Announcing my retirement

The time has come.

💀 October writing workshop is THIS SUNDAY, and the theme is, well,  “HALLOWEEN.” Costumes (at least from the waist up!) are super encouraged! Please sign up if you dare. Register here (Sunday, 10/31, 10am - 12pm PST).

❤️‍🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club: Storytelling Edition is Wednesday, November 3. Register here.

Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In the spring of 2003, when I was a freshman in college at San Francisco State University, I signed up for a one-unit elective that would fulfill what I believe was some physical education requirement. I chose yoga. I’d been a lifelong dancer and while I’d never taken a yoga class before, I had a vague understanding of what I might expect and it seemed a logical choice.

The class met once a week in a dark gym basement, dark because our instructor, a woman in her sixties with waist-length silver hair she wore in a braid and who dressed in a teaching uniform of colorful unitards, kept the lights off. The floor was padded—I think it was where the wrestlers practiced—so we didn’t need mats. I remember one of the first classes, popping up into a headstand at her encouragement after never having gone upside down before (well, maybe since I was a kid) and thinking, well now, what is this?

My memory is vague aside from these snapshots. This is due both to the passage of time, and also because during that period, I was stoned more often than not. In retrospect, I can see that I was working with some staggeringly low self-esteem, and after a childhood spent dancing—a great love that I gave up in high school because of extreme self-consciousness—this quiet, slow-moving yoga class was the first time I’d felt myself back in my body in years.

The next year, I moved into an apartment off the Panhandle in the Haight. Just down the street was a yoga studio, the first Yoga Tree location of what would soon become a studio chain. I signed up to do a work-trade in exchange for classes. It was the one healthy coping method in my life, and I clung to it like a buoy.

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In retrospect, I see that the budding practice I’d began to develop was the thing that kept me tethered; it was the thread that held me together; it was what held me back from ever fully flailing myself off the metaphorical ledge I seemed hell bent on leaping off of every time I drank to excess, which is to say, every time I drank. The way I felt after a yoga class had me see that the body I’d been abusing could also be the gateway to feeling better than I’d felt in years. I loved being in a room with dozens of other people, but that I didn’t have to interact with them. I could be on my own little rectangle, moving in that mindful, repetitive way that calmed my brain, breathing in a way that cleared my lungs and had me consider however fleetingly that one day I might be OK.

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In 2008, I got an $8,000 commission after a year selling study abroad programs to high school students. This was more money than I’d ever had. I bought a one-way ticket to Chiang Mai, Thailand, with a plan to spend the first month completing a CELTA certification, and then to hang out and travel around afterward. I ended up staying for almost a full year, stretching that money as far as it could possibly go, and while I did teach English to Thai middle schoolers, what I really focused on was yoga, spending most of my days practicing practicing practicing at a magical studio. It would still take about a decade for me to quit drinking, but this was the first time I saw that yoga could be a way for me to heal. I came back to San Francisco at the peak of the recession, and by the grace of something, within two weeks found a full time job answering phones for an acoustical engineering firm downtown. It was a decent salary, and my rent was $500/month, and I immediately signed up for my first teacher training with Sianna Sherman, following that up with another training with Katchie Ananda, who would become my primary teacher until everything unraveled and my adoration for the practice was pierced by scandal after scandal.

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In the beginning—that first decade of practice—it was good. I was as starry-eyed as I’d ever been about anything.

The studio I trained at after returning from Thailand was a six-block walk from my apartment in the Mission, right across the street from the 16th Street BART entrance. If you live here, you know it’s not the…nicest of intersections. The studio was an oasis, up on the second floor with views of downtown and a patio with plants I tended to with my green thumb. It shared a wall with an anarchist collective, and sat perched above a bodega. I did work trade there, too, trading one four-hour shift per week for unlimited weekly classes. I have spent thousands of hours practicing. Yes, I was studying physical movement, and kind-of-sort-of starting to make friends with my body; but I was also sitting in circles and learning and talking for hours about philosophy, and practicing meditation and breathwork, and then there was of course all the homework and self-study, and you can bet I put all of those teachers as far up on a pedestal as possible. I began teaching in 2010, and there was no question in my mind that sharing the practice of yoga was what I was there to do.

the good times (2009-ish)

What I wish someone had told me: that the desire to be a full-time yoga teacher in a city saturated with yoga teachers is not enough to actually become a full time yoga teacher. I spent so much precious time (not to mention hella money) on training after training, and not one teacher ever told the truth: that barely any of us would ever get to a place of doing this full time. We were encouraged to “follow our bliss,” to “leap” into a net that was surely going to appear, “to practice and all (wa)s coming.”

I believed them. I believed everything they said. Peripherally, I was slightly suspicious of the “love and light” crowd, who weirded me out with the way they seemed to worship the founder of the style of yoga I was practicing (also, I have lost years of my life listening to yoga people talk about what they were and weren’t eating on any given day.). I didn’t then have the awareness or language I do now: back then, no one in the yoga world was talking about being trauma informed, or cultural appropriation, or spiritual bypassing. I chose to focus on my teacher, who studied the dharma with Jack Kornfield, OK, and seemed to be outside of the weird in-crowd bubble (more on her later, sigh).

