Leaving Anusara.

         

This has been the longest time I have gone without publishing a piece of writing in over two years. I kept trying to write this piece and that piece, and frankly, I have  pages of fabulously rich notes, scribbles, and thoughts to play with at some point. What has prevented me from drawing them coherently into an interesting piece of writing has been the bottom falling out of a central component of my life, namely Anusara Yoga. If you’re reading this, you know the rough outline of what has happened or perhaps you know the gritty details or the hints and shadows of them. In any case, every time I attempted to develop a piece of writing for the past few weeks, it felt forced, stilted, beside the point.

I realized tonight, as I wrote my resignation letter, that this would be a purging of blocked words, a letting go of things so that I could clear the way for new words to come, new ways of thinking to coalesce. And as I type this now, I feel relieved, renewed. I am creating instead of leaving, forming instead of dissolving. I’m entering the upswing of a new cycle.

The following is my letter to my community. Some people will like that I published it here and others will not. I wrote a piece here last year in which I spoke about the need to smash apart the old to begin again, and so this is what I’ve done. This is the way I need to deal with it to feel complete. Putting something into words makes it feel real to me. It seals the commitment. To those of you I love who are staying and those I love who have left, I hope it’s ok with you all. It’s the best I have to offer at the moment.

Chidambaram OM

Dear Friends,
This evening I came to a calm, yet profoundly sad decision to end my business affiliation with Anusara Yoga. This has been a painful process for me, involving the same anxiety, sleeplessness, and tears that so many of you are also experiencing. I love our system of asana and believe it to be the most elegant and intelligent one out there. I deeply love and admire our community as well, and for over ten years now I have been in a continual state of wonderment over the ocean of talent, intellect, and creativity that I have encountered in Anusara teachers and students. I cannot imagine my life without it and without all of you.

Furthermore, and the toughest point in all of this, is that I truly love, admire, and respect John. He has been supportive of me in many ways, and his teaching has helped me to heal when I was going through a couple of tough times. He has changed my life for the better. I am amazed at what he created, and I am forever grateful.

After several days of emotional turmoil, I realized that I was resisting leaving because of my deep love for the practice and for our community. The problem was, I had fallen out of love with the organization. Did you ever end a relationship because you and the other person were playing with different rulebooks? This is what I’m talking about. And this is why I have to leave.

I would like to be very clear. My resignation is a painful and carefully thought-out decision. It is a decision whose roots are in thoughts, feelings, and experiences that I’ve had over a few years. The events and revelations of the past couple of weeks have sealed it, but that tiny seed of thought indicating my eventual departure has been gestating for a while.

I pulled away from the initial cascade of resignations that began Sunday, feeling that I did not want to make a major life decision quickly, simply because so many of my close friends had left. What is necessary for me in any major life event is to get quiet, to make sure that I am in a thoughtful and grounded place, and to act from that place with informed certainty. I wrote, I meditated, I taught, I spoke with friends and family, and I’m in that place right now.

My reasons for leaving are rooted in my belief that an organization cannot successfully and healthily exist when one person has control over so many. I have felt like a bit of an outlier in the past few years because I have resisted some of Anusara’s philosophical underpinnings, specifically the Shiva-Shakti Primer. I have also disagreed with some of its financial initiatives, such as the 10% dues we are asked to pay on yoga products, when so many of us can barely make a living.

I have not felt empowered to publicly contest either of these policies without potentially damaging my career within Anusara, Inc., and that is a huge problem. I am a person who once spent six months on a picket line at the Museum of Modern Art fighting for my rights, and for me to feel, at this point in my life, that I can’t voice my dissent is not healthy. A silently fuming person is not the person who I wish to be. A person who says one thing and then does another is also not who I want to be. I believe in boundaries but I don’t believe in constraints. There is a difference. In addition, I feel that there has been a culture of fear and secrecy that is the opposite of the transparency I embrace. There are far too many moments for me to cite here, but I welcome anyone’s questions for clarification. This is about my personal integrity and about how I want to move through the world.
I am still a certified Anusara Yoga teacher, although I will be relinquishing my license. I will fulfill the teaching commitments that I have planned in the next few months that offer credit hours to those attending.

