I haven’t had as much time to write recently, but one benefit of hybrid classes is that I can easily share clips of my opening talks. Here’s 5 minutes from last week, a riff inspired by “The Return of the Guilds” by AE Robbert.
This talk emerges from my lifelong inquiry into what it means to live skillfully - or even just survive with sanity intact - in this epochal moment when old stories are fading but a new story has yet emerge.
Child of the Nintendo era, growing up alongside the Internet, I have followed the siren song of new technology and benefited greatly - while simultaneously grieving the high cost paid by the living world for our obsession with growth and progress. I studied computer science in college, and promptly realized that spending hours and hours in front of a screen, coding on a deadline, was making me anxious and angry. I turned to yoga for relief and was lucky enough to be able to make a career from it.
As a yoga teacher and yoga therapist for almost 20 years, I have witnessed the somatic impact of smart phones and the reality distortion field of social media. It’s not pretty. The kids and adults are not ok. Yoga studios have become urgent care centers for tech-addled, info-gorged nervous systems. It is high time that we started to consciously consider how we want to relate to the god-like powers these devices offer. Somatic practices like yoga can make room for remembering what really matters in a human life.
But three years ago, I started getting frustrated with always focusing inwards. If the corrosive solipsism of the Personal Feed fuels modern pathology, perhaps it would do us good to practice turning outwards for a change? I attended a training in Mindful Outdoor Experience at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in 2022 and offered weekly classes at a local Evanston mini-forest. That wasn’t possible this year, but I happy to be able to offer two weekend workshops this summer. Click below for details.
And if you’d like to read more from me on the practice of nature yoga, I have several other essays on this Substack.
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