Intro to Vedic Chanting

It’s said that music is good for us.

Mind body art science. That intersection is where mantra lives.

Listen: it’ll rewire you. It’ll move you. It has the capacity to soothe, to carry, to stabilize, to rock, to break you. It can show you god.

Funny thing: the ancient seers knew all of this. They knew what brains are. What humaning is. How difficult. They also knew how prone we are to disaster and suffering and causing trouble and pain. They knew how likely we are to feeling trapped and lost.

And these guys knew how simple practices can be liberation.

The oldest and I think most direct practice was/is chanting. I mean the real, true ‘authentic’ yoga. Thousands of years ago, some folks figured out how to harmonize what feel like the tensions of life. All this other stuff - poses and philosophy, fasts and art, mindfulness and life hacking - is really just a later attempt to repackage or over simplify something that has been true and proven and practicable for millennia.

I can’t possibly tell you how true this is in my body. It’s down in my cells. It’s in my sleep and dream cycles. It seems to have tipped my dangerous tending toward addictive and depressive and hot bio cycles to a roaring symphony.

It tickles my intellectual brain, starts to make all the apparent contradictory things you hear in yoga spaces and life spaces all start to fit. It all starts to fall together.

And I feel like a riptide.

This art science of chanting is vast. There’s a lot of crap out there to wade through. I’ve put together a ‘intro to Vedic chant’ course that will run Tuesday mornings 7 am CST on zoom beginning in September. 6 weeks.

Vedic chant is THE way to take yoga past poses. It is ancient. It is now. It is recognized as a world treasure by UNESCO. It is available to anyone, with the little caveat that you need to be taught how to navigate it. You need a teacher to initiate you. Once that’s done, the doors are wide open.

Anyone can chant. You don’t need musical ability or Sanskrit philosophy or a spoonful of religious dogma. The only ask is commitment, and knowing that I will ask you to unmute yourself and sing on mic and expect you to figure out how to practice for yourself for ten minutes at a time, several times a week.

Quick overview:

Week One invocation and Ganesh start where all things should start, with an invocation to the god who removes obstacles. Discuss what invocation and prayer are in this tradition and for you personally, with a nod to cultural apporpraiton, modernity, post-religious lostness and spiritual longing. We’ll get a crash course on the six (main) rules of Vedic chanting and a primer on how a music practice sparks up the human system in terms of cognitive function, emotional balance, optimism and spirituality, physical balance and capacity, intellect and soul.

Week Two the power and beauty of Saraswati with Ganesha on board, we’ll now learn the invocation to Saraswati, she goddess of the power (I mean force) of learning, beauty, wisdom, creativity, and music. Keep learning some basics about chanting as you start to root around in the basement of your subliminal through a personalized practice. There is so much power and grace and flow and growth to harnessing our learning power and becoming a student. There is so much loveliness and beauty and compelling, attractive power to this whole show. We invoke her, next.

Week Three Initiation exploring THE Gayatri mantra The Gayatri mantra is like the top of the charts mantra for all of human history. It is so popular, has been for so very long, that there is richness and electricity just in the thought of it’s continuity throughout human history. All great teachers will say this is the greatest yoga thing, the only one you need, the start and the source and the heart of all teachings. Yet, partially because it is the one, it has been pop cultured, watered down, misused, abused, and infinitely mistaught. We’ll do some unpacking of harms and restoring of things to their place as you both learn how to do it right (yes, there is a right and a wrong here) respecting the lineage and at the same time plug it in to your individuality, your possibility, your contemporary thoroughly modernized humanity. Bonus: how and what oṃ is and how to hold it right.

Week Four The art of listening. Adhyayanam is the traditional method of transition, or handing on the teaching, or methodology of learning. This is so fundamental to ALL of Yoga that it will unlock doors for you, including the deepest and heaviest ones of your heart. And oddly, it is misunderstanding Adhyayanam that has so mixed up yoga in contemporary spaces and the spiritual marketplace.

Week Five the art and science of personal practice. There is a tensioning at the heart of being human, and of this path that is essentially a question of how to human a little more gracefully. How do we handle the firehose of information and stimulation and overwhelm that is life without drowning? But at the same time, how do we keep ourselves alive and not die of lack? Personal practice is the way. Let’s unpack all that.

