becoming weather...

the weather is our collective reflection in our sky mirror.

this is unarguably clear to me as i try to find space for myself,, my heart, my lungs, in the ferocity of the red sun, yellow haze, black smoke,the terror that is the los alamos fire... the forces that scream at me, strangle me into PAYING ATTENTION to the climate i am unconsciously helping to create...

i pray for rain.

my actions, and my thought-actions, are not an accident. they are calculated now, deliberate...if i am to be creating, i want this to be a conscious act, and a positive one; bringing vitality and not destruction.

here's a new-ish poet to whom i've come; he speaks about becoming weather:





Becoming Weather, 21
by Chris Martin

I was out interviewing clouds amassing
the notes of a sky pornographer while patches


of the city subnormalized
by fear of fear like a reef bleaching closed


I took to the streets
looking for a human velocity

feeling disequilibrium

heavy in the abundance
of summer light
the silent apathy
of stars which is neither
silent nor apathetic
I am becoming weather
and
I don't
plan on doing
it alone

all the same. ....?

thanks to ian for this magical, powerful message.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGNBS6_0CCw&

thoughts?

open heart

to dance within and between the shadows of shapes that shift secretly. i am suddenly solid. shaken from a dream-- suspension.

something summery. a time to play with notions of goals, of schedules shattered, to be tweaked to new rhythms.

our thoughts are forming the world. so says my teabag. & the heart sees deeper than the eye. my backbends are becoming easier, more joy-filled...does this mean that i am more open to sharing love? does this mean that my heart is growing? does this mean that i'm embracing some level of vulnerability?

beginnings...continuously.

gathered during the school year, but not processed. i return to this idea to ride on through the summer...

beginnings. each moment. to nourish.



Elegy in Joy [excerpt]
by Muriel Rukeyser

We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.

The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.

[LOVE is all you need.]

breathing room

the wind...

it's more powerful than i've ever experienced it here...or anywhere for that matter...

stripping the desert raw; scoured of pretense...screaming at me, so confrontational i can hardly bear it, and i crumble. collapse.
admit. yes,
i did it,
i'm guilty.


even though i know not what of.

and i believe it.

what a gift to go into the yoga studio today. into a space in which i could BREATHE without fear; of dust, of being swallowed alive, of being swept away, of being ripped to shreds of a something once self.

emily's words sent my mind to places and faces of people for whom this essential luxury-- not just the luxury of yoga and a beautiful bamboo floor and shelter from the wind, but the luxury of BREATHING deeply-- is not even imaginable.

how blessed i am to live without the fear of exhaling; how paradisal to live this ability to relax to sink in to let go.

may i always see it; appreciate it; shine it; cultivate it.

forgetting re-memory

there is much in my day to capture...and it amazes me how much i fear forgetting...i think it's because so much of the time i can only see GOODNESS in retrospect, wonder in the re-memory...and so, if there's no account, no archive, no catalogue of that thoughtfeelingexperience, where does it go?

it's lost, lost.

so this poem in my inbox this morning, but unopened until just now captures this anxiety, just a bit. and transforms it. just a bit.


forgetting something
by Nick Flynn

Try this—close / your eyes. No, wait, when—if—we see each other / again the first thing we should do is close our eyes—no, / first we should tie our hands to something / solid—bedpost, doorknob—otherwise they (wild birds) / might startle us / awake. Are we forgetting something? What about that / warehouse, the one beside the airport, that room / of black boxes, a man in each box? I hear / if you bring this one into the light he will not stop / crying, if you show this one a photo of his son / his eyes go dead. Turn up / the heat, turn up the song. First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines

so in case i forget to remember...

today was...

another song.

