My biggest impression after the Winter Gathering is just how grateful I am for the overlapping communities in my life. This event required me to play a lot of roles, from organizer and host, to presenter, space holder, and participant. Everyone at the event was someone who has been part of my yoga journey in some capacity for varying lengths of time. Many in attendance were not just people who I feel fiercely committed to doing the work of personal and social growth with, but through this work they’ve become my friends to laugh and be silly with, my support in times of need, my confidantes, and my accountability. After years of working together we’ve got significant personal and professional interest in each other’s lives. Of course, one of the challenges of being so close with one another is the potential of finding yourself in an echo chamber that just amplifies your blind spots and hides the personal and structural flaws that are most in need of the work. Riding the waves of positive emotion that were forged during our weekend of sharing, I realize that it’s important to stay open to challenge and strive for equity in our spaces.
“Our methodologies are forged within the default mindset of colonization over people, planet, capitalism-as-religion, winner take all, rape and plunder as spoils of victory, human and natural resources taken as subjugation to the land-owning, resource controlling, very,very privileged few…”
“…with all due respect to Ghandi— We can no longer afford to just be the change. We actually have to be the transformation, which is to say we have to transcend the form, the construct we find ourselves in.
The only way we can do that is to observe the construct that we’re in instead of trying to tinker with it right away with the same blind spots that we came to the problem with.” Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Rev. angel Kyodo Williams and Lama Rod Owens with Jasmine Syedullah, PhD
The theme of our weekend was ‘Authenticity’ and without any pre-conceived notions of what we would find, recognizing that every voice has value, and knowing that anything we arrived at would change, we set out to explore who we are as individuals and community. We looked at ways that we can create spaces that encourage authenticity and to hold space for each individual’s view on our shared experience.
In order to do this we played around with group dynamics a lot! We had some of the usual formats of a teacher sitting in front of the classroom sincerely sharing the teachings to which they’ve devoted themselves. Kia guided us in pranayama and Scott guided us in mindfulness. This connected us to the tools that identify and support us as yoga practitioners to do the work. We explored the roles and definitions of the teacher-practitioner relationship over the weekend. Teachers are important and a good one can be a trusted guide and access point to wisdom traditions. The teachers were skillful in pointing the tools back to the practitioner allowing the practitioners good judgment to adapt the tools for their own bodies, minds, and contexts.
In a room of 35 practitioners we had an Assisted Self Practice (Mysore style), with seven teachers in the room! That might sound overwhelming, but the teachers and practitioners had made some agreements before hand about how we would operate in the practice space. We explored new dynamics in the teacher-practitioner relationship. Consent cards were present, each practitioner starting with a “No Thanks” turned face up. They could switch it to “Yes, Please” when and if they chose to opt-in to having a teacher involved in their practice. It was agreed that the cards could be turned up or down at any point during the practice. Practitioners could ask or refuse any teacher for support or an assist during their practice. Dialogue between practitioner and teacher was encouraged. Yes. There were times where it got noisy, but it offered a new lens through which to consider practice. Having a support team of teachers made it less about the individual teacher and more about the group of practitioners.
Practice is not static and this weekend was a social experiment among curious folks from various ashtanga yoga communities who wanted to explore together. One day a practitioner may want more assists, one day they may want more space. One day someone may feel like talking their practice over, discussing what it brings up for them or strategizing about their progress. Another day, silence might be what is needed. The key is that the practice space should encourage us to listen inward to what we need and to feel comfortable that when we express it our choices will be respected. This was only a single weekend, but it gave us all an opportunity to play with best practices in the classroom so we can start to consider ways forward that will be supportive and effective, that will create safer spaces that share power between practitioners and teachers. Our practices and communities are tools that can be used to do the work of personal and social development or bury us in vertical hierarchies and dull our awareness. This weekend we explored ways that our practices and communities can offer us the support we need to do the work of authenticity.
“A new Dharma is one that insists we investigate not only the unsatisfactoriness of our own minds but also prepares us for the discomfort of confronting the obscurations of the society we are individual expressions of. It recognizes that the delusions of systemic oppression are not solely the domain of the individual. By design, they are seated within and reinforced by society.” Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Rev. angel Kyodo Williams and Lama Rod Owens with Jasmine Syedullah, PhD
In the afternoons, we sat for discussion in a variety of interpersonal settings to do the work of discussion and active listening. We asked that in each of the phases of the gathering everyone tune into their inner state and note any reactions to the work. Authenticity is often considered to be an essential inner state that is more real than our social self. We can sometimes burden ourselves with expressing that inner state without change in all circumstances. However, a key feature of our humanity is adaptability, empathy, and co-operation. We are hard wired to respond to one another and operate on unspoken social contracts that enable us to work together. Acknowledging and accepting this is crucial to knowing ourselves and being a more skillful agent in the world. This knowledge is where we go from being nice to get along to being compassionate in holding space for multiple view points. Being nice to get along means that we aren’t questioning or aware of the dynamics in which we find ourselves. We are often simply trying not to rock the boat, even when the social dynamic is harmful or oppressive. Being aware of and compassionate towards social dynamics gives us the choice to engage or not, and change when necessary and possible.
We sat in dyads where one person spoke and the other practiced active listening. Active listening is hard. It is bearing witness to someone’s authentic truth without judging, validating, fixing, or responding. It is so hard not to consider what their truth means about us, to center our experience as we listen, or think about what we want to say next.
Then we sat in small groups of four to discuss questions for reflection before then joining the full group for a free form discussion. In each of these settings we might feel more or less comfortable and we might find ourselves responding differently.
On day two we sat in circle with a selenite wand as a talking piece. Every one in the circle had an opportunity to speak and everyone else had the opportunity to practice active listening. It was incredibly important that everyone know that they could participate in any aspect of the weekend or not. The progression of the weekend felt supportive, opening the door to trust and intimacy without feeling oppressive or coercive. By the end of the weekend, their was laughter and tears and many radiant smiles. This blog is going out to all participants attached to a feedback form so that everyone who participated can offer their feedback privately as well.
The Same
This is a time when
Doing
is split off from
Knowing
and Being
is
hardly at all.
But here and there
on this side of the horizon,
people meet in circles
to form communities
and speak their hearts
that seek the same.
—Meir Carasso
In these different exercises the practitioner/teacher dynamic was muted if not totally erased, and the individual/community dynamic rose to the forefront. It felt like a completely different type of yoga workshop. It felt as though it honored tradition, but responded to the time, culture, and environment in which is was situated. There has never been and will never be another workshop like it. The very structure of the workshop itself was democratic and so the content would be adaptive and flexible depending on who participates. I look forward to making these workshops more widely available so we can broaden the tent to include as many voices as are willing to participate.
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.” -Fred Rogers
