Lineage, Part 2: Yoga by the Book
What can you learn about embodiment from a two dimensional text?
I’ve been working on this post for several months without being able to figure out how to make my whole journey concise enough for a reasonable length newsletter. Today, the solution appeared. More on how I got to that in a moment.
Many yoga practitioners can trace their lineage back through their teachers to their teachers to their teachers, all the way back to some of the key individuals whose practices underlie the vast majority of what we recognize as “yoga” in the west. For the sake of space, I’m going to vastly oversimplify an incredibly complex truth about yoga that I’ll be returning to in my own learning for my whole life: yoga goes back thousands of years on the Indian subcontinent. It is an ancient practice, a beautiful, nuanced, multi-faceted and deeply layered one, and one with a complex background of classism, colonialism, and appropriation in both India and the west. I am not an expert in this and am constantly, constantly learning. There is tons of information on yoga’s journey to the west. You might start here or here. I also appreciate Claire Dederer’s book Poser as an illustration of a late nineties/early oughts phase of the process that I didn’t experience but recognize in our current climate’s outgrowth from it.
Tracing my own yoga lineage through a very anti-linear journey has been both challenging and valuable. I’m including the early installment of my own personal history of lineage as almost a prelude to what I consider my “real” practice that began later (you can read a little bit about that here).
I first encountered yoga through a coffee table-type book that came from my great aunt, though I’m not clear whether I borrowed/stole it from her Ohio house or if she sent it to me for some long-forgotten reason. At the time I got the book, sometime in middle school, I had recently entered a phase of trying to make my body different (read: smaller). I talked a lot about wanting to be “healthier,” but that’s definitely not what I meant. I already had the sense that something was deeply wrong about this desire that I felt to be smaller, but I couldn’t shake it, and the little book seemed like a more acceptable way to approach “health” in my stoic midwestern household that didn’t suffer vanity well. I did a lot of butterfly and tree and the asanas that looked like stretches from gym class. I don’t think they actually built much strength or flexibility because I didn’t really know what I was doing. But I did start to realize that, when I was in those positions (or trying to get into them), my mind was on what I was doing, not on the homework that wasn’t done or the bottle calf that we didn’t know would make it through the night. There was a sense of focus or calm or something that didn’t come from my other academic or extracurricular pursuits. So, inconsistently and uncertainly, I kept shifting myself into the postures.
Looking back on this initial exploration, I’m struck by just how counterintuitive of a way this was to start a yoga practice. I’m also struck by just how normal this experience with yoga is in the U.S. Many people come to postural yoga as a purely physical practice, whether as “exercise” or as recovery from a physical injury. These physical postures (asanas) developed way later (as in thousands of years later) than the meditative practices that are the foundation of yoga, and were conceived essentially as ways to prepare the mind for meditation. Which means that I’m also struck by how my brain and body were on to something, however unknowingly, when I felt that little bit of calm, focus, quieting of mental chatter back in middle school.
Now, even after years of practice, as someone with an active, highly verbal mind, I struggle with seated meditation; my only real hope of feeling successful in meditation is a relatively intense physical practice (never mind the fact that “success” in meditation a myth - more on that another time). I’m not a particularly physical person (I don’t run unless something is chasing me, and I was never coordinated enough for sports), and I would rather do anything than drama-based image work (ironic for someone with my particular background), but I learned over time that being embodied (as in in my body, not somewhere far off in my head) is the only path to finding my way toward a calmer, more responsive presence. And it’s difficult to learn to be embodied from a two dimensional page.
Which is why it strikes me as funny and appropriate that I first learned about yoga in a book…of course I did. Of course my 13-year-old academic brain thought I could learn yoga from a book. Of course it was also the safest way to learn the practice - going to a class would have meant asking for money and telling my (loving and lovely but stoic midwestern) parents that I wanted to go to a yoga class, if there even was a yoga class in my small stoic midwestern town at that time, which I don’t think there was. Of course it didn’t require the exposure of trying a thing I didn’t know how to do and didn’t feel predisposed to do well in front of people. Of course I tried to learn it out of a book. And there were some benefits from that book. And eventually, the book led me to find a more embodied, intuitive way of learning the practice. It opened the door to a deeper understanding and more courageous exploration of the physical postures and the community elements of yoga that scared me the most. And for that, I’m grateful.
The spark this morning that helped me figure out that I wanted to focus on lineage one piece at a time was actually about another yoga book. In a video message, a friend shared that her almost-two-year-old is currently enamored with a children’s yoga book. She also shared that her daughter was initially incredibly frustrated because she wanted to do the postures in the book but couldn’t figure out how. When my friend and her husband started doing the poses (embodying them, in 3D, right in front of their daughter), something clicked for her and she had a major jump in being able to find her version of the pose. Because of course she did - embodiment begets more embodiment, and practicing in community imbues your practice with something different than practicing solo. But the spark from the book still counts, and it still matters.
In this adorable and profound video, my friend asked her toddler to demo bird pose (translation for adult practitioners: Warrior 3) and she did a beautiful version with her hands on the shelf in front of her. Her mom explained that she was still learning to do the pose without support. I couldn’t stop laughing and almost crying in recognition - I love Warrior 3, and I frequently need the support of blocks or furniture…it’s only once in a great while that my balance allows for my hands to find my heart in that pose without considerable physical preparation. Wherever we are in our practice, our journeys are both solely our own and inarguably connected to others’ paths.
Wherever you are in whatever journey you’re on, I wish you both the spark and the community to take the next right step.
I’ve been listening to Michelle Obama’s second book and can’t recommend the audiobook highly enough. (Side note: it’s interesting to have every single book you read start with commentary on the pandemic…that’s the phase that we are in, and it’s predictable and still strange).
These songs are getting me through the early middle of an intense fall semester:
I’d love to know about what’s sparked your interest in something you care about, or what you’re listening to in these waning days of summer.
I’d love for you to join my first weekend practice on September 24th!
