Lost and Found

"Children are all foreigners"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Over the past weeks, I have returned to Emerson's wisdom again and again. I spent the month of August teaching yoga in Taipei as part of the Taipei National University of the Arts summer dance festival, TaiepeIDEA, which invites guest faculty from all over the world to work with children, high schoolers, and college/professional/adult dancers who come mostly from Taiwan and mainland China. It was an amazing adventure that reminded me of the importance of remaining open, like a child, in awe of each and every stunning moment we have in this lifetime.

When we let go of the need to be something or someone perfectly defined, we make room for the unexpected. And it is the unexpected--sometimes painful sometimes beautiful--that so often awakens us to aspects of ourselves we scarcely dreamed existed.

Sometimes we have to, quite literally, get lost in order to be found. To discover.
Or recover.

Of course, we need not travel any further than our own lives to cultivate a sense of exploration...what better landscape than the peaks and valleys of our daily experiences? I have found that each time I travel afar, I better understand "home," as a place and as an experience that begins and ends inside of me. When we take time off from the routines that normally dictate and frame our responses and understandings, we get a glimpse of what truly carries, supports, nurtures, and inspires us. 

And we also gain perspective on what binds, limits, and burdens us. 

In High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver marvels at Buster, the Bahamian hermit crab who inadvertently immigrated from the beach to her desert home in Tucson, AZ in a shell she collected while strolling the beach. Surprise gives way to a low-grade guilt that gives way to fascination as Kingsolver and her daughter decide that, "when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and give it the best home you can." And as Buster begins to settle into his new home in the desert, so far from the Caribbean seas of his infancy, something shifts in his behavior. What Kingsolver observes is so extraordinarily poetic and mysterious in part because it echoes something so entirely ordinary and familiar and ancient.  They witness Buster's gradual shift from awkward disorientation to a mysterious conciliatory dance to a rhythm that can only be described as high tide...in Tucson. In other words, Buster, like all of us, has an innate ability to tune in and listen and hear and feel and sense and smell and know hope and Home...no matter where he is under the weight of whichever latest shell he carries upon his back.

We find our way.

My time in Taiwan was extraordinary, in part because I had never been to Asia and thus had no pre-conceptions about what to expect. I was Emerson's foreigner in the truest sense--a child completely in awe of all I saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. I arrived raw and bare--the shell of my known life cast aside somewhere between Tokyo and my first day of teaching a relatively unknown practice to students who spoke little to no English, much less Sanskrit. I found myself stripped of all the usual tools and props that might otherwise support or dictate my teaching--they had no prior experience with yoga and wouldn't understand the most specific of cues I might give. We were all together in that space where native language and cultural context can't bridge the gaps. I couldn't just say, for example, "Down Dog" or "sit up tall" or "inhale, exhale."

I had come to Taipei as a teacher from a foreign land only to find that most of what we teach in yoga relies upon so many givens. A given context, a given motivation, a given set of cues. A given language. In a few simple syllables, I can guide my U.S. students through a myriad of shapes and experiences, from standing toes together to lying in the corpse. And somehow (sometimes) I can convey, too, the essence of the pose, can invite them to feel what it is to be a snake shedding skins, belly to the earth...or feel what it means to be the corpse, letting go of everything in complete surrender. Because we share the language and the context--we find ourselves in a class together and can safely assume an awful lot.

But when stripped of the given language (be it English or the language of yoga as a discipline), stripped of the cues and the culture of it, I began to see IT--yoga, and by extension something far less easy to label--differently. I had to distill the subject matter down to something beyond language. To something I could convey, inspire, encourage, and support.

What is it, really? What exactly was I there to teach? What, at the end of the month, did I want these incredible beings to have, to feel, to know? To remember? When you have to start from scratch, and you cannot even take for granted the underlying motivations or desires of your students, what exactly do you teach? And how?

And upon returning to the States, I found that though I was "home," everything had shifted. What I see around me--in the (how else can I say it) scene that yoga has become (the magazines, fashion lines, jewelry lines, vitamin/supplement lines, shoes, festivals, conferences, etc) no longer offers me refuge. There is something empty about it, something I once crawled into but now must follow my instincts and scuttle away in search of a more honest home.

My time as the foreigner has made me, to a certain extent, a foreigner in my own discipline. I am not sure, in other words, what it is--stripped of the merchandising, glamour, gloss, bells and whistles, cliche and commodification. So much of what I see is just another trussed up version of the same old stories...

But I am jumping ahead. Impatient. What can I say, I am from a land of impatient people.

