Shakti Yoga Transcript (026)
Shakti Yoga 2.0 with Michelle Gigante (5/29/20)
JENNIFER E. BREVORKA: Greetings! This is Jenny Brevorka, a trial lawyer and yogi based in Houston, Texas. You’re at the Point of Learning with my friend, Peter Horn. I grew up in Buffalo, and I have known Pete since childhood. When he returned to Buffalo and sought a yoga home, I told him the real deal exists at Shakti, Michelle Gigante’s studio on Grant Street. I had the honor of meeting Michelle during a tough period in life, my first year at law school. Through Michelle’s grace and yoga teachings, I changed my relationship with uncertainty, loss, and constraint. Man, these qualities seem to permeate our lives right now, so I’m super eager to hear Michelle’s insights and wisdom. Enjoy the show!
PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, a 5,000-year-old healing modality:
MICHELLE GIGANTE: To me, the practice of yoga is coming into oneness: coming into union with where we are, with the current occurrence; with how the body might ache, or the mind might jump, or the heart might yearn.
[VO]: What it means to practice during a global health crisis:
MICHELLE: We’re all just learning how to sit in the eye of the storm, which means we allow it to be stormy. And the practice is how you relate to yourself during your own storm, during your own inner turbulence; how to embrace that, rather than feel like there’s something that you need to get out of, and that there should be a result that is better than the one you’re in right now.
[VO]: And the stakes for all of us if we don’t find some way to take care of ourselves!
MICHELLE: If we do not take care of the self, we are unable to take care of anyone else, and we will be unable to handle this crisis.
[02:19]
[VO]: Zoom, the nearly ubiquitous conferencing platform that many of us are using for everything from classroom instruction to work meetings to virtual cocktail parties, has only been with us since 2011. Yoga, on the other hand, has been helping people to center themselves for 5000 years. When the director of my yoga studio here in sunny Buffalo—by her own admission no big fan of communications technology—decided to start offering sessions over Zoom during the pandemic, I got pretty excited about the possibilities of this new point of learning. I know yoga isn’t everybody’s thing, and it’s popular enough that most people already have some idea about it. My hope for my conversation with Michelle Gigante in this episode is that even if you already have a yoga practice, you’ll hear something new—or remember something ancient. If yoga isn’t something you do yet, right now may be the perfect time to try. In either case, I can’t recommend Michelle's online sessions highly enough. We’ll be talking about those in just a little bit. Master teacher Michelle Gigante has been guiding people toward energetic openings through a blend of yoga, breathing, and mindfulness techniques for nearly 25 years. She has an extensive background in theatre and dance, which contributes to her ability to execute classes with clarity and precision, improvising sequences that are creative and playful. Michelle founded her studio, Shakti Yoga, just over 10 years ago. The word shakti suits the creative energy that abounds in her studio, which during non-pandemic times regularly hosts musical performances, dance parties, and lectures, in addition to yoga classes. Michelle is also a Reiki master and Qigong practitioner. Like yoga, these are both healing practices that open energy channels: Reiki is Japanese, developed about a century ago, and Qigong is the Chinese grandmother of Tai Chi. Though yoga does help people become more fit, and some yoga centers do focus on fitness, for Michelle the ancient Indian practice is first and foremost a healing modality. In her 20s, Michelle was living in NYC running a theatre company, working 14-hour days with no days off. After she got so exhausted that she literally passed out on the streets of New York, she knew it was time to get well. So began her yoga practice.
[05:03]
PETER: So we’re recording in mid-May, 2020 at a point when unemployment levels rival those of the Great Depression. Many people have a little more time on their hands, but many others have less, as they struggle to juggle working in essential areas or learning how to work from home, plus childcare and/or teaching their kids who can’t go to school. How do you make the case for carving out time to take care of oneself?
