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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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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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Let’s weave it together, breath by breath, pose by pose

I hope my yoga and meditation classes might bring you back home to the truth that your childhood religious experiences may have taken from you: that, at heart,

🪷 You are whole.

🪷 Your body is good.

🪷 You can trust it.

🪷 Your spirit is wise.

🪷 Your heart is vast and spacious, far beyond any particular tradition.

🪷 Our lives are impermanent and fleeting, and we’re all gonna die, so we might as well cut the crap and learn how to really do this thing well while we’re here.

🪷 You and I and all of us are caught up in an interconnected interfaith web of being that no toxic patriarchal theology can take away.

Let’s weave it together, breath by breath, pose by pose.

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Start from the belief that you are good

There’s a great new series of interviews this week on parenting (and re-parenting ourselves) with clinical psychologist @drbeckyatgoodinside over on Glennon Doyle’s podcast. I listened and nodded my head throughout.

For anyone who’s interested in raising well-adjusted children who don’t have to unlearn toxic theology later on, it’s full of gems. 

When you were a little kid growing up in the church, did you learn that you were broken and a sinner? Destined to be separate from God because you kept falling short? Yeah, that’s lots of us. 🙋‍♀️ Hashtag #christianity. Even with very loving and well-intended parents, toxic Christian theology subtly infused the idea that we were naturally depraved, our flesh was sinful, and our desires were not to be trusted.

I love Dr. Becky‘s core emphasis that children are naturally GOOD, and we should treat them as though they are good inside, even when they’re having a hard time (aka what some people like to call “misbehaving” — btw, I hate this word.). The same assumption of goodness goes for you and me, and even that co-worker who drives you mad, or the ex who broke your heart.

This spirit, of course, aligns with the fundamental Buddhist notion of basic goodness. And, as Glennon mentions in the interview, it completely contradicts the Christian notion of original sin many of us church kids have had to unlearn over the years.

Give it a listen. 🎧 I’m a big fan of this wholehearted parenting approach and love how it dovetails with Buddhist and yoga philosophy.

It’s all connected, folks. ✨

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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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What is the shape of your suffering?

The thing that first drew me to Buddhism was its honesty about the fact that sometimes, well, life just sucks. And that’s how it is. For everyone.

It was so refreshing. 🌱

Eighteen years ago today I sat in the front pew with my family for my dad’s funeral. It was a grand and sweeping celebration of life that he had planned out himself, complete with soaring hymns and a sanctuary full of kind, devoted Lutherans who’d been like family to us throughout his years of campus ministry.

To be honest, I don’t remember much of the wake the day before, or the lunch afterward, or any of that week — it’s all a smoky haze of grief.

But I do remember, very clearly, the Christian platitudes that came our way, about how he “was in a better place” and “God had a new angel” and “it was part of God’s plan,” and how they all felt supremely spiritual bypass-y, as well-intentioned as they were.

That spring, I was taking a course in my graduate program on Buddhism in Contemporary America. It became a beacon; a solace.

The Buddhist teaching that “Life is suffering” (aka the First Noble Truth) felt like the only honest thing in that season of grief.

It gave me such quiet comfort to know that even this most unfair of losses — my young father, lost to cancer at age 58; me only 26, witnessing my peers cherish decades with their not-dead parents — was in fact just a part of being alive. A normal, universal aspect of this whole being human and having a body thing.

So that was the shape of my suffering back in May 2005, which, of course, brought me to yoga, and to meditation, and a life devoted to living and sharing these practices. 

What’s the shape of yours? It ebbs and flows over time, of course — from loss and death to aging and disappointment, uncertainty and malaise, the job you wanted and didn’t get, the love you found and lost, the child you wanted and never got, or the being you adore whose own suffering breaks your heart.

Suffering is baked-in to the human experience. The sooner we can be real about that, and connect on that level, dropping the bullshit small talk and really diving in together, the sooner we’ll find a flash of peace amidst the shadows. 

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Just notice

I say this about a million times per class. It’s the key to everything. 

Yoga and meditation are all about learning how to FEEL. Staying with discomfort — whether that’s an emotion or a tricky pose — without freaking out or running away. Making friends with all the very human feelings that arise within the course of an hour or a day or a lifetime.

Which is hard in a culture where, from little on up, we’re told things like “Stop crying!!” or “Nice girls don’t get angry!” or “Why so serious? Put on a smile.”

Your anxious thoughts or difficult moods aren’t good or bad; they just ARE.

See what happens if you can start to just notice them (“Huh, isn’t that interesting, I feel completely pissed off right now”) and stay with them without judging (“Oof, my hamstrings are SCREAMING in this pose!! I’m gonna DIE!!”).

Sit tenderly, and turn toward the discomfort. Breathe into it. 

Over time, slowly, surely, you’ll be less likely to get tangled up in your thoughts and feelings — realizing they’re temporary, and you’re steady, and spacious, like the sky.

It’s deeply psychological. We’re re-wiring, re-learning what it means to be fully human. (So much more than just poses.)

And that’s only a good thing. 

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You understand suffering. That’s why you should teach.

Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been reading (and loving) Susan Cain’s new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.

In one chapter, Cain tells the story of how renowned meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg helped to bring Buddhism to the West, finding refuge in meditation practice after suffering profoundly in her youth.

The young Salzberg’s teacher in India, Dipa Ma, tells her she’s ready to teach — not because she’s done some 200 hour training, but because she deeply understands suffering.

I love this and believe it to be so true. 

Sure, there are countless 22-year-old Instagram yoga teachers performing all kinds of athleisure-clad stunts while spouting New Age clichés about positive thinking and the Law of Attraction.

But the only teachers I am really drawn to these days are those who have truly known suffering and loss and have come out the other side. People who have been *through it*.

Who cares what they look like in yoga pants, or whether they can touch their toes?! 

Yoga and mindfulness colleagues, this is where we really have something to offer; a reminder that can keep us grounded when the pressure to do superficial bullshit (like making those cringe-worthy reels to keep up with the algorithm) feels overwhelming.

This practice is all about relieving mental and physical suffering. We can dress it up in athletic poses and expensive mala beads, but those are just trappings of the profound soul lessons — and potential for true ease, relief, and liberation — that all lie underneath.

So don’t worry about the damn reels or the washboard abs. Stay true to the teachings and just say real things that help people deal with their toughest shit. That’s what folks need the most right now, anyway. ✨

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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. ✌🏼