Yoga for the 99%

Some people are magically gifted with discipline. They wake up early, floss twice a day, enjoy a long morning practice, write novels, run marathons and are vegans. They do it seemingly efforlessly. It's just who they are.


But it's not me.


I've been back on the mat everyday, or at least most days. If you read it you know that I made a lot of other goals for myself in the last post. As it turns out, it wasn't so easy. I'm not perfect yet. But I have faith, and my experience tells me, that if I do my yoga first, everything else will follow. Eventually.


There's a saying from Twelve Step programs: "Keep Coming Back." Of course, they mean keep coming back to meetings even if they don't make sense or you keep drinking or whatever.


In meditation practice, it's given that the mind wonders, that we get distracted. The instruction is the same: keep coming back. 


In my yoga practice, I know that I can keep coming back. I get distracted by relationships and world events (happening at the moment right down the street) and other goals and work and travel and family.


But I'm back and it feels right.


I really want to write about Square One, the little yoga studio in the little town of Emeryville that I started almost three years ago. It was such a dream then. Originally it was called "East Bay Yoga Cooperative" or some other mouthful, but the idea was the same. Yoga for the 99%.


I forget. Sometimes it just feels like a business, a job. I say yes and no and make mistakes and fix toilets and write emails and hope for the best. I lose sight of what it is I hoped for and dreamed about before we had a real location or yoga mats or instructors.


I wanted a yoga studio that had no barriers to entrance. Everyone could come, either by paying what they could or by volunteering, and when they came, they would feel welcome. They would not be put off because their clothes weren't right or because their bodies weren't ideal or because they were old or uncool or whatever it is that we think we are when we enter spaces and feel different and uncomfortable.


And so, once again, I'm coming back to that idea. Back to that story I held when I started, that we're not just another yoga studio. The Bay Area does not and did not need another yoga studio. We're providing a real and necessary service that no one else is providing. We really are. Absolutely anyone who wants to can practice at square one. We will make it happen. 


At times I feel something close to guilt because I am not participating in the demonstrations downtown. I've always wanted a movement, something revolutionary, something populist, something that I really believe in. It's come to my city, and I'm not there. Am I a coward? Am I complacent? 

Gandhi said, "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." So maybe it's okay that I haven't been arrested or tear gassed or spent the night in a tent downtown. 

I get distracted and lost and discouraged. A lot. Over and over again. I guess we all do. It's nice to remember that I can keep coming back again and again and again, to whatever it is that is necessary and right to me. To my work and to my practice, which are, at their hearts, indistinguishable. No matter how far away I go.