Week Six: Unshakeable. Moving on, letting go, stepping forward. There is an art to letting go. And we’re all, every last one of us, control freaks. We’re fortunate and half way there if we are savvy to our personal brand of control freakiness already. As we wrap up this course, we’re both finishing and beginning. Whether you are moving on to study a new thing with me or others, or are simply taking what you’ve learned here home to mull over on you own, it’s important that we close right. Let’s look at closing mantras and the concept of offering, surrender, and freedom in Yoga philosophy and practice. We’ll touch on the imporance and pre-req of inner safety and the safety nets built into the tradition (and ways they have been neglected or ignored in your past or the industry.). We’ll discuss the discovery of safety in sensation, in lived experience, in practices as provided by yoga (in asana, in meditation, in daily ritual or special ritual, in Ayurveda, in sangha, and in your body and breath). We’ll look at the role of all techniques leading to meditation techniques, and how this deep neural plasticity work curates an inner resilience and resolve without you needing to cognitively do it. Let’s not forget to unpack community (healthy, unhealthy, but ultimately the most important thing) and general mindfulness (it’s all yoga!….but don’t forget to practice). We’ll dive a little, little bit into the mental game in the physical body, what’s happening in present moment awareness, letting go of future worries and healing ancient wounds. And letting go wouldn’t be complete unless we also explore the challenges of aging, an unfair world, physical and personal limitations.

FAQ stuff

This is a weighty course so far as impact goes. It will give you the foundation to study and learn forever. It will clarify and answer the super messy confusions out there. It will orient you, initiate you, and begin you. Yet its a relatively light class from your end:

• six weeks, a tiny personal daily practice.

• Live class Tuesday mornings 7 am CST via zoom for 6 weeks beginning September 3.

• Recordings.

• Audio and text tools to support your personal practice.

• Humongous workbook for your forever.

• send 3 recordings of your practice for personalized feedback and support.

• $250 bucks.

• Get $50 off for you and your friend if you sign up together. Everything is better together. Both of you will need to ask Karin for the discount code to do this.

• Sign up on Mighty Networks.

The dregs of winter, the light of spring

Fatigue is cumulative.  Weariness grows.  Think of the way a steady, slow drip of water will erode a mountain or a wall over time.  Or the way you can handle one bad day, one set back, but after a series of setbacks your response is going to change.  Eventually, you yourself change.  There will be a proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back.  One thing more and you might just crack down the middle.

We are, for all our modern gadgetry, primitive beings.  We have bodies that are prehistoric and digestive tracts that precede the agricultural revolution.  We have minds that are older than the industrial revolution, and we're simply not intended to be able to process a constant barrage of information, stimulation, environmental strain.

Ama is the sludge, the build up, the slowly or not so slowly developing layer of grime that weakens our immunity, dulls our enthusiasm, and clouds our vitality.  It's a toxic wet blanket thrown over our cell's ability to communicate, and without clear communication between our 70 odd trillion cells, things go a little haywire.  We'll get sick more often and sickness will linger, longer.  We'll be prone to allergies, including food sensitivities.  Our hormones will back fire and our inflammatory response will alternately spit and roar, roar and spittle. 

Ama is

• the consequence of inadequately digested food or experience
• toxins which build up in the body and prevent our connecting with or ability to discern the body's underlying intelligence
• blockages - weather in our arteries, our joints, our our ability to experience love and happiness
• improperly digested food - any substance not utilizable by the body as food
• excess of the bi-products of metabolism (uric acid, components of bile, free radicals)
• the physical substance of maldigestion which blocks the body's subtle and not-subtle channels

As spring comes in, we're aware of changes in the environment around us.  The skies get lighter, and higher.  The earth thaws.  Something deep in plants begins to move like a white milky pap toward the surface and then breaks through.  Animals are born, the rains come, the heaviness of winter becomes the green wild pulse of spring.  

These are profound shifts.  They are a regeneration process.  And the thing is, something similar is going on in your own physiology at this time.  But we tend to be so disconnected from seasons and nature that we don't recognize the signs, wouldn't know what to do with them if we did, we live more by our newsfeed and our work demands than our body's inner wisdom.  

The ancient vaidyas encouraged people to go through seasonal shifts with a purification process known as panchakarma.  Every April, I go through this process myself and guide others through it online.  It starts April 1 and is four weeks of ritually cleaning out your gunk.  I mean the emotional, and the physical, and the old, and the relatively new.  For $100, you'll get

• a PDF guidebook with a week by week plan to prepare your body to deeply release, to go through the release, and then to rejuvenate.
• daily reflections as a part of that guide
• a weekly 'how to' video, as well as supplementary videos that are all optional (how to make ghee and kitchari, a few asana videos, etc)
• this year I'm including a series of how-to-meditate videos that will give you a technique for effortless meditation, different than watching the breath or mindfulness.  Meditation is purification.

