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Prana

In yoga philosophy, the Sanskrit word prana means “life force.” It’s the spirit that drives you. Energy moving through. 

Sometimes it’s just not there, right? Last week Switzerland roasted under a massive heat wave. We all felt drained and sweaty and blah after endless days of 95° heat and humidity.

When cooling rain finally set in Friday night, it was like the whole country went “Ahhhhhh!!” And now, as the mist continues, our garden looks lush and green and renewed — and my body feels the same way.

PRANA.

We all do things, consciously and not, in our daily lives to feel more awake (or, in yogic terms, to increase our prana). We sing, or eat nourishing food, or dance, or play drums in an 80s band, or hang out with babies, or garden, or paint. And that’s great, because ultimately, we all want to feel more alive. 

Especially if you are currently spending 8 or 10 or 12 hours in front of a computer in a cubicle in some measly office building off a concrete highway.

For me, a regular yoga asana practice makes all the difference — even if that’s just five minutes a day. Paired with walks in the forest near our home, I feel rejuvenated and connected and alive. That time is nature is essential. 

What can you do today to increase your prana? It doesn’t have to be fancy. A quick puddle walk just might do the trick. 

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Bhakti bundt cakes

Stumbled across this old gem while I was in Nebraska. My first national print magazine publication, in a 2009 issue of Yoga Journal. On bundt cakes, bhakti, and the yoga of baking. 🍰

I’d just finished defending a masters thesis on Karl Marx and bodies and queer theology and the commodification of salvation. “The Joy of Baking” felt so damn cringe. 😝 (Needless to say: I did not pick that headline.)

But it truly was a joy to see my words in print for the first time. For a writer, that feeling never gets old. It’s at once thrilling and heart-racing, vulnerable and terrifying. Now that print media has essentially died (RIP magazines 😢) and the yoga world has changed so much, I’m glad to hang on to this dusty memory.

The last few years, I’ve been mostly writing behind-the-scenes, doing corporate communications work. But now, with several more personal projects in the pipeline, I’m feeling quietly excited to get publishing more frequently again.

Stay tuned. ✍🏼🪷

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Belly

I use this word a lot in my yoga classes — purposely.

BELLY. 🪷

Because it’s a great one to make friends with. Normalize. Welcome.

“Soften your belly like a nice loose Buddha belly.”

“Bend your knees so much you can press your belly into your thighs.”

“Hug your belly toward your spine to stabilize.”

“I like to move my foot to the right a few centimeters in this pose to make room for my belly.”

And so on.

BELLY. 🪷

Say it. Love it. Embrace it.

Twice a week I teach yoga to my kid’s soccer team. The other night I had them lie back on the turf in Supta Baddha Konasana and place both hands on their bellies, and say “Thank you, belly.”

They giggled. A lot.

It was so sweet and silly. And gentle.

Can you be a little more sweet, and silly, and gentle with yours? ✨

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Be like water

My favorite mantra of the last few years. We can thank Taoism for this one. ✨

Be like water. 💧

Go with the flow.

Don’t get attached to one place, or state. 🌊

When you bump into something hard (say, a rock mid-river) stay malleable, take a deep breath, and just flow amiably around it. 🪵

Pour your whole self into the space you’re in, whatever the size. ☕️

Stay soft.

Shapeshift to suit the season (ice, water, steam) — but always stay elementally the same. 🧊

Bend, don’t break.

Rinse off the dust. 🚿

Nurture the living. 🌻

Stay close to things that grow. 🌱

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Queer theory meets yoga philosophy

June #pridemonth always has me marveling at the incredible overlaps between queer theory and yoga philosophy. 🏳️‍🌈✨🏳️‍⚧️

Take these, for starters:

🌈 An emphasis on fluidity and non-essentialism

🌈 The sense that our identities are always and ever unfolding

🌈 A deep valuing of embodied experience as a source of wisdom

🌈 The notion that your body and your desires are inherently GOOD

🌈 A spirit of playfulness and camp. In Sanskrit, this looks like the word “leela”, meaning “divine play”

🌈 A history of folks who’ve consciously lived on the margins, outside of heteronormative nuclear family models

🌈 A countercultural spirit

🌈 A celebration of individuality

🌈 The value of relaxing into authenticity; dropping all masks

🌈 A rejection of dualistic binaries (though yoga still has much to unpack in this regard: the tired sun/moon, ida/pingala categories we use in hatha yoga desperately need to be queered)

If you want to check out some examples of queer theorists’ work, dig into:

✨ Judith Butler

✨ Adrienne Rich

✨ E. Patrick Johnson

✨ Angela Davis

✨ David Halperin

✨ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

✨ Audre Lorde

✨ and so many more I haven’t mentioned here

Who are your latest favorites? Love to hear.

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Everything is temporary

This is the most bittersweet time of year to be an expat. 🥺 Jobs change, contracts end, and people pack their families up to leave as soon as the school year ends.