LisTeNinG tO thE ever-never cHiLd

The theme of 6th Grade Lit is THE HERO'S (or in the case of our girls...) HEROINE'S JOURNEY; all year in Will's class, the girls have been reading seemingly most different-est :) texts that carry this archetypal arc, with all of its conventional punctuations and nuances: they started with the easy "hook" read of PERCY JACKSON & the LIGHTNING THIEF-- but at the most profound heart of this whole study was an in-depth exploration of THE LITTLE PRINCE....They've already written the most sensational thesis-driven critical literary essays about this book [back in February when they finished the book--

I wrote one too; it was about Chapter XX and dealt with a redefinition of "value" and "worth" as being not what certain objects or creatures mean to others but rather what they mean to each of us, individually...In this tiny chapter the little prince encounters an entire garden of bloom bursting roses and so realizes that his own flower is not unique but instead simply one of manymanymany...this breaks his heart and sets him sobbing...I initially thought, like the girls, that having to focus on one single chapter of this tiny book-- a mere handful, if that, of pages, would make writing this paper impossible-- but I managed to overturn my own misconception by finding magic, and rich depth for analysis in these few simple words...

So today, when a student's father-- of whom I've only, previously, seen the gruff, abrasive, truly "adult" side-- brought in his collection of dozens of editions of THE LITTLE PRINCE, gathered carefully over a so-far lifetime, I could begin to understand his characterization of this book as a Bible in his own universe of experience. "For any question I've ever encountered, I've found an answer in this book..."

We talked about naming & taming, we talked about counting, we talked about fear, and we talked about Antoine de Saint-Exupery and his inspirations, we talked about this book's open-endedness, about its capacity for interpretation, and simultaneously its primordial construction in relation to this "hero's journey" concept; we talked about what makes something a classic, and we talked about audience, and we talked about the worlds of children and adults-- overlapping, and yet so distant from one another, and our ability to, with a link to some reminder like the little prince, move between the two without losing that child-like quality of wonder retained, clarity of vision, truth of heart-- that "sees what is invisible to the eye" and therefore, what is truly important...The girls were rapt, and were fully engaged, asking college level questions and answering with little princely profundity...They wowed me; but even more was I thrilled to have my own assumptions about this growelly, grisly, bristling grown-up completely turned on their collective silly heads: his own commitment to keeping his own child-self awake was something he talked about so candidly, and so powerfully; and what I realized was that even though he clearly doesn't succeed always in living in-tune with this self, the fact that he has this awareness, and the tool by which to constantly check himself in this pursuit is so admirable, and it is what matter in the end...not the "success"....How do you measure the way in which a book has shaped your life? How can you know what your life would have been like without the impact that such a story had, and continues to have in each revisiting of its pages? Like this man said, you simply can't know...You can't quantify it either. And yet, you can't imagine your SELF without its guidance...

As he talked about his desire to have children coming out of a hope for a reconnection to childhood; expressing his delight and his gratitude in his ability to dwell in imagination, to create, to dream under the baobabs and volcanoes and bird flocks and roses that he painted on to the walls of his daughter's bedroom....I couldn't help thinking myself that, yes, this is why I teach...And why I teach this demographic specifically...They bring me back, every day, to a moment in my own life when this spirit was most alive...She was the person who believed that,

"If somebody wants a sheep, that is a proof that one exists"

& that

"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."

And in this space, with these girls, she is once again able to breathe, and scream, and laugh, and sing, and wonder without consequence or fear of things unsensed but just imposed as important...

And it sometimes takes a grown man exposing and celebrating his own vulnerability and connection to a Neverland that is truerthetrue, for me to remember this...and to accept it, and to embrace it....

SPONTANEOUS COMPASSION

can we teach EMPATHY? flexibility? generosity? LOVE?

maybe, maybe.



http://blog.ted.com/2011/04/20/the-world-peace-game-john-hunter-on-ted-com/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDBlog+%28TEDBlog%29

sensory catalogue::: wHy wRiTe iT?

today i've been thinking. no, sensing is, i suppose, more accurate.

a catalogue of that sensation?

well

[abbreviated] here it is:



the scent of a santa fe rainfall that makes all attempts at secrecy in the sandwiched witching hours between the sweep of sleep and the fluttering open of eyelashes is in itself bewitching...up the mountain this morning-- no visiting soul here to share the space with me and my breathing its dank exhilaration ininin...just the shock of enormousness that the scurrying squirrels embody and the ferocity of the wind in the pines...sends me into a dream of a day in which magic isn't just possible but potent and positively present.