MICHELLE: Well, I mean we can ask that question any given day, whether it’s a crisis or not, right? It’s such a great question. You know, to make the shift in the mind’s eye. And I really do think it is up to us to make the shift in the mind’s eye, that only we can do that, from [A.] living in a state of survival and just simply getting by—right?—kind of having the lion chase you and you running as fast as you can with all of the balls up in the air and no time for anything else other than survival, to [B.] living in a much more productive, energetically efficient time of creativity. And once again, the rational mind can certainly challenge that, right? “There’s no time for creativity right now! We just have to get through this crisis!” But if our attitude is to just get through it, we are going to be spinning our wheels and we are going to be exhausting ourselves. So we have to just stop. We have to just drop everything and attend to the instrument, attend to the self. And as we start to do that, we notice that we have more energy, more availability to not only handle the crisis but to assist others. I really truly believe we can only assist others if we have taken the time to really address the self first.
PETER: It’s maybe a trite image, but I do think sometimes about the advice on airplanes to put on your own mask on first, before you can assist anybody else.
MICHELLE: Yes, that’s what we have to do in order to survive in a situation like that. You using the airplane as the example—and if we just apply that to daily routine, to daily scheduling: just stop and take care of the self first. And when we hear that, at first it sounds selfish, but if we do not take care of the self, we are unable to take care of anyone else, and we will be unable to handle this crisis.
[08:06]
PETER: What do you wish more people understood about yoga?
MICHELLE: I’d have to say that I wish more people understood that it was okay to be where they are. To me, the practice of yoga is coming into oneness: coming into union with where we are, with the current occurrence; with how the body might ache, or the mind might jump, or the heart might yearn; to really come into oneness with that; to allow oneself to be fully present to whatever it is we are feeling or thinking. Our culture is so addicted to bypassing those things as if there’s something wrong with us, and just, you know, get to the result of feeling better, feeling good all the time, you know, feeling good! And we often misinterpret the practice of healing for the practice of just feeling good. Usually, the practice of feeling good incorporates a bit of an escape. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with that and we all need that. But the practice of yoga gives us a chance to really be in and with our stuff. And then we learn; we learn how to address it. We learn how to take care of ourselves when we practice yoga.
PETER: So if one way to translate yoga is “union,” that has to do with the relationship that you’re establishing with yourself. And that includes all of it. The stiffness, the anxiety, where you’re feeling off. Just kind of accepting that, being compassionate about it. You know, I loved when we were talking once and you gave an example about the practice of yoga, saying, “Suppose you’re doing a balance pose. The practice is not ‘Can you balance?’ ‘Can you hold tree pose,’ for example, ‘for this long.’ The practice is ‘Can you relate to yourself while you’re attempting that?’
MICHELLE: Yes. There’s so much life that can come through when we’re on our mat. There are so many life lessons, and what we do on our mat can potentially come with us off the mat and, you know, learning how to embrace the wobbles that are so natural, that are so incredibly natural to what it means to be a human being walking this planet on any given day. And, you know, particularly during crisis, why should anyone of us expect to be able to hold balance during crisis? Right? We’re all just learning how to sit in the eye of the storm, which means we allow it to be stormy. And the practice is how you relate to yourself during your own storm, during your own inner turbulence; how to embrace that, rather than feel like there’s something that you need to get out of, and that there should be a result that is better than the one you’re in right now.
[12:07]
PETER: Coincidentally, you happened to meet my mother this morning because she showed up at one of your Zoom yoga sessions. It was nearly 20 years ago that she gave me a book by Eckhart Tolle called The Power of Now, which took the top of my head off for a number of reasons. Drawing on a number of faith and philosophical traditions—
MICHLLE: I love that expression, Peter!
PETER: Oh, man! Well, that’s, you know, that’s Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry—or one of them. She said, “you know, if I’m reading something and I feel as though the top of my head has just come off, then I know it’s a poem.” So yeah, I throw that in from time to time.
MICHELLE: That’s brilliant!
PETER: She certainly is! But back to Tolle: All right, so drawing on a number of faith and philosophical traditions, one of his big claims is that the only real moment is the present moment. This really prompted me to consider—and again, that’s not original to him, and he doesn’t claim that it’s original to him, but he’s really trying to make this point. And looking at, you know, for example, how much of U.S. culture in particular—maybe partially because our culture is often very invested in selling us something—how much of it pulls us away from the present moment so that we’re hoping for, or worrying about sometime in the future maybe, or regretting something or rehashing something that we did in the past. So as a remedy to that, one of the things that I value most about yoga is its emphasis on the here and now. Again, in today’s class, for example, a refrain that you happened to use was “life as you now know it.” Breathe in life as you now know it; breathe out life as you now know it. It was a real emphasis on life as we’re experiencing it, as you’re experiencing it right now—not as it should be, not as you’d like it to be. So I wondered if you’d want it to riff on the idea of the now for a moment.