Stress and strain and less than optimal digestion are part of the world we live in.  But there are things we can do to recover, rejuvenate, regenerate.  You can feel spring, as a thing that is happening inside of you.

Training

Last night I got a text from a friend.  The Yoga Center of Minneapolis closed it's doors last night.  No one knew it was going to happen except the few key players involved.  I know how bad this can hurt.  I know how many people are affected.  This morning the word has spread and more and more people are expressing sadness, hurt, and confusion.

There is grief there.  Grief is a complicated thing, both a process and not a process at all.  It lasts.  And it changes.

From a humble place, I want to make myself available to anyone who needs to talk.  From a more humble place still, I will open my intensives/teacher training this summer to anyone who can no longer complete their work with The Yoga Center.

It doesn't fix everything, but it is something.  It may not be the right fit for you.  But we can have a conversation and figure it out.  "Training" and "yoga teacher" and "Yoga Alliance" are all confusing topics right now.  We'll address every one of them.

Deep bows,

Karin

Resolution, Revolution, and Ritual

It’s mid January. The dawns are so deep they break to ink blue. Stars are sharp. To say nothing whatsoever of the cold.

Only that it’s a hard kind of season. It’s a difficult time of year.

Now that 97% of the human population has trashed, dismissed, or diminished their New Year’s Resolutions, I want to talk about them.

To be fair, I’m not a person who makes resolutions. I never have been. In the first 29 years of my life, before-the-yoga, I fully identified as a fuck up. I wouldn’t to commit to a damned thing. I wouldn’t commit because I knew I’d fail. 

I no longer think of myself as such a damaged piece of work. But I still don’t make resolutions. My reasoning is different, though; I don’t make resolutions now because I know that changes happen – beautiful, devastating changes – in spite of me. Change is an experience of grace.

Sankalpa – the Sanskrit word for intention – means the law that arises from the heart.  It means the rule you follow above all other rules.  And here’s where I think we misunderstand: intention doesn’t come from the goal setting and thinking part of us; it rises up out of the flesh like a baby.  Or a disease.  To try to think or plan or strategize our way into the new year is to misunderstand both human beings and change.   The heart is going to do what the heart needs to do.

Being human is what traditional yoga studied.  In depth.  From multiple angles.  Down through the layers and into the shadows.  Movement studies.  Mind studies.  One of the key things the sages came to understand is the inborn capacity for human beings to overcome, to heal, and to grow.  Lay the ground, plant the seeds, cultivate the space, and the human spirit soars.  Change is what human beings, do.

But laying the ground is decidedly different than a bucket list.  It’s related to healing, not goal setting.

There is a tremendous cultural pull, born in the holidays and proved in the longest nights of the year, that resurrects and reflects who we’ve been in our lives.  The pull underscores aging.  It’s laced with familial roles – how sweet and sustaining they are, as well as how fraught with contradiction.  It’s sourced in finances, commercialism, and gender roles while being boxed by cultural traditions.  It trades in shame, hits our weak spots, and plays on self-esteem.  To top it all off, end of the year rituals are reminiscent of religious rites; even if we’re not religious, we want to be spiritual.  We’re drawn to things that smell like candles in the dark, salvation, and promises.  The resurrecting and reflecting pull is so strong we start vowing.  We want a clean break.  Never again, we say.  Or this year I promise.  From this point forth and so on.  Sometimes it appears more mild: it’s true I’d be happier if I finally lost this weight, maybe.  Or, now that I’m middle aged, I really should start exercising.  I don’t know that these are actually mild.  They’re rather passive aggressive.

Resolution and change are not the same thing.  They aren’t even related to each other. 

The one is sourced by ego, master of phrasing self-hate as self-improvement and avoidance as self care.  Resolution implies a problem needing to be fixed.  But the problem here is the self.  We so often make problems of ourselves. We try to change ourselves to fit in or get enough likes, without realizing that’s an endless hunger.  We may stoke our ego enough for today, but tomorrow we’ll have to do the same thing.  And the next day.  And the next.  The needing will never end.  There is no ‘goal’; there’s only a hamster wheel.  Or one of the minor circles of hell.  Resolutions feed either our ego or our insecurities.

