If you’re reading this at the approximate date/time it’s been posted (Monday, November 4, 2024), it’s a slightly brighter morning, and maybe you feel a bit more rested. No one seems to remember these aspects of falling back into daylight savings time, which went into effect this weekend—and which we all thought wouldn’t happen anymore but I guess the government was busy with other things…? If you’re reading this 24+ hours AFTER November 4, it may or may not feel like a brighter, more restful morning for reasons outside of meteorology and antiquated time changes. I recently asked a friend whether we’ll ever have another election like the first one I voted in, in 2008, where there were debates on issues and a clear winner and an absence of paralyzing fear. God willing I live to see that day, because this election hasn’t been it.
While we (in the U.S.) hang in a terrifying limbo for now, I’m choosing to focus, at least partially, on the spirit-aligned track I’ve been on all year, and which has led me to and through remarkable places. Around this time in 2023, I committed to viewing my health, business, relationship, etc. problems through a new lens I hadn’t tried before, going beyond the body and mind whose imbalances I had coddled and appeased for years. “Spirit” revealed itself as a last and final frontier of healing, and it required a healthy dose of spirit to give it a try rather than abandon everything all together. I knew I couldn’t meditate or pray my way through the year and just hope for the best—I’m too rajasic for that—so instead I decided to direct all the other things I’d been doing toward this new intention. My yoga practice, my food, my self-care, my everything would be in service of nourishing my spirit. I didn’t define it beyond that, and instead trusted that, in the way things tend to happen, something would change as the result of my actions and attention.
Dear reader, it did. For this context, and because it was the most structured part of my plan, I’ll share what happened when I focused my yoga practice on spirit. Not that spirit wasn’t always present on my yoga mat, but this year I organized my monthly themes in a more systematic way, progressing through categories of poses in a way that paralleled the “well rounded” sequence I’d learned back in teacher training, and that flowed with the gunas, elements, and energies of the seasons, as I’d learned in my Ayurvedic studies. In other words, I wanted to teach the why behind the poses and their largely accepted order.
In late winter and spring, we harnessed the power of the legs to crawl up out of the snow and mud and remember how to hold ourselves up so we could grow; in summer, we circulated and released the heat that accumulated during the spring (as the sun built toward its peak at the summer solstice); and now in fall, we’re falling with grace—moving toward the ground through rhythmic, fluid movements that help cushion the descent that’s inevitable yet somehow always a surprise.
Having flowed through these cycles of movement and energies all year (along with a handful of dedicated students), I admit I’m surprised by how profound the effects of this methodology have been on my body, mind—and, yes, spirit. During my eight years as a teacher, I always found myself feeling burnt out at some point or another during the year, creatively or physically, bored and underwhelmed by the canon of yoga postures and sequences; not this year. Coming to the page to share about my monthly themes in this newsletter could feel like a chore in the past, a practice that lay under a shadow of doubt as to whether what I was saying made any sense or if anyone was even reading; not this year. I showed up to teach in all these forms, on days when I was full of energy and on days when I was empty, and the practice would remind me of something bigger than my petty problems. And while I still call teaching yoga one of my “jobs,” I have somehow detached its value in my life from the financial income it generates. I’ve arrived (for now) at a stage in my practice that feels a lot like Patanjali’s Sutra 1.3, which explains what happens when one practices Yoga:
तदा द्रष्टुः स्वरूपेऽवस्थानम् ॥३॥
1.3. tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe’vasthānam.
Then the true self/seer/soul abides in its own nature.
That nature-based movement should be where my particular spirit abides doesn’t surprise me at all. When I think back to the time when my chronic health issues began, I was standing at a precipice where many of us have been: deciding how to spend my life and studies after high school. My academic performance and interests were strong, but I had an equal passion for dance. The latter was a wholly impractical choice of profession, I knew; plus, I was mediocre at best and doubted my ability to even compete and perform at the college level. I sent applications to a few schools where I could potentially minor in dance, but it remained an extracurricular as I chose to prioritize my mind’s proven and acclaimed strengths in writing, and thinking and writing about writing.
