Fresh Offerings

Okay, community. It’s here.

I’m entering a season of… outpouring, I think. Academically as well as professionally, I think I’m in a space now where a lot of energy is coming out of me and being offered up. I can’t really say that I’ve been preparing for this, or that I have any idea how it’s all going to shake out. I can say that it feels like the right time, and that I remember how to do it, and I’m going to keep practicing. My prayer, my vow, my sankalpa, is that I will be able to continually give to others out of the abundance with which the universe fills me.

What does this mean for you? Fresh opportunities for us to practice together.

Open Level Yoga Classes, Tejas Yoga, Thursdays, 6:45 pm Eastern/5:45 pm Central

In support of my beloved friend, Katie Rowe Mitchell, who is preparing to welcome a new family member, I’m teaching an all-levels yoga class at my yoga home, Tejas Yoga. It feels wonderful to be back in the space of my teachers and mentors, my yoga family, even if that space is digital and not literal. I’m so grateful. We have a great time. Every week, at 5:30 pm (Chicago time) I’m chanting the Shiva Sankalpa Sukta (which you are welcome to join), and practice begins at 5:45. I’m so grateful to be teaching at Tejas again. For pricing and registration info, please visit Tejas Yoga. I anticipate teaching this class through the fall.

New! The People’s Yoga, every other Sunday starting Sunday, 9/20/20, 4 pm Eastern

This is a class with your healing, encouragement, and recovery in mind. It features a gentle physical practice suitable for all levels, a little breathwork, and a guided meditation practice called yoga nidra. There is no charge for this class, but donations are welcome. Every month, proceeds from this class will be donated to a different organization. While this class is public, it’ll be offered on Zoom, and it will be password protected. For questions or registration information, please contact me.

Sacred Sadhana: Yoga at HDS, Tuesdays 4:30-5:30 pm EST

This is a class offered for members of the Harvard Divinity School and the larger Harvard community, where I’m entering my second year of div school. HDS students and friends should reach out via HDS email, or follow up with the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. I’ll continue to teach via the HDS Yoga Shala as well, so stay tuned for announcements regarding that schedule as well.

This season is real, y’all. Drink your water, floss, sleep, eat, and let’s practice together. With gratitude, without judgment or shame, let’s meet ourselves on the mat. See you there.

B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

seeking my reflection

I feel vulnerable talking about my faith practice. My physical practice elicits a different kind of vulnerability: I run into the voices that say I’m supposed to look a certain way or do a certain thing, or I haven’t been teaching long enough to know what I’m talking about, blah blah BLAH. But spiritual practice is a different thing: organized religion has done so much harm to so many, I wonder if I’ll lose folks’ attention by triggering them, and they’ll go read any of the other jillion things available to read. Folks are myopic about their faith, and if I posit something outside their concept of the tradition, they’ll stop listening, get defensive or argumentative, and I’ve lost them too. On top of which, I carry a deep fear of being perceived as heretical by my home tradition, Christianity. Christians have a historical penchant for doing violent things to folks who don’t believe what they believe.

But this is where I am. Black folks just keep getting killed by police. When George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by police and American cities erupted in protest, the despair that set in, that filled me with a rage and a grief so thorough I couldn’t communicate, it didn’t feel social or circumstantial; it felt spiritual. To get at it, I have to talk about faith.

My struggle is with a view that argues that God is in all the things: in the rage and the grief, and the fear and the oppression, in George Floyd’s neck gasping for breath and the boot constricting it, in the heart of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the bullet that ended his life. I struggle to wrap my head around the supposition that God is in the torture, abuse, and murder of black folks. I feel… connected to folks by our shared cultural identity and experience. Interpersonal complexities notwithstanding, there’s a kind of kinship that exists among black folks. I’m not saying it’s simple or universal, or even that it’s felt by all of us all the time, but it’s real. The fear, the anger, the tension of hating that to which you must grovel and propitiate—I know it because to be black in America is to know it. Someone recently told me it was arrogant to assume I knew someone else’s experience because I hadn’t lived it. Yes and No. I’ve never been a black woman trying to find a job in Jackson or Birmingham or Charleston; I’ve never been a black man in Oakland or Los Angeles, in the Bronx or Detroit; I’ve never been the only black person on the board of directors in corporation in Manhattan; I’ve never been a professor and thinker pulled over in my own neighborhood while going home; but the power of white supremacy to reach into all of these lives and squeeze is the same, and that’s a power I know because I live here. In America.

