Last week, we hosted Ty Landrum in Buenos Aires for an intensive Ashtanga workshop. He traveled from Boulder and practitioners came from the farthest reaches of Argentina’s borders. Ty stayed at my house, immersed in the rhythms of my family and Latin American informality. Ty is now a leading figure in the yoga world, but he is also my age and has a small daughter, in addition to a humble and open heart. We enjoyed many sweet moments at our kitchen table, talking (inevitably) about yoga but also sharing stories about our own pasts and ideas that we hold dear.
The last night of his visit, my daughter Justina asked me to tell the story of how her father Juan and I met. I didn’t feel embarrassed to share such a personal story, and Ty had already told me how he met his own wife (in a yoga studio, of course). Juan and I have been together for over twenty years, and I have told our story many times, but I had never told it to Ty Landrum. The context of his attention changed my own understanding of what had happened, almost as if it were a different narrative altogether.
I met Juan during a play we did together in college. The director wore black Levi’s, a leather jacket and a thoughtful scowl. During the first three weeks of rehearsal we did mysterious movement exercises, completely irrelevant--it seemed to me--to acting, the play in question or common sense. I had auditioned because a guy I liked mentioned that he was going to try out. But the guy didn’t get cast, and I did. So it was that I ended up doing weird things with people I didn’t know in a cold basement at Bryn Mawr.
Juan was the only person in the cast that I knew by name, though we had never spoken. He was “the Argentine guy” who wore a black poncho instead of a jacket and always turned in his papers late—though he apparently got great grades because his teachers loved him. In retrospect this was telling information.
The afternoon that changed my life was dark and cold, already night by 4 pm. Outside, the college grounds were hunched in snow and ice. For a girl raised in Georgia, this already seemed like an apocalypse. Inside the rehearsal room, the director gave us another uncomfortable and enigmatic task. First, he asked us to choose an object in the room. Then, he told us that we had twenty minutes in which to walk towards our goal. We were to move as slowly as possible, focused on our bodies and their rhythms, steadying our gaze. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. Are we ever going to read the f?? script?
With great imagination, I chose a crack on the wall and began a slow crawl in that direction. The room fell quiet, and all I could hear were the glacial footfalls of my fellow actors as they almost moved. The silence was thick and textured, like the snow falling outside in the dark.
At that stage in my life, I was a student and an athlete. I played soccer competitively and enjoyed pushing my body to its outer limits. I was a key defensive player on the team and the training staff used to joke that my injuries took up their entire budget. I felt complete with dirt on my face and an ice pack taped to my quads. Off the field, I spent all my time in the library, connecting ideas and writing poetry. Either dreaming or bleeding, I did little beyond sport or study. Once a month, when I ran out of socks and underwear, I did my laundry or went shopping for more.
But on that cold day, I experienced something new, radical. As I lifted one foot in slow motion, a strange current arrested my attention, as if all my senses and thoughts were moving in tandem, joined by the silence. There were twenty of us in the rehearsal room, but all I could hear was breath. Waves of concentration thickened the air, which seemed to become heavier with each passing moment. My mind felt both unusually sharp and unusually still. I experienced every prick of sensation in my body, but not (for once) through pain.
Suddenly, my balance shifted and the left side of my body became heavier than the right. What was happening to me? Some kind of stroke? (even at 19 I was a hypochondriac). I stopped moving and understood that I wasn’t dying but that someone was behind me, holding on to the pearl of my left earring. I could feel their breath on the nape of my neck, the buzz of their presence behind me, and the heat rising from their hand. This person was very close, well within the personal space that Americans consider their birthright. Who, I panicked, could it be?
Whoever this being was, they had arrived quickly at their destination, and so we had to move together over the next fifteen minutes. The roots of my hair tingled and my skin grew hot. I prayed that it wasn’t the Puerto Rican Juan with the bad teeth and scary laugh who’d been chatting me up during rehearsal breaks. If not him (please, not him) then who? I could feel the intensity of their concentration on the small pearl and the rhythm of their breath. They exhaled with one step and then inhaled as they lifted the other foot. Soon, we were breathing together. My own perception sharpened in all directions, as if my sense organs had finally come on line. Time dissolved around us, and the present moment grew wide and elastic. It was tortuous, but I didn’t want it to end.
