30 Days of Shavasana
I just finished a 30 day yoga challenge. I had the glorious experience of doing at least an hour of yoga every single day from Jan 2nd - Jan 31st.
When I first started considering writing about this, I thought I might have 30 pithy insights to share, one for each day I went to class. And then I started thinking about how great it would have been if I had consistently journaled throughout the month, and had recorded a pithy insight for each day, and then I started feeling guilty about having not done that... and then I realized how terribly un-yogi my guilt about something so mundane was.
So, instead of an insight per day, I simply want to share a few observations from my 30 days:
Practice is personal but practice in community is powerful. I practice on my own at home, (not so much in January, since I was in class every day, but on a regular basis otherwise) and I think that's necessary to cultivate a strong practice, but the energy from being in a room of like-minded yogis is incomparable. There's just something incredibly beautiful about a group of individuals going through similar motions with similar hopes and desires in the same space with completely different articulations and outcomes. It feels like solidarity and looks like community and it was such a gift in this particular January.
I will not try to articulate any goals of yoga, but I think I learned this month that a goal of regular practice is to cultivate space for growth, which is subtly yet crucially different from the goal of growth. I'm reminded of a parable in Luke 13, when a landowner complained about a fig tree that grew but did not bear fruit, asking: "I came looking for fruit and couldn't find any...why does it even use up the ground?" The gardener convinced the owner to wait at least one more year before cutting it down, saying he would spend that year exposing the roots then covering them with fertilizer. I love that one of my yoga teachers once shared this parable in class (without mentioning any Biblical source, and presumably this parable could have many sources), allowing me to hear it in a new way. I love that another of my teachers, nearly a year later, focused on this concept of root-ed-ness for an entire class, allowing thoughts of this parable, that previous yoga class, and everything in-between to rise to consciousness as I practiced that day. And I love that the sum of these reflections became a focus on allowing my roots to stretch deep and not fear exposure, to allow acceptance of where I am to be a good enough goal, rather than wondering how anyone else may perceive my visible fruit or lack thereof.
As I thought more consistently about cultivating space for growth, I found myself thinking of space a lot. The teachers at my studio talk about space often, encouraging us to trust there's space to go deeper in a pose, to be content in the space we're in, to breathe to find more space, to send our breath into intentional space, etc. And, finally, to take up space in shavasana. At the end of every class, we come into this final pose and lay corpse-like on our mats, allowing the effects of practice to integrate, and allowing ourselves the space to rest.
If I forget everything else, I do not want to forget the importance of taking the physical and spiritual time to rest and notice - or not - the effects of something that just occurred. A moment of silence and breath in the midst of a crazy, loud, demanding world is indescribable, and yet here I sit, trying to tell you about it. I think the main thing for me, today, about shavasana is that it feels like an act of resistance. It's a declaration that whoever I am, laying on this mat, is enough. I don't have to so a thing, say a thing, to be good enough to deserve the space I take up in the world, but just my presence is substantial. This month that was necessary - I am looking for and engaging in other acts of resistance in response to all the stuff going on in our country, in the world. And those actions are crucial, but I'm not confident that anything is more powerful than presence, and I know I can't accomplish true presence without shavasana. Mere action, frenzied busy-ness, will not accomplish the peace and unity I long for. But laying in a room full of people who trust that we are carving out space for more goodness, and resting in the knowledge that the work of that cultivation is important, and that we are enough as we are in this moment - this is a radical act of acceptance, of self and others. And the world needs more of it.
Along those lines, on a very personal note: on some days, my shavasana started with me observing all the things I did NOT do that practice, or the things I did wrong, or a way that I may have embarrassed myself. For me, these kinds of thoughts tend to sum up into discomfort with my own curvier-than-most-at-my-studio body. It was amazing to experience my familiar self-shaming while my teachers would say things like: "Take up as much space as you can on your mat. Let yourself be heavy." This is shocking advice for me. I can't think of a single other place where I have been told to "just be heavy" - in the rest of my existence, I tend to perceive the message that I should figure out a way to lighten up. I can't think of a single other place where I am told to take up as much space as I can - I tend to find myself fighting against my size and frustrated with the space my body occupies, expending energy on covering up and squeezing in, trying to hide and get out of the way. To have these words, this unfamiliar acknowledgement that it was ok to be all of me, indeed it would not be ok to scrunch up and try to be anything less, consistently spoken into me for a month has been an unexpected gift. I have learned that my body is not my enemy, not a thing about me that I need to change. Rather, I am more aware of the integration between body, mind and spirit, and rather trying to deny or diminish any aspect of myself, I simply want to to keep practicing, to keep learning about myself from myself, to keep trusting that what I am right now is enough and worth exposure.
Much love and gratitude to the community and phenomenal teachers at Tough Love Yoga. Namaste, y'all.