Crisis of faith is such an overused phrase, and man, it seems so cliché to be a div school student who is questioning her own belief. Somebody, stamp my card. But the stakes of this feel so high, because embedded in this knot is a lie that I am trying to untangle and dissolve: the lie that my life as a black woman, that our lives as black Americans, have less value. It’s hard to say that I am special, remarkable, lovable, if God creates a life for me that knows this suffering. I’ll acknowledge that this is not subtle and it’s not universal; I am entirely self-focused when I think, why would God want to embody the human experience as a black woman? Why would God create a context wherein to exist as a person means to be beaten, objectified, exoticized, assaulted, ignored, cursed, starved, and even killed? Who is God, to me, in this? Is God a comforter in the experience of oppression? Or is God a passive observer? Or is God another oppressor? Or all of the above?

I initially was thrilled by the idea that God/dess would choose the experience of a black woman to experience manifest reality. If s/he in all their glory and wisdom and massive incomprehensibility would choose my life’s experience, then there must be something of value in it. The idea that my voice is less important, that my body can tolerate more pain and illness (so I get substandard health care), that my visage is not as aesthetically pleasing but is aberrant (so don’t put me in art because no one will engage with it), that I can’t rise to meet high standards(so don’t challenge me), and that the fact that I can make coherent sentences is a miracle, (because, you know, I talk a certain kind of way), all of these are lies. They are lies that I’ve believed because the world around me supports them and because they’re perpetuated--consciously or otherwise--in systems, businesses, relationships, and art; they’re lies that it takes continual effort to dig up from my heart; they’re lies that we believe because white supremacy. Now I know they’re lies because God chose me, chose black woman, black person, black child, as a home for incarnation.

But if God is also the systems, the individuals of oppression, and quite frankly, and much scarier, if God is the legions of white folks comfortable with and defensive of their own ignorance and complicity in white supremacy and oppression of folks of color, then maybe they’re true. This is not about a desire in me to see myself or to see black folks as better than. This is a desire to see myself. To see myself as a relevant, present, meaningful part of the community, of society. White supremacy feels… gravitational. It feels like such a powerful planetary force that folks don’t want to or don’t know how to pull themselves out of, and if they do they’ll fly away. Maybe I don’t believe that anything other than white supremacy is possible, and if that is true, my work of using spiritual practice to foster relationship across identity boundaries is dust.

“[V]ictimage and violation are never simple functions of physical subjugation or speechlessness; they encompass the deeply-engrained, disguised, and habitual forms of “structural violence” that systematically negate the will and deny agency to vast numbers of people in modern societies simply because they are poor, “colored,” infirm, elderly, vagrant, or migrant… [Authur] Kleinmann has coined the phrase “social violence” to describe the pervasive indifference, endemic oppression, and sense of abjection that can make a person feel as though he or she is a mere object, nameless, of no account, ground down, in a world where agency seems to be entirely in the hands of others.”

— Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling

Arrogance, I am told. It is arrogant for me to assume that I can know the will of God, that I can know anyone’s suffering other than my own. How can I possibly begin to conceive what God is doing in the fabric of the universe? I am playing at God to assert that life should be anything other than it is.

Maybe so. So what? For one thing, I think God is absolutely big and strong enough to fight with me about the need for, and God’s hand in, violence and injustice, without anyone else standing in between us. If what I believe to be true about God is true, then there’s nothing I can say to God, no argument we can have, that’s going to separate me from God. God is not put out that I would question them. So let’s get at it.