There is no other style of asana I wish to teach. I firmly believe that this brilliant alignment system is the best there is out there. I will continue to teach exactly how I teach right now. I will honor all that I have learned from John and from everyone, both teachers and students, who have been with me through this wild and beautiful ride. I love you all. Thank you. I’ll see you on the other side.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
- Rumi

With Love and Gratitude,
Susanna

Looking for God on the 6 Train

Waiting for the Train, Morning, NYC

 “If you are regular in your practice, you will shift the field”  – John Friend

I used to read like crazy on the subway. I would almost panic if, after procuring a seat, I opened my bag to find that I had left my New Yorker Magazine or my book at home (Was it on the table where I had inhaled my breakfast?  Did I toss it on the chair by the door when I put on my coat?).

But one day I became a yoga teacher and something shifted. Suddenly I had so much to do, so many things to think about, and so many practices to implement. I no longer had the desire to read on the subway, which was really very strange because I love to read. I crave books like food. For years I have shared a joke with my similarly-inclined friends about how I want to take a sabbatical from my life so that I can spend a year doing nothing but reading. Do they give grants for that?

Some of my Bookshelves

I remember my best childhood friend Kristen musing, It’s so unfair, they just keep writing and writing – we can never catch up. It was pretty funny, but there was an anxious passion beneath what she said – a desire to know as much as we could know and to travel down every possible avenue of beauty and creativity available to us. She ended up working in film in LA and I found myself in the NYC art world, supporting myself as an artist by commuting to the far reaches of every borough lecturing about art in the public school systems on behalf of MoMA. This brings me back to the whole subway situation.

Suddenly I wanted to be more fully in the experience I was having at the moment that it was occurring. I wanted to connect with what was going on around me – not that I wanted to engage in conversations with strangers, but I wanted to listen more and escape less. I wanted to soften to the richness of each moment and recognize the interesting-ness of everything. I wanted to become more sensitive, more aware, more engaged and entertained by the world. And the more I did it, the better it became.

Open 6-Train Doors

I no longer feared the unbearable boredom of the flickering lights, the jockeying for seats, the banality of the beige-yellow-orange subway seats or the clacking of the machinery. I was interested in it all. I admired the clean lines of the stainless steel doors. I wondered why the woman across from me tapped her foot so anxiously and whether the workmen in their dusty clothes were traveling to their construction site or headed home. I found myself listening for mantras in the patterns of sound – the screeching and clattering – the voices – the iPod music overflow – the newspapers – the multilingual conversations. There were so many stories, emotions, plans, and thoughts packed into a small space. Amazing.

There was this practice that I began to do, because, despite my new interest in my immediate commuter reality, its shoving, noise, and dirt still really got to me: people taking up precious subway real estate with their mounds of bags or their widely-spread knees, their dripping umbrellas, their open-air coughing…So I slowly began, one by one, to look for god in every person in my vicinity.

6-Train Rush Hour

Maybe I would choose the angry guy who crammed me into the corner with his backpack in my face – or the self-absorbed teen eating a pungent slice of pizza and dropping greasy napkins on the floor. I would take them in and then soften. I would think, someone loves this person. This person has aspirations, things they feel passionately about, personal tragedies and victories that I cannot imagine, yet are as significant as my own. And I could see these things in their faces, their postures, making me feel tender toward humanity. I shifted the field.

John Friend in NJ Oct 2011

I spent last weekend with my teacher John Friend. He alluded to that “feeling in the heart when a friend does something that reminds you of god,” and I had this flash of association – of the almost physical feeling of connectivity to the world around me when I regularly did my subway practice. John said that one of the first things his teacher Gurumayi said to him was, “See god in each other.” It was storming outside as he spoke about this, and he invited us to see our experience of the world like the storm – as having a layer of disorder or an appearance of chaos, but if you backed off just enough to see the individual raindrops, there was deep order and amazing beauty.

These days I do most of my reading in the afternoon or evening. Sometimes I can’t wait to get home and read my book. And when I do bring one with me on the train, I usually find that it rests undisturbed in my bag, waiting for a more settled reading time. I often skim through my emails or briefly peruse the NY Times headlines, but sometimes I stop myself, click off my phone, slide it into my bag, and choose to reenter that place of wonder at the world, which, since the moment I discovered it, has been continually available to me.

Subway Floor Cosmos

Saying Thank You - A Love Letter To My Teachers

 

Nataraja, Bristol, NY, July 2011 

Yes...That. I am that. That I am.

