Finding Our Place in the Family of Things*

I just returned from five days visiting old friends in Central NY, a place that still rings as home to me. There, I reconnected with people I consider family, nourished my love for the Finger Lakes countryside, and relished in the sense of belonging that I felt in my bones the minute I arrived. Jamming to the Bee Gees, sailing, kayaking, and hanging out by a bonfire under the moonlight, I was reminded of the centrality of interconnection to a sense of well-being.

In Tantric philosophy, Divine energy pervades every living being and therefore weaves a deep web of interdependence. In fact, Anusara™ Yoga places the yoga kula, or community, as one of its top three principles. The collectivity of the yoga kula raises the quality of everyone in it. It creates a symbiotic relationship wherein the collective strengthens the individual, which then in turn strengthens the whole.

Feminism also emphasizes the relationship between the individual and the collective, the personal and the structural. Large scale change occurs when we work together, each taking our responsibility for our part in the greater good. Both Anusara™ Yoga and feminism recognize the value of community. It helps us feel connected. It reveals our interdependence. It offers us support and the gift of supporting others. It helps us find our place in the “family of things.” In doing so, it enables us to blossom into our full potential.

Try it:

Vrksasana (Tree Pose): Gather in a circle with your Yoga Kula, interlace your arms, and take tree pose. Then, striking a balance between standing on your own and leaning on one another for support, lean back. You can more easily add a small back bend to tree pose when you can receive the support of one another.

Partner Stretch: Take a good Tadasana. Your partner will stand behind you, take a good solid stance, and hold your wrists. With that support, you can fall forward as far as feels comfortable, trusting that your community will support you. Lead with your heart, and communicate with one another to ensure a safe and exhilarating stretch of body, mind, and heart.

*The title is a reference to Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese”

Moving From Within

Ok. So I have just discovered the So You Think You Can Dance television show this summer. I am hooked! Now in its fifth season, the show features professional dancers who get weekly challenges with professional choreographers and compete to become “America’s Favorite Dancer.”

As a feminist pop culture critic, I see the flaws with this and every other reality show. But what intrigues me about So You Think You Can Dance is how profoundly “moving” the performances are, with top notch dancers and seasoned choreographers. The performances stir something. They inspire. They intrigue. As the show’s producer points out, dance is a medium for emotions that cannot be expressed any other way.

Good dance, like yoga, comes from a place of deep embodiment. Many physical activities in the U.S. are about mind over body, or about achieving a particular body type. Anusara® Yoga, on the other hand, comes from a pavriti perspective. Unlike the nivriti perspective that seeks to transcend the body, the pavriti path celebrates the body as a key part of our integrated experience.

Anusara® Yoga, then, is about honoring our bodies as part of our holistic experience. We move from core to periphery, so that our actions come from the inside out. We have to first come into our hearts and know who we are, then expand out and share that with the world. This yoga recognizes that our bodies have wisdom and helps us cultivate our connection with that wisdom.

This is a profound shift in a culture that often encourages disembodiment. Women are particularly susceptible to disembodiment. We are barraged by objectifying images around us and often experience sexism in our daily lives. For survivors of trauma, disembodiment is often a survival mechanism. The detachment and isolation that results from this disconnection with our bodies has a price.

But we cannot merely tell people to become embodied. If we are living a disembodied life, we often don’t even know the full extent of it, much less how to change it. Physical practices like yoga can help heighten our experiences of embodiment. Yoga offers tools through which to become aware of our bodily experiences with compassion and affirmation. This compassionate self-reflection, along with the support of a yoga kula (community), is key.

I used to think that I didn’t understand dance, so I rarely went to performances. I wanted “get it” intellectually when the true heart of dance is to feel it emotionally and physically. My practice on the mat has changed that. Yoga has opened new doors for how to participate and make sense of the world.

Learning How to Listen

So why do many yoga classes begin with a brief meditation and then end with Savasana? These practices help ground us. We can quiet our minds, scan our bodies, emotions, and minds to see what we need that day, and, at the end, fully receive the gifts of our practice. Unlike exercises that are about mind over matter to achieve a goal, Anusara® yoga is about listening to our inner experience so it can inform and dialogue with external ones.

