December Update - Reflection….
From Derek Walcott’s Love after Love:
”The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome…..”
Contents
Online Yoga continues
- Weekly Classes Sat and Wed ams 12/1 - 12/31
- 12/12 Special Bilingual Benefit class with amazing guest teachers Edgar Ortiz and Roynel MartinezIn Person Yoga:
12/17 Celebrating Winter Solstice - Boonville
- Monthly local workshops in 2024 - Info soon!2024:
- 1/1, New Years Workshop Beginning Anew!
- One 2 One monthly private sessions 2024
- Yoga Salon DEEP YOGA - Online Program
First Sundays 6.45am-9.30am Feb - AugustRetreats 2024
Gray Bear Retreat 4/25-5/2, 2024
Early Bird ends 12/15Summer Solstice at Bell Valley, CA 6/17 - 21, 2024
Spanish Spa Retreat 9/15-21, 2024 - Info in Jan
Read on for a free meditation about retreating, a great poem, an article on Naomi Klein’s amazing Doppleganger book and mucho more….
Online Yoga continues 12/1 - 12/31…
4 Saturday ams and 3 Wednesday ams; Michelle’s Tuesday ams; Restoratives 12/8
Sign up for Auto Subscription and receive 3 months of recordings; auto subscribers also get a 33% discount on private online sessions and can bring a free guest during the month of January
Monthly or Dropin options available
Coming in January - Anyone who has never attended online classes with me, can join for the month of January for $20. One to One Program returns for anyone needing some individual attention.
Our Online Yoga Theme this month is Reflection…, as we move into the dark dark time, when nature is asking us to rest, recalibrate and reflect, can we explore the practice as a way of dropping into the deepest part of our beings and inviting a gentle, heartfelt review and retreat? (see poem below)
Photo: Tyler Lillico
YOGA VA BILINGUAL FUN-DRAISER!
12/12 8am-9.15am
In September of this year, Yoga Va3 graduated a program in Habana despite incredible administrative, economic and transport challenges, hurricanes and food shortages. Jorge Avila, the director, seen here at the center, lost his house in a hurricane at the very end of this program and suffered a stroke, the complications from which he and his partner Mariela are dealing with now.
Join us for a Bilingual Online Class and Chat to support Jorge who has given so generously to so many. Amazing Yoga Va guest teachers Edgar Ortiz in Costa Rica and Roynel Martinez in Argentina will join us. If you can’t be there, just make a donation at any level. This class will be recorded and the recording sent to anyone who donates.
Info here. Register/Donate here
In Person: Celebrating Winter Solstice 12/17
12-4pm
at Bell Valley Retreat Center, Boonville CA
Time to celebrate the ending of the year, the changing of the light and drop into a deep quiet exploration and letting go, through yoga poses - gentle and restorative - pranayama, meditation, reflection, and silence. Suitable for a wide variety of practitioner.
$50 pre 11/17; $65 thereafter.
Mendocino County folks discount still applies!
More Info
ONLINE: New Years Day Workshop - Beginning Anew
1/1/24 10 -11.45am
Begin the New Year with an all round balanced practice where at every moment we have the opportunity to begin again, to open to possibility.
Info
ONLINE: Pesky Piriformis and Other Pelvic Allies
4pm,1/19/24 - 10am,1/21/24
Online weekend workshop to explore the external rotators, pelvic floor and the gateway to the earth.
Discounts for Deep Yoga and Auto Subscribing Yogis.
Info
Retreat Time? December is the perfect time to withdraw while our culture attempts to distract, entertain and flood us with activity! This is a free meditation with a poem that touched me particularly after being on retreat this month. We come with so much garbage, and sometimes, little by little it begins to drop away. I hope you get some reflecting, retreating time this month. And consider joining us at Gray Bear TN in the spring or possibly at Summer Solstice in CA for that precious time away with other practitioners in beautiful parts of the world.
Free Meditation: Allowing - 25mins
Zazen
by Virginia Hamilton Adair
When I first floundered in
no one knew me
not even myself
staggering under a Saratoga trunk
crammed with humiliations
bottled like urine samples
nailkegs of anger
carbons of abusive letters
chemistry quizzes with F's
even the horse I never had
and two casseroles left over
from the dime-a-dip supper.
No one remarked that
I had brought too much.