MICHELLE: Well, bringing it into the practice of yoga just for a few moments, there’s so much that we can learn through the body. And what I mean by that is the body is the thing experiencing the present moment, right? The body is the one that is seated on the chair in the living room in the house on the West Side of Buffalo on May—whatever day of May it is—
PETER: It is March 70th, March 75th, right? Sorry.
MICHELLE: The body is the one that is experiencing the temperature. The body is the one experiencing the sunlight, et cetera, et cetera. As well as just very human conditions like hunger or yearning or aching, right? And we learn about the life we’re living in the present moment through the body, through this instrument, through this conduit. So being able to stop and pay attention to where the body is and to how the body is feeling is schooling us into the moment. It’s a wonderful way to become present. And we often think about the body as, you know, how we want the body to look when we’re done with the fitness class, the yoga class, the this class, right? That we can touch our toes or that we have the tight abs or what have you. But you know, in actuality the body is really the link to the now, and the mind will be more apt to join it if the mind is paying attention to the breath. Right? So the breath is also another tool, another link into the moment. If you just really stop and think about it, you know, every second is a breath, is an inhale, is an exhale. So if we can just stop and bring the mind into the breath, we’re giving ourselves the chance to be in the present, to be in the now, the power of the now. How is it powerful? Why is it powerful? I mean, I don’t, you know—I’m not really sure I can answer that. I think it’s very, very individualized. You know, how we filter these moments that we’re living: how we see, how we smell, how we taste, how we feel. It’s all a very personal experience. But when we allow ourselves the chance, by way of the body, by way of the breath through the mind, by way of the mind through the breath, to come into the now. It really is a gift to feel one’s heart beat. To hear the birds sing, to feel air brushing the skin, things that we just, you know, walk through the day not paying attention to. The things that we take most for granted: being alive in the now. Right now.
PETER: You talked about how the breath facilitates that, so I’d like to talk about breathing for a second. Most classes I’ve ever taken at any yoga studio begin with attention to the breath, and continue to attend to breathing throughout practice. You’ve said that intentional breathing can help to extract unnecessary thoughts, stagnant energy, tension, insecurity. How does this work?
MICHELLE: The breath is a buffer. So the breath just simply helps us handle whatever’s coming through. The breath is like a cushion, a little buffer pillow between you and reality in such a way that you can tolerate; that you can tolerate your reality with more peace and more ease, and the softness that comes through when we inhale, the relief that comes through when we exhale, you know, just by paying attention to it and allowing it to correspond and correlate to the thought and the sensation. And once again, it’s yoga: it’s the union. When the breath comes into the experience of, you know, the sensation or the thought that comes to infiltrate the mind, when the breath is there, it buffers the sensation and the thought in such a way that we can handle it, that we can tolerate, that we can be with whatever is occurring. The practice of yoga incorporates a kind of a skill of breathing, if you will, where we are continuing to train the brain to go into the breath.
[20:32]
PETER: You suspended classes at your studio, Shakti Yoga, here in Buffalo, in mid-March, and by the end of March, with the help of tech guru, Christina Stock, you were leading centering meditations on Facebook and yoga sessions on Zoom. You do accept donations, but you’re quite clear that if people can’t afford to contribute right now, that’s fine. Okay, first, thank you! You know, six days a week, these sessions help me to structure and center my day. But there’s another thing that occurs to me and that’s thinking about the difference between participating in one of these live Zoom sessions, you know, even with my mic muted and my camera off for most of it as I generally do, versus, say, moving along with a yoga video on, for example, on YouTube—there was one [video] I used to do to start my day every morning before I would go teach at school. There’s a seven-minute video out there that I must’ve seen a thousand times! But so one difference is that you as the guide are different every day, so there’s a nice variety to what you ask us to do, just as there would be in a live class. But I wanted to ask: for you as the teacher or as the guide for this practice, how do you think differently about the classes that you improvise for a Zoom connection as opposed to what you do what you’re used to doing in a face-to-face connection?