But how do we learn to listen? This is not an automatic skill. Women in particular often have trouble finding their inner voice when gendered socialization often pressures us to subsume our needs to those of others. Cultivating a clear listening to our inner experience, and learning how to appropriately integrate the inner and outer worlds, is a skill we can—and must--learn.

Many top universities recognize the value of what Brown University’s Contemplative Studies Initiative calls “critical first person” study.[i] This type of study involves a curious inquiry of one’s inner experience, and then an ability to step back and examine the significance and meaning of that experience. Practitioners learn how to integrate their internal experiences with the third person study that is more traditional in many educational contexts.

Yoga is one of many powerful tools through which we can learn this “critical first person” study. It can help us not only find a clear inner voice, but also examine how the personal is political. In Anusara® yoga, we move from the core to periphery. We turn inward and allow that awareness to motivate our external actions. And we then take what we learn from our outer experiences to inform our internal ones. It’s a mutually enriching process.

Try it:

Ardha Chandrachapasana: From Ardha Chandrasana, bow forward to find your core and to grasp your foot, then extend your foot and head back. Find your extension only after connecting within.






[i] http://www.brown.edu/Faculty/Contemplative_Studies_Initiative/rationale.html

In a recent issue of Ms. Magazine, Aimee Liu provides a moving account of living with an eating disorder. She concludes that women who suffer from the illness need to cultivate a sense of self in order to heal. Liu writes that “our bodies contain us. They carry us and work for us and give us pleasure. They speak for us when we dare not admit the truth. We owe it to ourselves to remember how to listen” (emphasis added).

After years of teaching Women’s Studies, I am convinced that Feminism offers for both women and men a powerful and empowering counter balance to misogyny. But I am also convinced that we cannot merely tell people to have a sense of self, or even empower them only intellectually and politically. If women have internalized the disembodiment that saturates U.S. culture, they often have no idea what it would feel like to become embodied. Women’s Studies (as well as other disciplines in Education) needs help students learn how to cultivate an engaged and integrated embodiment.

Yoga can provide such tools. With its emphasis on compassionate awareness, students can learn to pay attention to our bodies. Anusara® Yoga, in particular, offers some valuable ways to listen to one’s body. In an Anusara® class, students learn precise alignment principles as they move through poses. We learn how, in the words of John Friend, “to follow the breath and let her lead.” In doing so, we can cultivate an affirming and reflective way of inhabiting our bodies from the inside out, rather than the externally driven motivations that can prove unhealthy for both men and women. We can learn, then, how to better embody feminist principles.

Liu, Aimee. “The Perfect Pantomime.” Ms. 11:2 Spring 2009: 74-77. Print.

Connecting the Individual with the Collective

Feminism strives for a balance between individual experience and systematic, large scale patterns of oppression that pervade society. Change, then, needs to begin at home, but it also needs to be a collective effort if it is to create structural transformation. Ultimately, we realize that we are integrally and inevitably connected to both.

In yoga, our front body represents the individual, our back body the universal. Most of us lead from the front body, particularly in the U.S., where individualism runs rampant. Try it: take a good Tadasana (Mountain pose) and bow forward into Uttanasana. Which part of you leads the way?

Now, imagine infusing your torso with the support of your entire community. Get really tall and full. Take your shoulder blades down on your back as though it were cradling your heart. Then bow forward, leading with your heart, knowing that you are fully supported by the greater good. In yoga, as in Feminism, individual empowerment is strengthened when we collectively engage to create a more socially just society.

Finding the Collective in Twist:

Often, we lead with the front body in twists, wanting to reach our full extension as quickly as possible. Instead, try leading from your back body. On each inhale, lengthen the spine and extend out through the top of your head. On each exhale, twist a bit further from the back body. Allow the larger universal good to guide your individual actions.

