Anusara scandal

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    I Am Resigned

    ByElizabeth

    This week, I am resigned that Anusara has finally dissolved too completely for it to live on in any way that resembled its former self, the most sweetly and bravely hopeful having at last been pushed away by the concatenation of energetic forces.  Though I never actually said:  “I have resigned,” during these months of observing the intense communications of other members of the community,”  I have said with resignation:  “what is there to resign from?” “from what would I be resigning?” and have wondered whether and to what end I should express it out loud.

    I haven’t felt able to say anything specific  until I was sure I could trust that whatever I said was coming from my heart and truly honored all the gifts of learning and friendship from this decade of practice in the Anusara community.  The joy, the knowledge, and the healing fruits of the practice remain part of my being and teaching even if the relationship that facilitated them is no longer tenable.  I have an idea that being a part of this break up/break apart/act of Siva/Kali/Durga — what should we call it?–might itself have been meant by the universe as a teaching for me about relationship and community (perhaps sort of like being whacked on the head for fidgeting in meditation–though I never sought out the whacking on the head kind of teacher or practice).

    Since the first posting on the internet in the extraordinary world of social media, I felt a relunctance to engage in the on-line conversation and a deep call and responsibility to practice.  When I am sitting in meditation, when I am practicing asana — and when I am dancing at the contact improv jam — is when I know to my core that the gift of the practices and the opportunity to share the practices in community as an ongoing exploration of mind, body, and relationship matters more to me than the structure of the community or who is leading at any given time.  Along with asana, meditation, and studying, I have been practicing bhavana (deep meditative contemplation) on the inextricably intertwined processes of dissolution and creation.  Having been forced to go deeper from this whack on the head as it were, I am seeing better than I have before in this embodiment  patterns in my actions/reactions  for which ways to rework, undo, shift, reweave into more harmonious ways of being are revealing and unfolding themselves.

    During these weeks, I kept thinking the time was ripe to write publicly about my reaction to what was happening and then I would contemplate whatever words I had thought I should say and realized that I still was not ready.  I suppose some part of me was hopeful, though I have also been from the first resigned to the imminent scattering and shifting and dancing into different constellations of all of our voices as teachers trained in this style that no longer has a referent for its name nor a precise shape.

    I confess that I am more concerned about Mitt Romney, Scott Walker, Trayvon Martin, global climate change, the recession, my garden, and my friends and family, than I have been with John Friend, though I miss the delight of getting together to practice en masse and the comfort of being recognized as part of a skilled community of teachers together under the banner of a respected trademark.  And how joyous at its heyday our collective  explorations on the mat of the exquisite, elegant, and healing universal principles of alignment.  I am doing my best to take what I have learned from yoga practice (Anusara and not) and study to inform how I act, speak, and relate to the community in its evolving incarnations and to the how and what I offer my students.  To support my practice and the community, I have been continuing to attend workshops with friends and teachers who have inspired me over this decade.  It is good to practice in smaller groups closer to home.  It is good to see my practice buddies.

    I never did formally resign (perhaps I was stuck like Arjuna’s sitting paralyzed on the battlefield, perhaps it was something more or less than that), but I am resigned, in the way of a graduate who liked the comfort of the structure of school but who knows she must go out into the world and make her way, that there is no choice left but to move into relationship with this community of fellow students and teachers in a different way.

    Perhaps  I will have more to say, but I cannot yet say when (though if you’ve been following my blog, you may have noticed how much I was saying in pictures and stories that were on one level about something completely different).

    This is my desk at the office.  The quote is “The Four Agreements” by Miguel Ruiz.  I read “The Four Agreements” at the recommendation of Betsy Downing at the first Anusara yoga retreat I attended, and though it could be seen as so much New Age psychology, I think the agreements themselves are useful guides for considering how to respond when someone pushes my buttons.  Betsy will be at Willow Street Yoga June 22-24  and it would be great to see many of you there. In the meantime, on and off the mat, I continue to contemplate these “agreements” along with the “four gates of speech” and how they can positively shape how I relate and speak to others in my world, especially when things get tough.

