Monday, October 24, 2011

Choosing community

So here we are, months after my last post and this fool’s life has changed and shifted dramatically. While I still sip a cup of ritual coffee as I pen these words, most of the rest has changed. When I last wrote, I was a guest in a foreign city for a finite amount of time. Not only that, I was intentionally disconnected from any form of employment. I spent months in San Francisco doing little more than reading, drinking tea and practicing yoga (exaggeration included…)

A transition period ensued between that life and my settling in Montreal. During this time, I took full advantage of August’s bountiful warm and sunny demeanor to eat blueberries, reconnect with friends and family and ride my bike around big lakes and on small islands. I also did spend some time fretting and worrying to some degree about the future, one that didn’t seem to have much direction other than teaching yoga in Montreal. August was a truly amazing time for me. I got the chance to put all sorts of principles into practice and watch yoga come to life in a completely new circumstance. My situation had the potential to generate a lot of needless anxiety. My yoga homework was to be present to the anxiety and simultaneously find joy, steadiness and ease within this unknown and new territory, and it worked out pretty well! This felt like a clear affirmation of the potency and power of the tools I am being taught and beginning to use in my life. I was shown through direct experience that this process is sound and does indeed help me to accept my humanness in a diversity of circumstances.

How exciting!

Autumn has me settling in and working to find people and spaces in which to share all that I’ve learned about yoga on my epic pilgrimage to the northern California coast. What has been truly amazing about this transition, this return, has been to observe my reactions to sameness, to familiar places and people, watching myself going through a long and drawn out transition in which I didn’t know what was to come.

Now, the always-terrifying task of putting myself out there in the world is upon me. Oh the things I’m learning about myself and about yoga in the process of doing that…

About here…

Landing in a new community is a very exciting thing indeed. And I’ve been really fortunate to choose a community, which is rich, diverse, vibrant, dynamic and bountiful. Already, I’m being given the opportunity to practice with a diverse group of people, in many different settings and everywhere I turn, people want to practice yoga. It is strange to be faced with the reality of a place when I’ve been concocting a strange question mark filled fantasy about it in my mind for months.

About yoga and community…

A surprise that I hadn’t expected about teaching yoga is the incredible capacity it has to bring people together. If only for us to come together to share our practice, it is worth doing. There are incredible teachers in each and every one of my students. If there is a willing student, no matter where or who they are, it is absolutely exhilarating to share this practice with them. I am really actively relishing in this joy and newness and sincerely hope that this feeling never goes away! A piece of advice given me from a great teacher often comes to mind: Let yourself be transformed by your students.

About the fool…

Ah, the fool. Here the fool is finding her place, standing still, gardening and nurturing one place for a while. Should be scary really but it’s not. If feels stimulating and exciting and I don’t think that this fool has lost any of her foolishness from standing still. In fact, from being in one place, the foolish tendencies only become that much more obvious. The fear of complacency and boredom has dissolved as I watch myself in action in this new space. I am witnessing myself wedge into nooks and crannies in which to teach and learn, resisting too much comfort and actively engaging with the opportunities I’m being given to ask the question: is this what I’m here to do? I can trust in my foolish tendencies to always provide a cliff edge only a few paces away!