voice of the heart.
“
श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुण: परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात् ।
स्वभावनियतं कर्म कुर्वन्नाप्नोति किल्बिषम् ॥ ४७ ॥
śreyān sva-dharmo viguṇaḥ
para-dharmāt sv-anuṣṭhitāt
svabhāva-niyataṁ karma
kurvan nāpnoti kilbiṣam
It is better to live your dharma
poorly Rather than perfectly live
another’s dharma. When you act upon your own dharma
You are naturally free from wrongdoing.
”
shift + adapt
The bright surprise of sunflowers awakens my mind as they flash by my train window on a journey from Zürich to Geneva. The moment their yellow heads nod to meet my gaze, the golden smile of an old dear friend shines forth in some mixture of memory and daydream. I am always reminded of her when I see sunflower fields; her ashes strewn in a similar field thousands of miles away in rural Ohio now ten years ago. I wonder how many grains of pollen, yellow petal tips, seed husks and bird songs she has become by now through season after season of resting quietly in the soil, filtered up through roots to be reborn again and again as something wholly new. My eyes close and focus shifts. While the glimmer of my friend endures against my eyelids and through my pulse, I am aware of my physical surroundings once again. Here in the train, a baby is screaming, others are quietly chatting, snoozing or staring into the abyss of their phones. Cello and piano swim in my my headphones, adding to the floating quality of my mind. I am held in the moment by my own awareness but also by the weight and power of presence. Through the perception of senses, thoughts, and memories I am cradled in this moment, carried forward on the whispered wings of feeling.
In moments like these, when I am able to step back and give myself space to feel, to dive beneath the intellect and the ever-running litany of thoughts, I become a clear prism of the totality that I am: reflecting my past experiences, the depths of my interests and pursuits, my inherent nature, and the wisdom which has been born of the meeting of these elements.
I can witness in this space (a space that is always present, simply often unrecognized) all that enters my awareness. On the train, I take in the flowers, the memories and daydreams, the screams, the music, my thoughts, the tone of my mind and the feelings in my body… this space is both naturally me but also met in glimpses through decades of study and practice. It is the culmination of continuous effort to settle into effortlessness for a passing moment.
Suddenly the sun peeks into the train window after two hours of cloud filled skies and lights up the dust on my computer screen. It is now harder to see the screen but easier to see the sunflowers glinting out from the green fields. Life is like that. The sudden shift of one small thing and the whole view changes. When we are open to that shift, the transition is often much smoother, sometimes nearly seamless.
When we are open and have done the work to be so, we then build the capacity to be far more easeful and to appreciate it all. We recognize our own open space. We perceive the experience. We allow without fixating, we act without attachment. It all sounds like a cliché, but only because it is so very far away from how we often interact with life. My own path has been a personal desire to challenge this status quo within, to use that internal challenge as a continuous assessment and upgrading of my contributions as mother, wife, teacher and human, and to share what I learn with others along the way
In the last ten months I have settled and WE have settled into a very good life here in Switzerland. Content is really a perfect word. Appreciative would be another. When things have suddenly shifted in our life together and the whole view has changed, our family seems to have adapted steadily through the transitions. It seems that we, together, are open to change. I think that is an excellent sign. We have evolved and grown together as individuals and as a family. We have been profoundly lucky in many circumstances, but we have also worked hard to build a life that reflects what we really value. Part of that process has been a steady refining and discarding of what we no longer need or identify with.
This most recent year involved moving out of a home we loved, moving overseas (again) and, for me personally, beginning to come to terms with a reality that grows ever clearer: that my path of livelihood and career is shifting. Letting go of a beautiful studio I had built in our home was only the beginning. Now as I traverse once more along the path of “yoga teacher” here in Switzerland, I am faced with some potent decisions that are pointing to a continuation of the shift that began a year ago (and in some ways started many years prior). In contemplating these big decisions, I am reminded that my personal journey to share what I love through yoga has never been an easy one, even when everything looked close to perfect from the outside.
dharma
If you were to ask me who I was and what I wanted ten years ago, I would have told you I was an aspiring yoga teacher who had built her own method and aimed to travel the world and share that work with many people. I was ambitious and driven to climb a ladder of my own making and I wanted to be seen and known as a “great teacher”. Due to a combination of timing, luck, and my own driven and creative spirit, I found myself rising in popularity in the first decade of my teaching career. In my surprising and exhilarating ascent to “yoga fame”, I had opportunities to travel and teach in numerous cities and was written about in publications from NY Magazine to Yoga Journal. These statistics I tallied - cities taught, press received, students per week, my photo on the wall of the highest grossing Lululemon in the country at the time: they were part and parcel to the core of my outer identity. I wore that identity around like an armor, impenetrable and shiny. On the outside I may have looked strong and fierce and successful. On the inside, however, I acknowledged in reflective moments that all of these stats only ever served as a buttress to my ego and that there was something about the trajectory I was on that felt “off”, both in relation to the true essence of what I thought Yoga was about but also in the relationship between what I was sharing externally versus what I was being called toward in my heart. In yoga this calling into our innermost purpose and duty, the voice of the heart, is called our dharma.