Our ego and our insecurities turn out to be inseparable.

The other, change, is sourced elsewhere.  By god, maybe.  The really real.  By the ordinariness of biological, historical, genetic and teeming life.  And let’s face it: ordinary life, in the power of the galaxy, the wonder of a seed, the outright miracle of human birth and the delicacy of minerals in the soil, is wonderous.  I could go on and on.  The ordinary life of snowflakes and sixty five million refugees, salt in the blood, the wild bones of children and the fact of guns in America; I mean racial wounds, feminine persistence, immigrant dreams and native wisdom. I mean hope and sadness, hope and guts, hope and the medicinal poetry of ancestors. 

There is so much more to life than our ideas about ourselves. 

We need rituals, after so much talk of resolutions.  Rituals dabble in the taboo and make it sacred. Ritual approaches the ordinary with a sense of humility and revelation.

Ritual leans in; change and healing follow.  Then, and only then, do items on lists start to check themselves off.  They fall off surprisingly and without effort, a kind of domino effect.  What was vague becomes clear.  What was ignorance becomes wisdom.  Like photography, resolution has to do with clarity. Resolution is a side effect of healing, not the means.

As I write this I’m watching the sun rise, flamingo pink and throat red.  Everything but the light is freeze blue, hard white.  The juxtaposition is sharp.  By the time the light reaches a diagonal, it will be molten gold, a lava on window panes, hot honey on houses. A siren wails and an ambulance rushes to the hospital.  I’m working on my own love, my own marriage.  One of Martin Luther King’s books lays spread-eagled next to the coffee cup. 

I can’t ignore reality. Nor can I deny beauty. Nor can I handle even one of the greater questions of our time.  In the face of all that, I need something to hold me. 

I need something to hold me because I am not strong.

Ritual makes an offering of the self rather than an imposition of the will.  Rituals invoke our heart with all its vulnerabilities.  Vulnerability has power.  Ritual notices the beauty of deep winter even as it shivers in the face of it. Rites acknowledge need, accept uncertainty, appreciate human effort and sing earthy wisdom.  Ritual sacralizes the taboo, the profane, the frustrating, the quotidian; and what else could we do with such things?

What else could we possibly do?

Ritual is the mysterious work of hope and healing.  Their mutuality.  Their human and ordinary realness.

But healing looks so very different than a yearly pep talk or ultimatum.  Change often takes years to unfold.  Decades.  Generations. Sometimes this is so hard. It is so tiring.  How can we take on such tremendous problems without losing hope?

Like many of the deeper questions, this one has two apparently contradictory answers.  It’s paradox. 

On the one hand, we only have the courage and capacity to do such things when we remember that they are bigger than us.  They are generational, historical, and communal. We have to do our part.  It’s important that we realize we are part of a movement. It’s possible to see with the eyes of the not yet born.  Our work has been handed down directly from the ancestors.  Then the difficulty of the present doesn’t matter.  Our frustration isn’t the whole of the story.  When we do this, we are uniquely able to notice the beauty of things without their beauty being tarnished by the shitty context in which they happen. 

And on the other hand, we have to take care of ourselves.  We have to learn the lessons implicit in our own lives.  When we do this, when we explore personal healing, we find a beauty and a grace quality to life that we’d never suspected before.  We find parts of ourselves we never knew existed.  Parts of our self we couldn’t get rid of become our standing ground.  If we don’t leverage our own life lessons, we re-iterate them.

If we don’t have both levels of healing we suffer.  If we only think about ourselves, we eventually become self destructive.  We’ll roil in diet mentality.  We’ll self-improve ourselves to death.  We’ll never have enough qualifications, or degrees, or respect.

But if we only ever look at the big issues, we lose ourselves. We’ll get depressed. We’ll burn out.  Everything will be heavy.  No one will want to be around us because we’re self righteous and annoying.  And we’ll develop conflict and resentment because we can’t claim the problems of the world as our own personal destiny.  They don’t belong to us.  They aren’t ours.

Ritual is the only thing I know that draws these polarities together.  A yogic truth, if it is one, suffuses through all the layers of reality.  It has to be true at the subtle level, as well as the most scientific.  It has to be both a universal truth, which can anchor us; and it has to be an intimate - almost embarrassing- personal experience, which floats us. 