MICHELLE: Well, I think first and foremost, it’s very much the same. So, you know, I show up, I hook into my breath, and the breath creates a tapping into creative energy: the word shakti. And I just simply offer from there. I never have a plan. I never have a script. It’s always an intuitive offering. So in that way it’s the same, and it’s proven to be very helpful, because I’m really getting a sense from the people tuning in that they are having a fairly unique experience, regardless if it’s through technology or not. So that pleases me greatly. You know how it’s different, I suppose the most obvious thing is that we are just not all physically in the same space at the same time. And there’s a bit of a thriving of energy, a sharing of energy that cannot be replaced. You know, it makes it dramatically different to do this by way of, you know, screen and camera, if you will. But the benefit I feel is the same, which is, you know, you’re tapping into your breath awareness and letting your body move in a very intuitive, expansive, experiential way. And we are all there to support you in doing so. And the little kind of council that we hold at the end is just one of the many ways to celebrate that community being together. So that’s how it’s very different from say a YouTube video where I just kind of shoot it and put it out there and you watch it at your own convenience: we’re all going through the experience together. You know, alone together, if that makes sense. Right? Everybody’s in their homes doing it alone, but yet there is a still a sense of community that is being shared. And that’s one of the nice things about being able to offer through the through the Zoom platform as we’re doing it together.
PETER: And it’s one of the facets of your teaching that I admire, and that I think is a great practice for any teacher, is to ask participants, to ask students, “How is this going for you? What’s working for you? What could be better? What suggestions do you have?” And it was in fact a student’s suggestion to say, “Well, what if we un-muted our microphones for the oms, [the chanting of the syllable om] at the beginning and the end?” I mean you don’t necessarily want people’s mics on all the time. There are a lot of dogs in people’s homes and lots of small children come in, so it wouldn’t be great to have the mics on for everybody all the time, but at the beginning and at the end for the sacred sound of om, yeah, that’s gotta be something to hear that from all the places that you’re hearing it!
MICHELLE: Yes. And you know, when we started doing Zoom, before we did the un-muting for the oms, you know, I would hear it like through my imagination, I’d hear it deep inside the well of my heart and kind of, you know, imagine what it would sound like, you know, but this is, it’s just awesome. And you know, as those oms come through, you do hear people’s environments. You do hear the dogs and the television and it’s just awesome. And in a new-found way, and in a way where it would normally sound—where the critical mind would normally be like, “Ugh, this is chaos!” And it’s just the most joyful sound ever to hear the union of us coming through technology.
PETER: For me, one of the aspects of the Zoom version of Shakti, of your studio, that I love is being able to practice with friends of your studio who are now living in California or Colorado or Boston or Spain. We heard from somebody in Florida today. One of the questions that I have been asking, in my work as a consultant and researcher, one of the things I’ve been talking with teachers and school leaders about in recent weeks is whether there are—despite that it’s hard, you know—
MICHELLE: Right. That’s a given.
PETER: This is obviously hard, and harder in lots and lots of ways that we’d like it to be. But also, is there anything that opens up? Is there anything that you’ve been forced to look at a different way, or to try something that has been a positive?
MICHELLE: Yes, I’m extremely grateful for the “have-to”s. The stuff that I have had to do during this crisis has opened me up as a human and as a facilitator in a new way that is so unexpected. You know, I can be pretty stubborn. I’m pretty set in my ways. I’ve been doing this for over 20—like 25 years now. And I am very consistent, perhaps to a flaw. I am so grateful for having been “forced” to take on this new form of expression, this new form of communication, this new form of holding space. And it’s been a true pleasure and a great gift. And I know not just for me but for many others that that can actually occur, that we can share energy, that we can feel connected through technology, from and with technology is just extraordinary because I’ve always been against, you know, technology. Technology is the thing that is tearing us apart as, as humans, as far as being connected, right? There’s such isolation—
PETER: I think it’s all these damn podcasts!
