Today's piece is a combination of Nick news and associated contemplations.
The news
I am taking a 3 month sabbatical from all teaching, starting after Thanksgiving through the end of February.
Starting November 29, I am lucky to have Sarah Westbrook subbing my Monday 10a class in a hybrid format at the studio and on Zoom. She blends crisp, savvy alignment instructions with creative, organic movement and language. Try her out!
My other classes will go on hiatus. Please enjoy Rhoda and Lela’s classes at similar times.
So: last chances to practice with me live are Saturday, Nov 19 at 12p CST and Monday, Nov 21 at 10a CST.
Some personal context
My wife Lela and I did our first teacher training at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in early 2005. We were overachieving college grads, seeking a meaningful livelihood and determined to prove to the world (and to our parents) that we weren't crazy. So we got down to it. I made a simple website (thanks CS degree!), designed some promo materials and we started teaching weekly classes and soon after private sessions. The studio fell into our laps in 2010 (thanks Ivy Boyer!), so we've also been managing that for 11 years now.
That means I've been in the yoga biz for almost 17 years with minimal breaks. Now that both our kids are in full-day school, I have the cognitive space to consider what I want the next decade of my work to look like and what the world needs from me... and I'm really unsure. I've been operating in "what needs to done" mode for so long. It's time to step out of the deeply-worn grooves of my assumptions to scout some fresh territory in the realm of the adjacent possible.
During my sabbatical, I’ll continue supporting the studio from the “back office” (our dining room table), write more of this newsletter, pursue my own studies and see what else presents itself.
Big picture context
Evolution slowly but relentlessly adapts organisms to better survive and reproduce within particular environments. Complex ecosystems full of tiny niches give rise to hyper-specialized forms which are exquisite and unavoidably vulnerable to environmental change. In the language of data science they are "overfitted", which means they are so specialized to their niche that they can't easily adapt to new circumstances.
Humans, on the other hand, are consummate generalists who have figured out how to live on all the continents. This adaptability was likely triggered by natural climate change that thinned African jungle into wooded savannah, nudging our fruit-eating ancestors to climb out of the trees, pick up tools and start talking to each other about hunting. Access to more calories enabled bigger brains, which facilitated the rise of complex culture: a transmission of knowledge and skills outside of genetic inheritance. Culture evolves much faster than genomes, and thus humans could quickly adapt to live in deserts, jungles, tundra and everything in between.1
In order to be "programmable" by our natal culture and land, humans are born without many hardwired abilities (though plenty of drives and biases, as discussed in my last piece). Youthful neuroplasticity gradually gives way2 to more stable patterns, a.k.a. "being an adult", which are helpful for pursuing long-term projects like careers and raising kids.
Consistency is helpful when you need to show up to teach a yoga class every day. I've been teaching at noon on Saturdays for maybe 15 years, and I can feel how deeply that pattern is etched into my psyche. I am quite optimized to my local environment... or at least, I thought I was. My mother's death in 2020 (not from Covid) and the pandemic and the rest of the multi-crisis have altered both me and my suburban ecosystem. I am left feeling incongruent with my customary behaviors, but I have trouble seeing beyond my current niche while still immersed in the dailyness3. Thus the need for a sabbatical.
To be honest, part of me wonders if I could serve the world in a more useful, concrete way like... pouring concrete? Custom concrete countertops? Seems the market for skilled trades is strong right now. But also honestly, I have invested many hours and dollars acquiring these weird, intangible yoga teaching skills and it seems heedless to abandon them entirely. So perhaps my teaching can take a different form and meet the changing needs of the student ecosystem.
But there's a dilemma that flummoxes this tidy narrative: my ecosystem is going to keep changing. Literally true thanks to climate change, metaphorically true as human culture and technology writhe under the metamorphic pressures of this era. As they say in finance, "past results are not a guarantee of future performance". This is only going to get more true. It feels dicey to build myself a "new paradigm of yoga teaching" when the ground keeps shifting under my feet.
Consider this computer simulation of a population evolving over time. Here, the position of each speck on the “fitness landscape” represents how well a species “fits” its environment (not a measure of cardio capacity). As this charmingly simple world changes in fast-forward time, evolution sends the dots scurrying to better “fit” the changing circumstances. I’m glossing over a lot of details here4, but I think the video captures how it can feel being a modern human, finding our assumptions about the world quickly outdated, swarming toward the next “right answer”.
It looks tiring to keep up, but maybe it’s doable? Just jump on some calls over the weekend and learn to code in your spare time?
But as this second video shows, if the landscape changes faster, adaptation can’t keep up.
Maybe time to build a houseboat and ride the waves, rather than chase the carrot of best adaptation? That’s actually a sound bit of yogic advice right there. As the exponential age accelerates up the steep curve, we may have no choice but to abandon the quest for a perfect fit and learn to surf what comes, sometimes swimming hard, sometimes riding the currents from Beyond. Sounds tough to do this by ourselves, tiny boats in a huge ocean. Can we learn to adapt together, over and over? A guiding question I’m taking into this time of reflection.
Much more I could say, but I’ll leave it at this for now. Many thanks to all the students present and past who have granted me the great privilege of sharing yoga as my livelihood, and thanks to my many teachers whose wisdom I attempt to transmit in my imperfect, human way. I pray that this time away will refresh my vision and guide me towards better service to this community.
Many bows,
Nick
PS - Hat tip to Michael Garfield and his Future Fossils podcast for turning me on to fitness landscapes and other useful metaphors from evolutionary biology. He’s one of my top sources for horizon-expansion.
For a great read on how our evolutionary history affects us today, I recommend The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman.
But adolescence seems to be stretching longer and longer. Life milestones like marriage and childbirth happen later and later. There are many reasons for this trend, of course, but one theory is that the complexity of the world keeps increasing, so our brains need to stay malleable longer before solidifying their models. As we head up the exponential curve of change, will we need to remain childlike our whole lives?
My maternal grandmother Beth Cunningham’s phrase.
Longer video and more resources here:
🙏🏽🧡
Many blessings on your sabbatical. May your next steps be revealed. The yoga I practice in my 50s looks very different from the yoga I practiced in my 30s. There are no “classes”, no studio space…there is a corporate office and wonderful colleagues, there is the drive to grow a business, there is a beautiful home and a sweet family, and there is my desire to be of service and the need to surrender everything I thought I knew about what my future would hold.