Savasana: Be Still and Know

I love teaching yoga. The truth is I love it more than teaching the university courses that my PhD afforded me the opportunity to teach. I find it exciting, engaging, impactful, and adventurous.

But in Washington DC, “I teach yoga” is not the appropriate answer to a query at a dinner party. Sometimes I accommodate - I pretend the last 5 years didn’t happen and I skip right back to when I taught literature. People find that appropriately interesting. Or I say I’m an educator and leave it at that. Sometimes my husband does it for me -- I say I teach yoga, and he finds a way to share where my academic degrees are from. It’s as if at that point everyone can breathe a sigh of relief and I fit in again.

I was just with a friend yesterday and she asked if we could meet for a morning coffee. I told her I'd love to, after I was done teaching a yoga class at our local gym. She asked, "You teach at the St. James Club?" "I do", I answered. "Why?" she asked.

I am currently writing a book to answer that question.

But this repeated encounter, perhaps obvious, is worth noticing: why is it that teaching yoga is considered less significant, less important, less appropriate than teaching literature? Why is it that teaching something that actually addresses the body directly is considered “beneath” a person with an advanced degree as an educator? Why is there such discomfort, mine included, around my dramatic redirection from one kind of teaching to another?

The answers are surely steeped in issues of class, privilege, western ideology, the patriarchy and the university. Steeped in academic institutions with complicated histories and overt/covert walls that serve to hierarchize, separate and exclude. Steeped in the intellectual study of bodies that consistently maintains the dichotomy of the thinking mind and the feeling body and the privileging of one over the other. The placement of intellectual craft over felt experience is tantamount to the project of the university. But in the same way that disability studies forces a reckoning with the able-body as the primary, or race studies makes us question how whiteness is the norm by which all is measured, so too we might grapple with the prioritization of brain work over body work. Why is my love of literature a subject of worth, while my passion for yoga is not? Why is one supreme?

To delve a little deeper into this quandary, I am drawn back to my years studying and teaching comparative literature. I came of age as an academic steeped in deconstruction. It was mind-bending and exciting. I was taught to pay special attention to moments in texts where the transparency of communication became cloudy and our attention was directed to the very act of attempting to communicate. Being absorbed into a narrative experience is pleasurable, yet at the same time, deconstruction reminds us that it is delusional. Delusional because we are merely looking at words on the page, or images projected onto a screen. Deconstruction asks the reader to be the quintessential skeptic by recognizing that there is no such thing as direct experience in art: narration is always filtered and never transparent. I learned to be most fascinated by the type of art that carefully, beautifully, complicatedly draws our attention to its own impossibility - the impossibility of communicating, of getting close to the thing itself. A text offers a woolen knot to be unraveled, a secret puzzle to be de-coded. And what I learned in those intellectually-exhilarating classes was this: when you get to the heart of the matter, there is always already a foregone conclusion. The conclusion is that communication is impossibly flawed and unstable, with no capacity to stand in for the actual. And "good" art always reminds its audience of this very limitation.

While my literary training taught me to be skeptical of expression and to find it inherently faulty, my yoga training leads me to believe in the profound power of inexpressibility. It has taught me to focus on how it feels to be embodied, corporeal, and animate. Yoga has led me out of the university and into the studio precisely because yoga defies the domain of the skeptic. It is not something to be unpacked and ultimately shown to be straining against its own impossibility. To be sure, there are systemic issues to be analyzed and critiqued in yoga -- not least of all, the cultural takeover by the Western fitness industry of an ancient Indian philosophy and science for healthy living. Not least of all, the essential need to extend our caring to people who have not felt welcome or included in a wellness space. At the same time, I would argue that the foundational premise of yoga is a radical one: that you can enact change through bodily postures. It’s not just that you can actually make meaning, but more so: you can generate a way of feeling and a way of being. Perhaps yoga is the greatest act of deconstructive rebellion -- it bypasses language and representation completely through embodied transformation.

And embodied transformation is what we encounter in the final pose of a yoga class. We each lie in stillness on our own mats and experience where the journey has taken us. If we're lucky, we get to do it again tomorrow.