MICHELLE: [laughing] I mean, of course there are positives, but you know, the kids that are on social media, you know, it serves as their way to communicate, and then creates great isolation. Yet here we all are giving thanks, giving thanks for that very thing. You know, it’s pulling the community together, and it is how we show up for each other. It is how we have to communicate. And I will probably continue to do so when the crisis is over, because there are students, my West Coast students—there’s, like you said, people in Europe, people in the South, they want to stay connected to Shakti. So, you know, I got the kick in the pants and now I gotta keep going, I guess.
PETER: Yeah. And I think that’s another thing about showing up. You know, I often think about the difference between like a team sport and an individual practice. There is something about, you know, even when you’re not feeling like it at all, you know, that 3:30 practice starts or whatever, and the other people are going to be there, you know, you’ve got this community that you’re working with—putting on a [theatre] show, you know, the same sort of thing. But I sometimes can’t make it to the 12:45 session, and I do think, “Well, you guys are there” in a way that I never would think, “Well, that YouTube video’s out there, and I’m not going to be able to watch it.” I mean, there is a community that I could be a part of and there’s something that I’m kind of missing out on by not showing up.
MICHELLE: Yes. Showing up for each other. Right.
PETER: Yeah, it’s different.
MICHELLE: It is.
[31:06]
[VO]: As a companion offering for this episode, I’ll release a short YouTube video cut from an actual Zoom session with Michelle, so you can get a little taste of a few of the elements that have been typical in her online classes six days a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays tend to be lower-impact, often involving a stint on a chair, for instance, but all classes proceed with compassion for what people may be living through right now. Every class, I should also mention, is preceded by a 30-minute centering session involving meditation, breathing, and mindfulness. Those happen on Facebook Live. The mini-session I’ll share includes a breathing exercise, child’s pose, and a gentle body shake that comes from Qigong.
PETER: Breathing we’ve talked a little bit about already, so I’m wanting to go with the child’s pose for a second and just talk with you about it. So, along with downward-facing dog, I think this is one of the poses that many people who have even just a passing acquaintance with yoga may be familiar with. It’s a kneeling forward-bend pose, and there are variations, but essentially you kneel and bend forward with your head to the floor and your arms at your sides, or sometimes extended in front of you. But you’ve said that you personally have gravitated towards this pose during this time. And I wanted to just to ask, what’s that about for you?
MICHELL: Yes, it’s about—you know, I never think my way in, like, “Hmm, what would be the good pose to do today?” I have been gravitating toward child pose probably more regularly than in the past. And I think it’s, you know, it’s a response to the current crisis. And the shape to me is one of two beautiful things. One is it’s a genuflection, it’s a bowing. It’s an honoring, so it immediately hooks me into to higher power, higher source: a real honoring; honoring of this process, and a surrendering to this process through that genuflection where you lay the waist upon the ledge of the thighs and you bow inward. And secondly, you know, the posture speaks refuge. I feel like each posture has a beautiful kind of language that is whispered through the body and I feel like child's pose speaks the language of refuge, of protection, of shelter, of inwardness. But inwardness, you know, not in a way where we’re barricading the world out, but just really allowing ourselves to drop in to some inner depths of the self.
PETER: And it’s literally a grounding. Of course, maybe that’s too on the nose, but you know, I realize I asked you if you gravitated toward it, and of course it does bring you down to the earth. There’s just something about the name in English—and of course, all these poses have Sanskrit names that come from a 5,000-year tradition. In some cases, they’re that old. But in English, it’s also sometimes called “wisdom pose.” Is that right?
MICHELLE: I just love that! Yeah, yeah.
PETER: Yeah. As a teacher, I love that. Another name for child’s pose could be wisdom pose because there’s a lot about, of course, the wisdom of children that adults could stand to learn from. But I wondered, why do you love it? Like do you have a thought about that, or the connection between those, because sometimes they’re presented as antithetical, like the opposite of “wise” is “kids,” and like that.
