The Truth Is, Yoga Is Never About The Poses
The “Happy Face Club” playhouse was founded by Jennifer Atzen, my neighbor, and I in our conjoining backyards in 1972. I was 11 and she was 9.
We loved our playhouse. It was our sanctuary, a place where we could take charge of the things that were important to us, like practicing our songs for the upcoming school musical “HAIR” and learning ALL the lyrics to American Pie by Don McLean.
Being of the TV generation, we talked a lot about shows as if they really happened. On overnights we’d watch the shows we loved like Brady Bunch and Partridge Family. I told Jennifer that she reminded me of Mary Tyler Moore on the Mary Tyler Moore Show because she liked to write and liked being independent. I told her that I heard women were getting stronger and were now allowed to run in the Boston Marathon, AND they were being admitted into Ivy League colleges! And then I confided that my dad loved it when we could sit down as a growing family on Thursday nights and watch The Waltons. I think my dad felt conflicted about raising independent children and keeping us young forever.
We talked about things we didn’t understand too much about, like something called Watergate, the Vietnam war, George Wallace getting shot and why Jane Fonda sat on an anti-aircraft gun. We liked to talk about things that sparked our imagination like the Apollo program and living in outer space. When Apollo 17 went up, barely anyone watched the TV anymore to see it take off, but we liked to talk about setting up The Happy Face Club on the moon one day. I had also heard that a young guy named Bobby Fischer became the first American chess champion in Iceland. At the time, Iceland seemed about as far away as the moon.
We often returned back to the subject of TV shows. I told Jennifer that when I was sick and had to stay home from school, I would watch this new show called “The Price is Right.” Every Sunday night at 7:30 p.m. the last show we could watch before bedtime was “The Wonderful World of Disney.”
We spent our childhood in our backyards. We floated through our adolescence building forts in trees, roller skating on metal wheels, baking cookies, riding bicycles and secreting away in our Happy Face Clubhouse. We created the world we dreamt about and tried to understand the one we lived in.
“Life moves pretty fast in the suburbs.” — Wanda, Wanda Vision
In a blink of an eye, 35 years had passed. We met up again at Jennifer’s home in Maine. I brought my children and husband to the coast. We celebrated the colors of Fall with pumpkin fairs and pre-halloween parades. We explored beaches and tasted the salt spray of the powerful Atlantic ocean. We studied the rock walls that separated the acres of land from one neighbor to the next and took notice that it appeared similar to the rock walls in Ireland. We climbed the staircases of Lighthouses commissioned by Washington and Adams. We ate a loaded lobster roll oozing with buttery juices from the infamous Red’s Eats. I wanted to contribute to my children’s childhood in a way that left room for expression, creativity, and discovery...the way my parents contributed to mine.
Over dinner, Jennifer and I revisited memories of The Happy Face Club. She did become a journalist like Mary Tyler Moore and my husband and kids received an earful of stories about childhood and how our brothers would torment us from their tree house high above our playhouse.
The emotions our stories conjured still felt fresh and new. I mean, seriously, I could still feel the irritation when our brothers would play bombardier and throw things at our playhouse disrupting our conversation. They were such dorks! I could also feel the pride we felt in our playhouse when we invited our neighbors for our Open House, inaugurating our President and providing some historical history for our families and neighbors. I loved that our elderly neighbors got all dressed up (we’re talking nylons for her and a tie for him) to attend our celebration.
We served refreshments immediately following our historical reading. I remember my dad saying, “Ohhhhh, that’s why…” with an affirmative nod. Apparently we had provided clarification to some battle between the brothers and the sisters. The memories flooded back. The humor too. Jennifer and I spoke a language I believe my brother Chris made up: “Peh dog woo” meant: “Pippen” (their dog who) “barked and howled.” Our giggles over these memories quickly became spirited laughter and then rolled into gentle, satisfied smiles.
How can memories remain so powerful even after 3 decades have passed? How does emotion affect memory?
According to research, when we get emotional, the amygdala in our brain is stimulated and our bodies often secrete adrenaline. Somehow, these two processes work on the hippocampus, which is the center of memory function. The emotions tell the hippocampus, “This is important. Keep this.” I suppose this can work for both positive and negative memories.
I can’t help but worry for my students’ amygdalas and hippocampuses. Their whole bodies, in fact. Brain to toes. What will they remember from their childhoods during this precarious age of the pandemic? What will stay alive in their bodies for the next 35 years? Will they be able to look back and laugh at their childhood shenanigans like I can, or will their memories echo only fear and uncertainty?
We’re approaching 20 months of COVID-19. Twenty months of mask wearing. 20 months of following safety guidelines to the best of our ability. 20 months of becoming reoriented to how to care for each other. 20 months of losing familiarity with each other’s expressions and full facial features.
