What’s your love language? Until very recently, I believed mine was “words of affirmation.” Maybe it was because I’m a word person—a reader, a writer, someone who expresses what’s in her mind most directly, thoroughly, and sincerely in writing. But as we come into the season of giving, and the time of year when I’m wont to become reflective and sentimental, once again, I realize that I’ve been wrong all along about my love language. You see, words are my superpower when it comes to ideas; I was given an ability to synthesize and explain concepts, even complex ones, with clarity, and when I’m lucky even eloquence. But what my year-end reflections have unveiled is the simple truth that ideas aren’t the same as love—especially not the idea of love. When it comes to love, something which I (perhaps appropriately) cannot really define or explain in words, I express myself most directly, thoroughly, and sincerely not through words, but gifts.
My surprise upon realizing this a few months ago was as big as if I were told my father was the Wizard of Oz. Because, to be frank, I love giving gifts, but I’m not so great at receiving them. Not infrequently have I found myself unable to hold back facial expressions of disappointment or dislike upon receiving something I didn’t specifically ask for. Now, before you click away from this email and decry me as a terrible person, hear me out. When it comes to things—material things, like the ones you’d give as a gift—I’m very picky. Fabrics, ingredients, country of origin, packaging, mode of shipping, organic and minimally processed, useful or beautiful according to my eccentric taste…these are all things that I value in the things I own and use. When I’ve receive gifts that don’t fall within these parameters, even when given harmlessly and well intentioned, I’d feel offended and unseen. This person who knows me enough to buy me a gift maybe doesn’t know me at all! Plus, I’ve been further entangled in the web of harmful consumerism I tried not to participate in through my strict purchasing requirements. Lose-lose.
There’s a lot wrong with the above statements, I know that, but one thread bears expounding upon because it’s what’s led me to my new holiday spirit—and is the theme for my teaching this final month of 2024, the culmination of a year of unexpected gifts. When I was given these imperfect gifts, I was not only participating in the excessive consumerism that characterizes most gift-giving in our age; but I also wasn’t participating in the act of human exchange that started much, much earlier than Black Friday and the like. I wasn’t speaking the right love language—or any love language at all—because I wasn’t receiving.
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This aha moment came to me not during a gift exchange, but while working through my teaching this year. Excited as I’ve been to share my personal insights about embodying spirit in asana—or any of the other topics I teach in classes and workshops and with private clients—I’m not immune to the frustrations of the working world, especially as a freelancer in NYC. As many teachers, of any subject, will know, there’s nothing more disappointing than pouring your heart into a topic and having it fall on deaf ears. You speak passionately before a sea of dead eyes; or you develop a curriculum and marketing and no one signs up. Why, I wondered, don’t people want to learn these things—they’re literally life-changing! What could be more important, or a more worthwhile thing to spend time and money on?? I felt bad for these non-students for what they were missing out on, the gifts I was so eager to give; and worse, I had the stomach-sinking realization that I was dependent on them to do my job. What good is a teacher without students? What good is a gift without a recipient?
Knowing I couldn’t control the decisions of my fellow Brooklynites, no matter how compelling my Instagram reels and newsletters were, I changed course. I would teach for myself. Yes, you read that correctly. Now, before you click away from this email and decry me as a terrible teacher who isn’t devoting her craft to her students’ well-being, hear me out. I care deeply about my students and will always respect their needs and desires. But looking back at my own journey as a student, the most important things I’ve learned from teachers—English teachers, history teachers, music teachers, dance teachers, yoga teachers, Ayurveda teachers…the whole lot—weren’t things I thought I needed, wanted, or asked to learn. If I had called the shots, I’d be pretty close to where I started in terms of expanding my knowledge, let alone wisdom. My teachers saw something I couldn’t—a space of potential growth—and invited me into that space. I was allowed to take what I needed from what they shared, no questions asked. They taught—they gave their wisdom—without any expectations of what would happen on my end. This gift had no clear recipient, and yet somehow, in that free and open exchange, we all transformed—the teacher, the student, and the material.
