Practice is the only choice

Each week, fellow apprentices and I gather with John Schumacher for 30 minutes to ask questions and learn his sequence for the coming class. This week we had no questions. 

Before covid, we sat around his desk in his office at Unity Woods (which closes on August 31 after 40 years); rarely there were few or no questions. There were almost always questions, regarding a technique, phrase, response by John in the previous class, on particular students and their specific issues, or about our clinical understanding of how to do and teach any pose he had taught. 

In covid, we are no longer in the room adjusting/touching the bodies in the class, so the questions have dwindled. Previously fed by a stream of observations and experiences—feeling, smelling, sensing, hearing and seeing the students—we now try to come up with questions about the digitized Zoom-box reflections of the people we watch on our screens every week. It seems to me that questions have also waned because we don’t know what we’re trying to figure out anymore. The physical-cum-electric-connection has seeped into our practices and into ourselves, as well, and without the physiological exchanges between each other, teacher-students, apprentices-students, students-students, apprentices-apprentices, we are all finding ourselves a bit lost.

In the absence of any questions from us, John had one for us. It was about our practice. While he has for months been soliciting our thoughts on new classes we are taking, this time he got more specific and asked how these other or extra classes were affecting our practice.

We all answered. Each response was different, and it was interesting to take in the descriptions of practices as reflections of  that person. Having taught yoga for almost 20 years, I have learned to observe how someone communicates as a function of how they practice. Words and thoughts emerge from the consciousness as much as actions do. 

One apprentice echoed a sentiment I have heard many times since April: she is struggling with motivation to practice on her own. She feels isolated (especially politically when she “has to listen to the propaganda” from the teacher before class) and out of synch with not only the practice but the community she previously defined as yoga, as yogic. For another post, the politics of practice.

Everyone in developed society is struggling with the depression, disconnection, and anxiety of the 2020-2021 pandemic. Many in developing countries become more impoverished while the wealthier elsewhere have the privilege to reckon with the realities of this dramatic shift. For those of us who practice yoga, experiencing this redress means connecting two things: 1) the emotions, opinions, and experiences you understand you are having in the outside world with 2) the flow of energy and understanding you have of yourself on the inside.

As a teacher, I understand the feeling of isolation and disconnection. As my family and I turned our attention from a recent restful holiday to the realities of work and school in Washington, I groaned inside when I thought of going back to being in a box and looking at bodies in boxes. It’s so tiring being online. Presenter and listener, giver and receiver: our roles, actions, experiences and expectations are all dramatically changing. Previously in in-person exchanges, comportment was derived from physical circumstances, on the in-propria-persona aspect of being. Now, as all electronic, our connections and any feedback we get are many times removed from what we know to have been true and feelingful in interpersonal relating of any kind. Now, online, we work in different ways to absorb and internalize the information we are taking in and relationships we are having. Previously, information from experience was alternately egocentric and socially constructed, i.e., we used to be as aware of the other person or people we were with in a meeting, class, or exchange of any kind; now as we listen to words and see images that are, in fact, many times physically removed from what is actually happening for that person in her/his/their space, we have tilted strongly toward the egocentric. We are ourselves over and over again experiencing the information we are taking in and relationships we are having.

As a student, I encounter the isolation of this experience every day. Compared with what I used to feel, in associating my practice with the overall sensations I had when catching up with a BFF or going on dates with my husband, in covid I now see the strong capacity I have to erect a barrier of fear that exists between myself in my daily life, anywhere/with anyone, and myself alone in my practice. Before, I practiced without a second thought that I was actually going out (read: going in!) with myself, on a really sweet outing (inning!). Now, the step is bigger and feels more precipitous. I have to step over the fear that in practicing alone, I will not continue to be lonely and bored. Instead, being alone with myself in my body and my consciousness, to move, breathe, and be in the breath, is the most important practicethat gives me more energy, compassion, understanding and resilience for living right now.

John has said from the beginning of the pandemic that change is the only constant. I have said since the beginning of the pandemic that nearly all of us are being retraumatized by everything trauma that has come before, both in our conscious life and through our gene expression/tribal experience.

I’m not the first to say we’re in an era of yes/and, but that is where we are. That’s because the bipolarity of consciousness, i.e., yes/no, here/there, heaven/hell, yin/yang, is changing into what I’ll call “transpolarity,” in which constancy, change, and the third option/position are all equally valid.

Because we are still breathing and moving (though less), and sleeping and dreaming (though much differently), we have a choice, which is to keep moving in one way or another. We are guaranteed to fall back; look at us now, that’s what we are doing. We are not moving forward. We are regressing, retrogressing, in order to reorganize and remobilize and recodify and go forward again. 

The process and practice of yoga is one in which movement leads to stillness and vice versa. It is absolutely true that the Yoga Sutras teach that absorption into nothingness (or everything) occurs from the seer in to the seen. However, because we in actual fact experiencing up as down, sideways as something new, forward and backward as changing in their relative relationship, it doesn’t matter which direction you feel or even observe that you are going. It just matters that you are awake and aware, and that you are conscious of the choices you are making in order to move somewhere. 

Patricia Waldern, my other teacher now, said recently in her Master Class that there are so many feelings and troubles that enter with you into the practice these days. She said, though: you start with a posture. And then you do another posture. At some point, the postures can take over and can wash through you in such a way that you become the posture. This is what I feel in my practice. Yes, I feel a heavier concentration of stressed energy in my frontal cortex, sometimes even after savasana. Yes, many of the postures feel so differently than they used to. But what nearly all of them also feel is much deeper. My practice has objectively progressed, i.e. I can make shapes now that I couldn’t make in April; the practice has also subjectively inflected: it feels much deeper. 

That’s because I’m so much closer to myself every time I start the practice now, by the physical reality of being mostly still quarantined, and in psychological terms because I am a teacher of yoga and go to the practice for the greater good. Believe it or not, these days five minutes of connection to and feeling love in my family gives is a big part of what gives me the strength to go practice. Before, as a mother I often felt guilty practicing poses instead of cavorting with or reading to my kids, even though teaching yoga then, as now, was my job. Now, the experience of practicing with them so near affords me a feeling of belonging and of the ground that I hadn’t felt before, perhaps overall but definitely in yoga.

If you are a beginner to yoga and still reading this post 😂🙏🏻, the practice for you is the same as it has ever been: show up for class and try a few poses on your own in between the classes you take. If you are an intermediate student or whatever-the-label student (see above: doesn’t matter), and you are feeling unmotivated by your practice, keep pecking away at your attachments to what the practice actually is. The truth is that it is not what it was. It’s what it is now. 

So: join a class, look at the boxes, and smile at the reality of other boxed-in people doing the same thing you are. There is no replacing the in-person experience we are being deprived of right now and will hopefully sometime in 2021 come back to on some level (! 6FT 😵). In my opinion, though, we absolutely must, in the moral sense, tend to our bodies and our minds, as lazed and diffused as we have temporarily become.

Practice is the best choice.