for poses that don’t come easily to me.
(spoiler alert: if you want to do a whole bunch of the Sage poses and learn their stories… come to the Maha Practice this month!)
I wonder: what would be the ONE story that you could share about yourself, if someone asked you to share it? And I wonder: would you share it with me? You know how to get in touch with me.
That’s the dispatch for this month. Short and sweet, so we can get back to our bike rides and our deep convos. See you on the bike trail, or in the studio, or at the lake. And as Naomi Shihab-Nye says, in her poem “The Art of Disappearing,”
When someone you haven’t seen in ten yearsappears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
I hope to hold space for you all to be able to hear what’s most important about you, that you want to share. And I hope we can hold space for ourselves in that way, and for the beautiful shapes that make up our postural practice. I hope our ability to share stories helps us to realize who each of us is, and who we are to each other. And I’m always happy to share a story or two of my own, if you want to hear it.
Here’s a clip from Breaking Away for you to watch, where Dave walks with his father through the campus of Indiana University and tells his story of growing up as a “cutter.”
Xo,
Anna