....into... a dance my body knew my heart needed...gratitude to kelle for providing the space...the beauty of being able to release and to sound a "cuckadoodle doo" with chicken wings without a second thought.




texture in the kiss of fingertips to the blushing pink silk of a soul-sealed decision to touch and cradle luxurious self-love-- a purchase that sent me spinning and skipping out the door of BODY into the storm-swept skies that sang with the rightness of it.


savoring a cup of the jamaican coffee oceanna and i roasted and treasured home with a story of a once upon a time old woman living at the misty edge of a concealed corner of the world-- the taste robustly combusting and smoothing soothing simultaneously the tingling of my twittering tongue as we spent the afternoon creating transformations in the form of winged creatures.



swirls of sights that dew-drop across the web of consciousness for the brief sparkle of a sunlit second...today was dripping with them, richly.

so much over which to wonder in this day.

so this is why i need to write it: because if i don't, it gets lost in the unattended storeroom of lost living. i have no choice but to tack the senses to some words to refeel-- to "taste life twice"

so charles bukowski asks:
so you want to be a writer?

and i answer "YES...BUT"
and the "BUT" is bigger than big because i question the impulse that tells me to take pen to paper, or fingertips to the rattatat tatting keys.
WHAT DRIVES ME?
to write these catalogues, to document fragments that seem small but scream in my psyche
to write them rather than to just release them-- evaporation.
or to think and rethink and reredoublethink them?
& i don't know the answer...
and
WHAT STOPS ME?
from writing these sensations into words
[that they seem inadequate bodies for such power?]
[that i haven't the courage to face them?]
[THAT I AM NOT REALLY A WRITER?]
oh it's over this worry that i fret and fuss and obsess and upon which i lean, my ever-excuse in my absurd vulnerability, exquisite in its embarassment of its lacks and holes

but this poem helps that.

not to spin out of control into tangles of "NOT GOOD ENOUGH"; but to trust the waves of gut-wrenching MUST in the writing of it when it arrives...and to not invest in the spaces in which it doesn't show up...

it's a place for patience.

i never thought about it that way.

so LISTEN:

so you want to be a writer?
by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

so to catalogue sensation that has spoken, sung, within a day or night or a limbo half-light. this is the starting place of the authenticity for me.

if i can trust myself, and my sensation, then i can be patient enough give the writer her voice when she is ROCKETING on the incisive edge of MURDER, when it is TRULY TIME, when she has BEEN CHOSEN.

until then, i'm just soaking in it, and soaking it in.

DANCE for JOY

"I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community. I praise the dance, which demands everything: health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul. Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people, who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will, or feeling. Dancing demands a whole person, one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life, who is not obsessed by lust for people and things and the demon of isolation in his own ego. Dancing demands a freed person, one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers. I praise the dance.

O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you." ~ Saint Augustine





in these past months, i have found so many new sources of joy...they have been overwhelmingly inarticulatable. and yet profound in a way that screams to be communicated, celebrated.

dance has been one of these.

i have never thought of myself as a coordinated person. i quit ballet as a young, contrary girl who preferred pastimes requiring less patience. more ferocity. but it's lived in my bones until now, when i've begun to listen to its music...i started to unlock it a little in my last semester of college when i took a contemporary dance class to add a little spice to my stressed senior schedule...in the years that have followed, yoga's found a way in too...
the part of me that honors the moon and the depth of the water and breath that offer this "EQUIPOISE" to my fire...

and finally, the joy of dance.

now that i'm letting go of a preoccupation with what it looks like, what it's SUPPOSED to look like, i feel free, and it's something that feels authentic...

don't get me wrong:

i still get totally frustrated with myself for not knowing how to make my feet and arms match sometimes, not knowing how to bring myself into alignment with the music as it washes over me...and in these moments when my mind tries to controlcontrolcontrol i loose the connection completely, just like in those yoga poses in which i analyze the synchronicity into fragments...

