I was a feminist before I would have considered myself a spiritual seeker. Growing up, I had an abundance of female role models who were politically active, outspoken, and unwavering in their march through patriarchy, whether they would have put it this way or not. I modeled much of their behavior, knowing that there was something we were pitting ourselves against but I could not have told you exactly what that was. To borrow a metaphor from Carol Lee Flinders, I was aware of a bad smell coming from somewhere but it took me awhile to begin discovering the source of this rotting stench.
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The Big Magical Words of Yoga
“Poets have never used the word balance, for good reason. First of all, it is too obvious and therefore untrustworthy; it is also a deadly boring concept and seems to speak as much to being stuck and immovable, as much as to harmony. There is also the sense of unbalancing that must take place in order to push a person into a new and larger set of circumstances.” ~ David Whyte
Yoga is full of big words. Words like balance, and bliss, and peace, and love saturate the market of the yoga industry. We are asked to ‘open our hearts’, ‘finder our inner peace’, and blissfully let go into the vastness of this potential freedom. While we are yearning and perhaps hopeful of these tags lines, many of us spend our first yoga experience trying to simply decipher our left hand from our right hand and wondering if our agitated minds are actually insane.
Asana: A Language of the Body
“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.” ~ Katie Cannon
We know that our body language shapes who we are. Each time we put our body in a position, any position, we give it a message. We also give off a message. Do you understand what your body is saying? How often do you listen to it? While any simple movement we make is a way to explore and engage with the world, exploring our bodies through yoga is one way of striking up a conscious conversation between our interior lives and our exterior surroundings.
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