There is a woman I would like to thank, although I will probably never meet her. To be honest, I have never even seen her. I wouldn’t know who she was if she knocked on my door. My mother came home from spending a day with her sister. They had gone to a local place that has saunas and hot pools and cold pools and people misting scented water into your face. It’s the kind of place one might go to attempt to wring the stress right out of them.
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A Long Look
Over the past couple months, I have been teaching philosophy as part of a yoga teacher training. One of the topics last week was dharana, which is a Sanskrit word that is part of the 8-fold path of yoga. Dharana is translated as attention, focus, or holding steady. This is my favorite, I said when I introduced this word, which means to say that this is an idea I am holding closely lately. Each word learned in this system is worth getting to know with more intimacy. This is the only way any sort of understanding can come.
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When Yoga & Feminism Meet
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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