Additionally, it doesn’t take a lot of magical thinking for me to know the plight of black folks in America. See above.

I can’t write lately, and when I can’t write, I read. Every morning I pick up some book as I’m sitting down to meditate: lately there are two, Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman, and Waiting for God by Simone Weil. I reread this essay. It’s like an anchor that I’m holding onto in practice these days. I read from it recently in a weekly meditation I was invited to. It always has something new. Quick background: Simone Weil was a French Jewish philosopher, and an often-thwarted activist who lived and died in the mid-twentieth century, and who wrote about the teachings of Christ. Her work is problematic, though I wonder how it might have changed if she’d lived long enough to bear witness to or experience the Holocaust. She died at 34 years old from a hunger strike.  

In the essay, she writes, “Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack of immediate apprehension of physical pain… There is not real affliction unless the even that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction unless there is a social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another.” In this, I recognized my experience. At the very best, she writes, he who is branded by affliction will only keep half his soul. That was the feeling: I was asking, begging, shouting, How could You do this? Where are You in this? Why would you choose blackness if this is what blackness means????, and getting only Silence.

It’s a bit of a downer, right? Am I supposed to be writing galvanizing, encouraging messages of exhortation and direction? Because what I’ve got is affliction.

The idea of affliction being a bodily experience, and not just a spiritual one, appeals to me. If the body, mind, and soul are somehow connected, and if the body is a manifestation of Divine, as some of the soul is, too, then of course affliction is as much a physical experience as a spiritual one. “When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: ‘It is the trade entering his body.’” One of her points in this essay is that learning to see God in all things, in oppression and imprisonment and violence and destruction, is a lesson we can learn.“ As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It really is an apprenticeship… Through joy, the beauty of the world penetrates our soul. Through suffering it penetrates our body… The body plays a part in all apprenticeships.”

Look at that: the same idea in Tantra, expressed by a Christian thinker, saying the same thing.

Let’s be clear: Weil was big into valorizing suffering. In the Christian tradition this glorification is not new, and I don’t know that it’s always useful. Still, she is not advocating that we should surrender to injustice, violence, and inequality as a result of this apprenticeship to seeing God in all things, but only to recognize God in all, and even the worst as obedient to God. Consider this radical love that she is calling us to, even in the midst of this affliction: “we must love absolutely everything, as a whole and in each detail, including evil in all its forms;…” “…through all the horror, he can continue to want to love… It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul.” This is a big ask. We live in a world of our senses and experiences: we know the perfectly ripe cold watermelon on a hot day; the smell of a baby’s head; the bowel-churning anxiety of waiting for word; we know a good full-body stretch; we know the hole inside us when something or someone is gone that won’t return, that we don’t know how to fill; we know surprise, fear, grief, desire, and all of these things make us feel a certain way. The yoga tradition calls it attachment and aversion. Consider how felt watching that video of George Floyd being killed, or how you felt arguing with your white friends or relatives who still, still(!) say ignorant shit to you, or how you felt when you realized that remark, or that silence, came out of white privilege or white supremacy. Consider what we are attached to and averse to, what we cultivate and what we reject, in our work. Perhaps, so long as I continue to draw things toward me that are easy to see God/dess in, and push away those moments, sensations, or experiences that are hard to see God/dess in, I continue to be pointed in the wrong direction.