My first few days in Taipei were as exhilarating as they were intimidating. The Taiwanese are the most gracious and friendly people I have ever met. The students were eager and quick to smile, even as we were all adjusting to the sheer awkward newness of yoga in the land of dance. Everyone calls you "Teacher," Laoshi, and even those who were not in my classes would pass by smiling shyly and waving to say "Hello, Teacher." Their questions (or later, their warm and loving responses to classes)  tingled in my ears like the gorgeous insect sounds that pulsed and surged in the mountains all around us. Familiar yet totally unfamiliar. Comforting yet foreign. I didn't necessarily know what they were saying...but I felt we were on the cusp of meeting, of truly connecting. Our words were like empty shells, lovely and scattered, passed back and forth by tides we had not yet attuned ourselves to. 

It wasn't lost upon me that the students seemingly have an innate and organic comfort with recognizing the teacher--all teachers--reverently, humbly, and with enthusiasm. In my own training and practice as a teacher of yoga, no invocation has been as powerful or influential as the Guru mantra, which honors the teacher in all things at all times. It is all the teacher. May we have the good sense to see it. May we have the humility to honor it. Even when it makes us vulnerable. Especially when it makes us vulnerable. 

Because it is here--when the hard shell falls away and we feel most exposed-- that we tend to flee...to run, hide, get compulsive, get manic. Frantic to get back to the comforts of habit, the known, the givens. The drinker drinks, the shopper buys something new, the control freak clamps down, the defeatist retreats. 

Yet the teacher--the guru-- is that force that is coaxing us one step beyond the old story, one breath beyond the resignation to who or what it is we think we are. One moment more in the unknown so we might truly meet ourselves, know ourselves. The teachers in my life have been exactly those circumstances and individuals that blew like typhoon winds until my clenched fists released whatever tenuous tether I thought so necessary, be it a man or a job or numbers on a scale or numbers in my account. In the letting go, we more surely let something in.

This is nowhere more obvious to me than in my own asana practice, where I settle into the posture--into its experience, its lesson, its challenge, and its evolution--on the exhale. When I watch students learn to breathe and make the breath primary in their practice, I also watch them more gracefully receive and more deeply express the asanas, the transitions among the asanas, and their truth of it. Their truth. Not mine. And so it is with my own practice, at that soft still hollow that concludes the exhalation, the asana and I are one story. Like the wave that pulls back to the sea folds into that space and becomes the power behind and beneath the next articulation crashing ashore.

But it's also true that when I hold a bit of the last inhale in--as though clinging to that breath with fear I will not receive more breath with untold new messages ferried upon it--my posture is crippled and static. It becomes a stilted performance hiding a deep fissure, a cellular or molecular disconnection between what I am expressing and what is actually happening. To merge with what is requires surrendering what has been. As Utah Phillips says, "The past didn't go anywhere."

And the future? Well, we know the trite admonishments around that. It doesn't exist.

But it's more than that, isn't it? The future doesn't just not exist...it is also always envisioned upon what has happened before, what we expect it to look like. And that vision, as limited and limiting as it is, changes when the earth beneath you shifts and the scenery and the customs and familiar all change; then there are new possibilities. The future shifts course.

In Taiwan, the challenges of the language barrier were amplified by the greater complexity of introducing Yoga--a practice and experience of wholeness and union--to dancers: a culture-within-a-culture, where the sense of self and body are so often steeped in harsh and dispiriting beliefs, traditions, aesthetics, and ideals. By no means do I wish to suggest that this is necessarily so. In fact, dance should and can be a glorious revolutionary celebration of the body, of the individual, of the creative sensual unbridled pulse of life. But there is an underbelly of the dance culture that often leads to corrosive self image and obsession with perfection and performance--two things from which, I believe yoga is meant to liberate us.

And yet today I wonder, as I see the latest Facebook posts and photos and flip through pages of magazines and sift through email after email and countless advertisements and realize it's all reproducing the same old story under a different name. As if huddling under the umbrella of "Yoga" can somehow give substance to ideas and products and behaviors that would otherwise be exposed as empty facades--pretty packages that offer no real sense of home. Maybe I am wrong, but yoga, the real deal experience of who we are, should feel like home. But I look around at the marketing of this experience and realize that but for a few well-rehearsed and overused words, I might as well be reading Glamour magazine or attending aerobics.

