July: Rest and Resistance
Happy July, Galaxy Friends! I hope the summer has gotten off to a good start for you. The smoke has finally cleared from the skies of Milwaukee, Humboldt is almost up and running again, and I’ve been able to ride my bike quite a bit. Not too shabby.
When I thought about the July theme, I had to struggle with my “it’s complicated” feelings about celebrating our nation. There are breathtakingly beautiful things about the United States. And there are breathtakingly heartbreaking things that are wrapped up in our history, and continue to this day. I tend to be a person that would rather dig in and closely examine, rather than smooth over and blithely celebrate, so I chose Rest and Resistance as the theme of this month.
Like most of what I do, the theme has layers and several implied meanings. The first is that our country is here because of acts of resistance and defiance that, when viewed through my contemporary lens of politics, resistance, and change seem totally implausible. It seems sort of crazy that the colonists’ revolution gathered enough momentum to result in the founding of a new country. I often think about whether I would be brave enough to join one revolution or another… and most of the time, I think I’d probably be a cowardly one who is afraid of change and reluctant to challenge the status quo.
A second layer to the concept of resistance is that, 250-ish years later, there are systems and structures, laws and economic systems that create patterns that are seem destructive and unsustainable. Uneven distribution of wealth, debt (particularly student debt), systemic racism, and the destruction of our environment are all omni-present in my mind, as I try to navigate a business, a family, and a life within these systems. I have to choose, daily, how I will participate, and how (if?!?!) there are ways I can choose not to participate, or contribute to the re-envisioning of our systems that perpetuate such inequality and burnout.
And burnout seems like the right word. You know at the end of “A Day In The Life” by The Beatles where the orchestra swells and is traveling in that never-ending upward chromatic swell and you feel caught up in a frenetic musical tornado that ends in a booming major chord? That’s how I picture most of our lives under our systems these days. Except our booming end chord would be minor, or even some sort of dissonant mess of keys banging on a piano. Also, it’s ironic that the ending chord of that Beatles song is now what we hear every time we boot up an Apple computer (thanks capitalism).
So, one way I like to position my little yoga studio and community space on Milwaukee’s East Side, is that it’s a place that, for maybe an hour a few times a week, we can step a tiny bit outside of the hierarchical norms of our society, and work on cultivating both rest and release, and resiliency for what I believe is the necessary fight to establish better systems for our world.
But even my little community space has to operate in ways that perpetuate inequality, and access to what we offer isn’t broadly available. So those of us who have the ability to step out of the grind and re-charge, get clear on who we are and what we’re doing, and build resiliency… we have a duty to share our resources with those who don’t have those privileges. One way I do this at the studio is by offering scholarships to our teacher training program, and by working to develop our pay-it-forward program, which will hopefully launch soon. This doesn’t really seem like enough, but it’s a start. I hope that this dispatch will get you thinking about ways that you can also share your resources, and if you have anything you’d like to share with me about that, let me know!
The third level that this theme operates on is in how we approach our yoga practice, our bodies, and our minds, as we commit to work this physical, mental, spiritual and ethical discipline that is called yoga. Having been a practitioner over the majority of my life, I’ve seen zealots who stake out their corner of the practice and insist that their way is the only way: practice in a hot room, sit in meditation, use yoga as a practice of physical fitness and muscular toning, use yoga as a practice of rest and relaxation, move fast, move slow, pay attention to alignment, throw out all alignment cues, relax your glutes in backbends, use your glutes in backbends…. I need to stop myself before I get carried away.
What is the right way through all of these practice choices? I think the answer will be different for each person, but one way I know that my choices are working is that, most days, I have a feeling of resiliency - I have gas in the tank, mentally and physically speaking, I have time and space to rest, and I am asking myself to take on some challenging disciplines, and I have the mental and physical presence of mind and strength to work through them.
Times that I’ve gone too far in either direction - too much rest or too much hard work - have sent the message back loud and clear that the practice requires both things if you want it to be sustainable and a part of your life for the long haul. We have to learn how to rest, but we also need strength practices if we want our body to be happy and healthy into old age. There’s no way around it. So, along with some revolutionary readings, I’ll be incorporating strength practices into my classes this month… along with some poses that require us to slow down and relax. Because we need both.
If you’ve been in my class recently, you’ve probably heard me reading from one of Michael Stone’s books. Stone was a Buddhist meditation teacher, yogi, and psychotherapist who wrote passionately about how to pursue a contemplative life that still engaged with the pressing problems of the world, and I’d like to end the dispatch with something from his book “Awake in the World:
“This body and heart can be tools for peacemaking. But they are only valuable tools when they have vitality and energy…
We practice both for ourselves and for our culture at large…
We embody the practice in order to go out into the world. The most important thing I’ve felt in my years of practice is that we are not alone. Liberation is not dependent on the form of the practice but on recognizing interdependence. When the Buddha taught that the self is simply an interdependent matrix, he set the stage for a socially engaged dharma practice. If what we are in every sense is everything within and around us, our every action makes a difference. When we see this body as a tool for social benefit, we begin to take care of it as we take care of our Earth. And we take care of the earth as we take care of our body.”
So I hope you can find ways to step out of the grind and tend to yourself, perhaps in our little Galaxy community - with the end goal of returning to the world with vitality, resiliency, and well-rested equanimity, so we can work together to effect change.
Now here’s a video of Little Edie dancing a patriotic flag dance for the Fourth of July, just because I love Grey Gardens and Little Edie, and if i’m going to be patriotic, I think I’d like it to look something like this:
From one staunch character to another,
Anna
What ERICA’S Reading
Have you met Erica yet? She holds down the desk on Mondays and Saturdays, has the most beautiful singing voice, and loves Musical Theatre and reading probably even more than I do. When I told her about this month’s theme, she immediately had a book pick, so I’m handing off the book of the month recommendation to her, and I can’t wait to read it.
Erica recommends Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco by Savannah Shange (daughter of Ntozake Shange, who wrote “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough”). Progressive Dystopia is an ethnography that explores the concepts of utopia and dystopia through the lens of a school in San Francisco that educates black students with a progressive, anti-racist pedagogy, yet still cannot seem to completely avoid systemic racist inequalities and injustice perpetuated on its student population.
It’s a little more complicated than questing bunnies in Watership Down this month! I’m here for it!