so this is about the whole person, the free person, the spontaneous yet purposeful person-- the one who finds the effortlessness, the weightlessness in the work, in the sweat, in the challenge that is the natural explosive quiet peace at the heart of it all.

like everything, i can construct this into a metaphor for life, a meditation on the parallels that are, in spite of their constant presence, always epiphanies, revelations...and i do, daily...because all veins of my life, all of the sinews of this body that i'm webbing of the physical mental emotional energies that i am, touch this: teaching running laughing skipping comforting confessing swimming crying listening observing...

practicing heaven on earth so the angel dance is just a natural next step...

[re]A-W-A-K-E

rounding this bend of spring,

[i am planting my annual nasturtiums today]

the stirrings and whirrings in my gut and in my brain [my soil & soul]
are demanding

my attention in a way that cannot be ignored any longer.

i need to write.

i need to catalogue the snapshots of poetry that i frame in thoughts as i move through my days--

small wonders
that RESOUND underneath surfaces, seismically,

that i'm so afraid to lose because they come quietly...but shake so deeply & surprisingly...

there is a need to taste the words and breathe them-- in and outward.
to make their texture is something tangible.

& then to examine them, too.

so here is rebirth, the REAWAKENING in this easter season, the breaking of penitence for the sin of living & leaving this glory unsung-- it's a breaking into blossom with the sun.

i am full of wonder at the energy that energy itself creates. at the abundance that is created by nothing more than intention. at the love that is, unquestionably, exponential.

and i know

that the state of matter is grave and gravelly and gray in this breath of the world's being.
that this reality is bloodied and disfigured and manipulated and greedy and riddled with brutality
so that its body is an unrecognizable version of its true self.

i'm not ignoring that maggoty flesh of it all.
i'm just waking up the possibility, the potential for another version, another narrative to write.

at least for myself. and for you if you want it.

i am so blessed to be brought into awakeness, into aliveness, every single day by girls who live rawly, righteously, respectfully, RESPLENDENTLY-- reveling without any reservation or recognition that there is any other way. thrown into this sharp focus, i am compelled to confront myself, and to offer the challenge: can i help this GROW? in me? in them? further? wider? deeper, even than these dimensions as we go out and touch the rest of the world.

this spring, i want the answer to be

YES
YES
YES.

a YES floating on effervescent wings & netted for moment, microscoped & marvelled into a formulation of an emulation and a re-creation, & then released to the joyful wind again.

it's waking UP and writing DOWN-- an undulation that is a celebration of the gratitude for this truth.

“Nothing happens until something moves”
~Albert Einstein


here's to that movement....

delayed by three months....

the space between

There is no panacea
for missing syllables:...we
all know what matter's mostly made of—: space
....
Sometimes the absences in us seem so profuse,
I wonder we don't pass through wood. (excerpted from RR Lyrae Matter by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon)

up-sTaNdinG!

aspen cathedral on the way to la vega-- santa fe, 2010.

in spite of how fantastic i feel in every other respect, today the nerve running up and down the back of my right leg is in the most excruciating pain i've experienced yet. after vinyasa today (which helped, especially right after a bikram session), i asked my teacher about it, knowing pretty much what her response would be: sciatica. it's ironic, really, because sciatic pain is typically caused by prolonged sitting and my lifestyle is really anything but sedentary...quite the contrary really, almost to my detriment i've been led to believe. however, it's not coming from the typical source of a bulging disc but rather from something stemming from the inside of the upper thigh/buttocks and burning like fire down my sit-bones and my leg, into the back of my knee. so i used to commute a lot last year-- such periods of prolonged sitting were absolute agony...now, i try to keep sitting to a minimum, but i've been told that over-exercising was my issue. there's no happy medium...although i'm thinking now that bikram's yoga is exacerbating the issue tremendously. need to work on healing this...it is absolutely awful...

in any event, i am celebrating the fact that i ENJOY being vertical-- not horizontal, or sedentary...vertical and vital! funnily enough, my POEM OF THE DAY from poets.org celebrates this very thing....



