by Hilary Lindsay | Jan 26, 2017 | Asana, Family, Healthy Living, nashville yoga, Social Commentary, society, Yoga, yoga class, yoga community, Yoga Philosophy, yoga teacher, yoga teaching |
They come from disparate worlds. They are many colors and many income bracketed families. It takes a no time to see how many struggle or don’t even bother to pay attention. Some of them come every week but every week there are newcomers as well. Yoga is simply a means to focus attention and hold attention I tell them. To do that, we use our bodies. I ask them not to talk to each other during class unless it is a necessity. The class is short I tell them. This will let us make the most of our time. This will help us pay attention. I ask them to follow me in a wide squat. I drop one shoulder and then another. We are squatting. We are twisting I tell them. And we are breathing. We will lose our attention toward the squatting and twisting and we will find our breath to bring us back to our movement. We will be in charge of that movement. We will practice this and we will eventually do it in our own way and in our own time but we will keep moving unless we need to rest. We will be good to ourselves and the people in our room because that will make things easier for us. We will move in rhythm with the breath, I say as they continue to follow me. I raise my arms overhead in mountain. Breathe in and as we bend forward with bent knees I ask them to breathe out. A little boy named Marcel who hugs me before class has stopped and is swinging...
by Hilary Lindsay | Nov 27, 2011 | Anthropology, Ethics, nashville yoga, Yoga, yoga class, yoga community, Yoga Philosophy, yoga teacher, yoga teaching |
I was raised as a response to Hitler; or Pharaoh, maybe. Never give up and never forget and do not make yourself someone else’s bitch. If you can get a B there is no reason you can’t get an A. There is no excuse for doing less than your best. We cannot afford that. Be the best or be nothing. Add to that my father’s undertone of don’t fuck with me and my mother’s banner of nobody tells me what to do and someone reading this says that explains a lot but appearances can be deceiving. For those of us of a generation still imbued with the work ethic handed down from a country begun by Puritans as well as the lessons of immigrant parents and grandparents who escaped oppression, the pressure has always been on to be better, do better as human beings, to fix wrongs where we see them. Now there is pressure from below to learn a system of living based on the paradigm of a global connection. There is the pressure to fix others when we ourselves are broken and thanks to the internet we know that more of us need fixing than don’t. The old, more physically present, order is largely gone but for its lingering poltergeist of try harder, do better, just do it. Now we are a mechanized nation, disconnected to ourselves while more connected to others, where the majority cannot give up, cannot do less, cannot relax because it will cease to survive. Does that message that you can try harder and do better belong in a yoga class? Is...