I heard the director’s voice mark the end of the exercise, and the weight lifted from my ear. For a long second, I couldn’t move, but then I found the courage to turn around. Shining there was Juan’s lovely and sheepish face. I have loved him ever since.
I enjoy telling this story because it’s tender and poetic—not to mention unlikely and somehow precarious. It unnerves me to think how it might not have happened; Juan could have chosen a doorknob or another girl’s pearl. But I when I told this story to Ty, I realized that this exercise was not just the curious way in which we fell in love, but it was our first contemplative practice. Our future vocations as yoga teachers and practitioners grew from that tiny nucleus, along with our future as husband and wife, mother and father. These realities unfurled from an experience of dharana and pratyahara, mudra and pranayama. It doesn’t simply make sense that we became the practitioners that we are today, but now I understand that we were always those practitioners, that we could all be those practitioners, given a generous and thoughtful context in which to evolve.
The last day of Ty’s workshop, someone asked how the practices of pranayama and meditation fit within the Ashtanga Vinyasa system as taught by Pattabhi Jois. This is a great question. Ty took his time to answer, giving the question the same breadth that he would embody in these techniques. All of these practices, he explained, share the same inner form: to observe what is arising with compassion and without judgment. In that loving space we can allow whatever has come up to dissolve, without grasping or rejecting. What remains in the wake of this process is nirodha, Brahman, the divine.
Ty, and his teacher Richard Freeman, remind us of the importance of experiencing all of these practices (asana, pranayama, meditation), along with the arts of chanting, mudra, bandha and kriya. But they also remind us not to fall into the trap of believing that one technique is better than another, that Bhakti Yoga is more pure than Jñana, Karma Yoga more noble than Raja. Richard has said that if we did any of these practices with our full attention and with our hearts fully open, we would drop right into the paradise of truth: the truth of who we are. Tvam eva pratyaksham Brahmasi, says the Vedic chant: You are the visible Brahman. Not in twenty years or when we do the fourth series like Ty. Right now. Yesterday. Tomorrow.
When I told Ty the story about how I met my boyfriend at 19, I remembered that every moment offers us the chance to fall in love with what is happening, with the people around us, with who we are. Melting into this process is the practice of yoga, or, as Richard would say: the pathless path of love. Ty and Richard teach us that the heart of our practice is relationship itself: between Guru and devote, mind and breath, inhalation and exhalation, prana and apana, Boulder and Buenos Aires, between two teenagers in a college play.
That day in the rehearsal room, I discovered the love of my life, but fundamentally I discovered love itself. Nadi Shodhana and the Yoga Chikitsa are not the techniques that will truly transform us. Our asana, mudra and mantra is the open heart. The magic wasn’t in how Juan held my earring or in the alignment of his wrist. The magic between us grew from silence and attention, the presence in our bodies and the momentary suspension of our mental conditioning. In that unusual space we saw each other clearly, and we have lived in that yoga for over twenty years (with all the halahala born of desire but also with its delights).
All relationships involve risk, the exposed nerve that vulnerability requires. Juan took a risk when he reached for my earring, just as Ty took another when he crossed the world to come to Buenos Aires, just as fifty practitioners did as they surrendered to Ty’s hands in the Mysore room. But the reward is so sweet, that the practice of yoga is worth the risk. There may be tears along the way, but they represent the indenture of our hearts to a great purpose: its own freedom.
It’s always hard to say goodbye to a beloved teacher. Through their grace we catch the pearl of our own hearts. We mistakenly believe that they carry it their grasp, when our own fingers have held the jewel. In these moments, I like to read John Donne’s great love poem, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning:”
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.”
Thank you Ty Landrum, thank you Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor; thank you Juan Mora Y Araujo and Alejandro Chiarella; thank you to my children and to those who looked after them; and deepest thanks to the practitioners who walked with us during those five days on the pathless path of love.
