Practicing Yoga and Social Justice

Well it’s been a crazy emotional rollercoaster these last few months. Since September it has felt like national and global politics have taken a (even) darker, more disturbing turn. Kavanaugh. The murder of Jamal Kashoggi. Numerous mass shootings by avowed white supremacists – they’re not all being reported that way but you only have to scratch one layer below the surface to see the evidence. Balsonaro’s election in Brazil entrenches the global reach of the white supremacist anti-democratic movement Trump has tapped into and expanded. It has felt that the forces of evil are gathering strength. We’ve all been wondering how bad it can get and I think we’re starting to learn – it can get very very bad. Meanwhile I had my mom’s 70 th birthday party, then my yoga assessment, and then election day. I’m a weepy mess this morning – the day after the 2018 midterms. I think we’re all struggling for perspective, but I have to offer some thoughts on the results as we know them so far. We...

I was doing pretty well with weekly posts but the last few weeks got too complicated. I had a really demanding week of work travel and then the next week was Labor day week. So now I’m on week 3 and if I don’t get back to writing, I’ll really be letting the momentum shift. That means today’s the day, whether I know what I have to say or not. Last week I actually started writing a post about sleep. I had two of the best nights of sleep of my life, which was amazing, followed by four nights of terrible sleep. And then I was reading the yoga sutras and realizing all the ways that sleep is actually important for spiritual growth. Not just because sleep deprivation feels horrible and makes it very difficult to focus the mind or be disciplined, but because the experience of good sleep is a resource to draw on while moving toward the experience of clearing out the mind while awake. There’s a beautiful passage in the yoga sutras about how one way to make spiritual progre...

I’m still thinking about prayatna saithilya – effortless effort. I feel my work life starting to speed up. More projects are getting traction, more tasks need attention, more opportunities surface – all invitations to get caught up in the energy and surf the adrenaline rushes. There’s a point where the momentum of work can be self-sustaining, where it feels good. When you feel like you have hit a rhythm, lots of things seem to get done, tasks feed into each other. I’ve heard athletes talk about being in the zone. Artists call it the flow state. It is amazing when it happens. That’s a kind of effortless effort. But there’s another side to it – when the adrenaline becomes the point. When you need adrenaline to be able to get anything done. And when the work saps your energy instead of restoring it. That happens for me in part because I abandon some of my better habits when I get really embedded in work. I noticed that last week – I was travelling, doing lots of meetings and tra...