Since July, I’ve been volunteering weekly at a lower east side shelter that provides services and support to homeless, disabled New Yorkers and homeless victims of domestic violence. Every Friday, I run a yoga class attended by people working through a startling array of medical and social issues: Multiple Sclerosis, Lupus, multiple amputations, stroke recovery, cancer, and the list goes on and on. Diseases and disorders aside, what most of my students have in common is a history riddled with abuse and abandonment. And yoga.
Over time [read: as my artfully constructed class plans fulfilled their collective destiny of MASSIVE FAILURE], I arrived at a system that’s safe and fun and spontaneous and totally chair-bound, since limited mobility is a hallmark of many residents’ conditions. It goes something like this:
11:00: greet students. commence chit chat.
11:15: introductions, breath awareness.
11:20-40: asana, including seated sun salutations, rotation awareness, twisting, lateral bending, hand & arm mudras, and good old-fashioned shoulder rolls.
11:40-12: meditation.
This week I started our meditation practice the way I do every week, by asking each person to weigh in on the question, What is meditation? I wanted needed to share their responses verbatim, because…well, you’ll see:
Meditation is…
- Concentrating
- Thinking
- Focusing on your breathing
- Thinking without thinking
- A process that makes your mind keen, so after meditation it’s like you can solve any problem
- Dreaming
There was some backlash after one of my sweetest, sleepiest students suggested “dreaming,” and I’m not really sure what happened next because it all transpired in rapid-fire Spanish, but suffice it to say, “dreaming” got the axe. Still, this is an impressive suite of answers and did I mention that those top three responses came from first-time yogis??
Because I got such superb-o answers, I gave slightly more in-depth instructions than usual. After five minutes of sitting, we talked about our experiences and there was a mixed bag. Some people felt peaceful and focused, others were sleepy, and one of my most consistent students said it went really bad. That’s when we talked about how there’s no “right” experience; how some days, the mind will be spacious and big like a clear sky and other days, it will be completely clouded over and some days, it might feel like the whole universe is jumbled up inside your brain.
Then I had a conversation with a brand-new student, which I will humbly transcribe below in the hopes that we all find a way to be so sure, so steady:
Student: I’m gonna do this everyday.
Me: That’s a wonderful plan. And ambitious. It’s really hard to sit everyday, especially by yourself.
Student: No, I’m doing this everyday until I die.
Me: Would you like to share your experience with us, so maybe we all try to sit everyday?
Student: This is the first time in my life that I could think one thought. The first time in my life. I have to do it. It’s good.
Me: It is good. It is really, really good.
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