I was wearing three fur hats
donated by opulent cousins
my feet encased in cement
ever since the failure
of the patio project
and my mouth full of barbs
as an old trout.
No one praised my appearance.
The trunk fell off my back
disgorging its unusual contents
at my stone feet
which also came off.
The fur hats tumbled like a
motheaten avalanche
burying a small monk.
No one noticed.
My sweat began to dry
I folded myself into one piece
No One
In Person: Spring at Gray Bear, TN
Breath Breathing Itself
- Advanced Intensive 4/24-27
- Presence in Yoga 4/27-5/2
Can’t wait to be there and see old friends and new! Time to book your spot on the retreat/s at this unique sanctuary of yoga among the woods, waterfalls and welcoming homesteads of Gray Bear. Early Bird fee ends 12/15 Info
Weird Warping Wellness Worlds - Reflections on Doppleganger by Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein, author of Shock Doctrine, No Logo and many other writings that critique capitalism and cultural status quo, had a challenging pandemic like many folks. Hers was both particularly dark and also - eventually - productive. A situation arose in her professional and political life that would have floored many of us, but this activist managed to pull herself out of a depressing hole, and has written one of her - in my opinion - most vital books.
The initiating inspiration for this book was the inability of many of us to keep 2 Naomis apart. Especially ones that we associate with feminism, womens’ empowerment and relatively radical politics in previous decades. Naomi Wolf, who wrote the Beauty Myth and whose passionate tone encouraged young women to question how marketing and social morays were diminishing their potential realities and their beauty, is frequently confused with Naomi Klein. They are of a similar age, respected in different fields and happen to have/had husbands with the same first name. And were both icons on the left for many at a similar time. I included Naomi Wolf’s work in some of the womens’ programs that I have run and although she is of a slightly different generation/style, I could see that her impact was helpful to many in terms of respecting feminine well-being. However, like another author that I used to recommend highly, Christiane Northrup, Naomi has shifted into a warped version of herself and in the last few years become a darling of the conspiratorial right, Steve Bannon’s right hand partner, and espouses bizarre theories regarding vaccines, health and politics, along with passionate gun ownership.
This initially began awhile back. While sitting in the toilet during an Occupy Wall Street event, Naomi Klein heard 2 women talking about her, and they were critiquing the fact that she had come to their demonstration, and was trying to interfere in the way this occupy movement was occurring without understanding their underlying intentions. It felt to her like being in middle school and overhearing some gossip about herself - but the gossip did not relate to her actions at that event. Eventually she emerged from her stall and washing her hands said, probably with a gracious smile, “I think you are talking about Naomi Wolf, not Naomi Klein” and left. At this stage Wolf was moving in a different trajectory to other leftie movements and after a traumatic interview on the BBC, where the research on a book she had authored was found to be extremely faulty, she ended up being pilloried by the left who were weary of her showmanship and antics. As Klein says, the online attacks were unnecessarily brutal and although Wolf had clearly not done the research to make the claims she did in that book, it left her bereft and without community. Trauma + pandemic moved her more and more into the right who were delighted to have an ex-leftie in their midst, using some of the leftie revolutionary mantras but without actually espousing a more socialist world.
Naomi Klein’s book Doppleganger explores in both an incisive and a vulnerable way the mirror worlds that we are living in and her own challenges in facing this warped mirror of herself. She was criticized by many for much of Wolf’s more outlandish and disturbing statements as she veered right, touting guns, qanon racist theories, including recently! accusing New Yorkers of not smelling human because most of them have been vaccinated. This book is a result of Klein surrendering to this dilemma and making it an extraordinarily revelatory epistle on how we are all living with distorted mirrors of ourselves in this bizarre time on the planet.
Most particularly in the wellness worlds, the worlds of yoga (Klein is a yogi) and spirituality. At least these are the parts of her book that touched and in some places horrified me particularly. I have been aware how many local and global yogis and wellness folks have drifted into a narcissistic world view, one that believes only our practices and self-improvement wellness schemes are going to save us. Be damned with the rest! Now, that might seem a little strong, but with Klein’s encouragement, let me expand and get specific.
In Klein’s region of Canada, her husband Avi was campaigning door to door for the socialist NDP party and came back shaken from an experience at the door of a yoga teacher’s home. This woman wanted only to talk about vaccine passports and her bodily autonomy. When Avi responded that this was great, but his concern was for folks who have compromised systems, and health problems that make the virus more likely to make them very ill or die. “Her response, in this hippy dippy West Coast community was “I think those people should die.” And with that, she disappeared into a cloud of sandalwood.”
