The unhinged, unplugged, cat is out of its box dance Not the pretty pretty, pick me, pick me dance We Have Come to Be Danced by Jewel Mathieson Yoga is a practice of peeling away labels of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and embracing whatever form of beauty you bring to your mat each day. Your wholeness includes your scars, your weaknesses, your mood swings, the days of your life you’d rather pull the covers up over your head and stay in bed.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body Use these words in whatever way moves you.įor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. Sometimes, I choose a poem as a contemplative focus in my own self-practice. Sometimes, I feel it’s enough to lead students to awareness of breath and then simply read the poem, letting the words speak for themselves. Sometimes, I briefly introduce the theme before reading the poem. These are 10 of my favorite poems for shaping a yoga class. The right words become the river guide that ferries us from this world of intellectualizing and analytical thinking across to the shadowy world of feeling.Ī poem is a bridge between the language of the mind and the language of the soul. However, sometimes words are a powerful means of carrying us into the language of the body. In the years since, I’ve taken many classes in languages I don’t quite speak, I’ve taught countless students who are not native speakers of English, and I’ve found over and over that the practice of yoga transcends whatever barriers a language difference presents. It brought us closer to each other, closer to ourselves.
Sometimes not being able to fill a space with empty words made us see each other more clearly. But mostly, as we practiced together, as we shared the process of learning together, we communicated through movement, through touch, through listening to one another’s breath. But we got by.ĭuring anatomy and philosophy, when we really needed a translator, we buddied up. We were a mixed group of multilingual, unilingual and somewhere-int-between yogis.
The training was half in English, half in German. I did my first teacher training in Cologne, Germany-at a time that I didn’t speak more than a handful of German words. I often think of yoga as a practice which moves beyond the boundaries of the spoken word.