To address my teaching dilemma, then, I had to shift the intention of my work. I couldn’t teach with a mission, a directive, or a goal—that would make the exchange one-dimensional rather than three. So I shape-shifted again and let myself be taught not by myself, but by the material I wanted to share. I began the year wanting to share the spiritual components of yoga asanas as I (thought) I knew them—what could we learn, experience, explore about our True Selves in a twist, a forward bend, or a standing pose? Now, at the end of the year, sense the relationship between poses and spirit isn’t so black and white. Our spirits don’t need poses to express themselves, just the way that putting on a costume won’t turn you into someone else. Rather, these poses arise from a longing of our spirit to express itself. We need all the poses, all the expressions, and when we’re aligned with all facets of ourselves our movement becomes a love language unto itself. When allowed to move and be moved, our spirits fall in love with us over and over again—and we get to receive that gift in the form of life.
While I don’t have many data points besides my own experience, I’d say this approach worked even better than I thought. I was able to learn this vital lesson of spiritual alignment through a desire to teach it, blurring the lines between giving and receiving. All it took was for me to stop trying to move through the world in ways that I thought would be good for me—the “words of affirmation” I believed to be my love language—and to start doing what feels good—being part of the transformative act that is gift-giving.
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To have discovered this aspect of spirit at the end of my year-long lesson is quite fitting when we zoom out and consider where we are energetically. Right in the center of vata season, the resources that nature uses to grow—to create the fruits and flowers and leaves that give life—are all but absent. The earth receives less and less sun each day as we move toward the Winter Solstice; and the waters that offer prinanam, nourishment, to these bodies of water we live in and on are either dried up or frozen. There’s little to give, and therefore even less to receive—or so it seems.
Looking out into nature, the objects of our attention might seem paltry and unappealing, too—gifts we don’t really want, or teachers without students. It’s bare, cold, and dark; to be outside you have to wrap yourself in layers of protective fabrics and hope there aren’t any slivers where the wind can sneak in. Yet when we really pay attention to the sensory aspects of winter, there is so much to imbibe, maybe even more than during the lush abundance of peak summer. The stark lines of bare trees, the vastness of an overcast, snow-coming-soon sky (and that unmistakable smell) set against the naked earth, the quiet that settles as if only to amplify the forlorn howls of wind—it’s awe-some. Your littleness cannot be denied in this season, since unlike in summer, when you need only loll over to a nearby tree to get drunk off its sugar and shade, now, you have to fight for your life. You—your body, your survival—matter even more, because to nature, you don’t matter at all. Your spirit must assert itself; your life force must will itself to live.
Indeed, the intensity of winter isn’t so unlike the intensity of summer. The Summer Solstice is when yang—the outward-moving energy of heat and movement—is at its peak. By contrast, the Winter Solstice is when yin—the inward-moving energy of cold and building—is at its peak. These two seeming-opposites reside on the same line of the yin-yang circle. And that line is Prana, spirit itself trying out different poses and seeing which one fits.
In this moment, then, where nature has nothing to give, our only option is to follow the line of Prana to its natural opposite: receive. How? you ask. Not by taking things from the outside, which is what we do in summer—and in our modern capitalist world. But by paying attention to what’s already here. The awe-some-ness of our winter landscape isn’t just in the abstract, startling shapes and sensations. It’s in the not-fully-known power of what we can’t readily sense on the surface, but what we know is percolating under the soil. The life that is being transformed while we wait and watch. Our prana—our attention—is feeding the transformation under the soil, which is all the more powerful because of the absence of distractions externally. The barrenness of winter begets an inner vitality that is merely the inverse of summer’s ostentation.
Winter, then, forces us to acknowledge that we are an inextricable part of the transformation that is the gift cycle. Having gone through the cycles of the seasons, our bodies are primed for this precise moment—full of juice and warmth so that we’re not as threatened when the external sources of those nutrients diminish. Our minds, too, are craving the darkness that reveals our inner abundance, that helps us recognize the love shining from deep inside the lengthening night. This is why and how we’re meant to be giving in winter—from our attention. Indeed, when you really pay attention to the people you love, you might realize that the thing they want most from you is you—your attention. And while it might seem like the scariest, most expensive thing to give, it’s actually the most readily available—even, especially, in the depths of winter, when the life force needs to be received in order to survive.
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So, this December, it’s been easy to shop for the people I love because I already have their gifts: the gift of receiving generously. Through opening my senses and receiving the prana from their gifts, I’ll gain proficiency in all the love languages, even while becoming more fluent in mine. And in receiving their attention, their gifts, I hope to give back to them in ways that make their spirits feel seen, appreciated, and loved.