A friend recently told me that her favorite part in the Bhagavad Gita is when Arjuna says to Krishna, show me the real you, and Krishna takes off his flesh disguise and shows himself and Arjuna freaks out and Krishna says, I AM TIME I AM THE EATER OF WORLDS, and Arjuna says, I give, I can’t take it. A similar story is in the Hebrew Bible, wherein Moses asks to see God, and God says, son you can’t handle it, but I will put you into this here crevasse and walk past you, and when I pass you, you can see the back of me, and Moses comes down from this encounter with God with the covenant for his people (the Ten Commandments) his face is shining so much that his friends are afraid to approach him. I recently had a similar prayer: show yourself to me, I asked my ishta devata, let me experience you. Maybe that’s what’s happening: this full-bodied affliction that makes me feel, to use Weil’s metaphor, pierced to my very center like a butterfly on a board; this boiling over fury that leads folks to destroy their own property, or others; the blue wall of police pushing back against peaceful protestors, and the peaceful protestors pushing against the blue wall; a president embodying the worst, the weakest, and most cowardly leadership in modern history; every thoughtful Tweet and ignorant-ass reply; every heartache and every embrace, every release and transformation—maybe God* is in all of it, if only I can learn to see.

Now my prayer is for a new set of eyes. I am trying with an infinitesimal part of my soul to want to love, and I am apprenticing myself to a new kind of vision.

“Suppose there was a book full of only the word,
let – from whose clipped sound all things begin: fir
and firmament, feather, the first whale – and suppose

we could scroll through its pages every day
to find and pronounce a Let meant only for us –
we would stumble through the streets with open books,

eyes crossed from too much reading; we would speak
in auto-rhyme, the world would echo itself – and still
we’d continue in rounds, saying let and let and let

until even silent dreams had been allowed.”

— "The Book of Genesis" by Kei Miller

M to the A to the S to the K
Put the mask pon the face just to make the next day
Feds be hawkin me, jokers be stalkin me
I walk the streets and camouflage my identity

I’m not really dreaming right now, or at least not having the wild, vivid Coronavirus-pandemic dreams that others are having, but I do notice that frequently songs are popping into my head. Curtis Mayfield, Fleetwood Mac, Erykah Badu: it will just come without warning and stay. This morning during my physical practice it was The Fugees.

I wrote a paper about hip-hop and religion last semester, about this book and how it shook my perception of Muslim-ness and blackness, and my own indictment of the single story of Islam that I’ve been carrying. The Score was a defining album for me, a young black woman in a massive, somewhat integrated high school in white suburban Southwest Ohio. Let me say, for the record: I know nothing of growing up in Newark. At the same time, that record was a vital gift for reminding me of what being black can mean. I grew up in the suburbs, but there was plenty of racism and violence waiting for me there. I am a grateful, fortunate, privileged person. And I live in a world and country where being born into a black body still puts me at risk. Of having a late-term abortion. Of dying in childbirth. Of rape. Of being disbelieved and sent home from a hospital despite being sick. Of being ignored or ground up by the systems that run our world.

I have a hard time in my body some days. I throw a lot of shade at early Christians (and some modern ones, too) for their struggle or inability to reckon with embodiment, with the idea that the human body, with its desires and appetites and longings and sensations, isn’t a breeding ground for evil thoughts and behaviors. This isn’t unique to Christianity either: there are plenty of religions that also have practices or histories of repressing and subjugating the body in pursuit of spiritual practice. Still, nobody gets side eye like the folks you know best—or at least oldest—which is for me Christianity. The misogyny, self-hatred, the body shame embedded in purity rhetoric that are a matter of course in the Church is so discouraging. It’s sent folks screaming from pews and confessionals over and over. It’s easy for me to throw this shade, but I’m as susceptible to the struggle of embodiment as they were. On top of which, Christianity has a rich legacy of oppressing folks, of destroying bodies, families, communities with its rhetoric. At best, it has a checkered past of loving and valuing a diversity of experiences. Most of the time I model fierce love of my own black body in defiance of that past (and present?) but it’s harder some days than others.

