To The Woman Who Teaches Yin Yoga On Wednesday Nights

I’ve only just left what I expect will be the last yoga class I take from you. I’ve never had an instructor who made it so easy to come to class before Going through flows with your guidance was like resting on the ocean floor, as far away from shore as you can get while still seeing sunlight shine through the surface. Straddling the border between light and dark. Each time I found myself being pulled into the murky depths, your gentle voice directed me back to the light.

Each class was a new world, even as we revisited postures. The stretch was different each time, with new boundaries of what feels right, what aches, what lets out that delicious purr involuntarily arising from within.

The patience to be there with us, the faith to keep us holding a posture that has our hamstrings twitching, our backs undulating, and every breath is all we can bare. We bare and we bare until we’re stripped into savasana, whatever it is that day.

The dignity you gave to the struggle, the vulnerability of the practice.

To step out of the story of our lives and flow like water through our bodies alone and together, by candlelight. To come to a space where we can plunge into the depths, return to the surface and peak our chins up, savor the inhale and surrender the exhale.

To discover new space in one’s hips, to discover the sensations of just be there for this, to do it because it’s delicious, to accept it for what it is.

This I will miss.

I have come to realize recently that it is not the person that we grow an affection for, but rather the moments we associate with their presence that we come to adore, to long for, perhaps even to crave. I don’t think we can perceive each other any other way.

But I think of the quality of a person who dedicates their practice and time and energy to bring a group of small town-dwelling people through such a sincere tradition. To be in a small, sweaty studio and to connect them with a human practice that threads back through the millennia and transcends notions of race and culture to allow people to feel so miraculously human, rooted, flowing, and present. I just can’t help but understand you as a true healer on this planet. Without hardly knowing anything else about you.

Perhaps that is the truly sacred nature of this practice in our society, that each person can congregate together like miscellaneous pieces of a puzzle, unknown to each other, and confront all the things we face in our own lives that feel so separate from each other but are not.

I struggle and struggle to draw what comes to me in this pace throughout my days and nights, I simply have to believe this is true, to various extents, for you and for everyone else practicing these flows.

But goddamn has it been good to try.

I wish you all the peace and joy and love the world has to offer you.

I know nothing about your journey, but I’m certain that it is far more magnificent than I could ever estimate in those strange, mundane and sometimes unsexy ways our lives play out.

Love,

Roman

P.S. Sometimes I find myself doing yoga with you at festivals while I’m dreaming at night.