Ritual lays the spirit on the altar, using whatever altar it can find.  Dust motes in a column of sunlight, say.  Or clumps of black grasses, shrouded in snow.  Ritual is seeing breath crystallized in bluey light and ego decrystallized into something not yet finished, nowhere near done.  To watch the ego decrystallize is hard, and such a relief.

Ritual redeems us like a coupon. 

Love, it says, is possible.  Even though we doubt.  Doubt, it says, is workable, because we still love.

Ritual heals us.  Which is what we’ve needed year after year.  It’s what we all, need.  It’s time for us as a society to focus on healing. There’s no task of greater importance and no undertaking that could be more profound. 

Now is the time for us to finally heal the painful legacy of racism, the lineage of patriarchy, the division between the wealthy and the poor. Now is the time to seriously take on the task of healing the environment.  It’s time for us to heal a broken educational system.  It’s time to heal an antiquated disease care model that poses as a health care system.  We have to address the ill health and depression that affects fifty percent of the world’s population.  We have to address the cost and the suffering laid on families and see the stress that comes of not getting essential things right.

I suppose what I’m suggesting amounts to a revolution.  I mean social justice.  I mean public wealth.  I mean human rights and acknowledging the staggering beauty and urgent role of science before our policies do irreparable harm.  

The gyst of such a revolution would be individuals healing themselves and the people they come in contact with.  It will spread until our halls of power are brown and feminine. Our governors won’t descend from fraternities but rise from immigrant families and we’ll support them. This revolution will enrich our economy and restore wounded dignity and we’ll celebrate it.  We can promote a revolution based on healing instead of the band-aid of suppressing.  We can call shame culture and bullying culture out as being the same culture. This healing will look for wholeness in our fragmented society and this shift will benefit everyone, every last one, in society. 

Like any revolution this won’t come from government.  It will come from individuals. It will come from us. 

The need is clear.  The way is clear.  Your soul longs for it and the world is so ready for it. 

I’m not asking for utopia. I’m speaking directly to the way things are. Things don’t have to be this way.  

There is an emptiness to mid January.  It stands in all the doorways.  It’s rubbed people’s cheeks to raw.  We’re depleted but expected to go on.  Lean in to ritual as both balm and sugar. It’s a fire and it’s a song.  It’s important, and it’s something we already know how to do.  Sankalpa is like that.  It’s proof that we already and always have cared.  We fill emptiness with love.

Yoga when the world's gone to hell

The news is relentless.  There is a sick taste in my mouth.  I oscillate between avoiding news and bingeing on it.  I oscillate between desperate, trembling activity and absolute apathy.  I forget myself: I teach I protest I aunt I wive I write.  And the self interrupts, selfish: I whine I dither I am needy lonely ugly and afraid.  I want comfort.  I want answers.  I want change.  And I want it all to just fucking calm down.  I want some sweetness in my life, the celebrations, time with the folk I love, time to do something other than crisis management and grief.  I dearly want to sit and watch as the sugar maple changes her clothes, gussies up, stuns, and lets go.

It doesn't stop.  The news is relentless.  Now this.  Now that.  Heartbreak.  Anger.  Fear.

There are days I desperately need my practice, and it feels desperate; starving, needy, heady, grabby, longing.  Then there are days practice seems utterly irrelevant, selfish, not good enough, unimportant, a waste of time.  On those days, everything in my body recoils from sitting.  Nothing in me wants to move.  Awareness is just too goddamned uncomfortable.  Nothing can tear me away from the twitter feed, the images, the debate, the body counts.  Or: nothing seems so urgent as uninterrupted time with my niece, far from news, away from danger.  

In recent days I've wanted the solace of my teacher.  But he died a few months ago.  I could go back to his published words or his voice in a podcast.  But I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to his voice yet.  It doesn't feel good.  I can't.  So there is silence.

I wanted the release of a practice and a community so I went to a class.  But I kid you not the teacher said 'feel the burn, it's goooood' and 'yoga bliss' and I wanted, a little bit, to sit bolt upright and stare at her in outrage.  I quietly left.  I wept in the bathroom.  It was an ugly, heaving, snotty cry.  Etheric music and wispy incense drifted around my head but I cried and I cried.

In the early stages of my practice, the first few years, it was all about that burning.  It felt, good.  I practiced, obsessively.  Every single day there was some new thing learned.  Every time I practiced was a revelation.  It was like learning a new language, an immersion.  I immersed. The words of this language were freedom, liberation, an end to suffering.  It rang bells inside me.  It lit fires.  It seemed true.  

