#om weekly

Hi happy spring!!!

Are you subscribed to the Om Weekly? I don’t tumbl as much anymore but I DO thoroughly enjoy writing a newsletter focused on yoga and meditation and mindfulness. It’s not just about the poses and movement (although sometimes), I also look at things going on in the world and how we can approach it all in a more balanced, kind and connected way. It comes every Tuesday morning to hopefully brighten up your day.

Subscribe here!!

much love,

That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be “self-ish” unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be, leaving me exhausted as I labored to close the gap. Today I understand vocation quite differently — not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be. ~ Parker J. Palmer

Last week I came across an article about a fish sandwich shop in Shaw, the neighborhood I live in. It's the story of a Turkish man who opened up a fish sandwich shop that I walk by every day but have yet to try. It's about a fish sandwich shop not all that many people have tried. In fact it's in a pretty dire state of struggling to survive. But it's not just about a sandwich. It's actually mostly about identity: cultural identity, ethnic identity, vocational identity. 

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, identity. Specifically, my own identity as a part-time yoga instructor and various forms of comparison and feelings of inadequacy thereof. When I first finished my yoga teacher training, it was difficult to call myself a yoga instructor so instead of using that title I would say things like, "I finished my training this summer." And now I lean on, "I just teach a couple classes a week," like some sort of advance-apology for my perceived shortcomings.

I'm not going to try to pretend it's hard to teach yoga. I suppose it depends which sort of yardstick you hold up, but overall I would venture to say the job satisfaction level is high on average. I am also reminded of the quote from Cheryl Strayed in her famous advice column aimed at a writer who is lamenting the difficulty of writing. "Writing is hard. Coal mining is harder," she tells her. Jobs that are objectively harder than teaching yoga: probably most of them. Part-time yoga? All of them. I scooped ice cream in my teens, and that was harder. I also have the luxury of working a great 9-5 job that offers that beautiful three-letter acronym, PTO. An acronym which barely exists for those who teach yoga full time. Anyhow, I don't teach yoga for the money (hint: there ain't much to be had). Sometimes I spend more money on the Uber or bus to get to a class I teach than I make teaching it. I started because I was curious and that curiosity kept evolving, as it still does. On bad days though, it manifests as a striving for an identity ideal that doesn't even exist. It becomes a comparison game amongst other teachers, an attachment to answering, "where am I even going with this?" What has made teaching yoga challenging for me has been a complete fabrication of my mind.

Because I don't half-ass things I love. I don't think most people do. I am indifferent about a lot of stuff, but yoga is not one. So I've tried to be more disciplined in my pursuit of enhancing my skills in a variety of ways--attending workshops every weekend, subbing any class I get the chance to sub, trying to meditate every day, trying to read different things, trying to emulate the teachers I love, trying to teach in new ways, trying to break out of my comfort zone, trying to sleep better, trying to eat better, trying to be better, trying to deal with my shit. Most recently I offered to teach a couple workshops, something I was terrified to do because it meant I'd need to talk a lot, and I'm still not very good at that. I reminded myself I had to try. I have to do things that are hard or else what is the point? I prepared for one workshop for a couple weeks, filling my Moleskine with research notes and meditation and breathing techniques. I didn't feel like the world's best expert on the topic but I felt like an informed human excited to discuss some topics that are universally grappled with.

Anyhow, it was supposed to be on Sunday, but no one signed up and what happens when that happens is that the thing doesn't happen. I told myself it was OK. And then I went to teach my second scheduled class that night, turned on all my electronic candles and placed them in a row along the walls, and rolled out my mat. And when no students arrived, I turned up the music and moved on my own.

It feels so awkward to tell this story, and also vulnerable and like maybe you will think I'm complaining or trying to elicit sympathy, or you'll think it's pretty shitty marketing to talk about how no one came to my yoga classes. (And maybe it is.) But none of that is my intention, I'm just sharing this stuff because it's real. It's real like the work that went into something that maybe no one else was a part of (yet) but that doesn't change the fact that there was work. It's real unlike the identity I often try to fit into. That probably many of us are trying to fit into in any given moment. 

I think I'm learning that even though it feels nice to get that validation when you do work you love, the only person that ever really needs to show up is you. The rest will figure itself out over time. You can't worry about metrics because how could you possibly know what a meaningful metric really is? Maria Popova recently said something that resonates with me on this. She said:

"We orient ourselves in the darkness of the unknown by grasping kind of blindly for familiar points of reference. And we seek to construct out of them a kind of compass, out of similarities and contrasts relative to our familiar world and our existing knowledge. It's especially true about such nebulous subjects as art or philosophy or really how to think where there is no true north. So we seek tangibles like the market to orient ourselves in this maze of merit and meaning...I really believe most people, all people have that capacity in them to not orient ourselves to what's been done, what's been thought, to the market, to the familiar, and try ever so gently to expand our private locus of the possible."

Or, it's like a yoga teacher of mine likes to say during class, "don't worry what your pose looks like, you don't really know how the pose should look." If you think about it, how true, and also how freeing to avoid arbitrary comparison.

On my walk home Sunday night, feeling crappy and down on myself, I thought of Ferhat Yalcin, the owner of that fish sandwich shop who has poured his soul into his craft, into his dream. Misguided business decisions aside, he still makes a bomb Balik ekmek, so they say. And I was just flooded with this wave of empathy. I know, at least to some extent, how he must feel. I went home and re-read the Washingtonian article about him again and laid on my floor and wept. We struggle for our own identity yet we are all none of us very different from each other.

I passed his restaurant on my commute home yesterday, with that same familiar sidewalk sign outside the door, and made a silent vow to go in and have dinner there soon, in an act of solidarity perhaps. I peeked inside, not a single customer. And every table cheerfully set with a candle regardless.

"It was a smile not unlike that of Walter White's at the end of Breaking Bad. Both were tributes not to great ideas, but the meaning one finds working to create them. They are tributes to creating the shows themselves.”