Jason Kelce’s next gig? Yoga teacher

Last Monday, the long-awaited moment finally came: NFL legend Jason Kelce announced his retirement.

After 13 years as the iconic, beloved center for the Philadelphia Eagles, Kelce hung up his cleats. Sobbing through an emotional press conference with his Super Bowl champion brother Travis, parents Donna and Ed, and wife Kylie seated in the front row, Jason admitted: “I don’t know what’s next, but I look forward to the new challenges and lessons that await.”

Sports journalists predict the popular NFL player and podcast host will make his way into broadcasting. 

But I’ve got the perfect next chapter for Jason Kelce. And it’s not what you think.

The guy’s a total yogi — bare feet and all.

As a yoga teacher myself, it’s been literal years since I’ve paid attention to American football. My family and I moved to Switzerland back in 2018, and since then, I’ve been happy to ignore the NFL in favor of European fussball, Granit Xhaka, and the Champions League. Sobering medical reports about the brain damage caused by degenerative disorder chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) have also increasingly kept me away.

But, over the course of the last NFL season, Jason Kelce and his brother Travis have brought me back — and turned me into a fangirl.

New Heights podcast subscriber? Check.

Giggling over memes of Jason topless in below-freezing temps cheering on his brother at the Buffalo Bills game? Check.

Curled up on the sofa with his Amazon Prime documentary, Kelce? Check.

This grounded, authentic athlete is a natural yoga teacher. No sticky mat or stretchy hamstrings required.

Here’s why:

  1. He’s refreshingly genuine. This realness? It’s yoga. Buddhist psychotherapist and yoga teacher Michael Stone once wrote that “Yoga is the practice of learning to be real.” Finding ease in your body, and cultivating true integration of mind, body, and spirit; this is yoga. With the Kelce brothers, what you see is what you get, motherf**kers. Talk of body hair and Dad bods. Jason rocking flip flops and an old muscle tank at his retirement press conference. Admitting to falling asleep at the bar the night he first met Kylie. “Being unapologetically yourself. That’s my role,” he says in Kelce. And it’s so refreshing. 
  1. He’s an embodied athlete. As a professional football player, Jason Kelce is at home in his body, comfortable taking up space and moving with intensity. (I mean, did you see him leap back up into the family suite at the Bills game? He’s an athlete for sure). Athleticism is his purpose and delight (and yes, sometimes scourge), providing “that jolt” of energy when he walks onto the field. This sense of dharma (Sanskrit for true calling or duty), driven by “being the best in the world” makes it clear exactly why it’s so hard to finally step away from it all.
  1. He laughs easily. You can tell a real yogi by how quick they are to laugh. In yoga and Buddhism, wisdom is embodied by a childlike lightness, a sense of wonder and flexibility. We practice to get more light-hearted, more easygoing. This spirit shows up as what yogis call prana (or life force). And Jason’s got it. New Heights is full of good-natured joking. Between Jason’s dry sense of humor and Travis’s head-thrown-back guffaw, it’s welcome soul medicine — especially when the brothers are making fun of Jason’s eyebrows or reminiscing about 1990s video games.
  1. He has a heart for service and integrity. Karma yoga is the yoga of action or work; it’s a service-oriented offering to the world. (Insert obligatoryKarma is the guy on the Chiefs, coming straight home to mereference here). Jason and Kylie both take pride in giving back off the football field on behalf of the Eagles Autism Foundation and via the Eagles Christmas album, which raised $3 million for about 70 nonprofit organizations in and around Philadelphia. Karma yoga aligns closely with satya, which is Sanskrit for the practice of thinking, speaking, and acting with integrity. The outpouring of gratitude from players and fans alike upon Jason’s retirement announcement overwhelmingly  highlighted his integrity as a leader.
  1. He’s all about interconnection. Interdependence rests at the heart of yoga philosophy. The idea that nothing and no one exists alone; we all unfold in and are made real by our relationships. (This concept is called dependent origination, if you want to get fancy about it, and it’s similar to the idea of the “Butterfly Effect.”) The Kelce brothers famously prioritize family. Kylie and Jason’s three toddler daughters feature centrally in their lives. Both Travis and Jason credit “Mama” Donna and “Papa” Ed Kelce in encouraging their great success. The brothers embody this strong sense of relationship, even when facing off against one another in the Super Bowl.
  1. He’s playful. In Hindu philosophy, the Sanskrit word leela connotes the idea that everything is divine play. When you think about a yoga practice — during which you might become a Tree, a Camel, a Monkey, or yes, even an Eagle — you can see how a certain playfulness and non-attachment to identity lie at yoga’s very heart. Jason doesn’t take himself too seriously. From his iconic Mummers costume at the 2018 Philly Super Bowl victory celebration to his infamous post-Super Bowl 2024 luchador mask to holding Pottery Barn tea parties with his daughters, there’s evidence of leela all around. 
  1. He’s both soft and strong. In every yoga pose, we aim to cultivate equal parts effort and ease. This concept is known as Sthira Sukham Asanam, and it’s a great guideline for moving through the world. Jason Kelce is simultaneously soft and strong: a tough-as-nails football player who’s also beloved for being emotionally intelligent. He’s a famously loving “girl dad” to Wyatt, Ellioitte, and Bennett. Both he and Travis admit to being frequently emotional — ”We’re criers” — and often tear up in public. And in his final moments as a professional football player, bombarded by cameras, Jason sobbed through his retirement press conference. Strength and softness personified. This is yoga. 

