Never Enough. A Love Letter To Our Circus.

Georges Seurat, Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque), oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, open access donated to WikiCommons

You might think I made this story up for this article (I did not, and those who know me personally will not be surprised), but when I was a small, small child, the first job I ever wanted was to run away with the circus.  I have said many times over the years that my child self wanted to be in charge of all the rides—but my adult self will also admit it was because I wanted to get away from the constant yelling.  Adult me also knows that my fullest, most honest self can hold both of those things true simultaneously.  Plus, the rides are great.

It always seemed like the people in the circus were beloved, even if a little bit “other”, set apart from the rest of us.  I knew I was like them even then.  I have always known I would feel at home with them.  And unsurprisingly, yoga is the only other space I have ever known that I would be comfortable in.  That too, I knew from the start.

Holding Two Things In My Hands.

This magazine I have started for us relies on real data and journalism, and is planted solidly on the foundation that the work of teaching or facilitating yoga for others is a worthwhile and valuable pursuit in life.  We make a difference in the lives of our students. We create spaces where people come into our rooms and let out a huge sigh, a feeling of welcome and home.  It doesn’t matter if your studio is focused on precision and aligned movement, unpacking the deep philosophical components of yoga, or using meditation and breathwork to calm the mind and facilitate relaxation. 

The people who come in feel like they have found a home. 

And that experience is one that I cannot represent with data.

I also don’t think that we, the people of the yoga industry, can be fully represented by data either.  Perhaps this is why we haven’t held bigger organizations accountable for keeping track of our data—we somehow know that it doesn’t encompass all of who we are. 

In that acceptance, though, we also don’t see each other. That is a choice we have made.  And I think that causes us both hurt in our hearts and harm to our pocketbooks.

And this publication and my writing hands will also attempt to hold both of those truths at the same time.

It’s A Funny Thing.

Our practice of yoga often centers around the experience of integration, and our teaching attempts to do the same.  We integrate what we have learned inside our own bodies, hearts, brains, and beyond—and then we share a gem of that integration with the people who come and see us for classes, trainings, workshops, and in private sessions.

But as we discuss the industry, we separate again.  Our integration has not reached this group project level yet.  We seem to be more interested in integrating on a cellular level than a collective one.

Industry discourse, short videos, and online conversations seem to separate us into one or the other.  Are we discussing our heart-led lives?  Our business funnels?  Are we figuring out how to market ourselves, disconnected in the ether, in the hopes we can someday reconnect in the real world?

All the while, we sit alone on our mats—often with many blankets, props, stones of some kind…all trinkets of one kind of devotion or another…trying to figure out if they see us.  We the hidden circus performers…the bearded ladies, world’s tallest men, too-tiny humans riding impossibly large animals around an arena.  We both perform for the crowd and live our lives there, the one exposed space where we feel most at home. 

We, as professionals, somehow reconcile this experience.  The thing that brought us to yoga in the first place…the thing that made us feel small, broken, insignificant, uneasy, or simply too exhausted to go on, lives inside us. And we use that experience to stand up in front of our audience to share our love of how we healed, just a little bit, with the room.

Perhaps they applaud.  Perhaps they leave both disgusted and curious.  Perhaps…someone, somewhere, said it was a unique and beautiful expression of humanity. 

Do we ever look at our experience as yoga professionals that way, though?  A beautiful and messy work-in-progress that expresses our humanity to the fullest extent?

I don’t think so.  We are too caught up in sales funnels, local competition, internet drama, and deep financial insecurity that we have internalized. 

A Bit Of A Balancing Act.

Sometimes when I look at this project of creating a trade magazine, I think that it is too much to hold at once for one writer.  The facts that are verifiable, the stories shared with me that frame our experiences as an industry, and the hearts of the people in this industry whom I hold dear. 

And if I am working on this balancing act for myself, as someone who is taken on the role of thinking about us full-time, how must the rest of us feel? 

I think disillusionment, stagnation, and cynicism are all reasonable responses to the situation we are currently in.  We don’t trust our greater institutions (with good reason), but that has also somehow worked its way down into not trusting our neighbors. 

How do we balance these two truths?  That we, as a collective, are worth fighting for—and we have already been fighting for so long that the continuation of that fight seems impossibly pointless.

Our hearts and creative expression matter to us, perhaps more than most other professions.  In issue 0 of Inside Yoga, I explored how there is a great amount of overlap between our work and that of creatives and artists.  Our spirits hold a lot of overlap with those of an artistic disposition.  Many of us have found that discovering this unique balancing act and also getting paid means denying our creativity and leaning heavily into the business side of things.  But then we are left asking, will that ever really be enough for us? 

All The Shine Of a Thousand Spotlights.

This collective reckoning of our place within the industry of yoga feels like too much exposure.  Someone will see that we really are the circus performer and relegate us to a place in the corner, out of the sight of the normal people.

This overexposure isn’t limited to our personal challenges, but extends to our relationships with money, authority, accountability, and our collective. 

We are happy to remind everyone that toads and mushrooms and deer and kale all share an ecosystem, but we ourselves deny the grace and joy of looking around at our colleagues and seeing that we are in an ecosystem with them too. 

The truth is we likely don’t have friends in that ecosystem, so seeing it fully makes us feel lonely.  We stand afraid that if we look too closely, under that spotlight, we might see our sadness too.

The more people like me dismantle the theatrics that hide our reality—the theatrics of organizations that never cared for us, of systems of deep competition based on scarcity stemming from some truly impressive credential inflation—the more we're forced to look at what's underneath.

And what's underneath is harder to see than those institutional theatrics ever were. How we have behaved. What we have believed. The sadness we have never fully acknowledged. The promises we have believed to be true…and were not.

Stealing Stars From The Night Sky.

Hope is a choice.  It always has been.  I remember when I was still that young child, wishing I could run away with the circus; I thought that hope was a privilege only other people had. 

But my adult self knows, with certainty, that hope is simply a muscle that is flexed often enough that eventually you don’t need to think about it anymore.  A bit of our invisible anatomy that runs on the joy we find in small moments.  The small moments, like the classes where you can see visible relief in someone’s face when they roll over after savasana, feeling more at peace.  The deep exhale that you hear from someone’s lips as they slide into the front door, just so grateful to be here…to be with you.  Our first step, I believe, is to start flexing that hope muscle on purpose.

And then we do what I think all truly good yoga teachers do.  We hold one foot in the science—the data, the studies, the things that are ‘provable’ through studies and expertise.  And then hold the other foot in the tradition—the hope, joy, discipline, and productive discomfort that allows us to evolve into a more…us…version of who we are.  That’s what yoga, in its whole, offers us—the opportunity to be more of what and who we already are. 

I will attempt to do the same as a writer for our profession. 

I will hold our data (or lack of) up for us to see, and hold our organizations’ feet to the fire.  But I will also attempt to hold our hearts safely as well.  We cannot look at changing the industry of yoga until we acknowledge that we are both.  Data and heart.  Science and tradition.  Oddball circus performer and revered spiritual teacher.

And we cannot hide it anymore.

Honestly, I don’t think we really want to.