An isolated incident? Perhaps but I heard a very similar sentiment echoed in a conversation with someone who was going to be the caterer for a yoga event I was organizing. When I asked if this person was vaccinated - this was in the peak of the pandemic when many venues were under state and county covid limitations regarding gatherings - I received a lecture about bodily autonomy, how healthy and yogic she was, and how those people who were getting sick were fat, or just unwilling to take care of themselves, ergo this wasn’t really an issue. All in sweet sandle-woody tomes.
”We Want Them Infected” is a book by Jonathon Howard, a doctor who volunteered at the peak of covid in New York, when the corpses were being stacked in refridgeration units. And perhaps the warped truths that were being passed around during and after were more the responsibility of those at the top. Doctors and academics at prestigious institutions who had never been with a covid patient directly, never experienced the reality of hospitals like Howards, who found a niche in right wing media also and from their ivory towers became spokespeople for now discredited interpretations of this virus and how it should be managed. This book goes patiently through myths that were circulated that had no basis in science but clearly found powerful footings in the wellness world and with those who have created their own ivory towers of influence.
Klein goes into in several places the rise of real fascism. Not the fascism that the “deep state” is being accused of, the “bio-fascist coup” that Wolf accuses public health of. Not the fascism that our local health food store was being accused of (by some yogis and new age folk), because the store asked at a certain point that customers wore masks to protect their staff. Klein points out that the Nazi regime deliberately limited or prevented populations that they felt did not contribute to the fatherland/aryan purity, from actually getting vaccines in the knowledge that this could eliminate these less desirable/weaker humans faster. New Age wellness folk wearing yellow stars at this time was a horrendous misrepresentation and diminution of the actual horrors Jewish and other populations suffered at that time. What a mis-reading of history.
“Culling the herd of its weaker members to strengthen genetic stock is the central goal of eugenics. And to a large extent it has happened. Of the first 800.000 people who died of Covid-19 in the United States, three-quarters were over the age of sixty-five. And according to an analyst conducted on the Poor People’s campaign, people living in poor US counties died at almost twice the rate as those living in wealthy ones; during the outbreak of the Delta variant, people in the poorest counties of the country died at five times the rate as those who lived in the wealthiest areas. These numbers tell a story of Covid as class war. “ Klein p188.
And so how did this come about? There will be history books and cultural critiques written for eons about this period of our history. But one thing is clearer from Klein’s writing, this polarising debate around health measures in the wellness community was nourished by the concept of “Purity”. This sense of our perfect bodies, our perfect children is connected to Eugenic traits in our yoga history and wellness worlds. This is the doppleganger self, the mirror self that is the aspired self, the one with no warts, the skinny one, the one without wrinkles, or injuries or disabilities, or ageing. This warped and idealised sense of the human beings we “should” emulate, is projected all over social media and is at the heart of marketing wellness and self-improvement. Many of us (I raise my hand!) have been subject to this not good enough, not pure enough inner judgement that does cultivate a mystical magical mirror self. In the strange isolated environment of the pandemic, this doppleganger self could be for some constantly threatened by contamination from the masses. This was part of our stories pre pandemic but rose to divisive heights during. Were you too subject to folks not wanting your contaminated vaccine shedding body near theirs? Many were.
Another force in wellness world is the market. Money…
“Unlike the epidimeologists who were busy trying to understand SARS CoV-2, many wellness gurus wasted no time pitching all manner of supplements, tinctures and miracle cures that all claimed to do what the doctors could not: protect us. It was a bonanza - until of course, the vaccines showed up and threatened to spoil all the fun. Is it any wonder wellness went to war?” Alternative or traditional medicine has saved my bacon on many occasions, and I am wary of wholesale attacks on complementary products however some folks do seem to have created vast wealth out of what might be mere snake oil at this time! Besides the fountains of profitable clicks that arise with anything touching into qanon whispers, influencers have also brought their money directly into political campaigns. In Vancouver, the “fatphobic billionaire” (Klein’s language) owner of Lululemon, poured funds into right wing politicians and media. According to Garth Mullins of the podcast Crackdown, the Oct 22 elections in Vancouver municipal elections moved from green, progressive orientation to right “with a nasty edge” (Klein) because “The election was about fear of crime, ginned up by dark yoga money”. Who’d have thought that possible?!