MICHELLE: Right, right. Yes. Once again, it just blasts your mind open when you hear something like that, that child’s pose is also called wisdom pose. And I think the link is, you know, what you’ve already said, that as we bow in, as we take this genuflection, it’s a gesture of humility. So it allows us to have the mind of a child, and you know, to really seek the innocent mind, the mind that is not yet tainted, the mind that does not think it knows everything about everything. Right? And from that the wisdom comes. That wisdom is something that we experience through the course of time. And to be able to continue to take oneself back, to kind of undo the workings of the mind and just to be present. Right. So now we’re kind of going back to perhaps one of your first topics that you brought up a little while ago: the power of the now can come through when we let the mind just really drop—to drop the junk out of the head, and to perceive life with the eye of a child. And there’s such wisdom in discovery. You think about children and how they discover, they come upon for the first time what a tree looks like, what a tree sounds like, you know? Right. And we always feel like we already know and we miss so much in the assumption that we already know everything.
PETER: And then there’s this gentle shake that I don’t personally recall seeing in other yoga settings. As I said, I’m looking to release a short companion video for this segment so that people can see it. But how would you describe what you’re physically doing, for people listening?
MICHELLE: Right. Well, what has been cultivated over the past 13 years of me offering in my own space at Shakti Yoga is a mixture of yoga, of breath work, of meditation, and of Qigong, which is basically the Chinese form of yoga. And some people perhaps know the word Tai Chi and it’s a very similar healing modality. So I try—no, I don’t try. It comes, it just seems to come naturally where I blend all of those aspects of physicality and of breathwork and of mindfulness together so that we can really tap into an energetic flow, and that gentle shaking that we’ve been doing through this crisis and through the virtual offering of yoga, it’s really just come intuitively as a little piece of medicine for each and every one of us to be able to drain the lymphatic system and keep the energetic body efficiently opened. You know, it opens the energetic channels essentially. It’s to be able to let the breath move through the whole body from the feet to the face with this very, very passive shake, this gentle pulse of the entire body for one or two minutes. And where people get a little hung up or perhaps they stray away for a few moments is they often will think of the shaking as if they have to shake out their tension or get rid of their stress. And it’s really a way to shake your way into your own circulatory system in a very, very passive way, and really sustain it for a good solid minute or two. And it seems to be assisting people and perhaps a new way of, of finding that flow, finding that flow inside.
PETER: Yeah, I totally love it. And I’ve seen you many times at the beginning of class doing it yourself—this is back in person at the studio—doing it yourself before you begin to lead a class, maybe to maybe get you in the zone a little bit. I don’t remember ever doing it in class, but I do remember when I asked—I was talking to you about performance, because you have this strong background in theatre. I was talking to you about finding my energy before I come on in a particular scene. This was for a show I was doing in December, and you recommended this as something to do in the wings before coming on stage. I realize I don’t know if I told you that I did do it.You may have assumed that I would. I did do it and it was very helpful, because you can do it for quite some time, but it just kinda gets you there—I mean, wherever there is, but it helps to kind of clarify and keep you from getting too tense. It just kind of gets things flowing, so it’s not surprising that it would be something that would come back to you as a kind of daily medicine in this time.
MICHELLE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, I always assume that whatever I tell people to do, they will do, Peter! [playfully] I can only offer it out then it’s up to you! But secondly, I think that one of the things that has excited me about this experience that we’re in by way of crisis is that yoga is being utilized perhaps as its truer essence, which is medicine. You know, not a medicine that cures but a medicine that heals, right? And we all need to heal from this experience, whether we have the virus or not. There’s major healing that needs to be done in the current moment, and when this eventually resolves itself. So I feel like the traditional roots of yoga is perhaps gaining more potency during this experience. I mean, you know, disciplining yourself to do chaturanga dandasana [low plank] and you know, fitness yoga right now is only going to take you so far. And then that’s not really much different than if you were in the studio three months ago to now. And we have to always be adapting to the now from the practice. The practice helps us adapt to the now, and the now is we need healing, right? Globally. The planet needs healing, and every single human being on the planet needs healing. So here we are in the practice of yoga, in this modality that allows the channels of the body to open.
[43:40]
PETER: I wonder about this fitness part, because I think one of the things that—you know, when I talk with people about yoga and they ask what I perceive as some of the benefits of yoga, one of the things that I’m very clear about—you know, after I do a little short commercial for Shakti—is that every studio is different. Each one has a different feel to it—
MICHELLE: And the voices in it.