One of the things I love about Tantra is its affection for the manifest world, or maybe acceptance is a better word. Rather than pursuing suffering and self-mortification of the body as a means of achieving enlightenment or communion, it seems to advocate a radical fusion between the world and the Divine. No one has ever said that to me before. Particularly when I’ve been told that my body is something I need to hide in order to prevent others from sin (1 Corinthians), or that looking a certain way is mandated in order to worship and take part in community (many places in New Testament), or that how I comport my body makes me a “woman of God” (Proverbs 31)—to hear that my body is not something to hide or control, not something to be shunned, is revolutionary.

One of the tenets that non-dual Tantra holds is that there is no separation between the individual and the Divine. There is no separation between anything and the Divine. Every sensation, experience, occasion, opportunity is Divine because the Divine is in all of it, is in every subject, object, person, place and thing involved. This is a big deal when you live in a black body and the voices around you tell you your body isn’t worth anything. When you don’t see yourself represented, when you don’t see black joy, black achievement, black health, black peace, black beauty, when the single story of what you see when you look through history is torture, slavery, subjugation, genocide, oppression, illness, death, and erasure of your ancestors, and the same for you and members of your family in the here and now—the idea that your black body is Divine is huge.

So why are we blase about black people being killed?

*

My posse in the Brooklyn wear the mask
My crew in the Jersey wear the mask
Stick up kids doin boogie woogie wear the mask
Yeah everybody wear the mask but how long will it last

These are Agbogho Mmuo, or Maiden Spirit masks. One is at the Art Institute, or at least, part of their collection. These are Igbo, from a region of Nigeria. Unlike (contemporary) Halloween or Eyes Wide Shut or clowning, where a mask gives its wearer license to act out fantasies or socially “inappropriate” behavior, masks like these that are worn in religious ritual. The mask is a doorway to incarnation of other Gods, and when the wearer puts on the mask, he (because it is a he) becomes that deity, he is that God present in body and flesh, as a part of the ritual. The man you knew who was a part of your community is no more, at least for a time; now he is the spirit and the God represented by the dress, the mask, and the dance. The God is in him, the God is him. “Whenever I… interview[ed] a masked dancer after his performance…, I was told that the dancer felt himself undergo some sort of transformation. He usually acted as if he was another being and not his usual self.”*

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

— New Testament, The Gospel of John

I heard a teacher once describe mantra using subject and object as principles of divine-human relationship. (Subject and object are words I hear get thrown around in Tantrik circles.) We tend to think of ourselves as subjects and when we chant a mantra we use it as an object to nod, bow, pay homage to—whatever—an energy or deity, or the capital-s Subject right? But what if, he said. What if the mantra is the Subject and the deity is the Subject, and we chanting the mantra are the object? What if the vibration created through the labor of our brain, vocal chords, and respiratory system is the means by which God is worshiping itself? What if we are a tool for God experiencing God?

So maybe this idea of the separation between human and divine, between manifest and unmanifest is a slippery one. Many of us believe that: a spiritual experience doesn’t have to involve ingesting anything and tripping, though it certainly can, but it might also be as easy as understanding what ritual act is for. Maybe all we have to do is put on the right outfit and dance; maybe all we have to do is open our mouths and enter into the vibration with sound. Maybe all we have to do is let the door between worlds slide open just a fraction, and we can see and know things that only seemed available to learned men who would hand it down from on high. Maybe our feet, our voices, our faces are available to us as means of connection with the divine, with no mediator necessary. Yes. My body as gateway.

Here, Toni Morrison writes, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it.**

I love that use of flesh as a verb. We flesh. We glory in the celebration of our skin and arms and feet and hands and heart and liver because we know how easily, how frequently it can be taken away, and how many will line up to take it away. She invites, demands, exhorts a righteous and dogged treasuring of our body because it is so vulnerable in American society. I ask myself, if Devii chose to incarnate as a black woman at the end of the 20th century—or for that matter, at the end of the 17th, 18th, or 19th century—in America, if she chose me because she wanted to be me, why would she choose a body so shitty? So risky? So vulnerable or burdened?

