Smrti & and the Life of a Goose
Untitled Abstraction, Watercolour, Pen, Ink & Alcohol ©2020 by Rami Schandall.
There have been more permanent yoga studio closures announced with the recent stay-at-home orders in Toronto. When I think of the past 20 years of yoga in this city, or 40 years of yoga in the North America, the “industry” has been far from static. It's tempting to think of the way things were, pre-pandemic, as stable. But it was not: yoga is precarious as a business, an uncomfortable fit with capitalism's constant expansion, disruption, competition. I am genuinely curious what this hard pause will yield—besides the obvious business closures and a poignant loss of community gathering places.
What will we do with this spacious uncertainty?
I incorporate many things that are not strictly yoga in my teaching. Yet “yoga” captures best my motivation — to practice with the “faith, energy, mindfulness, integration, and wisdom that form a path to realization.” (Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, 1:20)*
The practice is recognizable as movement, being in a body and taking care of it, and it is explicitly spiritual — concerned with the whole person and the community of sentient beings in our intricate dance of life.**
I continue to think creatively and openly about how best to do this work. For now, I continue online on Saturdays and Tuesdays, and I hope, in warmer weather and with less restriction, for outdoor circles, walking meditation, park practice ... What do you want from practice? Now—and in the near future—and in an ideal future—what would that look like? I would love to hear your thoughts.
* The next sutra, 1:21, offers this lovely promise:
tīvra-samvegānām āsannah
With wholehearted motivation, samadhi is sitting nearby.
(samadhi: realization, liberation, homecoming, remembering original face)
** Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is an Anishnaabeg scholar and storyteller. Her extraordinary book Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies is told in many parts by many voices, including humans, animals, and elements of the land: maple, stone, lake. One section is told by goose voices, speaking about taking formation, to fly in migration. Here is the elder goose:
Mandaminaakoog cannot imagine life without movement, without the continuous work that brings about equal parts paralyzing exhaustion and the sweetness of uncomplicated fulfillment. Mandaminaakoog cannot imagine life without the task of one's existence being dependent upon continual remembering. Life as an economy of meaning.
An actual good life.
Which feels to me like smrti, the sanskrit word often translated as “mindfulness.” Continual remembering, present moment remembering—into awareness and its open, interconnected spaciousness.
