Re-Entering the Stream
In 2020, I quit teaching yoga. It was for a variety of reasons, some intensely personal, some political, and all driving me to turn inward in my practice, to go into yogic hibernation. My partner and I had just closed our small studio where we offered yoga, massage, and Aikido, and moved from Boise, Idaho to Seattle, where I had taken a position teaching pre-college and first-year college English at Edmonds College. There was a natural pause in my yoga teaching to adjust to a new workload and new environment. However, the downshift had been coming for a while, and a short pause soon extended to a lengthy hiatus. I was struggling to interface with the late-stage capitalism yoga machine that had swallowed up this beautiful practice into a burgeoning right wing wellness grifter hellscape that soon went completely berserk over the coming years of mass social collapse. The brilliant yoga teacher Sadia Bruce called this the “yoga industrial complex”, and it really c...