Call it "yoga" and you can sell it. And lots of people are all in the market for whatever "yoga" is peddling these days--glorification of certain body types or attributes, glamorization of fanaticism and compulsiveness, homogenizing tendencies that make desperate teens of us all, and the disingenuous ploys that unapologetically conflate spirituality with self righteousness. Or, more disappointing still, with business.

Because this is yet another multi billion-dollar industry selling yoga to you--and the interest of any business is to keep you dependent. Slap on the right label and market it as "yoga" and people come in droves to be filled up. As though they were empty in the first place.We are a nation of well-trained and insecure consumers of identity, taught to scuttle through our lives like beggars, hands stretched out pleading, "Tell me who I am and how to be, and tell me if it's good/smart/sexy/funny/strong/bold/ accomplished enough." The American yoga machine reinforces this outward gaze, this need for studios, the new clothes, the yoga music, the recognition, the validation, the performance to a standing ovation. Standing in Mountain, maybe, but clapping those hands and feeding every insecure needy drive that prevents us from really experiencing yoga, the naked now.

"We shall not cease from exploration," wrote TS Eliot. "And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." After all, how long will we circle around ourselves, chasing our own tails and previous trails, pushing and looking and efforting our way to something, some place, someone that was always right there, whole and perfect?

I stood in a classroom, the foreigner and yet the teacher, the one with no sense of direction and culturally in the dark asked to illuminate.  How do you introduce and share the message and embodiment and experience of yoga--as liberation, freedom, love supreme? When the language, the culture, and the context are so completely alien? 

One thing I learned: you start from scratch. In the dirt and sands of all that has been passed to you. You sift through it and let fall away everything that can't be conveyed authentically. You recover the elemental, and find that you don't focus on the forms as much as you linger in the in-betweens. You teach the emergence and the dissolution, because you teach the discovery of something entirely belonging to the student. Road signs are all you offer. You find meaning between the words, in what is unsaid as much as what is said. And somehow you navigate and guide the way home.  

I am not just talking about yoga, here.
And I am always talking about yoga. Here.

The initial challenge seemed to be how to offer anything of value, of substance, without relying on the means and techniques I have been trained to use. I had to tap into something more, something deeper.

Something that didn't rely on the newest Lululemon fashion, an impressive posture (try impressing a Taiwanese-trained dancer), rote or cliche sayings.
Something that didn't rely on being clever or articulate or beautiful (try being beautiful in extreme heat and humidity) or smart or funny or entertaining.
Something, in other words, NOT about me.
Something I can only call yoga.

Like, without the bells and whistles, without the glamour or seduction or exploitation of our inner wounds and scars.

My teachers Sharon and David tell Jivamukti teachers to teach with 150% of our attention on our students--on holding space for them, on providing them the experience and opportunity to go deeply inward and explore, discover. Recover. Remember. "You cannot do yoga," they say over and over. "You are yoga." So what we are doing in any given practice is exploring where and how and why we are resisting that state that is our natural state, our birth right. Our home. All you need then is a sense of adventure as you explore the voices and habits and beliefs that you carry on your journey until one day, as Eliot wrote, you arrive at the start, ready for the first time to be there and know it as home. David and Sharon taught me that my job as a teacher of yoga is to shine light on them, not on myself. If students are being asked to look at the teacher all the time, how is that any different than the magazine ads and the tv shows whose incessant message is to look outside of oneself for validation, approval, or direction? "Stop looking at me," David corrected us years ago in CA. "Stop looking away from what is happening." Be in it and don't get distracted, seduced, lured, or scared out of this moment.

Buster the hermit crab withdrew deeply into his shell and remained so completely still in his experience that Kingsolver believed him to be dead. This displaced crab, an Arizona refugee, withdrew from everything outside that would normally give him a sense of where and who he was. The props and decorations faded away so he could tap into that mysterious tidal rhythm that brought him home.

I've had the exquisite opportunity to travel a lot these past years, but what is new (place, students, region, culture, custom) or alien is usually buffered a bit by some comfortable known. Something I can wrap up in and feel safe, confident, protected.

Hidden.

It seems we all go there sometimes, to a place where you feel laid bare by the absence of what you took for granted (once, or for a time, or for a lifetime), and you struggle to connect with another, with yourself,  across the unknown territory as you yearn to crawl beneath and take cover in something, anything, familiar. Maybe it's a trip to a land where nothing--not the sounds, the sights, the tastes, the smells or the surroundings are familiar. Nothing anchors you into a former sense of stability. So you discover where and how (and maybe why) you hung your center of gravity on something outside of your own life. Whatever we hanker for or grasp at in the moments we feel most lost are the teachers, too. But the teacher wants nothing more than for you to be free. 