I ask this question a lot, not because I’m a philosopher, nor because I’m seeking attention or causing trouble. I’m reckoning. I’m reckoning a radical worldview of non-duality with the profound delight of creation and the near-constant destruction of black bodies, and the white teachers I ask can’t help me do it. I remember being in a training a few years back and the two teachers were talking about shedding the narrative of identity (some of y’all know what’s coming). Race isn’t real. Set aside things like race and gender. I remember one of them saying that we live privileged lives, that we can walk streets without fear. I raised my hand, and countered, I walk the streets in fear. I don’t live in a country or city that shows that it values my existence, that in fact shows that I and people who look like me are expendable, that forces of “law and order” can take me out, and so can private citizens, by and large, with impunity. To their credit, my teachers acknowledged the reality I was pointing out. They’re the only two white teachers who have ever done this. One of them told me later, You work that identity as a black woman for as long as you can, until it doesn’t work for you anymore. I thought this was an interesting idea. I know that race is a construct, like gender, or sexual orientation, or affiliation, like so many of the ways in which we identify. I know that it is a narrative, and that the lie that the world is telling that this construct is who you are (and maybe I’m telling myself that too) is an incomplete truth. And I know I buy groceries and go to school and get sick and require medical care and walk streets and go for jobs in a world that uses the racial construct to ignore, erase, and oppress me and others. I don’t know how to live free, how to pursue and realize liberation in a world whose systems have embedded in them, either implicitly or explicitly, the mission of grinding me into dust. I’m not asking for a world where nothing bad happens. But I need a better reason then, because it’s more fun that way. (I have heard teachers say this. I think it is the Apex of Privilege to characterize race-based violence as a more compelling plot point for God than its absence. It is thoughtless and harmful, and it’s bad teaching.) This is my work, this is my practice, this is what I uprooted my life and moved across the country to learn to do. And I’m lost.

Life is a precious gift. Is it, though? If I believe that the God/dess is all things, that s/he is Ahmaud Arbery and the father and son who chased, caught, and subsequently lynched him, and the bullet(s) that ended his life, and the camera that recorded it and the man holding the camera, and the system that indicted them only after white people found out about it, (and will likely be unable to get a conviction because of some legal fancy footwork),and you and me and anyone else who is sick to fucking death of black people being killed because they are alive… then really, how precious is my life? Maybe it’s not so special. I am not talking about conceptual, abstract suffering; I am talking about walking The Path as a black woman in America. What value, what prize is a black life if the God/dess ends them so constantly and easily? How do I walk it actually believing I should love my body and prize my life, knowing that it’s disposable by Divine design? How do I love, trust, surrender to That?

*

M to the A to the S to the K
Put the mask pon the face just to make the next day
Brothers be beefin', cops be thiefin'
Brothers be schemin, they should be teamin
Jokers be smokin, and staying broke-in
Bitches be teasin, there money skeezin'
Niggas be creapin, baby mothers be weepin
I walk the streets and camouflage my identity

*

Maybe being human, maybe being a black woman, is a great disguise. It tricks me into believing that I’m not Divine, but that I’m the sum of my physical parts and that only. The vidya, the knowledge this path is supposed to move me toward is that, right, is realizing that God is in all the things, all the time, everywhere, that good and bad are just stories that we assign to stuff? In which case, the veil of reality that has convinced me that my birthright is not Divinity, but is only this manifest reality, has done a bang-up job. I want to believe that if I know that you are Divinity, as I am Divinity, then I will not take from you to feed me, that I will not ignore you or curse you or erase you. I want to believe that if you know that I am Divinity, as you are Divinity, then you won’t shoot me, or assault me, or won’t even interrupt when I’m trying to make a point. I want to believe that the recognition of God in and as all will make me want to be a better person, and you too. But I’m not sure. It feels like painfully hollow consolation to weep with those who are weeping and to tell them that God is in the actions that have caused them grief. I don’t feel better thinking that, I feel worse. I would get rightfully punched in the mouth for offering that as comfort to another.