My Two Teachers
I have many teachers, but the two who are really the great teachers of my life are the ones who, when I first heard them speak, seemed to be voicing the contents of my brain. If you have had this experience, you know exactly what I am talking about. You are surprised, and think – wait – how did you…? but I…  and then – yes and yes again. Then the surprise gives way to a magnetic compulsion that makes you want to scrunch your chair or yoga blanket or whatever you happen to be perched on …right…up…close.

It makes you want to travel around the world to study with them and precipitates dramatic shifts in how you order your time and with whom you wish to spend it. Your initial amazement and delight pool into a profound sense of gratitude for this glimpse into the mysterious synchronicity of things. Resonance and Recognition. This is what happened when I met my teachers John Friend and Douglas Brooks.

To Backtrack for a Moment – Paris and Proust
I keep thinking about the first time I read Proust. I was studying in Paris and as I tackled the dense text, I suddenly realized that I was being moved by the quality of the language and by the beauty of the prose. For the first time reading in French – instead of translating in my head, instead of it being about comprehension – I had moved into a place of profound aesthetic appreciation. That was something.

The writing seemed strangely familiar. As I read, it felt as if someone had transcribed the phrases and ideas lining the inside of my brain. I was seeing myself reflected in his words – not just things I had thought about, but patterns of thought – an underlying structure that said – That is me! The differences between myself and a neurotic French writer born in 1871, who closeted himself in a silent cork-lined room so that he could write all 3000-some pages of his book were evident. Yet, the startling sense of recognition triggered a sensation of deep connectivity to the world around me, which is actually what he was writing about. And this experience is what I’m now talking about.

Post-practice with John Friend - Anusara Grand Circle-Wanderlust, VT, June 2011

On Recognition and Moving through Things
Many years later, I was going through a challenging period in my life – I had lost 3 people I cared about in 3 months in unrelated violent deaths. I was toughing it out, trying to be there for other people while I just barely kept it together myself. I felt as if I was held in place by lots of little overlapping pieces of psychic tape and messes of determined glue – a shifting collection of pieces.

I had been studying with John Friend for about 5 years, and had already had the above-mentioned recognition experience with him. He was in town teaching a series of workshops in Soho. Usually when I studied with John, I was like an excited puppy  – exponentially more bouncy and chatty than I normally am. This time I was in a place where I just wanted to find some peace – to stop grinding my teeth for a few hours and feel happy again. We put down our mats and gathered toward the front of the room.

As John began to speak, something in the tone of his voice shifted something for me, and my carefully taped together self began to come unstuck. I spent most of the morning crying and sweating in the bathroom, finally managing to fit in about 30 sniffling minutes of practice. He came over to me immediately at the break and I recall spilling some incoherent mess about what I was dealing with, as he took it in and held that space for me.

Exhausted, I went back to my apartment, showered, scrubbed everything off of myself, and when I returned for the afternoon session, I was on the other side of it – clear, clean, and actually slightly happy for the first time in months. The tone of recognition and acceptance within his voice had triggered a profound alchemical shift within me. He had invited me more deeply into a particular part of myself so that I could process what I needed to move through.

Great teachers speak to you from where you are. They don’t try to yank or push or pull you into where they want you to be. They remind you to move into the fullness of your experience, to embrace whatever rasa, or flavor of experience, you are in so that you can best figure out how to align with your current reality.

With Douglas Brooks - Swamimalai Subrahmanya Temple, Dec 2010, photo-Diane Stone

On Reflection and Thatness
I was in upstate New York studying with Douglas this past week. Near the beginning of a meditation practice that Douglas was guiding, there was a moment near the beginning when one thanks one’s teachers. He let us know that this was what he was doing and that we were welcome to do the same.

Look way back – he suggested – go to 2^nd grade. I decided to really go for it, and it was amazing how many people I genuinely wanted to thank. I tried to pare it down to my parents, my high school English and Art teachers, my college Art History professor, several of my Anusara mentors, and Douglas and John. But then I thought about all of my teachers’ teachers, and that kept multiplying as well – lines and lines of them extending in every direction. It was endless.

I met Douglas when he was invited by Amy Ippoliti to kick off our Anusara® Teacher Training in January 2002. I have extremely vivid memories of being floored at every single thing he said. It was brilliant. And totally new. And yet utterly familiar. To conclude one evening, we were asked to give one word or phrase summarizing our experience. People said, inspired – intrigued – exhausted – perplexed – blown away, and more.  The one thing that I could truly say, was Yes…THAT. I am that. That I am.