Well, one reason, Klein sites for the power of this shift into gun-touting, conspiratory haunted, narcissistic me and my perfect body nemesis, is because we haven’t critiqued our governments and institutions enough. That, as always with conspiracies, there is a whiff of truth and many have felt abandoned by the powers that be for decades. Some of the tag lines used by Banon and Wolf have some truth to them. Who did make fortunes out of vaccines and tests? The Pharma industry who failed to share copyrights with the poorer nations. Some people got mega handouts in covid, some people lost their entire businesses. How many billionaires and politicians got richer at this time? And another point she makes is that the left – often so busy with in-fighting - does not provide a warm and supportive home or sense of belonging or something to do! that so many are seeking.
Where was the choice for a mother worried about a child’s bad reaction to a vaccine to have a medical person who would take their concerns seriously? and chart the ongoing health of that child, rather than being dismissed completely, the only option for empathy being those with less medically informed views. The medical system has failed so many of us in this country, why would we trust it? How easy for this distrust to turn to creating villains, by manipulative chaos influencers, of the very people who worked so hard to take care of us. Banon is constantly buttering up his “warrior mums” and sending them off to protests and to disrupt school board meetings, banning books about folks like Rosa Parks, cultivating gender discriminatory language.. Many of us, consumed by our own fears and legitimate eco and social issues, were actually too comfortable and hidden in the pandemic to see what was happening to most of the world in less supported circumstances than ourselves. As mentioned in Howard’s book, like many of the medics and heads of institutions who knew better, folks didn’t speak out at the time and still now, as we are seeing in the current chaos in government, because they do not want to be hasselled on social media by the aggressive right wing extremists or receive death threats. Understandable and achingly sad.
”Calm is Resistance”. A part of the book that stood out for me and also for a journalist from the LA Review of books, was this quote from John Berger. An art historian, writer and cultural observer that I have always respected. After reading one of her earlier books (he has passed away since then), he shared a comment which she treasured. That book as devastating and eye-opening as it was, as are all her books, created a sense of calm. In a way, this might mirror the calm that conspiritualists have when they finally find an explanation, even if it is off the wall crazy and bearing no relationship to reality, to explain why everything feels as if it is falling apart. There is a parallel. But I can relate to that sense of ordering, somehow sorting through the chaos of recent times and seeing some threads that connect, that indeed explain things that seem inexplicable, does create a strange sense of tranquility. The extreme right and folks like Wolf are full of rage and drama, jumping from one accusation to the next, whether true or not, the victim role blown up to be predatory, aggressive and random. Calmness and moving from a calm state of being in the middle of the mierda, can be supported by books like this, and practices that we share. Calm, and actions arising out of calm, can be resistance.
No solutions, but at least a path to new directions, and reasons to be able, as Klein has done, to put the mirror in front of oneself, and ask how through the fuzziness and chaos of what I see in front of me, have I been contributing to this, impacted by it, personally collectively in and out of our yoga world, and then gently, kindly, calling oneself back and cleaning the mirror.
Calm is Resistance
“ the pressure we’re putting on the self . . . is part of why we’re seeing so many people crack. I don’t think the self can support the amount that we are putting on it: It’s our income. It’s our retirement. It’s our safety. It’s our lifeboat . . . And it’s an illusion because we cannot protect ourselves from the forces that we’re up against . . . Our only hope of protection is through collective work and collective movement building.” – Naomi Klein
Interesting Interviews:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/calm-can-coexist-with-fury-a-conversation-with-naomi-klein Article
https://novaramedia.com/2023/10/01/naomi-klein-on-barbie-conspiracy-influencers-and-the-rise-of-fascism-ash-sarkar-meets-naomi-klein/ Video/Audio
https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/171-cracking-the-mirror-world-naomi-klein Podcast
https://lauraflanders.org/2023/09/naomi-klein-full-interview/ Podcast
Photo: Sunguk Kim
If you have read this far, thank you. You must be part of the family! A final sweet note, today 11/29 40 years ago Berni and I got married. And we are still together! in our weird and wonderful way. Can’t really believe it. Secret? Not taking anniversaries, weddings too seriously, but staying friends through thick and thin. Separate but nearby dwelling spaces helps!
Hugs
M
