Notes on Practice

Anyone who has ever committed to specialization of a skill knows there is no perfection, only continuous refinement and adaptation. Art changes the artist as much as the viewer.

I took yoga teacher training because I wanted to learn more, perhaps open a studio of my own (setting myself up to be employee #1), then The Pandemic happened. While we were all experiencing very personal levels of shock, panic, and grief, I was clinging to my communal practice for dear life. Home was not a safe place to be, but on my mat, I became fully present with myself in a moment, a movement, a breath taken then released. There are lovely ways to exercise in solitude, but I will always prefer yoga in community.

This practice - and I love it for giving me that word - is always and simply that. Some days I can headstand, other days I topple over. I can take my mat to the same corner of one studio with the same teacher 7 days a week and every single moment of each practice is different because that’s how I am and how life is within me. It’s the only time I slow down enough to notice, but I do, and that mindfulness is precious. It’s why yoga is truly a way of living and moving through life - we are all students and teachers, when open to the lessons.

Masters in any discipline know this; great artists drip, Olympians trip, A-listers have flops. It’s what makes the good shit so valuable. So even when winning (especially when losing), I keep coming back to practice, to remind myself of truths sometimes only my body knows, often wants to release, and return to center.

"Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them."

-Marcel Proust

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