You know in a minute flat when someone is going to be a great teacher in your life. You can learn from many, but the great ones – that is always clear. And there it was again and again, and here it still is again and again: the vimarsha shakti, which can be loosely defined as the energy of you being reflected back to you. Being around my teachers makes me a better person because of this endless mirroring and self-reflection, this sense of recognition, the inescapable resonance, the sweet invitation to that.

Jet-lagged but happy - with Douglas - Tirukalakundram Vedhagirishwar Hill Temple, Dec 2010

Saying Thank You
I was away traveling for much of this summer – Vermont-India-Paris–Boston-upstate NY, and had intended to write something like this for Gurupurnima, the traditional time of year to honor one’s teachers, so this is slightly late. But I honestly think about my teachers every day, which somehow blended with the nostalgia or longing that kicks in for me at the end of summer and the fading august light, so I felt compelled to write this belated thank-you note.

So here it goes  – thank you to Mom and Dad for being the most ridiculously fabulous parents anyone could wish for, to my sister Jen for being a model of integrity, thank you to my academic teachers who believed in my creativity and my skills – thank you to my yoga mentors and inspirations – Sianna Sherman, Elena Brower Amy Ippoliti, Lois Nesbitt, Vishali Varga, Ellen Saltonstall, and Sue Elkind. You have all given me so much.

And thank you John. Thank you Douglas. I thank you all for offering me myself.

With John - Anusara Grand Circle, VT June 2011

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. ~ Marcel Proust

Swollen With Light

John Friend-Anusara Grand Circle, Wanderlust, photo by Elena Brower

Notes from the Anusara Grand Circle - Wanderlust

Swollen with light ~ John Friend
I have just lowered down from another backbend and am staring up at the taut curves of an enormous white tent. My teacher, John Friend, has been talking about the burgeoning quality of the light at this time of year, the Summer Solstice. One little fragment of his talk still resonates: the idea of being “swollen with light.”  For some reason, this particular phrase delights me. There are a few pregnant women practicing and I imagine them light-filled, their bellies glowing like fireflies.

Pulsation
If you want to learn about the universe, get very quiet. Watch your breath as it moves through your body, initiating your inhale like you are pouring a glass of water. Fill the pelvis – the waist – the ribcage – the shoulders. Everything expands. Now pour out your exhale top to bottom.  What you just felt in your body is what happens in every aspect of nature, whether we choose to pay attention to it or not. The Sanskrit word for pulsation is Spanda. The passage of your breath. The pulse of your heart. The rise and fall of a day. The trajectory of a life.  The structure of a yoga class from the beginning invocation to savasana. Expand to contract. Contract to expand. Spanda.

Intentionality
Intention is an interesting thing in that it can be difficult to discern productive determination from needless grasping. Think about not trying to be like X, but rather, to be X. In this way, as John Friend said this morning, you ”put your will in the flow of the bigger will…then all we’re doing is lining up.” If you align so deeply with your desire, you become it. If you see your desire as a part of you, as opposed to something outside of you, the longing and the longed for become a unified dynamic: two parts of a whole, the question and its answer.

photo by Elena Brower

Dwelling in the wonder of not knowing ~ Hareesh Wallis
All good answers give birth to further questions, like sparks cascading from a firework. If we see an answer as a directional indicator rather than as an end, our worlds become vast skies lit up with the sparks and patterns of our sensibilities. We create our own personal constellations of questions, our own configurations of limitless light. “We dwell,” as Hareesh Wallis said, “in the wonder of not knowing.”

Raising the resonance ~ Elena Brower
Sometimes when I teach a class I feel it so acutely within my body that it seems as if I have actually moved through the entire physical practice. Sometimes when I assist a class I have the same experience. I opted to assist my friend Elena Brower today instead of practicing. The verbal instructions, the manual assists, and the physical practice formed a triangle of communication in which what was said, heard, and enacted upon “raised the resonance” of the experience. As Elena spoke of living ever-more fully within our individual choices and lives, I felt the words permeate my skin, soften my tired muscles, and open into a dense honeyed internal place. We finished in meditation, word, body, and intention melded into a gently glowing intensity.

photo by Elena Brower

We see all places as places of pilgrimage ~ Bill Mahony
Sometimes we journey to find a sense of ourselves. The strangeness of a different context can illuminate our particular qualities and habits. We leave home to come more profoundly home, which is why we’re all here. Bill Mahoney spoke about seeing every place in our lives as a place of pilgrimage. In this context, a place can be an event, a relationship, our connection to the world, or our sense of self. If we treat these “places” as sacred, our world becomes one in which every observation and interaction becomes rich with meaning and worthy of reverence. Our world becomes more substantial, our lives become a moving prayer.