So, what do you say? Jason’s about to have a lot more time on his hands. Ready for the next chapter? 

Yoga’s great for healing football injuries. 

*

Rachel Meyer is an American writer and yoga teacher based in Switzerland. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, On Being, Yoga Journal, Tricycle, Yoga International, HuffPost, and more. You can find her at www.rachelmeyeryoga.com or @rachelmeyeryoga.

Building a safe(r) container

A student stopped me one day after class and told me this, seven or eight years ago at YoYoYogi in Portland. I’ve never forgotten it.

Isn’t that what we all want for our yoga students? For them to feel safe? 

Last night I taught the B. Yoga Basel TT cohort all about Yoga & Trauma Sensitivity. We covered everything from the basics of trauma theory to Bessel Van Der Kolk and Resmaa Menakem to Gabor Maté to reptilian brains to creating a culture of consent and how to offer quality hands-on assists and trauma-informed savasana options to guru power dynamics to the most burning question of all: whether yoga teachers should even be touching students in the first place. 

Whew!! It was a rich, nuanced, complicated, inspiring conversation — and it made me fall in love with teaching yoga all over again.

From San Francisco/Oakland to Portland to Boston to Basel, I feel grateful to have been a fly on the wall for some of the most thoughtful and progressive trauma-informed developments of the last decade.

Here in 2024, we are serving students more wholeheartedly and creating a safe(r) container for them at the same time. If that’s not ahimsa, I don’t know what is. 

Fat talk

There’s a really rich and wide-ranging conversation about bodies, food, culture, power, gender, and anti-fat bias over at Ten Percent Happier thanks to Virginia Sole-Smith and her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting In The Age Of Diet Culture

Don’t miss it if you have a body or feed a body or even more importantly, want the small humans in your life to grow up with a good relationship to food and their bodies.

There are so many smart moments to shout out, but highlights for me included:

🍳 The wonderful work of Evelyn Tribole on intuitive eating

🍿 A sociological and historical look at how body size (and race and gender) correlates to power 

🌮 Why you shouldn’t force your kid to eat five more bites of cucumber (aka teaching consent and a sense of internalized bodily trust!)

🥗 Why finding a way to move your body that gives you joy (and that you don’t dread) is way more sustainable than forcing yourself to do a workout you hate

🍝 Why the word “fat” shouldn’t be a slur — and how it can/should be reclaimed in the same way “queer” has been

I’ve been following and appreciating Sole-Smith’s work for years. Her 2018 book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt In America was a smart, thoughtful read (although I admittedly didn’t agree with her on everything), and it’s definitely worth adding to your list.

While you’re at it, check out Aubrey Gordon’s 2020 book, too: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat. I love listening to Aubrey’s podcast Maintenance Phase and super appreciate her voice on social justice as related to anti-fatness, bodies of all sizes, health, power, and calling bullshit on much of “wellness culture.” 

January can be such a shitty time for cultivating body acceptance and/or body neutrality, as there’s so much cultural noise out there telling people to control, regulate, Botox, manipulate, and shrink their bodies in service of the new year.

So it’s a great chance to counter the narrative. Just borrowed both of these from the library on my Libby app.

Your turn! 

Morning light at B. Yoga

January is my favorite time of year in the yoga studio.

Brave newbies nervously unroll their mats in the back row. Packed classes pulse with eager bodies ready to (re)build a practice. There’s a childlike, not-yet-disillusioned sense of hope.

I teach in this radiant B. Yoga Basel space every Friday at 9:30am.

Join me for a little 🧘🏽‍♀️ and 🎶 and 🫁 and mostly ✨.

Begin again

This is the heart of yoga and meditation.

You can start over in every new breath. You’re brand new every time you inhale. Every exhale, a letting go.

Doesn’t have to be the new year. Doesn’t have to be January 1st.

So don’t get tripped up on the New Year’s resolution bullshit. Every inhalation can be a new year. You can always just leave that last one behind, and begin again.

