Street Yoga

Last night I took part in the first session of this weekend's Street Yoga training. 3.5 hours, roughly 50 trainees, 3 teachers, yoga mats, manuals, bare feet, and big hearts. Street Yoga is an organization that offers yoga to at-risk and homeless youth. The training is for anyone who would like to join Street Yoga and work with children and teens of this particular demographic, but the training can also be used by anyone who would like to teach specific populations: HIV/AIDS patients, cancer patients, sexually abused teens, domestic violence victims, incarcerated peoples, etc.

The training continues today and wraps up tomorrow. By the end of it, I'll have spent a total of 16 hours with some of the most amazing people I've met here in Portland. Last night we did lots of inward searching, bonding exercises: introductions, one-on-one interviews, walking around with our eyes closed and our hands searching for other hands. I learned from people who are trying to integrate yoga with autism therapies and speech pathology work, people who are interested in making yoga more appealing and more accessible to communities of color, people who would like to introduce yoga to severely emotionally disturbed teenagers, people who want to teach sexually abused women how to drop down into their bodies and work through moments of intense fragmentation, people who want to bring yoga into the public school system, and people who simply want to learn more about community service and deepen their own practice. One of the instructors, Sweethome, kept reminding us that the practice of yoga must truly serve each individual practitioner in order for that service to move outward.

I too had to explain why I had decided to take the training (I'm on a work-study scholarship), and the first things that came to mind were: Healing and Lacan. The two don't normally align for me. And no, I didn't whip out Lacan to this group of warmhearted, sweet-faced strangers. I said, instead, Healing and Language. I talked a little bit about my questions around Healing: what does that mean for different people, what does it look like, and is it possible? Then I spoke about my interested in Language, how Language can help facilitate the healing process, but particularly how Language is also limited in conveying things that have been held in the body and cannot be accessed fully or truthfully with words, and how the practice of yoga may provide a powerful vehicle for listening to the body and unlocking those points of containment. It felt a little blasphemous, but it felt right. 

I feel such gratitude for this teacher training opportunity. Every time someone  in that room opens their mouth I am humbled and inspired. I am so excited for what today and tomorrow have in store, not to mention what I'll be able to do with this information and these ideas once the training is 'complete.' 

One of the things that really struck me as an incredible image: the president of Street Yoga is one of the teachers, and he was leading us in a chaos/stillness exercise about midway through the session. We were asked to wiggle our fingers, then rotate our wrists, then rotate the forearm, then spiral the entire arm, all gradually and with intention. He said that when his young son woke up from a two-week coma after falling from a tree, the boy's arm did this very motion: it began with the fingers, then the wrist, then the forearm, then the entire arm. Spiraling. Involuntarily. The symbol for life force energy is the spiral. The spiraling signaled the revival of his conscious body.