The Beauty of Alignment II

Once, in the town where Krishna lived, a venomous multi-headed serpent named Kaliya took up residence in the local river. Kaliya’s poison had polluted the water so thoroughly that any of the townspeople who went to take a drink, bathe, or even wash their clothing became sickened by its toxicity and died. The poison had begun to creep up the riverbanks, leaving a trail of dessicated grass and plants in its wake, and the cows eating the grass collapsed beneath the withered trees. Everyone was in a panic.

The young Krishna, realizing that he had to take action, leapt into the water, and as the stunned villagers watched, vanished into Kaliya’s thrashing, swirling, vortex at the center of the lake. They waited, fixated on the water’s surface. A few minutes went by in silence. Nothing. No bubbles. No ripples. No movement. The townspeople began to cry in despair. Krishna’s mother fainted and his father began to weep.

But then, in the midst of their tears, the townspeople heard a sudden splashing noise. As they lifted their heads, peering toward the river’s surface and pointing, a smiling Krishna began to rise up out of the water, balanced on one of Kaliya’s poisonous heads. Krishna began to play his flute and dance, hopping from hood to hood, as the dazed serpent slowly swayed, mesmerized by the rhythm. Subdued and remorseful, Kaliya apologized for his violent behavior, explaining that it was his nature, as a serpent, to be venomous. Krishna, acknowledging that it is difficult to control one’s nature, forgave him, requesting that Kaliya move out of the river and into the ocean, where his poison would be less damaging. And so he did.

Invite the story within. Kaliya is a thing out of place – a misalignment. A thing out of place can be toxic, but when placed properly, can be harmless or even advantageous. This is an essential tenet of yoga, and one that both of my teachers, Douglas Brooks and John Friend, emphasize. Douglas frequently points out that it’s called earth outside, but dirt inside. That stuff that looks so rich and fertile in your garden is simply a mess when it’s on your rug. One of John’s key concepts in Anusara Yoga is your Optimal Blueprint. The point of a pose is not to make it look like the version of it you saw on the poster, on the magazine cover, or even like the person practicing next to you. The point is to apply the alignment principles to yourself, building the pose from the inside out in a way that honors the particularities of your own body and lets your mind and heart sing. The point is knowing where to put things.

Alignment is a continual process of negotiation and renegotiation. Even when the waters of your everyday life seem still, there’s going to be something underneath – a thought, an incident - that will bubble up. And if it doesn’t emerge from the muck within it’s going to surprise you from riverbanks. The big question is: How are you going to align with the challenges? How will you choose to negotiate the vicissitudes of life so that your challenges lose their toxicity and take a more appropriate place in the landscape of you?

The Beauty of Yoga in the City of Light

Le Sainte Chapelle (Via Dimitry B..)

I want to be luminous. I want to glow. I want to be lit up like the Sainte-Chapelle, the extraordinary cathedral of stained glass in Paris, where I've been this week assisting my friend Sianna Sherman with an intense five-day Teacher Training. In Anusara yoga we have an expression, "Inner Body Bright." The expression is intended to evoke the energetic brilliance that resides at our core, to draw it to the surface, and to shine it out around us like a full-body halo. How do we access that inner light so that we can extend our talents and gifts out into the world? We do the yoga.

The yoga for me is asana practice, philosophy study, art making, and writing. For someone else, the yoga might be singing, cycling, or martial arts. Yoga means yoking, connecting. Doing the yoga is about creating internal and external unity. The details don’t really matter. What matters is choosing to do what lights you up.

This week in Paris we've discussed what inspires us, what resides so authentically at our center that even mentioning it creates an inspirational glow for those around us. When our teacher John Friend was here, he spoke of being bathed in the light of the Sainte-Chapelle. The luminosity of the building was more powerful than the stone architecture. The cathedral became a body, while the light was the energy enveloping the structure. Lumineux dans le corps interieur. Illuminated from within. Inner Body Bright

What illuminates you from the inside out? How do you do your yoga?