Merging Yoga, Music and Community.
This is my tag line for my business in the healing arts. What does this mean? My life is an expression of leaning into the questions of what this could potentially mean. It involves questions of self exploration of community. Empowered engagement in community. This may sound intriguing but you still may not know what the hell this means! This is an ongoing transformational dialogue internally and externally with me!
I start with this. Where do I show up in spaces with others? How do I show up? What role do I play? What am I looking for? Connection? Validation? Acceptance? Shared values? Am I creating space for others here? Is the space I am creating empowering or taking choice away because I want or need to be a fixer or a savior? No right or wrong answers, just observations. Who is in this space? Do they look like me? Who is not in this space? Why not?
I go back constantly as a yogini to the word Namaste. If it makes you throw up a little bit in your mouth because it sounds like New Age bullshit, I am gagging right along with you!
In the context of community, this means, there is a light within you that is also within me. It is within every single one of us. The CEO’s and the junkies (maybe in some cases they are one and the same). Children of privilege and children of the slums, ghettos and wrong side of the tracks. Ivy League School students and prisoners of juvenile hall.
This is hard to reconcile. We want to identify ourselves as separate from the wounded and the wounders but we are one and the same.
So, how we show up in community , in my exploration has been the awareness that we are all capable of creating enormous harm to ourselves and to each other, and we are all capable of extraordinary good and love directed to ourselves and others. It is what we choose in each and every moment. It is a delicate balance and in community, we hold each other accountable here in a non judge mental manner.
When we can acknowledge in community is the collective potential for either. To create space based in faith, trust, compassion and love for transformation that allows and empowers people to make choices and decisions in their best, not worst interest. (Speaking from a long time experience of making decisions from defensiveness, victim sort of mode).
So, yoga, which has literally had thousands of years of effectively addressing suffering in the forms of attachments (cravings, grasping, clinging and addiction) and aversions (fear, anger, resentment, and hostility ) rocks this flipping out! Yoga in community. Not just with skinny, middle classed white women (although God Bless this demographic that minus the skinny, I am marginally affiliated with ! ). Yoga meeting suffering head on.
And Music. Not as passive let me listen to the radio and eat doughnuts and cry over old boyfriends kind of shit. This is feeling sound that you are creating in your own body. Primal vowels and repeated mantras that carry the energy of transformation and potential for personal power. Joining your voice in community. Finding your own voice and making space for other voices.
So this is the long version of my Tagline! Create your own Tagline for who you are and how you show up! Don’t bullshit yourself that it will be easy or fun, but do it! Triple dog dare!
Namaste!
