The news is relentless. There is a sick taste in my mouth. I oscillate between avoiding news and bingeing on it. I oscillate between desperate, trembling activity and absolute apathy. I forget myself: I teach I protest I aunt I wive I write. And the self interrupts, selfish: I whine I dither I am needy lonely ugly and afraid. I want comfort. I want answers. I want change. And I want it all to just fucking calm down. I want some sweetness in my life, the celebrations, time with the folk I love, time to do something other than crisis management and grief. I dearly want to sit and watch as the sugar maple changes her clothes, gussies up, stuns, and lets go.
It doesn’t stop. The news is relentless. Now this. Now that. Heartbreak. Anger. Fear.
There are days I desperately need my practice, and it feels desperate; starving, needy, heady, grabby, longing. Then there are days practice seems utterly irrelevant, selfish, not good enough, unimportant, a waste of time. On those days, everything in my body recoils from sitting. Nothing in me wants to move. Awareness is just too goddamned uncomfortable. Nothing can tear me away from the twitter feed, the images, the debate, the body counts. Or: nothing seems so urgent as uninterrupted time with my niece, far from news, away from danger.
In the early stages of my practice, the first few years, it was all about that burning. It felt, good. I practiced, obsessively. Every single day there was some new thing learned. Every time I practiced was a revelation. It was like learning a new language, an immersion. I immersed. The words of this language were freedom, liberation, an end to suffering. It rang bells inside me. It lit fires. It seemed true.
It isn’t like that these days. The world has shifted. Those very words—freedom, liberation, an end to suffering—ring discordant.
There are times this feels like the yoga isn’t working any longer, or maybe it was always a hoax. The very definition of spiritual by-pass and self-indulgence, delusion, empty promises. I’ve heard a lot of people say very similar things: It spoke to me, but then in the light of things, what it said wasn’t true.
I’ve been banging drums for years. Look at the world. Look at the world. Look. But recently I’ve been torn. Part of me needs to emphasize yoga as social justice. Another realizes my teaching needs to sooth.
urgent: come here, rest. Pause. Re-source. We need to take care of ourselves, each other, our loved ones and our students.
And, we need to change the world. Children are watching. People are dying. The maple tree rattles in the early morning dark.