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    The Man Who Would Not Be Pope (Habemus Papam)

    ByElizabeth

    I used to go to the movies several times a month.  As independent cinemas closed and viewing opportunities moved in-home (where I don’t have a television), my desire to go to the movies ebbed.  In the past year or two, I am lucky if I see a movie once every several weeks, preferring to spend my time in practice and study or conversation.  I still keep my eye out for a film that looks like an invitation to beauty or engaged thinking.  I was called earlier this week to see Habemus Papam by this:

    “The unanswerable question at [Habemus Papam’s] heart is this: How does a leader hold onto his sense of self when the job he is about to take both demands and denies his own humanity?”  Michael O’Sullivan for the Washington Post.

    Habemus Papum is at one level a small story; it is just a few days in the life of a select group of individuals.  It is rendered with charm and love, but it asks some very big questions and ones highly relevant to any who contemplate (in this country that makes a cult of celebrity and celebrities in politics and spirituality and not just on stage and screen) what it means for an individual or a ruling body to have or to seek leadership, power, or worship, or to be given it in greater quantity than the one(s) on whom they are conferred can handle.

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    Cause/ Effect and Integrity

    ByElizabeth

    Earlier in the week, on my way home from a conference on the other side of town,  I found on the $1 cart outside of Second Story Books, Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark — Magic, Sex and Politics.  Though I always learn something from reading Starhawk’s books and I had not read this one yet, the book was so heavily underlined, I thought twice about getting it.

    Something made me hesitate before putting it back, and I opened it at random.  On the page was the following:  “Directed energy causes change.  To have integrity, we must recognize that our choices bring about consequences, and that we cannot escape responsibility for the consequences, not because they are imposed by some external authority, but because they are inherent in the choices themselves.”

    I wondered why this had not been underlined in full when so much of the rest of the page had been underlined because I thought on reading it:  “Exactly right; that speaks to our current condition.”

    And being in the midst this dialogue in which there has been so much discussion of integrity (along with what we might have caused and how we might have been affected by certain actions), I dismissed the possibility that the underlining would be too intrusive for my own reading because, yes, this teaching comes at just the right time in just the right context for deep contemplation of the deep truth that to act with integrity, we must appreciate our own contribution to causes and results/responses in the undulating fabric of our connected being.

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    A Little (or Maybe Big) Perspective

    ByElizabeth

    I admit it. So caught up I have been in what my friends and colleagues have been posting on the internet about what has happened in our little corner of the world, that I haven’t been reading the news of the world with my usual diligence.

    When I head out the door of my building to walk home, I walk past a big homeless shelter. There is a grassy patch and a ledge on the side of the street where I leave the building, and there are always people hanging out. Sometimes they get somewhat belligerent with each other or talk or shout loudly to no one in particular. When I stay late, and it is fully dark, it can feel a bit intimidating.

    Tonight the line for a bed inside was especially long; it has been a wet day, and the temperature is dropping. I thought about our tempest as I looked at those who are homeless standing patiently in line in the hope of being able to spend a night inside, and I thought how much service, compassion, and love matter, and how little it matters exactly how or through whom we learn to better embody and live them.

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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    What I Wrote Last Week

    ByElizabeth

    By now, the news of scandal has become widespread on the internet.  The Huffington Post has put in its two cents in the way that modern journalism does–highlight the bad, forecast turmoil, and invite continued readership.  Put John Friend or Anusara scandal into your favorite search engine and you will get a couple of dozen blog entries about broken-hearted yoga teachers feeling they need to resign from the organization (though many say they will be teaching the method, just not articulating it as the brand, which confuses me somewhat).

    Last week, I chose to post only a guest blog on the District Kula website (since that posting, District Kula is no longer affiliated with Anusara).  Though I have much more information now than I did last week, I am still waiting to see.  I will be gradually revealing more of my thoughts here as things develop now that I believe that those far beyond the immediate (though large) community of practitioners are discussing the allegations and potential repercussions with intelligence and kindness or gleeful malice or somewhere in between.

    One thing I can say, is that I have always consistently separated the man from the message, and  I continue to believe in the soundness of the Anusara principles.  I also believe that the situation is emblematic of the uneasy, but inseparable relationship between spiritual practice and commercial enterprise in our current market-driven world.  While it is unfortunate and sad that it is in my chosen community, I am no stranger to upheaval and controversy in either workplaces or communities and there may have been no better time to have this discussion both within the community and as a broader societal matter.