It isn't like that these days. The world has shifted.  Those very words - freedom, liberation, an end to suffering - ring discordant. 

There are times this feels like the yoga isn't working any longer, or maybe it was always a hoax.  The very definition of spiritual by-pass and self-indulgence, delusion, empty promises.  I've heard a lot of people say very similar things: It spoke to me, but then in the light of things, what it said wasn't true. 

Another teacher of mine says: these practices have never been more important.  People need a yoga practice now, more than ever.

As a teacher, I've been banging drums for years.  Look at the world.  Look at the world.  Look.  But recently I've been torn. Part of me needs to emphasize yoga as social justice.  Another realizes my teaching needs to sooth.  It is my job to provide the necessary intervention of care.  This latter feels more urgent: come here, rest.  Pause.  Re-source. We need to take care of ourselves, each other, our loved ones and our students.  

And, we need to change the the world.  Children are watching.  People are dying.  The maple tree rattles in the early morning dark.

*

Yoga isn't enough.  It isn't an answer to atrocity any more than prayer is.  Neither are an appropriate response.  Prayer is not an answer to a broken democracy cracking in racial violence and underlying fear.  Prayer is not an appropriate response to flood, storm, thousands of displaced and hungry and needing help lives.  Prayer is not an appropriate response to domestic terrorism.  And releasing our own tension, feeling our feelings, gleaning insight is not enough. Children are watching.  People are dying.  Do I repeat myself? Or am I making my point? 

This isn't anywhere near, over.  More people are going to die.  Because hospitals don't have power and there isn't food or clean water.  Because police brutality and gun violence.  Because we haven't really answered the questions of race and sex and gender or democracy, of civil rights, of justice.

Which is not the same as saying either yoga or prayer - or whatever mental health and spiritual tools you've got - is irrelevant.  They are, relevant.  They are relevant as tools. They are tools for our own sanity.  They help us quell anxiety, reactivity, splitting away from our body and our feelings.  They resource our autonomy, our responsibility, our inborn capacity to choose and a renewed determination to choose well. These practices light fire, tend fire, inspire hope.  These practices empower the self, little as she is in the great scheme of things.

Little as she is in the great scheme of things, her empowerment is vital. 

I swear, the maple this time of year seems less a tree and more a poem.  I can feel the red drawing up, in my arms.

*

This is where paradox, the nature of two things being true at one and the same time, comes to a head: I know of nothing, other than my prayerful practice of yoga, that both empowers the pray-er and acknowledges the reality of suffering.  

I call this, hope.  It isn't what we'd expected and it is not, most definitely not, the way we want it to be.  Hope is surrender, and commitment.  Not one or the other: both.

In the beginning, yoga was all about me.  It had to be.

It isn't about me anymore.  It can't be.

My students have asked, in the last year, over and over and over again: what, now?  How do we not burn out?  How can we possibly keep feeling into pain, and suffering, and injustice, when it just keeps coming?  The question is on point.  How do we find the energy to take up a problem that is bigger than us?  How do we not lose heart in the face of such toxic realities, the unanswered questions, the big things like racism and immigration and climate change?

I've said: I have to remember these things are bigger than I am.  If I can believe that history will judge these moments, then it doesn't matter so much that I am tired.  If I realize that future generations might take up these very issues with more grace and possibility than we do, that my frailty is irrelevant.  That these questions are old, they are ancient, they are chronic like pain, simply doesn't matter if I realize there is some small thing I can do.  It doesn't solve the world's pain.  But I sleep better.  I recover, sanity.  If I believe in beauty, and justice, and the preciousness of children, than my fear isn't terribly important.  

Sometimes, I have to step back and let others bang the drums.  Sometimes, I listen for my teacher's voice, even when it isn't there. Sometimes, I speak and realize I sound like him; this gives me goosebumps.  Sometimes you are crabby tired and overwrought but then a child asks for a snack; of course you make it.  Sometimes, you'll hate yoga but then some one asks for help; you'll say yes.  No one of these things is the answer, and no one of these things is not part of the answer.  

It's okay to be angry, to grieve, to burn out if you realize it isn't about you and you're not alone.  The relative smallness of actions becomes tolerable. 

Pray as hard as you can, as often as you need, with whatever tools you've got.  

Pray, so that you can get back to work.  The news is relentless, and that's okay; that means it isn't over. Yoga is social justice.  Come, and rest.  It does something like red does to maple trees.  But it happens inside your own chest.