Sacred spaces

The other night we walked over to this twinkly old church for a holiday concert. It was spirited and brassy and singable.

Very few people go to church regularly in Switzerland. The political scene here is completely devoid of the bizarro religious nationalism (aka Christofascism) that’s dominant in the US right now. Needless to say, this is so refreshing.

But it also means that a lot of these beautiful old sanctuaries and cathedrals often sit empty. Many of them — like Basel’s stunning Pauluskirche and Elisabethenkirche — have been transformed into shared public spaces featuring cafes, often used for the arts, lectures, and all kinds of collective gathering.

I love this. It feels exactly like what a sacred space should actually be: an inclusive, welcoming, non-dogmatic community hub thrumming with melodies and bustling with people; a warm beacon in the cold twilight.

I’ve always wanted to teach yoga in a sanctuary space like this, similar to the long-running Yoga On The Labyrinth program at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. Maybe 2024 is the year? We’ll see.

Wishing you everything still, quiet, and nourishing on this darkest, longest night of the year. 🕯️✨

Heart-openers to put in your pocket

Winter has properly set in here in Basel.

Medieval chimneys puff smoke, morning temps hover around freezing, and the Christmas markets are back in full swing. It’s exactly the kind of cold that makes you want to hunch over, curl up, and hibernate.

So in class the other day, we spent a lot of time flowing through poses like this: heart-openers, shoulder openers, backbends. When you can remind your body to stay open and warm and loose, your spirit will usually follow — even when the air outside is bitter.

Raja Bhujangasana (King Cobra) is one extreme example. It really doesn’t matter if you ever touch your toes to your head or not. You can get similar antidotes to winter from poses like Cobra, Dhanurasana (Bow), Bridge, Camel, Reverse Tabletop, and variations of Reverse Namaskar (or just grabbing your elbows behind your back) in Tree or a wide-legged forward fold.

Put these heart-openers in your pocket for the days when you’d rather close off and contract. A few minutes of asana can be the perfect counter to the cold. ☃️

A quiet corner of Chicago O’Hare

I had a six-hour layover in Chicago, so did what any yoga teacher would do: wandered the terminal until I found a deserted corner and then plopped my ass on the floor for a few surreptitious stretches. Ahhh. A necessary balm for the 21-hour journey.

Des Moines International was quieter. The tiny airport felt like all sky, and old carpet, and silence.

I was in Iowa last weekend, unexpectedly, for a heartbreaking family funeral. There is immeasurable suffering in the world right now — Gaza, Israel, Maine — but this slice of heartbreak was particularly tragic, for its youth. I was so grateful to be able to make the trip, and to spend hours in community and conversation with my family — in the same time zone, for once.

Distance from loved ones is one of the hardest parts about living abroad. I think there’s a perception that expat life is all roses, all the time; so many people have casually remarked about our “life in paradise” over the years. It is often wonderful, yes. And I know I’ve subconsciously not shared a lot about our life here in Switzerland out of fear of people resenting me, especially in those first few years when Trump was still President and we had managed to escape, when so many others wished for the same and couldn’t.

But this is one hard thing. Wanting to be with your people when they’re suffering, and being so damn far away. I was fortunate to be able to return this time around. But I feel increasingly aware of those inevitable realities of life that Buddhist teachings highlight so clearly: illness, aging, and death. They come for all of us. And they are as much a part of life as the highlight-reel moments.

Yoga and meditation are practices designed to work with suffering, both in body and mind. They’ve been largely co-opted by Shiny Happy People wearing stretchy workout gear and spouting bullshit about abundance and manifestation. But thankfully, these practices go so much deeper than that.

I love how portable they are. A towel on the hotel room floor for a yoga mat. Legs up the wall in Terminal 5. Box breathing on the plane.

Atha yoga anusasanam. Now is (always) the time for the yoga to begin.

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. 

You Are Your Own Best Teacher

I’ve been re-reading Tricia Hersey’s recent book Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, and loving her emphasis on Womanist and Black liberation theologies.

This line jumped out at me today. ✨

It’s a version of something I often say in yoga class: Remember that you are your own best teacher, and you know your body better than anyone else. So take what I say with a grain of salt, and trust your own deep knowing as you move through your practice.

Did you grow up learning this sense of embodied trust in your own faith tradition? 🥴 Reclaiming it can be super hard for those of us who didn’t. (Ahem, Christianity.)

But that’s why I love the yogic (and Black Womanist, and ecofeminist) traditions. They cultivate that sense of inherent bodily goodness; of radical wholeness; of the fact that our bodies are wise and holy and strong, just as they are.

Grateful for theologians like Hersey who are spreading this powerful wisdom on a global scale. 🪷