Yogaland Roundup 🌴

August 20th, 2023

5 ideas for bringing the yoga tradition into your classes

Did you listen to this week’s episode of Yogaland? It dovetails nicely with the live from London episode.

In the London episode, we reflect on whether or not our modern yoga classes are still, in fact, yoga. On this episode, we talk about how to ensure that they are.

You can listen to the episode here.

Also! I’m asking you, dear community, to share a story of how cultivating awareness in yoga created a shift in your life.

Here’s a video explainer:

There’s an unintentional theme around aging for the rest of this week’s roundup. It just happened and I’m going with it. Each of these essays is poignant and funny and unique, which is the combo I enjoy reading most.

“Anti-aging is anti-living,” says Jessica DeFino

And I’m here to listen. Yes, ma’am.

This article pretty much rocked my world. I have noticed myself struggling more lately with the visible signs of aging. I’d just love to say that I’m unbothered by the outer process of aging. That my spiritual practice and connection to the divine nature of all things means I’ve transcended this part of my ego. Yeah, no. Not so for me.

Beauty culture critic DeFino breaks down the insidious (for most of us unconscious) impact of anti-aging marketing in such detail that it feels like a gut punch. And although, of course, I’m aware that we are all products of our conditioning, I’ve never considered what Defino so aptly points out here:

Flipping the script here would also have to address skin health as opposed to skin aesthetic. Healthy skin ages. Also, studies show that about 85% of what we’ve been taught are signs of aging — like fine lines, like wrinkles, like age spots — are actually signs of exposure. Exposure to the environment, pollution, excess sun exposure. Exposure to stress is another big one, and exposure to too many beauty products. 

The biggest thing that we can do to combat anti-aging ideology, I think, is remember that aging is another word for living. Anti-aging is anti-living. Living is the goal. Aging is the goal.

'There's no ethical way to sell products that target signs of aging'

After the Fall: On Turning 70

This Facebook post, by Ann Dowsett Johnston, is gorgeous, just gorgeous, and I sent it to my own mother.

For the moment, left to my own devices, up at dawn with coffee and my beloved dog as ballast against my hip, I will presume this: we persist. Of course, we do. We prevail. Time accordions out, and we find the courage to go on: with infirmities, with wrinkles, with metal in our ankles. Children die, lovers leave or forget our names, and still we move forward. Every ending is ripe with new beginnings.

Read the full post here.

Just a vain post by Holly Whitaker

Holly and I worked together at a health start-up in the early aughts. Years later, we reconnected and she came on the podcast to talk about how she used yoga, meditation, self care, and self-reflection as her framework for quitting alcohol, pot, and cigarettes.

Since that time, Holly has done a ton of work in the recovery space, including founding a start-up call Tempest and writing the best-selling book, Quit Like a Woman.

When I read this post on her Substack, Recovering, I felt like she had plucked a few conversations directly from my own inner narrator:

One day I felt like high school just ended and then all of the sudden I’m like “Men the age of my grandpa are hot.” How did that happen? Was it during the pandemic? Was it when I was alone in the woods?

#33 Just a vain post

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