Ashlyn Elizabeth
In 2012, a friend invited me to go to a yoga class with her after school. I agreed. Easy. "Why not?" At the studio, a sign told me to, "Slow down. Don't hurry. Don't worry. Trust the process." I can't remember my first class, and I can't remember my 50th, but the words on that sign and the instructor's guidance in those practices began weaving their way into my thought patterns. Yoga let me hold on until I learned I could float.
In 2015, I began teaching vinyasa*1 at my college's recreation center. In the summer of 2016, I received my 200-hour yoga certification under the guidance of Mary Byerly at Panacea de la Montaña in Costa Rica. Her training put roots to gratitude, to other roots, to history, to healing. I taught with a deeper appreciation for yoga's spread. All that rich and clastic knowledge about our causal bodies, our subtle rhythms, our physical form - it fascinated me. (You mean to tell me I am sitting on seeds profound and full of peace? I don't have to be at war with my thoughts? And the doubt can clear, and anger is a gear for redirection?) While teaching, I didn't feel nervous. I wasn't anxious. I'd often feel anxious. But in the seat of the storyteller, I had found ease.
And that’s just it: teaching yoga is story telling. Early yogis shared yoga philosophy as oral tales. Here I am, years later, in the context of my time, transmuting the teachings through my own interpretation.
Throughout college, I led a variety of yoga formats to staff and students on campus. I expanded my audience at a local studio and a wellness and rehabilitation center. At the studio, I taught pranayama, meditation, and asana in community-based classes. At the wellness center, I taught gentle yoga, restorative yoga and meditation, chair yoga for those with a limited range of motion, and mindful movement for children. In all of these contexts, you quickly learn what you already know: every body is unique. Yes, I'm the teacher, but I'll remind you to listen for that distinctness in you. Then, for fun, we'll practice removing that layer of discernment and category, and I'll remind you to listen for that aliveness in you. And we'll be still.
In every format, all these bodies would show up with souls and experiences and injuries and a ticker of thoughts. And I'd teach to all of them, hoping I could keep their attention on my offering, on their bodies and their thoughts, on their wisdom. Wondering if this particular pose had sparked in someone the same fire it had sparked in me. There, I see it in that person. I see it showing up in their physicality.
I like to remind everyone, at different moments, in certain poses, that they've got all these layers. The fire is deep in our energy, in a layer called pranamaya. I can't see that fire travel outward on its way to a body's surface, but I witness its emanations in a person's fingertips, down the length of their spine, straight through their posture, and out their keen eyes. Their aliveness revealing itself.
When I graduated college, I hopped on a plane, reunited with my yoga teacher and began a one-on-one 3-week intensive. She told me to make a list of all the things I wanted to expand on from our yoga lessons. I filled that page. We talked about death and consciousness. The power of "ohm," and the healing that happens when you hum it. Slow it down, draw it out. That kind of control processes cortisol. Mary owned three editions of the Yoga Sutra, and she had me read the first three sutras from each edition. I wrote them down and looked at them next to each other, in their sameness and differences. I observed the way each word's fullness made my brain feel. Now begins the practice of yoga (1.1). The ever now. Yoga won't stop. It will begin again and again.
I once had a private student. We had been working together for about three weeks. I walked into her office. She worked above a hardware store with four other women. They all had their own desks, and her desk sat behind closed doors. I walked in, and she had a diffuser going. She had a satisfied smile on her face too, and she told me, "I'm less angry because of you. My daughter and I always fight, but last night, I didn't let it become a fight." She told me she would never stop practicing yoga; she could never go back. The insight was too honest.
When the pandemic started, I stopped teaching. A natural pause, a chance to re-center and calibrate. I'm blessed it got to be this way. I'm privileged it got to be this way. When the pandemic kept going, I enrolled in a year-long online program called "Deconstruct to Reconstruct" with Alexandria Crow, and I'm still doing it. And that first manual I received from Mary - I'm still reading it, again and again.
Sometimes my best days are lying on the floor for fifteen minutes (an hour?) with a block under my back giving slack to my psoas. Never been in a position more grounding. Never been so still. I surrender.
To the practice, to the study - through direct experience, ancient text, and modern interpretation.
So yeah, we can do that here. By collecting attention and putting it towards a forever now.
*1. "Vinyasas are progressive sequences that unfold with an inherent harmony and intelligence. 'Vinyasa' is derived from the Sanskrit term nyasa, which means 'to place,' and the prefix vi, 'in a special way'—as in the arrangement of notes in a raga, the steps along a path to the top of a mountain, or the linking of one asana to the next. In the yoga world the most common understanding of vinyasa is as a flowing sequence of specific asanas coordinated with the movements of the breath. The six series of Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga are by far the best known and most influential." (Shiva Rea, Yoga Journal)