In my inner life, the pendulum continued to swing. I was still a sunny, eager yoga student by day, and a shit-talking vampire by night. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be up all night, traipsing around in the dark, saying yes to so many things that in the light of day would have been hell no’s, and then roll into a class or training, sweating out my shame, desperate for redemption. Eventually, I quit that receptionist job to pursue teaching yoga full-time, and not one person said, hey, maybe hold onto that gig with benefits and a salary. Instead, I took a part time job at a skincare studio, living off burritos, beans, and rice, trying to “make it” as a yoga teacher.

Then in 2012, things got weird.

The aforementioned founder of the style of yoga I’d been studying had started to abuse his power in a number of ways and the “system” I had devoted myself to fell apart in spectacular fashion. Studios closed all over the country. Senior teachers resigned en masse and more and more gross stories emerged. My beloved teacher moved away, and though my tight knit community tried to stick it out, a year later my sanctuary closed. That gorgeous yoga studio space is now an office for a tech start-up (cliché even for this town, I know).

I spun; I got graspy. Now what? Was the ground my life was built on truly so unstable? I got certified to become a health-coach, thinking that would round-out my offerings. I started taking personal development course after personal development course.

Concurrently, my experiences with these communities continued to feel yucky. People in the nutrition circles I followed seemed just as full of zealots and gurus as the yoga world (this was back when the Paleo diet was all the rage; again, let it be known that I can think of nothing more annoying that listening to people tell me about why they are or aren’t eating certain foods!). I began to sharpen my critical thinking lens. Questioning why I believed the things I did. Becoming skeptical of all teachers. Educating myself on logical fallacies and appreciating science as much as spirituality. I took a therapeutic yoga training with a physical therapist, going deep into anatomy and how to work with people with injuries. I adjusted my teaching to be considerate of how both the language I was using and the poses I was teaching might keep my students as safe as possible.

Yoga “culture” in here in North America was cringeworthy at best, legit harmful at worst (I am not smart enough to expound on the MANY MANY scandals that have emerged with awful teachers in the last decade, but there are a gazillion, and awful behavior is still the norm). But I still loved the practice. I walked away from the dream of teaching full time, but I swore I’d always teach in some capacity. I found a teaching home at Sunporch Yoga, and taught so many different bodies over the years, bodies of gorgeous humans, many of whom I remain friends with to this day.

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But wait! There’s more!

All along, I continued to study with my teacher when she was in town—often, her visiting workshops felt like family reunions where I got to reconnect with dear friends I had practiced alongside for years—and there was a group of us students who remained loyal and close. I assisted her trainings at Esalen; I visited her in Santa Fe on a road trip one summer.

Until, slowly then all at once, she started spouting harmful rhetoric about trans people, all that gross TERF talk a la J.K Rowling. Anytime any of us tried to call her in, she’d cut us off. This all culminated when she gave a podcast interview that I won’t link to (here’s a response if you’re curious) that was both ridiculous and harmful. A group of us reached out to the studios where she was still teaching workshops on “Liberation” (I couldn’t make this up if I tried!), asking them if they knew about her words, and when she caught wind of it, we all received terrible emails from her.

This was the final straw for me. The preciousness I’d held onto evaporated completely. If my teacher, who had studied yoga and dharma for almost forty years with some of the world’s most renowned luminaries, could fall so incredibly off the deep-end, what did that say about the teachings?

I seek my wisdom elsewhere now: mostly, from within my own heart.

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Tomorrow, after eleven years, I will teach my final yoga class. I gave up my in-studio classes a couple years ago, but continued with a corporate gig that, I’ll be honest, was too lucrative to let go. That company relocated to Menlo Park during COVID (yes, I’ve been teaching on ZOOM), and after this month my contract is complete.

Now, anytime I catch myself lifting someone onto a pedestal, I pause. It’s a signal to tread carefully, to open up my spidey-sense, to do my research, to examine why I feel the need to lift someone up over me.

I still practice from time-to-time. I can still close my eyes and give-over to the wisdom of my body. I know how to move without thinking. I trust that my body knows what it needs better than my mind. It’s been years (#COVID), but I can still have transcendent experiences in a big sweaty yoga class with great music and smart sequencing. And: there are some teachers out there who walk their talk. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And, my grief is still too acute for me to not tread so, so carefully.

Teaching my last class is bittersweet. It’s also a relief. I am still eager, and yearning. I still want to deepen into myself. I am looking for my next course of study, grateful for my increased discernment and a commitment to always developing my critical mind.

But fuck a guru. My teacher now is community, and my own damn self. So, if you’re looking for me…I won’t be on the mat. For now, I find solace grunting on the barbell.

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From the archives ~ this time last year:

⭐️A Conscious Apocalypse (note: I write about the same stuff year after year, it seems)

⭐️The Small Things That Add Up to Everything

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SELF MADE is a newsletter for fellow 🌺late bloomers🌺 with a focus on recovery, creativity and community. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, coach, and recovery advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

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