Curiosity over cynicism
If you spend enough time on the internet, you will know that virtually anything becomes problematic if you consider it for long enough. I fear this has made me deeply cynical over the last ten years. I find myself reflexively looking for the logical fallacy, or ethical shortcoming, or too-tidy explanation that makes something automatically bad or cancellable.
Usually, I can find it.
This is an intellectual habit that does not make a person particularly happy, and yet it’s one most journalists I know share. (As a general rule, journalists like being right, not happy.)
It’s true that in our rotten society, a lot of things — most things? — are problematic. It is indeed our job to dredge them up, challenge them, and reconstruct something better. However I fear that many people in the media space I occupy don’t engage with that work as a genuine process of discovery and unlearning, but rather as a kind of sport. They are not seeking the discomfort that comes with transformation; they are avoiding it by making sure they have the Right Opinion on Twitter.
It was the latter mindset that very nearly prevented me from doing something I embarked on in January of this year: a yoga teacher training spread out over eight months.
If the idea of a privileged white woman doing a yoga teacher training in London makes you want to roll your eyes, well … same. There were a billion ways I problematized wanting to do this, from the more prudent ways I could’ve spent the money (hello student loans!), to the fact that I might never find an ethical basis on which I would feel comfortable teaching other people. I worried that I would be turning my only respite from a hyper-intellectual and over-analytical life into something I would have to ethically negotiate in my head. Above all, I just worried it sounded kind of obnoxious.
In the end, my curiosity won over my cynicism. (I also had a lot of faith in my teachers*.) I wanted to know why this seemingly simple daily habit I’d developed in recent years became exponentially more interesting and incomprehensible the more time I spent doing it. Why learning how to move my body in less linear and goal-oriented ways had the effect of making me think in less linear and goal oriented ways, too. Why sometimes, even in the 2020 hellscape, a particularly well-prepped backbend can make the entire world feel wondrously expansive instead of grindingly oppressive.
The rather astounding thing about yoga is that if you want facts and science and proof, it’s all there. With a good teacher, skeptics can quite easily be converted, be it through the science of the vagus nerve and nervous system regulation, the studies around using embodiment to treat trauma, or the staggering fact that simply breathing properly (most people don’t) positively influences virtually every one of our body’s systems.
Of course, the western world’s desire to superimpose its own empirical framework onto an ancient eastern practice in order to “prove” it is legitimate — never mind it’s been practiced for thousands of years with pretty convincing success — is one of those things I could justifiably problematize here. Perhaps that is a discussion for another time. The truth is, while I did learn a lot of those fact-based things over the last eight months, they are not the most important thing I learned. Not by a long shot.
Completing a yoga teacher training during a pandemic and a much-needed global reckoning over white supremacy is one hell of a ride. (And if you’re wondering, about 70 percent of it ended up happening on Zoom.) At times, the circumstances felt like they’d been served up by a guru with a particularly wry sense of humor: “Oh, you want to focus on what’s important in life? Try losing every plan, schedule, ambition, and sense of security you had last week and sit at home to think about it as the world falls apart for the rest of the year.” Or another one: “Oh, you are squeamish about the ethics of a white woman teaching yoga? Why not instead reckon with more the far more fundamental fact that everything you are and have is a result of systemic racial violence that you unknowingly perpetuate and benefit from.”
About a third of the way through this training, everything had come spectacularly undone — personally, logistically, emotionally, globally. It was impossible to do anything right. So I just had to honestly meet myself where I was most days, with minimal judgement and with as much self compassion as I could muster, to find some modest way forward. Funnily enough, I think that is precisely what yoga has been inviting us to do every single day for thousands of years.
That sounds pretty good, right? But in truth I find it almost impossible to put into words the enormity of what that realization felt like back in April. It’s something I experienced as true in my body but fail to find the words or the mechanism to prove to you, despite the analytical and rhetorical skills I have developed in my career to do just that.
And that is precisely why I’m most glad I did this training. One thing we do through a yoga practice is work to change our samskaras, or the habitual movements of the mind. T.K.V. Desikachar described samskara as “the sum total of our actions that conditions us to behave in a certain way.”
One way I’ve been behaving in recent years is with the arrogance of a person who believes things are only valid if I can prove them to other people to be true. It’s easy to see why I feel that way, and I’m not saying that all of life is a choose-your-own-truth adventure. However, I can’t deny that shedding that samskara to make room for a less binary one has positively changed my life in ways I’m still wrapping my head around. (Stay tuned on that.)
That’s not to say it’s all simple now. The important work of honouring yoga’s often-erased south Asian roots while also sharing it with others is something I will never been done with. I will probably continue to mess it up. However, I’ve come to see yoga’s complexity, enormity, and frankly its mystery as an invitation, rather than a reason to avoid getting in deeper. It seems like being certain that you’re ‘doing it right’ is compelling evidence that you’re missing the point entirely.
Somewhere in there lies the magic, that thing I can’t explain: Yoga is not perfectible. You’re never done learning how to do it. Each time you step on the mat, you’re met with the playful truth that yoga begets more yoga. And so you keep going.
*The training I did was at Yoga on the Lane in Hackney, led by Naomi Annand and Adam Hocke.
Things I enjoyed reading
“We need to stop thinking … that we’re stars in our own aspirational romcom, heading for fame and happiness. Aren’t we just lucky to be alive and in an environment that isn’t an actual war zone?” [The Guardian]
I’m pretty convinced that in the next ten years, climate change will disrupt our lives far more than this pandemic has. (In California, that is already happening as I type.) I think it’s important we all countenance and prepare for this future as we make decisions about our post-pandemic lives. [NYRB]
This feature on the grim future of the fashion industry post-pandemic is a masterful example of business journalism masquerading as something far more entertaining. [NYT Magazine]
Showering less and largely ignoring the skincare industry is the kind of lifestyle advice I can get behind. [New Yorker]
If you feel like your compassion for the world’s unrelenting circus of horrors is waning, you are not alone. [Elemental]
On the surprisingly pleasant experience of living with your parents as an adult during the pandemic. [Quartz]
Can we chill out with all the social justice slideshows on Instagram? I’m not sure they’re helping and I am utterly exhausted by them. [Vox]
On how we pretend to celebrate single women over the age of 35 but still deep down harbour hope that a man will finally rescue them. [Vienda Maria]
The people we celebrate as “resilient” are often pretty pissed they have to endure so much. [NYT]
The pursuit of externally derived success is a trap! And yet most people I know are engaged in it. [The Atlantic]
Things I enjoyed listening to:
I’ll remember 2020 as the year I regularly burst into tears while listening to podcasts. This exploration of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black completely finished me on a Tuesday morning walk. [BBC Radio 4]
Have you contemplated your own death recently? It’s more practical than it sounds! As usual, the Buddhists have a plan. I’m enjoying the entire ‘Future Perfect’ series. [Vox]
I walked around my flat squealing with delight while listening to this exploration of why nobody has figured out the mystery of consciousness yet. I really hope it’s un-figureoutable. [Guardian Longread]
Word Soup:
"I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés... Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them...I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life." —Joan Didion
“I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.” —RIP John Lewis
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