Maybe Kris Kristofferson was right when he penned the famous lyric, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Nothing left to lose. 

I write a lot about death and loss. There is a reason I do so, and it isn't because I am macabre or depressive or even Scotch Irish. It's because I have witnessed and known great beauty and, yes freedom, in the places where my own small life has dissolved at some seam I once thought central to my fabric. And what I can say with some certainty at this moment is that the experience of being lost in translation was not altogether that different from the experience of being lost in loss...whether I felt unmoored by the sudden death of my father or by an inability to buy a mango at an outdoor market where no words worked, it was the loss that something was found. Something that cannot be lost. 

I'm learning to find my sea legs. I'm learning to trust the tide. I'm learning to be home with who and what I am.

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit into a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. (High Tide in Tucson)

Sometimes we are lucky enough--and I mean this--lucky enough to find ourselves entirely lost in a moment, a circumstance, a situation, a place, an encounter. To be at a loss. Lost to who we are and who we were and who we are becoming. And all we have to work with is who we are in this moment, in this context, in this relationship, in this breath. Now. 

In fact, the past and the future are really just variations, riffs really, on now. How we experience or remember ourselves is more than recollecting or retrieving mere facts. Memory creates us--to remember ourselves is to manifest ourselves. Memories are not stored in us like computer files. Each retrieval of a memory--a feeling, a song, a conversation--actively initiates a molecular-electrical-chemical dance. Different each time. The memory is not stored, it's created, it's felt. It is a posture. An asana. And the practices of yoga are, theoretically, meant to help us remember. As the White Queen says to Alice in Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking Glass, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." 

Teaching in Taipei changed what and who I am now (as a teacher, a practitioner, a woman) in part because it so irrevocably changed my perspective on who I have been and what direction I am headed. The challenge and beauty and magic of teaching (a job that suggests knowing) where I was unknown and knew so little revealed more to me about yoga, about myself, and about my so-called direction than anything known could have yielded. What is yoga, really? 

One afternoon a student, a woman in her late 40s, came up to me, tentatively. She had tears in her eyes and a smile. "Teacher," she said softly "Today my body feels like friend for first time." I wanted to cry. I wanted to hug her--and did. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, "Hallelujah, this stuff really works, I did my job!"In successive days I was blessed by more revelations and confessions from students who were able--sometimes on their own, sometimes through a translator or fellow student--to tell me they had found yoga. From the former beauty queen and ballerina who was facing increasing pressure to lose weight so she could do more to sell her book to the Beijing choreographer who did wheel for the first time in years when she made it a dedication to forgiveness. "Your words touch me," she said through Kady, my beloved ad-hoc translator. "Even though I don't know your words, I know what you are saying and it touches me." Something crumpled and fell to the floor at my feet when I heard that from Mai. She had made me the teacher, she had called it forth as they all had, allowing me to transmit something pure and authentic. No bells, no whistles. Nothing fancy. Just yoga.

By the end of our weeks together, my students were to give a "final showing" alongside the ballet, contemporary, aerial, and capoeira teachers. I decided that though it was almost antithetical to perform yoga for an audience, these students had yoga in their cells and could move through a complex sequence without any thought about who was watching--or why (and in a festival where Cirque de Soleil scouts popped up, that was no small thing). For 10 blessed magical minutes, we watched them move together in sun salutations and then into an advanced standing sequence that included twists and an arm balance. Resourced with modifications and variations, they unfurled and blossomed in waves, following their own inner rhythms and breath--all moving into postures and out of postures with their own timing and with unbelievable grace. Though they were all moving through the same general sequence, they were distinctly their own expressions--joyous, radiant, embodied yoga.

"Now you have yoga," I said. "You no longer need me. You never needed me." Ah, but I was so incredibly honored to have been there.

My Taiwanese students were not any different from my U.S. students in many respects. Almost all of us have had times we felt like foreigners in our own bodies, our own lives. This disconnection is woefully exploited by an industry that uses "yoga" the word to sell us images and ideas that make tourists of us in our own lives.

From all I understand (which is admittedly so very little, a grain of sand in Buster's home stretch), the job of the yoga teacher is to do all you can to encourage students to go inward and marvel at what they find. My task then is to say, "look at you," NOT "look at me."