At the end of this, all I have is presence. I don’t know if that’s enough. It would be a very Christian thing to say that God knows life is suffering and allows it, and that’s why s/he sent Jesus to literally be with us, though all I/we have of that is old third-hand stories about it. Frankly, it’s not that far off from saying that Devi knows life is suffering because she built it and she is in it as us, experiencing domestic violence, struggling to make rent, grieving for and with those who are terrorized and murdered Now. And now. And now.

All I have, All. I. Have. is presence. I’m supposed to, in this darshan, believe that I am Devi. Perhaps when it comes to this, being closer to Devi is me believing that s/he is with me in my rage and grief and despair. Maybe if s/he’s with me, even as she’s showing me my own shortcomings or skewed vantage points or whatever, I won’t think s/he’s just some Epicurean masochist who wanted to experience the best and the worst of life, of my life, for shits and giggles.

I know. It’s that single set of footprints thing. Terrible, right? Cheesy AF.

But I don’t have anything else.

*I’m quoting from an Anthropology Master’s Thesis written by Emmanuel Chidi Onwuzolum written in 1977 at the University of British Columbia! Delighted to use such a… random resource!

**This is from Beloved, spoken by Baby Suggs to members of her (black) community. Beloved is… a brilliantly crafted novel.

Likita Japa: A practice for contemplative reading and writing

One of my classes this semester is Contemplative Prayer in Christianity. It’s great. I have a great semester of classes, but I can’t stop talking about this one so I guess it’s my favorite. I am eager to consider how it will transform in an online context. It’s tremendous. So if you’re visiting this space from Contemplative Prayer, welcome. In preparation for our conversation on Thursday, try out the following practice.

Supplies:

• your copy of Chapters on Prayer by Evagrius (or another contemplative or sacred text, if you’re doing this practice but not in class with me, or a mantra or intention you’re working with).

• your journal, a notebook, or a piece of paper (this is not a practice you can perform on a computer. Do it longhand, trust me.)

• At least one, and as many pens as you like (feel free to use different colors or widths. You’ll see why as we carry on.)

• a timer (optional). This practice only took me about 15 minutes, and it can take you shorter or longer than that. If you’re pressed for time, I’d encourage you to set a timer for 15 minutes, and get as far as you can in that time. It’s not a race though, so the timing isn’t really important. What’s important is the experience you have with the text—it’s rhythm, its consistency, its voice; what happens to you and in you as you work with it.

Take the time to read through the steps before you complete the activity.

Steps:

1. From your text, choose a sentence or line that spoke to you this time around. Think one sentence or one line. A complete thought. A paragraph is likely too long. I chose two sentences.

“Whether you pray along with the brethren or alone, strive to make your prayer more than a mere habit. Make it a true inner experience. ”

— #41, Evagrius, Chapters on Prayer

2. Write the line down, word for word, on your piece of paper.

3. Write it down again, right beside the first line.

4. Write it down, over and over, word for word. Notice what happens inside you as you write the line over and over. This isn’t a test. Are you having trouble remembering it? Have a look at it as you write it down, until you can remember it. Is it echoing? Can you hear the text repeating itself in your head? Do you repeat the text in your own voice as you write it? Are you forgetting words, or adding words? Notice what’s happening. Take your time. You might even want to say it out loud as you write it.

5. Don’t be afraid to get a little creative with your writing. Want to change shape or direction? Do it.

6. Or get a lot creative with it. Use one or several colored pens. Allow the sentence to blossom and expand, and see where this practice takes you.

7. See if you can finish a shape or fill a page. This should be fun, and while it might be generative, it shouldn’t be difficult or stressful. Notice what’s happening.