Embody the Change

Ghandi challenged us to “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Sherri Shapiro, a feminist dance educator, has posed the question: “How can we understand through our embodied knowledge what it might mean to live freer and more empowered lives?”[1]
Both yoga and feminism reveal that embodying our principles allows us to act with integrity.

In Anusara language, we activate skull loop to “be the change” we want. Skull loop starts at the center of the upper palate. It is a circular flow of energy that moves back and up along the back of the skull then over the top of the head and down the face to the starting point of the upper palate. It takes the hyoid bone back, keeps the neck open, and the head in proper alignment. It’s also the natural position I embody when I “walk the talk” of my feminism.

The action of skull loop, like the action of integrating ourselves with our feminist principles, allows us to work for social change from a more sustainable place. Instead of jutting our chin forward and forcing things to happen, or gritting our teeth together and willing change, we breathe, align with our beliefs, and move from there.

There are times when social oppression demands the urgency of reacting to violence and forcing change. But over the long haul, embodying our principles allows us to extend further in healthier and more sustainable ways. We stand tall in our beliefs. Rather than merely resist oppression, we create new possibilities.


Inspiration for Daily Practice:

Note: The following are some possible poses for skull loop. They do not consist of a complete daily practice with proper warm ups or sequences. These notes emphasize skull loop. They do not cover all the actions that must be engaged to safely enter and leave a pose. They can, however, be integrated into a full practice that is appropriate to your level of ability. As always, consult your yoga teacher and a physician before attempting new poses.

Utthita Trikonasana (Triangle Pose): Activate skull loop to extend energy out the top of your head and elongate both your lower and upper side bodies. Once you have embodied your full integration, turn your head upward and radiate your potential out to the world.

Setubhandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose): Skull loop helps you actually press the base of your head into the ground. You then have a firmer foundation from which to extend forward out your knees and through your pelvic core. A solid grounding in our principles allows us to act from a more centered place.

Urdhva Dhanurasana (Backbend): When we move out of our comfort zone, we often resort to defensive habits and jut out our chins. Backbends can cause this reaction in a beginner. When going up into a backbend, remember to activate skull loop, to trust the proper alignment of your body, then press up. Trust that even in new territory, we have something to offer and something to learn.

Bakasana (Crane Pose): When we enter new territory, many of us experience doubts about our capabilities. Activating skull loop in crane pose helps you align with your potential, become lighter, and float up into the air. When we integrate into principles we know we can trust, we don’t have to so easily give into doubts. We can then surprise ourselves with the heights to which we can soar.



[1] Sherri B. Shapiro. “Toward Transformative Teachers: Critical and Feminist Perspectives in Dance Education.” Dance, Power, and Difference: Critical and Feminist Perspectives on Dance Education. Sherri B. Shapiro, Ed. Champaign, Illinois: Human Kinetics, 1998. 7-22.

Feminism and Yoga?

What on earth does feminism have to do with yoga? Certainly, it’s not hard to do a feminist analysis of the recent commodification of yoga in the West. Nor is it hard to critique the hyper-thin, young, flawless, mostly white, middle class models we often see doing yoga in Western pop culture.

But I am more interested in the insights that emerge when I place feminist and yogic principles in a deeper dialogue. When I recently completed my 200-hour teacher training program with Senior Anusara practitioners, I was struck by the many parallels between Tantric yoga practice and feminist praxis. In this blog, I will explore the richly textured insights they offer one another. I hope that you will join me for weekly posts.

Action over Form

For starters, both Anusara yoga and Feminism emphasize process over product. Contrary to the achievement drive that thrives throughout U.S. culture, Anusara yoga values the self-honoring process of regularly coming to our practice. Whether we “achieve” any particular pose is far less important than whether we make the choices that support the optimal alignment of our body—and our being--on any given day.

Similarly, feminism has long taught us that “by any means necessary” is rarely an ethical recipe for social change. As Audre Lorde so famously wrote, “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house.” Instead, we need to create new practices in society that honor ourselves and others. Only then can we sustain progressive changes and access the rich tapestry that is our global culture.