Did you see the New Yorker cover this week?
People doing yoga postures in Central Park.
At first I thought it was pretty cool! A representation of people concentrating, using their bodies, presumably trying to maintain their health.
But then it made me a little sad. Something felt missing. Disconnected.
The Promotion of Isolation and Detachment
I looked a little more closely, to try to understand that feeling.
And I noticed that they were all in their separate worlds. Not aware of each other. At least one with earbuds in, in his own auditory space. Each person completely doing their own thing.
In other words, the collective was entirely absent. The connection was absent.
Through my decades of various yoga practices, I fully understand that yoga practice is quite internal, personal, and unique to the practitioner. That each of us is going through our own thing.
But my sad reaction, I realized, was about the lack of togetherness.
On the one hand, it makes perfect sense. Most of us have been living in a world that has been quietly training us — for how many decades now? — to go it alone. To get “ahead”, to value our “autonomy”, to fulfill each personal need, and even to “learn” from machines.
Yet as part of this training, something essential has been diminishing, one day at a time: our ability to connect and to be fully with our whole selves and with each other. To witness, feel, and understand, without reacting and without shutting down. To show up for ourselves and for one another in real time, in a physical space, with the simple goal of connection.
If we don’t do something about this, we will continue to erode so much of what makes us human. Little bit by little bit. Like the frog in the pot of water. We might only notice when it is utterly too late.
Our Original Hot Yoga practices comes to each of us a bit in disguise. Sometimes we think it is going to be a sweaty stretching class. Other times we come looking for an intense cardiovascular workout or a runner’s high without any impact on the joints. Other times a continuation of physical therapy. And for some, just a way to get rid of accumulated stress.
While all of those things – and more – happen to us, what is also happening in that room is something psychologically, energetically, collectively profound.
We are developing nothing less than our embodied humanity. Our uniquely human capacity for complex communication, for conscious empathy, for discovering the wisdom of our emotions, and for self-realization. And we are doing it together, as a collective. The feeling of the group concentrating together, breathing quietly together, synchronizing with the teacher’s voice, while each taking care of our own intensity levels and limits.
What we are building in the hot room certainly has aspects of a “workout”, and it fixes so many people’s chronic health issues.
But on another level, we are forming a circle of healing, friendship, and trust.
A circle that contrasts with the circles of power, concealment, and competition that have been so normalized as to be invisible.
Who is this circle for?
This healing circle is not for a certain body type. It is not for people who already have it figured out.
It is for anyone who is tired of feeling disconnected — from their body, from their emotions, from their work, from other people, from something deeply real.
We come together in that room:
- To learn from the intelligence within.
- To quietly support each other.
- To challenge our own growth.
- To heal.
- To be aware of our presence here — right here, in this time and space on the planet.
- To admire the miracles of existence.
- To recognize our own wholeness.
- To undo the compartmentalization of body, thought, emotion, and energy.
- To build our internal strength.
- To be witnessed and loved in our weaknesses.
- To develop our vocabulary and cognition so that we can realize and communicate that which is deep within us.
- To expand and deepen our embodied intelligence.
What is this Embodied Intelligence Thing?
This one matters more than ever right now.
The contrast between the embodied and the disembodied is perhaps THE most important battle right now. We are replacing humanity (embodied intelligence) with machine language (sure, call it “artificial intelligence”) faster than ever. We are replacing romantic relationships, teacher-student relationships, and more.
The diminishment of embodied intelligence is one of the quiet crises of our time. We are losing the ability to feel, to sense, to know from the inside out, and to share in all of that. I heard a podcast last month where it was proposed that wi-fi could be called the 8th deadly sin! Presumably because there is so much sloth and greed that wi-fi seems to enable.
On a similar, somewhat lighthearted (but also serious) level, I proposed to myself that disembodiment could be considered the 8th deadly sin. At just the touch of a button and a few credit card digits entered, a lot of us can have nearly any material, physical, sexual, or psychological need fulfilled.
But we do so at such cost to our shared humanity. We do so at our own interpersonal peril.
This yoga continues to be the most powerful antidote that I have come across. And believe me, I was looking. I was so utterly pained, in my early-to-mid 20s, at the ways we were destroying our own hearts, our own bodies, each other, and the planet. It seems we are deeper and further along that path. Yet some of us persist in resisting.
If this yoga practice does ONE thing, it increases our embodied intelligence. It trains us in the internal skills of attention, discipline, emotional regulation, and sensory perception. It surprises us with what it teaches us about our selves, in the real time, embodied sense.
Finding the Limits
None of us is perfect, and this yoga will not solve every problem we face.
There will still be power, control, and abuse in the world. There will continue to be lack of empathy on small and large levels. People will continue to lie, conceal, and cheat to get ahead. There will continue to be pain and suffering.
But we show up anyways, and we practice, because we know it will do SOMETHING.
In a cultural moment where true health, wholeness, and integrity can feel all but lost — we have found each other. We are strengthening our circle of trust in the midst of declining connection, within and without.
That is not nothing. In fact, some days it feels like it is everything worth fighting for.
I look forward to seeing you in the hot room.
With love and gratitude,
Ann