Last week, we hosted Ty Landrum in Buenos Aires for an intensive Ashtanga workshop. He traveled from Boulder and practitioners came from the farthest reaches of Argentina’s borders. Ty stayed at my house, immersed in the rhythms of my family and Latin American informality. Ty is now a leading figure in the yoga world, but he is also my age and has a small daughter, in addition to a humble and open heart. We enjoyed many sweet moments at our kitchen table, talking (inevitably) about yoga but also sharing stories about our own pasts and ideas that we hold dear.
The last night of his visit, my daughter Justina asked me to tell the story of how her father Juan and I met. I didn’t feel embarrassed to share such a personal story, and Ty had already told me how he met his own wife (in a yoga studio, of course). Juan and I have been together for over twenty years, and I have told our story many times, but I had never told it to Ty Landrum. The context of his attention changed my own understanding of what had happened, almost as if it were a different narrative altogether.
I met Juan during a play we did together in college. The director wore black Levi’s, a leather jacket and a thoughtful scowl. During the first three weeks of rehearsal we did mysterious movement exercises, completely irrelevant--it seemed to me--to acting, the play in question or common sense. I had auditioned because a guy I liked mentioned that he was going to try out. But the guy didn’t get cast, and I did. So it was that I ended up doing weird things with people I didn’t know in a cold basement at Bryn Mawr.
Juan was the only person in the cast that I knew by name, though we had never spoken. He was “the Argentine guy” who wore a black poncho instead of a jacket and always turned in his papers late—though he apparently got great grades because his teachers loved him. In retrospect this was telling information.
The afternoon that changed my life was dark and cold, already night by 4 pm. Outside, the college grounds were hunched in snow and ice. For a girl raised in Georgia, this already seemed like an apocalypse. Inside the rehearsal room, the director gave us another uncomfortable and enigmatic task. First, he asked us to choose an object in the room. Then, he told us that we had twenty minutes in which to walk towards our goal. We were to move as slowly as possible, focused on our bodies and their rhythms, steadying our gaze. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. Are we ever going to read the f?? script?
With great imagination, I chose a crack on the wall and began a slow crawl in that direction. The room fell quiet, and all I could hear were the glacial footfalls of my fellow actors as they almost moved. The silence was thick and textured, like the snow falling outside in the dark.
At that stage in my life, I was a student and an athlete. I played soccer competitively and enjoyed pushing my body to its outer limits. I was a key defensive player on the team and the training staff used to joke that my injuries took up their entire budget. I felt complete with dirt on my face and an ice pack taped to my quads. Off the field, I spent all my time in the library, connecting ideas and writing poetry. Either dreaming or bleeding, I did little beyond sport or study. Once a month, when I ran out of socks and underwear, I did my laundry or went shopping for more.
But on that cold day, I experienced something new, radical. As I lifted one foot in slow motion, a strange current arrested my attention, as if all my senses and thoughts were moving in tandem, joined by the silence. There were twenty of us in the rehearsal room, but all I could hear was breath. Waves of concentration thickened the air, which seemed to become heavier with each passing moment. My mind felt both unusually sharp and unusually still. I experienced every prick of sensation in my body, but not (for once) through pain.
Suddenly, my balance shifted and the left side of my body became heavier than the right. What was happening to me? Some kind of stroke? (even at 19 I was a hypochondriac). I stopped moving and understood that I wasn’t dying but that someone was behind me, holding on to the pearl of my left earring. I could feel their breath on the nape of my neck, the buzz of their presence behind me, and the heat rising from their hand. This person was very close, well within the personal space that Americans consider their birthright. Who, I panicked, could it be?
Whoever this being was, they had arrived quickly at their destination, and so we had to move together over the next fifteen minutes. The roots of my hair tingled and my skin grew hot. I prayed that it wasn’t the Puerto Rican Juan with the bad teeth and scary laugh who’d been chatting me up during rehearsal breaks. If not him (please, not him) then who? I could feel the intensity of their concentration on the small pearl and the rhythm of their breath. They exhaled with one step and then inhaled as they lifted the other foot. Soon, we were breathing together. My own perception sharpened in all directions, as if my sense organs had finally come on line. Time dissolved around us, and the present moment grew wide and elastic. It was tortuous, but I didn’t want it to end.