circa 2010 - photo by Matt Taplinger
Looking back, it was a truly special and potent time in the yoga scene, especially in New York where I lived. There was an electrical feeling of “things happening” along with a tide of major events, festivals and gigantic (often outdoor) classes offered to the public - in retrospect it seems likely to have been the golden age of yoga in relation to the business and public spheres. In the height of my own ascent, I had a chance to teach hundreds of people in places like Bryant Park, Governor’s Island, Kripalu and the Wanderlust Festival. It was truly an honor and a gift to have such opportunities and I recall them still with a lot of fondness - a modern yoga teacher’s dream, perhaps. By uniting the things I identified with and loved most at the time, (music, dance, DJs, joyful and exploratory movement) I aimed to extend people an opportunity to step outside of their inner restraints and try something new. I wanted to offer them a taste of ego-lessness and fearlessness through risk-taking in a relatively safe environment infused with joy. Quite astonishingly to me there were many people who also seemed to love it, or at least the idea of it.
A part of me always knew that the essence of those classes was never about the showy movements, but about the inner growth people found when attempting something new, challenging, difficult, terrifying even. At the heart of my “method” was the shakiness of not knowing and trying anyway, and also an opportunity to shed ideas or beliefs (about ourselves, yoga, dance) that were limiting. These elements, no matter how much I or my teaching has changed over time, remain a critical part of how I approach practice. In yoga terms we might define them as embracing impermanence (anitya), steady and diligent practice (abhyasa) and finally, detachment or the capacity to not fixate on self or things external (vairagya).
Nature, of which humans are an inherent part, is always changing and transforming. This is something we can tend to forget or ignore but recognizing this transience and impermanence helps us stay connected to a basic sense of reality and is an important part of Buddhist teachings, which have a deep and storied relationship with Yoga, and which I have also studied extensively. Impermanence is also what makes any codified practice or systematization of dynamic truth ultimately limited and too constraining. When I taught my “method” (which never started as a method, only a playful exploration), aspects of that work and those of my own heart were already evolving as soon as I began to share. However, the problem I faced with my growing popularity was that I immediately felt locked into what made my name so well-known. As my inner landscape continued to play and seek and question, I attempted simultaneously to solidify the outer expressions so that I could stay relevant within the financial realities of the yoga and fitness industry. I was told I needed to have set sequences of poses, a set structure for the class, I needed to be able to scale it (essentially dumb it down) so I could teach it to other teachers, and - oh, by the way would I be open to selling the brand to a large fitness chain so that they could promote it (and sell me and my “method”) around the country? In all of this external excitement and scrambling, the essence of the class was fully lost on the people who had all of the money and also stood to profit off of my ideas.
Let me shift forward again to the present, where it is within this dichotomy that I find myself still often struggling today: the dance between what sells, who is selling it, and what is actually meaningful and useful for people in their total life. Most importantly, I am often challenged with how these things interplay with my own values and what I am actually good at.
the heart of yoga
When I first began practicing yoga in 2003, I thought of asana as nothing short of a miracle because it seemed to fix the back pain that essentially ended my dance career, and I began teaching with the attitude that yoga postures could solve many problems. Less than a decade later my physical practice appeared to be the primary cause of problems: namely intense pain and dysfunction, so severe that at one point I could not walk from a back injury. Looking back it was always a part of my journey to understand how one thing could be so useful and also so destabilizing depending on the context. After I recovered from the back injury, I continued to teach in similar ways despite my sense that something was clearly wrong in some of my physical approaches to teaching. I did this in large part because I felt financially and personally locked into the identity that had made me popular. In my own practice and studies, however I began shifting my direction and deepened my pursuit of more subtle and therapeutic applications of yoga. A chasm began to grow between what I was sharing in the classroom and what I was exploring on my own. Despite my attempts to begin to weave in more subtle concepts, it didn’t always seem to fit the narrative of who I was as a teacher and what people came to expect of me.
Then in 2016 our daughter, Miya, was born. During the end of pregnancy and afterward, my general pain and discomfort intensified so much, I started to blame asana for much of my suffering and by the end of 2019, I considered giving up on yoga entirely. I felt betrayed by the practice for a myriad of reasons. This experience, and then the evolution of becoming a mother and all that came with that powerful role, helped me begin to embrace my heart’s calling as well as discard the things that no longer served me or my students.
November 2019 - Insight Body Training Zürich
All along the way, at each of the crucial points where I could have left my yoga teaching career behind, I pushed myself to keep seeking. I sensed somehow that it was not the asana that was the issue, but it was likely how I approached the postures and what I was not able to see or feel inside myself. I dove further into studying therapeutic yoga applications and challenged my mind with meditation and Buddhist philosophy and psychology. I took on other movement modalities like joint mobility training and weight lifting. I also pushed myself to explore the subtle layers of the body from a scientific perspective and have spent hundreds of hours exploring my body through slow, subtle, gentle movements that have given me great insights and have allowed me to slow down and look more intensively at the tiniest components of asana and natural human movement. I have discovered that it is often these tiny components which can make all the difference.
