What sacred texts can do is provide context for the Truth that is always living inside you. The book itself isn’t nearly as important as the Truth it expresses, which is both timeless and crucial…retreat within it for the solace and companionship offered by the sentiments, but don’t overly identify with the pages themselves. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali offer a road map for discovering a manifesto that’s already written inside you.The only reason the sutras make any sense is because they speak the language of the soul. About her choice to include the sutras she writes, This IS the work of yoga.Įach chapter starts with a few choice yoga sutras that weave their way into the essay that follows. Listening to and learning from folks of differing lived experiences cultivates Ahimsa (non-harming) and Svadhyaya (self-study, inner exploration). With Yoke, Stanley provides a much overdue opportunity to broaden my view. (Stanley, page 141)Īs a yoga teacher I am aware that I teach from the experience of my body size and ability, and though I have worked hard to make my classes trauma-informed and personal choice-driven, I need to constantly remind myself that I have unintentional blind spots born of my privilege. That’s the thread that will always stitch us together. What makes us all the same is we’re all having our own unique experience of self-exploration and acceptance. We’ve gotta stop expecting other people to understand where we are coming from because they just never will…We’re strangers even to our closest friends. We’re not all having the same experience and that’s okay. I have been reminded that my own lived experience is not universal, and yet the universal is where we find common ground. This book has served to remind me that I teach Yoga with plenty of unconscious bias that rarely gets challenged, because for the most part my yoga students look and act like me, and come from similar socio-economic, educational and cultural backgrounds. In Yoke, Jessamyn Stanley offers us a lens through which to view Yoga in a way rarely made available by mainstream means.
Residential Yoga Study and Service Immersion.
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