Savasana: Be Still and Know

I love teaching yoga. The truth is I love it more than teaching the university courses that my PhD afforded me the opportunity to teach. I find it exciting, engaging, impactful, and adventurous.

But in Washington DC, “I teach yoga” is not the appropriate answer to a query at a dinner party. Sometimes I accommodate - I pretend the last 5 years didn’t happen and I skip right back to when I taught literature. People find that appropriately interesting. Or I say I’m an educator and leave it at that. Sometimes my spouse does it for me -- I say I teach yoga, and he finds a way to share where my academic degrees are from. It’s as if at that point everyone can breathe a sigh of relief and I fit in again.

This repeated encounter, perhaps obvious, is worth noticing: why is it that teaching yoga is considered less significant, less important, less appropriate than teaching literature? Why is it that teaching something that actually addresses the body directly is considered “beneath” a person with an advanced degree as an educator? Why is there such discomfort, mine included, around my dramatic redirection from one kind of teaching to another?

The answers are surely steeped in issues of class, privilege, western ideology, the patriarchy and the university. Steeped in academic institutions with complicated histories and overt/covert walls that serve to hierarchize, separate and exclude. Steeped in the intellectual study of bodies that consistently maintains the dichotomy of the thinking mind and the feeling body and the privileging of one over the other. The placement of intellectual craft over felt experience is tantamount to the project of the university. But in the same way that disability studies forces a reckoning with the able-body as the primary, or race studies makes us question that whiteness is the norm by which all is measured, so too we might grapple with the prioritization of brain work over body work. Why is my love of literature a subject of worth, while my passion for yoga is not? Why is one supreme?

I came of age as an academic steeped in deconstruction. It was mind-bending and exciting. I was taught to pay special attention to moments in texts where the smoothness of communication became disrupted and our attention was directed to the act of attempting to communicate. Being absorbed into a narrative experience is pleasurable, yet at the same time delusional. Delusional because we are merely looking at words on the page, images projected onto a screen. Deconstruction asks the reader to be the quintessential skeptic by recognizing that there is no such thing as direct experience in art. I learned to be most fascinated by the type of art that carefully, beautifully, complicatedly draws our attention to its own impossibility - the impossibility of communicating, of getting close to the thing itself. A text offers a woolen knot to be unraveled, a secret puzzle to be de-coded. And when you get to the heart of the matter, it is always-already about the impossibility of language, of media, to stand in for the actual.

Practicing yoga rejects representation and gets at felt-experience. While my literary training taught me to always to be skeptical of expression and to find it inherently faulty, my yoga training leads me to believe in the profound power of inexpressibility. It has taught me to focus on how it feels to be embodied, corporeal, and animate. Yoga has led me out of the university and into the studio precisely because yoga defies the domain of the skeptic. It is not something to be unpacked and ultimately shown to be straining against its own impossibility. To be sure, there are systemic issues to be analyzed and critiqued in yoga -- not least of all, the cultural takeover by the Western fitness industry of an ancient Indian philosophy and science for healthy living. Not least of all, the essential need to extend our caring to people who have not felt welcome or included in a wellness space. At the same time, I would argue that the foundational premise of yoga is a radical one: that you can enact change through bodily postures. It’s not just that you can actually make meaning, but more so: you can generate a way of feeling and a way of being. Perhaps yoga is the greatest act of deconstructive rebellion -- it bypasses language and representation completely through embodied transformation.

What do we do on our mat? We - literally - practice taking a stance. That stance may look like Warrior Pose. It involves steady breath, focused gaze, planted feet, solid legs, and outstretched lifted arms. It invites you to find the sweet spot between effort and ease, and create the discipline to stay there. It asks you to cultivate the ability to be present, aware, and attentive. This pose - like any yoga pose - is ultimately an embodied blueprint for living, an opportunity to actively take a stance and live in it fully. It’s a posture, it’s a way of being. It is feminist in that it’s finding a new way to live in my body. It is activist in that it shifts the way I act, relate and perceive. Yoga is always an opportunity to understand yourself better and explore what you will offer the world.

I recently read an article by Claire Vaye Watkins on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The Awakening was one of the turn-of-the-century books that informed much of my work in graduate school. Vaye Watkins re-energizes this book for me by posing its central question as this: What wakes us up? “Edna, awakened by the natural world, invited by art and sisterhood to be be wholly alive, begins to notice what she wants, rather than what her male-dominated society wants her to want. Edna’s desire is the mechanism of her deprogramming...Feeling her own feelings, thinking her own thoughts, Edna recalibrates her compass to point not to the torture of patriarchy but to her own pleasure, a new north”. Vaye Watkins quotes from Sarah Ahmed saying that pleasure and sensation are not “frivolous or narcissistic but an essential reorientation.”

That essential reorientation is what happens when I practice yoga. It is work, and it is challenging, but it is also replete with joy, contentment and pleasure. These are unruly emotions that disrupt and disorganize the rational forward-moving trajectory of getting from here to there. Yoga, at its very best, is not about contorting a body into a pose. Rather it is about self-expression and self-actualization and courage and joy accessed through a pose. It is a chance to be in a body that is rebellious, unruly, too much, that announces itself, that doesn’t conform or hold back. I’ve always wondered why realist literature so often centers around female desire and female bodies: Nana, Sister Carrie, Madame Bovary. These are texts by men about disruptive women who cannot be contained. The existence of these women strain the very systems committed to containment: patriarchy and realist representation. The heroines are -- not surprisingly -- killed off by the narrative. But before that happens, they get to be the disruptors. Each of these protagonists could use more joy alongside their rebellion, and if the authors were female, they might be granted it. Pleasure activism, writes adrienne maree brown, is “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”

Here is what I love about teaching yoga. I see my students and they see me. Each student has their own unique experience, and they leave their mats a little more alive than when they arrived. Alive: more connected to their own emotions and their own bodies. And more willing to show up without the self-protective armor we all don to protect ourselves from pain, trauma, insecurity, and loss. As Toni Morrison wrote: “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Yoga does that. And teaching yoga gives me the opportunity to contribute to the dismantling of each of our unique fears of flying.