What I share in classrooms has also changed vastly over time, caused in part by my seeking but also very much the reason for the seeking itself. I have sensed for a long time that when I would teach asana in certain ways, there was often a disconnect in many people simply striving for an external aesthetic of the pose rather than experiencing their own body’s wisdom within the exploration and embodiment of the asana. I could also sense that people were using “yoga” as a way of checking out and shutting down in the face of what challenged them, rather than compassionately staying open to and with themselves amidst the challenge, which to me is the very heart of what Yoga is calling us to do.
mama dharma
Berlin, May 2016
As I mention above, when our daughter Miya was born my dharma, or life’s calling, took a seismic shift. It was something I was not prepared for and if I look carefully at the trajectory of my career since she arrived, it has slowly (sometimes with much inner resistance) transformed so that being a mother and giving Miya the best life I can imagine for her has become the one true dharma of my life. It has also transformed what Yoga means to me and why it is so important. Over the last eight years, every external and superficial scaffold propping up my role as “yoga teacher” has fallen away almost completely, and what has been revealed within is a different entity altogether. Yoga is my life, but it is my life now because of the mother I continuously aspire to be. It is my life because I aim to constantly assess and reassess myself to find the blind spots and the pieces that are calling to be put back together in my heart. I learned to do much of this assessment sweating on a yoga mat or seated on a meditation cushion, but the heart of the real work happens every day, moment by moment, as my ability to inquire into and navigate my experience allows me to be a better mother, wife and human.
When Miya came into our life, it slowly became clear that nothing else mattered to me as much as her well-being and that my existence became centered around what was most meaningful for her. I shifted my work to be able to be at home as much as possible, and ultimately built a business model around that idea first in Zürich and then again in New York. In turn, Miya grew up not only seeing me as a dynamic mother who integrated work into mothering, she also got to take part in the aspects of yoga that she herself naturally loves: the movement, the community, and the exchange of sharing meaningful and valuable aspects of herself with others. Through watching her interact with Yoga in these ways, it has inspired me even further to expand how I share the work and to build our lives around the amazing gifts Yoga has offered us. It is through these gifts that we are able to be open and adaptive. It is no mistake that Miya continues to thrive and that our family is always evolving around what we encounter in our lives. We have had many difficult times but our ability to navigate these difficulties is grounded in the inquiry, balance and internal steadiness that I have found in Yoga.
shift + adapt again
I arrive to the present moment where I have been taking a deep dive into the questions, “Who am I and what do I want?” Also, “What is meaningful to me? What am I good at?” Echoes of past iterations of myself perservere. I still enjoy sharing my insights and offering people the space to discover something about themselves, maybe even more so now that I have been on such a vast journey through doubt and difficulty. I still want to offer work that is meaningful and useful to people, and I constantly challenge myself to learn and grow so that I continuously show up with insights that people can potentially apply to themselves.
Where there used to exist a chasm between what I taught and what I practiced and studied, there is now a steady connection. My discoveries in my own practice are like the spring that feeds the river of what I share. But despite the deep connection I have to what I offer people, something is no longer working in the spaces in which I am offering it. And here is where the shift seems to need to happen.
I am not yet sure where my feet will land in the next few months as a professional. It is clear that a change in venue and possibly even vocational direction is inevitable. What I do know is that because of the practices I have explored and cultivated over these last twenty years, I am certain of my ability to adapt and evolve in the face of this huge shift. With my family and my daughter as the true north on the compass of my life, it is also clear that no matter how difficult the next steps may be, they will be inherently guided by the voice of my heart.
As I conclude this essay I am brought back to that first moment on the train to Geneva where the sunflowers awakened my heart and spurred me to begin writing. It has taken nearly a month to finish this work, in part because of my own realization that the subject about which I was writing was in its own deep process of evolution. I could not bring myself to end the work while it was clear something big was about to happen. That big shift has now officially begun but it will take some months and maybe even years before it reveals where it will take me.
While I sit in my small practice studio at home, I hear my daughter and husband sifting through legos as they build a world together in the attic. They listen to a story on the iPad while building, and their mish-mash of legos tinkling creates a chorus together with the mumble of a lawnmower out on a lawn somewhere in the distance. The majestic rotmilan bird cries her triumph from a tree up the mountain. A breeze kisses my cheek and shoulder. An old familiar ache in my left gluteus reminds me to lie down and visit with my body after I hit “publish” after these last three hours of sitting at the laptop. All of these points of awareness dance in my experience, woven together with the weft of Yoga.
I have been sharply reminded yet again in the last few days that this life is always in flux, never guaranteed. The only rule to count on is that everything will change and fall away eventually. With that truth in mind, I carry the preciousness of these transformative practices in my heart. I have been so fortunate to have a life that guided me into Yoga and am so appreciative to have had this much time to explore what Yoga really is and what it can offer us.
Regardless of where I land in my career and the transitions that have been set in motion, these precious practices will be carried along wherever I go and the heart of my dharma will remain steady; the voice of my heart crying ever clearer, triumphant from the mountaintop of a life well-studied, well-explored, well-lived.