I don’t know my students’ smiles.
On Zoom I was able to see my students’ smiles and now teaching in-person, those smiles are hidden behind a mask. Still, I’m able to feel them.
Teaching yoga to middle school students is already a sensitive undertaking, and even more so now. I offer “Fun Friday” for my 6th grade yoga class, which means students get to step in as the instructor and I take a backseat. Today Gabe, an enthusiastic and bright student, taught the class. His partner was sick which meant Gabe would teach solo. An abundance of students approached me asking if they could co-teach. I re-directed them back to Gabe. He was the instructor today. He thought about it and then looked me directly in the eyes and said, “I think I want to teach alone today.”
He’s a gifted dancer and set up a perfect alignment routine that established a beautiful foundation for us to build upon. Gabe is the kind of student who, before class, will spontaneously practice Dancer Pose while perched upon a folded and then rolled up yoga mat. Anyone else may roll their ankle, but he extends his body outward, slowly reaching both vertically and horizontally. Anyone who watches appears to hold their breath until he dismounts. I certainly do!
It was no surprise that he wanted to teach about balance. "Align your neck with the rest of your spine. Become tall. Roll your shoulder blades around your spine and reach through the crown of your head up toward the ceiling." He instructed. “Stand with flexed foot parallel” Gabe continued. Oooh, I like that instruction! I thought to myself. It was so much more succinct than my own phrasing of “stand with your feet side by side.” I’m borrowing that one!
He invited us to begin on all fours and then built up to standing balance poses. We got a small invitation into his world as we followed his directions through a physical practice. My role was to be nothing but a support system for him. I was his DJ and the timekeeper, selecting music from my playlist as he requested and keeping track of the hour. I was also prepared to be the behavior management support, but, what I quickly noticed was that he didn’t require any support in this category. His peers listened to him. Completely. We all moved as one, all 30 of us!
The truth is, yoga is never about the poses.
3 out of 5 days, I have a student arriving to class in tears for various reasons, from normal teenage drama to the overwhelm of a life disrupted by a pandemic, to an unnamable sadness that spills into everything. Once a week, I’ll have a student become emotional during Savasana. Yoga is a place where unspoken things are given breath. Or, at least, this is what I invite as the space-holder. Expression, creativity, and discovery: breath. I offer it to my children, I offer it to my middle school students, I offer it to myself, and I offer it to you.
When we move with synchronicity, I would imagine the experience we are having is similar to that of Tai Chi students I used to see during Graduate School on Russian Hill in San Francisco. There was a silent, slow motion movement as if they collaboratively moved with the breeze. In our yoga room, we move as guided. Some students move differently than others and that’s okay too.
“Thanks for the lesson…but I don’t need you to tell me who I am.”
— Wanda, Wanda Vision
I suppose we chose to have a Fun Friday' to summon peer empowerment. During this time of unpredictability and with keen awareness of fellow classmates becoming ill (some even hospitalized), we chose this day to take charge and design our one day. Afterall, these are students who met me and each other over a computer monitor 12 months prior. We participated in learning physical movement together for 6 months over a Zoom format before we met each other in-person. Countless lessons and Community Connections have brought us to this point. The only light shining through glass doors, with muted vision, soft music and the invitation to lay down at the beginning and end of each class, each student arrives to the stillness of being grounded. We find ourselves here. We are respectful, masked up, not complaining, cooperatively balancing with one another in a well taught student-led class who just happens to be an 11-year old. He closed the class with a series of sound bowls during Savasana.
Once again I am reminded that, perhaps, I have chosen this class to be their student and not to be their teacher. (I’ve written about this before, I know. It seems silly at first, but when I think about it more in depthly, I simply cannot compare my own personal childhood ‘tipping points’ to that which my own students are facing.) Are they growing up too fast? Are we asking too much of them too soon?
What if we needed the pandemic to allow this to happen?
Our school marched last Friday for Climate Awareness. We held signs and asked drivers in cars to “HONK!” in support of our march. The students were thrilled! We were reinforced with 86 honks in a single hour and my students couldn’t have been more energized with delight!
“Greta needed some help!” I heard one student say. Greta Thunberg created a Fridays for Future movement to bring awareness to our climate pandemic. Open about her Asperger’s, she prefers referring to it as her “superpower” rather than a deficit. Empowerment is all inclusive and welcoming. Capturing this moment as it becomes embedded within our children’s developmental stages, could this change be imagined and then considered a movement toward rebirth?
“She said it’s the one thing that brings us all together. That I can have my toe in the ocean off the coast of Maine, and a girl my age can have her toe in the ocean off the coast of Africa, and we would be touching. On opposite sides of the world.”