I have no regrets about the choices I’ve made in college and beyond, but the fact of the matter is they ultimately led me back here—to the work that my spirit has longed to do from the beginning, but I was too timid and distracted to honor. Now that I know—feel—this truth, I have an even bigger job than to show up and teach people how to move and be moved by their spirits. It’s my responsibility to maintain the resources I need to do this work. As I reflect on the various ways I’ve fallen out of alignment over the years—namely, through derangement of the vata dosha—it’s especially satisfying to see how I didn’t need to force myself into an “opposite” state to find balance. The excess (abundance?) of the cala guna (movement) I’d been gifted at birth wasn’t wrong, it just needed the right container, the right rhythm, and the right direction to not just be functional, but to elevate all aspects of my health per Ayurveda. As a teacher, my body gets to move without being depleted; my mind gets to shape-shift and tell stories around sensory and healing experiences without being graded, judged, or commodified; and my spirit gets to act as the vessel for grace that it is, to be the prism that takes in pure white light and refracts it into the full spectrum of vivid, gorgeous color.
For this, I am beyond grateful. I am humbled. Because the story doesn’t end when a spark like this is lit, when you’ve found your person. It’s just the beginning of the work we are each given the beautiful responsibility to do each and every day when we come into our bodies: to hold onto what you’ve found. And to be held by what’s found you.
**
Coming to the penultimate month of the year, it feels natural to begin reflecting on living a year in spirit. But November itself is also the month of spirit, even outside of my specific intentions. The threshold between October and November is marked by fascinations with death—the costumes, tricks, and treats of Halloween; days for saints and souls; reminders of the power of everlasting light and a thinning of the veils between unmanifest and manifest reality. From our earthly realm, it may feel difficult, even cruel at times, to come so close to ones we’ve lost but still be separated from by the dense layers of our humanity. But we have a lot of power where we sit. With our bodies, we can do good acts for and in honor of our ancestors, ensuring their spirits are fed and remembered the way they deserve to be. And we can do good acts for and in honor of our own spirits, so when it’s time to cross over to the other side we leave behind something worth remembering and honoring. In recognizing death, we continue the cycle of life.
Knowing this more spiritually porous time was arriving (along with the more acute tensions of this year’s presidential election), I did my best to plan ahead and ensure that October’s practice would be grounding—but not too grounding. You see, I’ve taken a new approach to dosha-management in all my work that pushes up against the mainstream, not-quite-wrong-but-perhaps-overly-simplified advice to throw opposite qualities at a dosha that’s acting up (thanks, spirit, for helping me figure this out!). Just because September = fall = vata season per the books and calendar, doesn’t mean that all of the qualities of vata arrive at once. Here in the northeast, summer weather now lasts through September, and we had at least two 70+-degree streaks in October…clearly some pitta was still at play. So I ignored the lists of “vata-pacifying” activities and foods, which predominate in warm and heavy qualities, and met us where we were. And what we needed was water. Not only is dryness a quality that carries over from late-pitta into vata season, it’s also the most threatening to our organism when it comes to disease and death. When we create the conditions for the system to create its own juiciness—water, rasa, ojas—then the other qualities of vata dosha stand less of a chance of overwhelming us to the point of disintegration. And of course this makes sense, since water’s job in the ecosystem is to cohere.
For October, then, we flowed. But it wasn’t the same kind of flow that I taught in March and April (kapha season)—a circulating, stimulating, pay-attention kind of flow. Deliberately mirroring that kaphaja phase of the earth cycle but with different qualities, October’s flow was more like horizontal water—a gently undulating inlet of the ocean, rather than the vertical power of a waterfall or downpour that’s needed to wake up kapha in spring. With moon salutations, lateral vinyasas, and layers of strong prone backbends, we set vata’s inherent mobility to a smooth, lay-low, easy-listening beat. We oscillated between effort and ease so as to not jolt or alarm our delicate organisms, cajoling ourselves toward rest.
Taking the “slow flow” concept one step further, I simplified all of our lives by teaching a single, repeated sequence. This was hard for me. I’m a teacher (and student) who thrives in improvisation (the one area of my life where that quality applies!); I love nothing more than keeping myself and my students sharp and adaptable with novelty. But even novelty has a point of diminishing returns, and vata season is that point. I knew I’d be doing us all a favor by creating a predictable bass line on which the melodies (and cacophonies) of our present moment could ride. I am so proud to say I kept my promise—for 30 classes to be exact.
While this amount of repetition was in and of itself a kind of stability, it was really just a pregame for the deeper stability (sthira and guru gunas) that I have on the agenda for this month. While calling up the earth element in October would have been fine (it’s absent from both pitta and vata doshas), it would have been a bit extra. Like using a giant rock to put out a still smoldering fire, when a bit of water would do the job better. Plus, the sequence of the elements have a rhyme and reason that we need not play around with. Water comes before earth because without it, we’d be completely dry (fire → earth), and earth would have no fertility to it. The juiciness of water—the flowing quality of October’s yoga—allows earth to come into the system and not choke us like a mouthful of hot sand, but soothe and nourish us. Following water, earth becomes the tamas inside the rajas, the yin inside the yang. That which maintains the flowing quality of life even at the end of its cycle.