I heard the director’s voice mark the end of the exercise, and the weight lifted from my ear. For a long second, I couldn’t move, but then I found the courage to turn around. Shining there was Juan’s lovely and sheepish face. I have loved him ever since.
I enjoy telling this story because it’s tender and poetic—not to mention unlikely and somehow precarious. It unnerves me to think how it might not have happened; Juan could have chosen a doorknob or another girl’s pearl. But I when I told this story to Ty, I realized that this exercise was not just the curious way in which we fell in love, but it was our first contemplative practice. Our future vocations as yoga teachers and practitioners grew from that tiny nucleus, along with our future as husband and wife, mother and father. These realities unfurled from an experience of dharana and pratyahara, mudra and pranayama. It doesn’t simply make sense that we became the practitioners that we are today, but now I understand that we were always those practitioners, that we could all be those practitioners, given a generous and thoughtful context in which to evolve.
The last day of Ty’s workshop, someone asked how the practices of pranayama and meditation fit within the Ashtanga Vinyasa system as taught by Pattabhi Jois. This is a great question. Ty took his time to answer, giving the question the same breadth that he would embody in these techniques. All of these practices, he explained, share the same inner form: to observe what is arising with compassion and without judgment. In that loving space we can allow whatever has come up to dissolve, without grasping or rejecting. What remains in the wake of this process is nirodha, Brahman, the divine.
Ty, and his teacher Richard Freeman, remind us of the importance of experiencing all of these practices (asana, pranayama, meditation), along with the arts of chanting, mudra, bandha and kriya. But they also remind us not to fall into the trap of believing that one technique is better than another, that Bhakti Yoga is more pure than Jñana, Karma Yoga more noble than Raja. Richard has said that if we did any of these practices with our full attention and with our hearts fully open, we would drop right into the paradise of truth: the truth of who we are. Tvam eva pratyaksham Brahmasi, says the Vedic chant: You are the visible Brahman. Not in twenty years or when we do the fourth series like Ty. Right now. Yesterday. Tomorrow.
When I told Ty the story about how I met my boyfriend at 19, I remembered that every moment offers us the chance to fall in love with what is happening, with the people around us, with who we are. Melting into this process is the practice of yoga, or, as Richard would say: the pathless path of love. Ty and Richard teach us that the heart of our practice is relationship itself: between Guru and devote, mind and breath, inhalation and exhalation, prana and apana, Boulder and Buenos Aires, between two teenagers in a college play.
That day in the rehearsal room, I discovered the love of my life, but fundamentally I discovered love itself. Nadi Shodhana and the Yoga Chikitsa are not the techniques that will truly transform us. Our asana, mudra and mantra is the open heart. The magic wasn’t in how Juan held my earring or in the alignment of his wrist. The magic between us grew from silence and attention, the presence in our bodies and the momentary suspension of our mental conditioning. In that unusual space we saw each other clearly, and we have lived in that yoga for over twenty years (with all the halahala born of desire but also with its delights).
All relationships involve risk, the exposed nerve that vulnerability requires. Juan took a risk when he reached for my earring, just as Ty took another when he crossed the world to come to Buenos Aires, just as fifty practitioners did as they surrendered to Ty’s hands in the Mysore room. But the reward is so sweet, that the practice of yoga is worth the risk. There may be tears along the way, but they represent the indenture of our hearts to a great purpose: its own freedom.
It’s always hard to say goodbye to a beloved teacher. Through their grace we catch the pearl of our own hearts. We mistakenly believe that they carry it their grasp, when our own fingers have held the jewel. In these moments, I like to read John Donne’s great love poem, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning:”
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.”
Thank you Ty Landrum, thank you Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor; thank you Juan Mora Y Araujo and Alejandro Chiarella; thank you to my children and to those who looked after them; and deepest thanks to the practitioners who walked with us during those five days on the pathless path of love.