Take note of your experience trying this practice, so we can talk about it in class. Something to consider: you don’t have to be bound by the shape of the paper. You can use a different shape (like the circle that I used) or any other shape the passage feels like it lends itself to. This might also be an opportunity to explore sacred geometry and how it might affect the phrase you’ve chosen: does a circle, a triangle, a yantra, or a cross feel like a meaningful shape? Feel free to try writing the sentence or phrase in that shape, and see what happens. The creativity should be an option, not an obstacle. This practice is called Likita Japa: a devotional reading and writing practice. (I learned it from Chanti Tacoronte-Perez and Tracee Stanley.) Have your paper available to show and talk about when we meet next. Can’t wait to talk more about it on Thursday!

Online Yoga with Jess: March 23

If you know me, you know that I like to do the stuff in person: I prefer in-person classes to online ones, I’d rather meet for coffee or a walk than talk on the phone, I’d almost always rather look you in the face and take you by the hand. Alas, that’s not possible right now, is it? COVID-19 has us all learning and practicing and working remotely, for our own and others’ safety. We are all in need of community and practice, and I really want to make the space for us to practice together. So let’s do it!

• Join me for a one-hour gentle movement class this Monday, March 23 at 5:30 pm on Zoom. This week we’ll say a quick hello, do 15-20 minutes of gentle movement, and then transition into some Yoga Nidra. For class, a yoga mat, a blanket, at least two pillows or a bolster or two will all be useful—but don’t let not having the props stop you! Use your favorite comfy cuddle stuff. For more info on Yoga Nidra as a practice, have a look here. By now, we’ve all heard of Zoom, yes? (You can have a look and set up an account here, if you haven’t done so yet.) Hopefully, it will serve us as a great platform to see each others’ faces, and to work cooperatively and affectionately with our bodies.

• class is every Monday at 5:30 pm EDT. After the first week, we’ll be doing a variety of practices. Every week, we’ll move a bit, we’ll rest a bit, we’ll breathe a bit. The classes are designed to be gentle and accessible. Having a mat helps, but it isn’t mandatory. If you need other props, I’ll be sure to let you know on the day, and to suggest easy things around the house to use. (Classes will continue weekly through early May, at which point I’ll reassess and see if and what kind of changes might be necessary.)

• class is about movement, breath, healing and community. If you’re able, please use your camera when you call in. If the camera feels like too much right now, I get it. Don’t sweat it. You’ll be able to see me, and I’ll be demoing postures from time to time, but if I can, I’ll also want to see you, particularly if you have questions or concerns. This is not going to be a vigorous practice. No shade, I love them; but what I want to offer is something that warms us up gently and allows us to feel ourselves, and work with our energy. It’s not always easy to do that if you’re muscling your way into an arm balance.

• class is not meant to be a stand-in for medical advice. You know your body better than anyone else. Listen to it. If something doesn’t feel right, back off, or ask for a modification. Take rest when you need it. Don’t push.

• class is about being generous and compassionate with ourselves and one another. New to yoga? Great. Don’t know all the Sanskrit names for postures? No problem. This is not a time or practice to demand a lot of yourself or others. So: no shade, no body shaming, no judgment, internally or externally.

• class is free to take, but not free to teach. I’m offering this practice free of charge, in part because if I were teaching it on campus, it would be free of charge. Additionally, I am not interested in creating any barriers to practice, especially if you need it and feel like it’s difficult to access for whatever reason. Having said that, if you feel moved to show your appreciation of my efforts in a tangible or financial way, reach out to me and we can talk about that. It is by no means an expectation or a requirement. I want to practice with you, no strings attached, no payment necessary.

This class, while designed for my HDS community, is available to anyone in my network who’s interested. If you’re interested, but not a member of the HDS community, please let me know via Facebook. I will create a closed group where I’ll post the number for that week’s call-in. I’ll post it on Friday for the following Monday. (For this first week, I can just send it to you via DM.)

I’ve only recently begun to teach online, so this will be an adventure. I’m looking forward to discovering how we can care for ourselves and for each other in this new frontier. If this sounds at all useful to you, I hope I’ll see you there. xo