One year and the fall

This time last year felt like free fall. As we’ve all experienced in one way or another since March 2020, the rug was pulled out from underneath us, the ground shifted, “the nightmare” began, etc. We’ve all had to recoup, regroup, and reorient toward living in a pandemic society and now are digging out to create whatever a post-pandemic society actually is. Given the penetration of digital communications into every crevice of our brains and social behaviors, we really don’t have much of an analog in the 1918 flu pandemic to understanding our life after this wipeout; We are in uncharted waters.

I’ve been teaching yoga for 19 years and was drawn to it for how much it changed my immediate mood, things I was thinking at the time and, sometimes, larger perspectives like what I felt was important and what I felt was not. That’s why, after 25 years of yoga practice, my mind goes to headstand.

If you’re able to hold headstand, or Sirsasana 1 as the Iyengars describe it, over time you begin to experience and cultivate what I’d call a “laboratory” sensation of freefall. This is one in which you’re controlling for any other possible experiential variables. You’re just balancing on your head, ultimately on one point on the head with the forearms to help you maintain your balance. Inverting the body’s relationship to gravity is a reversal, one could say, of equal-and-opposite functions in the body: The feet become the head, the legs the arms, and so on. The feeling of having the legs unmoored and floating, and in turn the trunk and the organs reestablishing their own relationship to gravity, is the feeling of floating or free fall. That’s why so many people are afraid of it. The fear of falling is very real. 

(Spoiler alert: In my 19 years of teaching, I know of only two injuries that have occurred in headstand and both involved home practice in which a leg met a bruised ending because the brain had not put it far enough away in the unlikely event that falling occurred).

I tell students all the time that the poses are easy and living is hard. Learning the poses provides an exquisitely complex and, at the same time, sensible map (let’s even call it a “common sense” map to echo a phrase parroted endlessly—meaninglessly IMO—in politics over the last several years) for how to recognize what you’re experiencing as you live.

Let’s tease this out as it relates to our one-year, unprecedented experience of lockdown and the social, educational, and financial deprivation nearly everyone went through and, in most cases, is still going through. To recognize something is to perform a highly personalized, individualized action¹.

The past year has been so stressful on every level of the human experience because we recognized so little of it. It’s safe to say that only a handful of people alive in 2020 had any memory of any other pandemic, and the only other comparison we were able to make was the one to war. There’s much more to say here in terms of the stress on society as a whole, on communities, educators, parents, children, those living alone, those with any kind of comorbidity, leaders. The list goes on.

What makes yoga so succulent and calming for us, especially at times like this, is that every time we practice, we recognize things about ourselves. To my knowledge, there isn’t any other activity in modern society that begins with quiet and ends with a posture of deep relaxation. We bookend physical practices, which take an infinite number of shapes, many rapidly modernized over the last 20 years, with peace and quiet. 

This peace and quiet puts us directly in touch with how things feel on the inside, from the mundane sensation of a hamstring fiber stretching to the arguably more elevated sensation of a back extension (like upward facing dog pose, or urdhva mukha svanasana) making you feel nauseous, or making you feel elated. Even though many of these sensations may feel “new” (one of the most common pieces of feedback I’ve gotten over the years after a class from a student is “I had no idea I could feel that part of my body!”), they are actually not new at all. You are just experiencing them again. You are knowing them again, in a controlled, safe way, with yourself and, even on Zoom, among others. This safe experiencing of the self among others is what has made yoga such a powerful practice in modernity. As isolation, loneliness, and stress have become epidemics in society (even more so in the past year), yoga practice and the communities they spawn have become places where people can safely, curiously, and compassionately experience themselves (again, even more so in the past year).

Yesterday, I was knocked out after my second Pfizer vaccine. But when I woke up to greet that day, I smoothed out my body’s reaction to this second grody vaccine shot with breath practice, or pranayama. As more of us get our vaccines and we slowly segue back to “normal,” yoga practices can keep sustaining us. We have learned to convert any space into a yoga studio and any item into a yoga prop, all while our animals and children zipped in and out of the screen, and as the seasons passed by. The flexibility, strength and stamina we met head on (see: heastand!) will continue making practice our north star as we begin to—and learn what it means to—reassemble, reconnect, and reunite.   

¹At its root, the word comes from the Latin verb “cognoscere,” which means "a getting to know, or knowledge," and combines the prefix “com-” or "together” with the word “gnoscere” or "to know." When you add the prefix “re” to the front of this root meaning, it means you are “getting to know something again.”