In my classes this week
Wednesdays 5:30 – 6:45 and 7:00 – 8:30.
Saturday 10:30-12.  Make life easier and sign up here.

I finally watched the video that has been circulating for the past few months. I don’t think I was ready before today, perhaps. But today I needed it.

Among the many horrific things on today’s chopping block is the Affordable Care Act. Limited and scandalous as it is, the ACA provided access to healthcare for me and many people I know and millions I don’t. Now, the money-hungry anti-humans (who’ve been dreaming of defunding Medicaid since their days corralling around the keg) are about to pull the trigger (a term I am using with great intentionality) on a “new plan”…and deal a death blow not only to Medicaid and health care coverage for millions of people, but also to the jobs and ultimately to the lives of millions.

[It is not too late. They vote tomorrow. If you have a few minutes to spare, please call your representatives and ask them to vote against the American Health Care Act. Find their info at http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ . Remember, emails and petitions do not bear as much weight as calls and visits.]

Today, I needed Valerie Kaur’s message of possibility and hope. With tears streaming down my face, I watched the powerful speech she delivered this past New Year’s Eve, in which she evoked her ancestors and the ancestors of those who’ve survived occupation and internment, enslavement and exploitation.

She called us forth into the magical space of dreaming, of awakening to the possibility that this is not a requiem but a rebirth, that the sounds we hear are not the laments of a dirge but the lilts of delivery. Not lacrymosa, not tears of sorrow and grief…but labor, tears of joy and growth.

What is this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? -Valerie Kaur

This week in my individual practice and in my public yoga classes, I am reflecting on what I personally need to let go of in order to make space for that type of hope and possibility. The Spring Equinox is naturally a time for this type of shedding and rebirth. I am feeling that need in a new, paradigm-shifting kind of way.

So tonight and on Saturday, the practice will center on the energies of rebirth and renewal, which necessarily includes the pain of grief, mourning, shedding, and release.

In the Hindu pantheon, Kali is the goddess of both Destruction and Creation…a recognition that these two processes are inextricably linked on the individual, social, and cosmic levels.  No new energy is ever created in the Cosmos…it is simply recycled.  We cannot build something new unless we are willing to liberate all the energy that is bound up in the old and out-dated.

What can we destroy, what can we let dissolve and diminish, in order to usher in a New Creation Story?