Vertical
by Linda Pastan

Perhaps the purpose
of leaves is to conceal
the verticality
of trees
which we notice
in December
as if for the first time:
row after row
of dark forms
yearning upwards.
And since we will be
horizontal ourselves
for so long,
let us now honor
the gods
of the vertical:
stalks of wheat
which to the ant
must seem as high
as these trees do to us,
silos and
telephone poles,
stalagmites
and skyscrapers.
but most of all
these winter oaks,
these soft-fleshed poplars,
this birch
whose bark is like
roughened skin
against which I lean
my chilled head,
not ready
to lie down.

LoVinG YouRseLf to LoVe the rEsT...

a piece of wisdom to slip into your heart today:


"Don't ask yourself what the world needs,
ask what makes you alive." H. Thurman


follow your fire.

GraVity'S wiNgS

The world is dying but now I’m writing

Writing
because it seems the last way I know how to hold it
Even though these words don’t even have the eternity that ink half-promises; no matter

To write is to dream hope-prints on to a page...

& if I dream of a world of pirates and seashell ships and rain in the afternoon and honey and flying and nests of cuddling moss, peaty and muddy green-glowing....it's realer than real.

It's a choice....so

If I choose to fly with the way I am feeling, with the colors I’m seeing behind my eyes and with the tastes that stick to my budding tongue in their curious bitter-brightness, does that really mean that’s the way IT is?

Sweet contentment lies in the ability not to dream-out reality but to see the dream within it, and in having the trust to believe it.

Without imagination I am nothing, and the world is cardboard flat and saccharin empty…

I sprawl on the quilted covers and dance on the ceiling and swing among the rafters.

Gravity only pulls because it’s heartbreakingly lonely.
So when I try to fly, why don’t I?

I am the slave-bride of Gravity; I can’t love him because he binds me to the rock solidity, but he won’t release his hold until he feels love,

so we are whirlpooled

until
I decide I can love his limitations, and wear them as wings

Dancing Soaring Singing all the forms of flight I can own in this atmosphere—all the more precious because they defy laws and breathe magic.


Gravity
You bring the miraculous smile to my body’s narrow curves; sparkle to my muscles; fire to my eyes…

It’s because of you that I know this exhilaration; you make me earn it.

And so I believe that the world is dying only because I let it mirror my own face and its failings which are only real until I choose to engage, actively, give energy to dreaming a smile and reimagining gravity's pull.

bEauTifuL (something for a sick day)

woke up this morning with burning throat, pounding head, aching heart. realized that no matter how stubborn i might be, there was no going into school today. again.

now, really, a day off is a day off in the positive sense, always, but i'm eager to get back in the classroom rhythm as i've been out of it since the start of our holiday break, and learning how to acknowledge a real need for a day off, to recognize when pushing through isn't the answer, and isn't even the expectation that i feel exists in the workplace, in the world-- what a challenge for me!

so i stared my compulsive need to gogogo right in the face, and crawled back into to bed to sleep, even as the day was breaking brightly...

and i know how silly this seems, but it's a strange part of my until-now story, a hiccup in the expected and accepted smoothness in the song, that's starting not to sound so sweet in its monotony...so to be content in this discomfort-- this is what gave me food for thought today, and the space and time in which to really dwell in it a little.
by the afternoon, i felt strong, and in need of focus and so i moved into a vigorous, and then restorative hour and a half long practice in my sunset-soaked living room.

as the day closes, i'm physically feeling better-- and in my heart? better also. i'm going to bed with the lullaby of this fabulous song-- brought to my attention by the beautiful bettina...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfJAh6hrCzw

"may the grace of god be with you always in your heart
may you know the truth inside you from the start
may you find the strength to know that you are part of something beautiful."