But in order to teach the Taiwanese students, students who couldn't understand my usual verbal cues, I was in the position of juggling how to show/demonstrate without reinforcing or encouraging a habit of mere mimicry, of looking to others for a sense of self. I didn't want them to imitate me. I wanted them to find their own expression of yoga. To feel, from the inside, how Warrior energy surges up and opens the heart or how plugging into the earth helps conduct the fear and hurt that so often arises in full wheel. To guide them just far enough that they could, for even a moment, forget about me. Because it seems to me that in order to empower a student, the goal has to include rendering oneself obsolete. The teacher's job, really, is to remind students they are already whole. To support their independence, and not seek from them greater dependence on you. Even if that means going broke, having no one show up for your classes or never being praised.

Teachers and studios who cultivate dependent students are not teaching liberation and wholeness. They are themselves dependent, bound up and looking to be filled by those who have graced them with the opportunity to embody and support yoga.

Dependence on the students for money, on gaining popularity, on achieving success or fame...preying upon students to be fed is not yoga. It's marketing. 

As hard as it is for those of us who teach as our careers, the teacher is not called to sit before her students so that she can keep them coming back. Her job is to help them set themselves free. Love them enough to let them move beyond you. Not to think so little of them that you foster neediness or allegiance or loyalty. There should be a marked and obvious distinction between a teacher and a pusher...but I can tell you that there are those who interact with their yoga practice as an addiction just the same. Just because you call it "yoga," and just because it is "a healthier addiction," doesn't make it any less crippling--any less unconscious. If the imbalance is already swinging in the direction of compulsive, the teacher's job is not to indulge, much less exploit it. And if the imbalance is already a tendency to keep seeking approval and validation, the teacher's job is not to indulge, much less exploit it. The teacher isn't given the supreme honor of sharing what has been shared with him so that he gets rich or famous. He is there to do one thing: see them as whole--insist on it--and not seek to fill them like holes.

The best teachers I know are the people and forces in my life that eventually render themselves obsolete. "When you touch someone in an assist," David taught us, "you should be invisible, like an angel. You come in and hold that space so that they can experience where they are headed. Then go away." Don't seek recognition, attention, or even gratitude. Just do your job and get out of the way.

And yet, all around us are messages--from teachers, teachers of "yoga"--encouraging us to look outward. At them. At their practice. Their product, their brand, their prowess, their progress. Call it "inspirational" and it hides what is, essentially, performativity and a need to be recognized. The small self is always on stage, needing an audience. A spotlight. The gaze of others. Like models on the pages of the glossy magazines.

But our lives are to be lived, as subjects, not objects--not mere backdrops to the lives and gazes and needs and desires and pocketbooks of others, whose own subjectivity is imposed and elevated to somehow determine our value or place. Or home.

So many magnificent women and men have washed up on my humble shores looking to be found, to be enveloped in something sturdy and safe. Some arrive with the shocked look of the newly vulnerable, raw and mistrusting and wide-eyed in the wake of what has been suddenly or violently ripped away. Others arrive quiet and carved out and brittle, hollow enough to hold to my ear to hear the sharp whisper of every cruelty that emptied them out for the sake of such fragile beauty. And whether they are yearning to be held or to be filled, I know they have long stopped hearing the call of Home.

And Taiwan was no different.

But neither is my own history, and my guess is neither is yours. I suppose that is what became so poignant to me on my travels. In being a complete stranger in a strange land, where I was forced to communicate and express and connect in new ways without any of the old crutches or strategies or even talents, I was simultaneously laid bare to new and alien elements. I was emptied of all I had once sheltered as my substance as a teacher, a practitioner, a woman. A human. An animal. And so I came to know, a bit better, who and what I am.

There isn't a word for that, or even a precise way to communicate it. Language fails.
No, language isn't necessary.

So these past few weeks I have been curled up in a shell, listening for that rhythm while around me so many voices echo the same old bullshit. I'm trusting the crazy tide that is dancing inside me, even if it isn't lining up with precise measurements of an industry or a culture. It's ok to unfurl and blossom in ways that make no sense to the world around us on its surface. We are all in synch even if we are moving so very differently into and out of things.

I refuse to scuttle around and play a part in something that won't hold up in the typhoon winds or the high tide of my life. I will not ignore my instincts and the call of Home.

There comes a time when we must travel lightly, with nothing but an open heart and mind to guide us through unknown and mysterious lands. And there comes a time when our desire to see and taste and hear and feel something true and beyond language outweighs the compulsion to fit in or be filled up...and in that openness we find we are and have always been fluent in the language that counts and will be offered shelter, comfort, and warmth wherever we go.

We find our way home.