PETER: Just as every house of worship is different. I mean you can be a Presbyterian, but this church is not going to be just like that church over there, even if they’re both Presbyterian. So, it stands to reason that yoga classes—sometimes they have different aims. And especially in the U.S. it seems like a lot of people can be driven toward a kind of fitness-based approach. And it’s not that if you do yoga consistently, you won’t become more fit. But that’s kind of imposing this other aim upon it, this kind of goal-oriented rather than this process-oriented, rather than this being-oriented part that, to me, is the real magic and power of it. It’s reminding me that it’s not about what I’m going to look like later on. It’s not about what I’m going to be able to lift, or how I can stretch. And we’ve talked about this a little bit, but there are some times that I think yoga goes into a category of exercise. There’s certainly the exercise dimension, but it’s more than just physical—
MICHELLE: Well, it makes sense. I mean, because that’s what sells, right? Everybody wants to have a better body. Everybody wants to look better. Everybody wants 10 more years added to their existence and that’s a very normal thing for us as humans, right? And the practice of sitting and being in the now, and really being present with your own aches and addressing them as they come up, it’s less appealing! It doesn’t quite have the high industry market, right? You know, so thus far it might be safe to say that in the U.S. that’s how it’s gone—thus far. But I really think the norm is broken. And I talk about this on the Facebook Live [centering session] segments pretty regularly. The paradigm, the norm, the structure—it’s all broken. Whether we’re talking about religion or the educational system or government. This is a real opportunity as we allow that norm to just completely be broken, to dissolve. We are giving ourselves a chance to have a new approach with life, right? A new relationship to some sort of new norm. And I believe that this crisis is bringing more and more and more people into the reality that every human being is fragile, that we can all get this disease right now, this very novel virus. There isn’t anyone that is immune to it, right? So that’s an enormous wake-up call to be able to preciously embrace that, to really hold space for one’s vulnerability, to really be able to hold space for the practice that can heal us. You know, rather than “I’m going to continue to do the fitness work, making myself as strong as possible and blocking out the reality that this thing could touch me. It can touch each and every one of us, no matter how many chaturanga dandasanas [low planks] you learn how to do, right? So I really believe this is an enormous wake-up call for us as humans. And it’s not just the U.S. or Western culture. It really is us as the pack of humans coming to realize that there is work to be done on addressing, on really addressing one’s vulnerabilities, in working with them from a very compassionate place, rather than a false sense of security that often the fitness industry can present. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with having a practice that makes you fit and that promotes a healthy wellbeing. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just that it might not really be taking us deep enough into the core of who we are.
[49:07]
[VO]: That’s for today’s show! If you want more information on either the Facebook centering sessions at noon or the Zoom yoga sessions at 12:45 every day except Sunday, visit shaktibuffalo.com. Thanks to Ravi Padmanabha for permission to use musical selections from his 2018 album Meditations, available on Bandcamp. Ravi has performed and accompanied sessions at Shakti many times over the years. My great thanks to Michelle Gigante for spending some time with me via FaceTime audio. I’d also like to name some of the other outstanding instructors who have guided my yoga for nearly 20 years now: Nicole Mode, Magda Caraballo, Brittany Messuti, Debbie Diver Kephart, Kristalee Hites, and Abby Spindelman. Grateful for all of you, and all y’all other yogis and non-yogis alike. My favorite translation of Namaste is “I honor the divine within you,” and I mean that. It means so much that you listen, especially right through to the credits, and I will have a little something special for you at the very end of today’s episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for letting me use instrumental versions of his songs for intro and outro. If you’ve ever wondered what his voice sounds like, stick around—which, I guess, is a pretty big hint about the surprise bonus: it’s a hidden track, you guys! I’m Peter Horn, and Point of Learning is recorded, written, edited, mixed, and produced by me, here in sunny Buffalo, New York. Please take a moment to rate, review, and share this episode with just one other person you know who might dig it. It will mean most coming from you. I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can, with social psychologist and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, author, most recently, of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. See you then!