~iNvoCatiOn~

i have chosen SANTOSHA to be my focus-- this NIYAMA (or OBSERVANCE, as a piece of the Eight Limbed Yogic Path)means "contentment" by rough definition, though i call it "SWEET" because it was once described in this way by a teacher of mine, and truly, i can think of nothing sweeter...and possibly, more difficult to achieve..."santosha" involves the practice of gratitude and joyfulness—maintaining calm at all costs. this state of mind does not depend on any external forces or dynamics, but still exists in connection with them....
my hope for myself is to find the sweetness in the immediate moment.

i have been realizing more and more that i fall neatly into the cliche of not knowing what i have until it's taken away. in the now, i recognize that there is the capacity for beauty, for goodness, for joy, for peace-- but i am never content with it...the possibility that this sweetness IS true is never enough to convince me that i need to change, to move "forward." so rarely can i just be with something, sit with it, and not need to analyze it-- weigh its pros and cons. i long for the sweetness in which this tension doesn't drive me. i trust that it exists.

so, through yoga and its many facets (specifically the YAMA of SATYA or "truthfulness," asana (with sequences i will include here), and pranayama), through poetry and stories, through conversations with my brilliant girls, through inspiration from my enchanted southwestern home and the people who make it so-- i dream of putting wisdom, calm, strength, and vision that i cultivate on my mat into my perspective and approach to the world, and my place in it.

so, to start with some poetry: e.e. cummings' "seeker of truth"
seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here.

"karma" yoga

Until recently, I've misperceived the practice of yoga as only that of ASANA-- the physical postures and exercises meant to strengthen and release the body...

The practice of yoga is a service to our Selves, individual and collective. Through this personal endeavor, by heightening our consciousness, our awareness, our “awakeness,” and becoming a sound mind in a sound body, we can more effectively serve those around us. By turning inward and facing with honesty and love that which we find there, we cultivate the ability to see the outside world with more compassionate eyes. Here, for me, is where the connection between yoga and service takes root. What I do with the training in this powerful practice has and will continue to impact my own understanding of myself and my place in things, grounding me and inspiring me simultaneously and it is upon this foundation that all I do from here on out will be built.
I hope explicitly and directly to connect the teaching of yoga to my other passions in the context of “service,” particularly because I know the transformative power it holds as a compliment to anything and everything we each do. Specifically, there is one demographic in which I hope to apply my learning as a means of sharing the gift it’s given to me. I would love to work with adolescents, introducing them to this method of relaxation, of concentration, of dedication. I have worked with this population in various contexts, most recently and directly as an English teacher and a coach. Kids in middle and high school are searching for something to ground them in this tumultuous time when everything in their worlds is turning upside down and inside out. Many don’t get enough exercise, or they get too much overtraining for one or another specific sport. Many students, particularly those in the less privileged situations (such as where I did my student teaching in New York City) have such profound stressors and negative influences, on top of the usual horrors of “teenagehood,” to deal with that they cannot even begin to commit to fulfilling the responsibilities that the worlds of school and their social networks demand of them. It is they, as well as all teens, who would undoubtedly benefit incredibly from the practice of yoga. Even simple exposure to it and the ideas that are manifested within its rich and multifaceted tradition could serve to ground and sustain, and at the same time uplift and inspire young people to take care of themselves body, mind, and spirit. It has the potential, with the connection through an empathetic teacher, to instill confidence and compassion. Essentially, it offers a space in which people in this stage in life, who so often are written off as being lazy or apathetic or lost or unappreciative by adults and by their peers, and deemed failures and losers by themselves, to realize that they are unique and powerful and worthy individuals. They become empowered because they are their own teachers in this practice.
I have already spoken to the Boys and Girls club in my town about setting up free community yoga classes for kids their and I am offering an after-school program at the school where I currently work. I would love in the future to bring this into more schools throughout the country. The connection between body and mind is a profound one—and yoga, as an integral part of the school day is not just practical on a logistical level (the fact being that the kids are already here and don’t need to be driven or bused to another location for expensive classes) but also practical in the sense that it sharpens and focuses and calms the mind to prepare for academic learning.