Movement isn’t the only yang we’re trying to maintain. The fire of agni also benefits from the combination of water and earth, juice and stability. A reliable appetite is the best way to build healthy dhatus and ojas, which we need to maintain our systems throughout the season of depletion and deprivation. The cold and dark qualities of nature beckon agni to come inside, take off its coat, and stay for a while; hence why we crave and can digest heavier foods in the fall and winter. And it’s no coincidence that vata season is the time for feasting—holidays built entirely around eating are coming up, and we’ll need strong agnis to digest the foods and emotions that arrive at these gatherings. The predictability of holiday gatherings might taste sweet to some, and sour or bitter to others—which reminds us of the options we have when it comes to the rasas we eat (as in flavors) and the rasas we feel (as in emotions). If we’ve set up a rhythm of self-care that maintains agni no matter what’s being served, then our digestive systems will not fail in the face of incompatible food (and people) combinations; and even if they stumble a bit, they’ll recover more easily. If you don’t have a self-care anchor yet, I encourage you to establish one now, before you get too busy. It could be as simple as drinking hot water in the morning or taking one breath before each meal. If you like doing it—and how it makes you feel—enough, you can’t fail.
What this looks like as an embodied practice is so literal I almost resisted it: core and balancing poses. Moving from standing to the ground, the way nature is descending toward its source this time of year, we’ll foster the strength in our foundation—feet, ankles, legs, hips—to make that transition more graceful, even while being able to hold ourselves up from the center if and when the ground falls out from under us (but it never really does, does it?). Crunches, planks, Pilates, etc. won’t make up for excess eating or indigestion—in fact, it could make those discomforts worse. Rather, creating strength and suppleness in the abdominals, psoas, and back before feasting (or being served an extra helping of big emotions that you tried to politely decline) can ease the nervous system, which in turn allows for good digestion (it’s called “rest and digest” for a reason). We have four whole weeks to get ourselves calm and strong enough for this, people. Let’s go.
***
One of the few things I remember about high school chemistry—perhaps because of my teacher’s excellent metaphor skills—is the law of entropy: a system will always move toward disintegration. (She used the image of what happens when we teenagers were let out of school after the last bell.) This is described in the Ayurvedic laws as well, where the cycles of the year and life move from an origin point of density and stability (kapha/spring/childhood) through heat (pitta/summer/mid-life, and thermodynamics) to a state of spaciousness, frailty, and isolation (vata/fall/wisdom years). Ayurveda goes one step further than chemistry in explaining this progression (that’s because Ayurveda is more like physics than chemistry, as a teacher once explained to me; yep, 🤯). As with everything, Ayurveda isn’t satisfied by just knowing what’s happening; it wants to know why. And the five-element, three-dosha theory of the universe gives us a rather elegant why behind entropy. You see, as the body—of a human, of the planet—moves toward and through the disintegration of death in vata season, it sloughs off all the gross, dense, heavy matter that’s been occluding the true source of stability keeping the whole system together: spirit. The medicine for our disintegration right now isn’t in prevention or avoidance or deluding ourselves into thinking we can move ourselves to the opposite end of the wheel of the year. The medicine is in being right here. We only have to stay still, and patient, enough to allow the spirit to reveal its full self to us. And from that grace, the work, gift, and responsibility of our lives comes into crystal clear focus. We remember that from emptiness, everything arises; that, as E. E. Cummings wrote:
“to destroy is always the first step in any creation.”
In vata season, a lot can and will be lost. But if we keep wandering around and around and around, searching for a remedy for that feeling of disintegration, we overlook the facts of where we are, which is the only remedy for living a life inherently full of suffering, as the ancient philosophers tell us. The suffering ends when we stop anticipating it, and flow with the cycle of spirit.
Samkhya philosophy, the evolutionary narrative guiding Ayurveda and yoga, describes that purusha, the supreme reality, became manifest as prakrti because of its desire and longing to know itself. From there, the individual spirit and consciousness, mind, senses, and five elements were born. Earth as we know it is the form in which Spirit decided to express its love for itself. What better way, then, to fall into that divine love than to fall with and into the earth, now?
This month, may we remember the stable, steady, and resilience nature of our individual spirits, and our one spirit, which reveals itself in the dark, heavy earthiness of this season not because it’s waiting for light to return in spring—but because it knows the light is still here.