Over the last few years, we’ve sent dear friends off to Ghana, Dubai, Singapore, England, Spain, France, Canada, Malaysia, Sweden, and more. Our little village just keeps churning.

Right now, folks are frantically selling off their cars and sofas and lighting fixtures — getting as physically light as possible so that they can return less expensively to their home countries, or move on to the next job somewhere else.

Being an expat means that your life abroad is tied to a job — and when that job ends, so does your permission to stay. But the folks you meet along the way become your immediate family, since none of you have blood family within hundreds (or thousands) of miles.

So living in an international community, you get really good at sad goodbyes, and super quick with warm hellos, and plan your life in weeks or months instead of years, as you all constantly hover in that liminal space of wondering: when will it be our turn? Should we bother hanging art on the walls?

The truth is, though, of course: everything is temporary. Living an expat life, this reality is exacerbated every single day. You know it won’t last forever. So you try to enjoy it while you can.

In places like where I grew up — Nebraska — a lot of people are born, stay for high school and college, settle in as adults, and spend their whole lives in the same community. It can be easy to forget, there amidst the illusion of permanence and safety, that even this is all temporary, too.

I like to think that, as bittersweet as this expat churn is, the “loving and leaving” that is our regular experience is just living deeply in relationship with the Buddhist and yogic teachings of impermanence.

That all things arise, change, and fade away.

Like an ocean wave. 

And when you know this, you become still. 

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Every yoga class should be a trauma-informed yoga class

Tonight I’m teaching the B Yoga Basel teacher trainees all about yoga and trauma-sensitivity: everything from Bessel Van Der Kolk to Resmaa Menakem to creating a culture of consent to polyvagal theory to patriarchal guru power dynamics and whether yoga teachers should even BE offering hands-on assists anymore. 

With an estimated 1 in 4 folks walking into your yoga class with a history of trauma, this was always important. But considering that the whole world has been experiencing collective trauma since March 2020, and Turkish and Syrian folks just experienced a literally earth-shattering loss of life and home, and Ukrainian refugees continue to flee mass suffering and genocidal war crimes, knowing how to teach trauma-informed yoga feels more essential than ever. 

I’m (pleasantly) stunned by how much has changed on this in the yoga world in the last decade. Ten or twelve years ago, we assumed that even in a class of 150 sweaty heaving bodies, every student should be touched at least once. Like touch-without-consent was only a good thing. 

Thank goodness the industry has woken up to trauma-awareness since then. There’s been a true outpouring of scholarship and activism in the last few years, and we’re all better for it. 

Teachers: there are so many subtle ways we can cultivate agency, encourage self-regulation, and help folks feel physically and emotionally safe in our classes. Let’s keep at it, together, until every yoga class is a trauma-informed yoga class. 

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Leave your politics out of YOGA!

Woke up to this Trump voter screaming at me over the interwebs the other day. 🤦‍♀️ Sorry, Karen. I will not.

First of all: Yoga IS political.

Any teacher who tells you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Waaaay beyond a workout, yoga is an ethical system, a spiritual discipline, a way of being in the world grounded in compassion and non-violence and the reality of interdependence.

When you really practice this sh*t, when you realize it’s so much more than just stretching, when you let these radically-loving yogic ethics pervade your every breath, then of *course* it’s political.

And, honestly, that’s why there are so few yoga teachers who’d really vote for Donald Trump or support imperialist war or condone the recent violence against trans kids in Texas and gay folks in Florida.

Many (most?) of us vote blue. 🗳 Because those very ethics of compassion and non-violence and interdependence make it clear the Christofascist lens of the modern-day GOP is completely incompatible with a yogic way of being.

Second: girl, it’s a free yoga class. On YouTube. Where there are six million other free classes you could take instead.

So if my politics turn you off, close the window. Click away. 🤷‍♀️

Or even better, stay awhile, and see if you can learn a thing or two about the meaningful, life-changing Eastern philosophy that’s behind all this bendy stuff to begin with. ✌🏼

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Debunking the Myths of Yoga

(studio BE)

September is National Yoga Month, so what better time to quash some of the most common misperceptions about yoga? Join us in debunking the myths of yoga together — starting with perhaps the most famous:⁠

  1. YOU HAVE TO BE FLEXIBLE TO PRACTICE YOGA.

Simply put, this one is a big NO. ❌⁠⁠ Yoga invites you to come exactly as you are: tight hamstrings, stiff shoulders, achy low back, creaky joints, busy mind, strained Achilles.⁠ If your muscles are tight, you’re in just the right place! Yoga was designed for you — and it will meet you where you are.⁠

Pop culture representations of yogis tend to overemphasize already-flexible models performing flashy, bendy poses. Don’t let those fool you. ⁠Yoga is just as suited for the couch potato middle-aged dad who can’t touch his toes as it is for the ex-ballerina whose foot slides easily behind her head.⁠

As you unroll your mat for the first (or 50th) time, trust that you’re in exactly the right place.

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