A Secular Sabbath
Hello —
For the last fifteen years or so I’ve primarily associated rest with moon days— because in Ashtanga yoga, new and full moons are taught as days of energetic intensity, and therefore opportunities to “take rest” from physical practice. But as life has shape-shifted over the pandemic, I have re-evaluated just about everything including who I take instructions from; what rest means for me and my community; and how I can embody rest, not just grasp it with intellect and cognition. In my findings, I’ve learned that: 1) any day can be a rest day; 2) any moment can be an opportunity for stillness, and; 3) a moon day can be a practice day. I see y’all clutching your pearls. I hear your gasps. I was alarmed at my own deviant behavior at first, too.
But in my self-perceived blasphemy, I return to the idea that yoga isn’t static; that tradition isn’t ever pure; and that claims of authenticity are often claims to power. As I am rebuilding my own life, heart and spirit after a personal and professional unraveling, I’ve begun to take each day, each practice, each breath as an opportunity to assess what is required of me in this moment. I ask myself throughout the day: where do I need to put my attention and resources right now?
Maybe it is a long and sweaty āsana practice. But it might not be. Oftentimes my resources are required for tending to family, friends and fresh air. Because life has gotten both messier, and more real, but also fuller and more joyful.
“However little joy we may see in this world, the sharing of it, together with the good we ourselves create, produces the only happiness which makes life tolerable.”
— Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of “reverence for life”
These last years I’ve also been humbly acknowledging and considering my ancestral Jewish roots. Which has meant, at least in whispers, contemplating the weekly Sabbath, or Shabbat, the Jewish “day of rest.” I aspire to this kind of intentional and routine pause, even if it is only an hour break from technology, or a 5 minute breath practice to still the ever-present internal noise. Author Mirabai Starr writes:
“The practice of Shabbat is not only a spiritual response to the timeless commandment given to my ancestors to keep the Sabbath holy. It is a political act. I am keeping the Sabbath radical. That too is my heritage.”
As a practice of welcoming the Sabbath, resistance and rest back into my life, I’m pivoting this newsletter from a moon missive into a Friday gazette. Each edition will be shorter, but you’ll receive them with more regularity. I’m making this shift in the spirit of growth and transformation, and as a practice in forging new rituals that are rooted in time-honored traditions. I look forward to your comments, queries, insights and thoughts. Below, four links that got my yoga wheels turning this week.
Thanks for being here. In pursuit of rest,
Erica
I synchronistically just received a copy of Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness in the mail. He too writes about “A Secular Sabbath”:
“The need for an empty space, a pause, is something we have all felt in our bones; it’s the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape. That’s the reason American football players prefer to go into a huddle rather than just race toward the line of scrimmage, the reason a certain kind of writer will include a blank space on a page…”
May you make yourself a little secular Sabbath wherever you are, however you need.
Slate dives deep to find out if the goats like the yoga as much as the humans. Spoiler alert: “Goats are hardly just dumb, cud-chewing livestock; they’ve learned to read human behaviors. And good news, goat lovers: some goats love goat yoga.” | An Investigation
Are skinny pants out? Jessica Grosman sits down to talk with Virginia Sole-Smith about the intersections between yoga, diet culture and fat shaming, and I’m very much here for the vibe shift. While Jessica’s definition of yoga is reductive and primarily based on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (which is by no means the beginning or end of yoga) her overall argument is valid and worth considering. Yoga is a polyvalent Sanskrit word and has been used to connote secular, religious and spiritual experiences since it was first put down in writing. But never ever has it been synonymous with weight loss, leggings, or being a “spiritual gangster.” I recommend pairing with Elliot Goldberg’s The Path of Modern Yoga for an in-depth look at how yoga became the embodied, physical practice we know it as today. | Burnt Toast
“Coming of age as a woman in the United States, I was instilled with very specific messages about my naked body and who should see it. I learned that, post-puberty, my body was inherently sexual, an object that enticed…When we entered tree pose, I was able to fully take in the room. These were not the bodies we see in commercial porn, on magazine covers, or in TV and movies. These were ordinary bodies, of various ages, shades, shapes and sizes. We were beautiful there in that room, all of us awkwardly balancing on our mats…Our nakedness was a reminder of what we have in common as we navigate how best to live and relate to one another in our shared social world.” | The Guardian Investigates Sex-Positive Bare-All Yoga
Are unrealistic beauty ideals and archetypes “the opposite of Present”? What are we molding when we reshape our bodies, and transform our minds? Jessica DeFino’s always thought-provoking Substack isn’t specifically about yoga. But it does poetically outline the slippery slope between wellness and the beauty industrial complex. In her latest word collage, she combines Kim Kardashian’s self-proclaimed beauty vibe with subject lines and sentence fragments from her inbox. The result is chilling. | The Unpublishable
“Living with other human beings is one of the most challenging things most of us will ever do….we do not need to reside in intentional communities like Lama Foundation or a beguinage to live lovingly and responsibly as feminine mystics, but it’s vital in these times of desperate divisiveness that we reach out to the rest of the human family and affirm the truth of our interconnection in any and every way that we can.”
— Mirabai Star, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics
