It was my first month of teaching yoga, and the night before my fourth class at this particular studio. After the first class, the studio owner took me aside and offered me some feedback: speak louder, share more inspirational words with students, add music to the class and pick a theme.

I ignored the thought in my head that instantly categorised her advice as criticism. I ignored the fact that I was already doubting myself and my ability to teach. I was especially nervous about the ‘inspirational words’ aspect of teaching.

But my care and my desire to do a good job outweighs my self doubt. For the second class, I looked back at my yoga philosophy notes from my teacher training. I read about aparigraha, non-attachment, and put together a sequence and script that encouraged students to notice what objects, people and ideas they were gripping too tightly in their own lives.

For the third class, I read up on santosha, contentment. I said a few lines to encourage students to find peace in the realities of their circumstances, to be okay in the present moment, even if it wasn’t exactly how they desired things to be. Although learning about these ideas in yoga philosophy has been deeply transformative to me, it felt inauthentic trying to share them in a Ted Talk/motivational podcast style during a class. This could be due to many reasons, such as:

• imposter syndrome and not feeling confident enough to teach

• not feeling well educated enough to share yoga philosophy

• still trying to find my ‘teacher voice’

• the fact that there’s so many things to think about when teaching a yoga class, dharma talk does not yet come naturally and really just felt like an additional worry

But for the second and third classes, I incorporated the motivational talk and it went okay. When the fourth week came around and none of the yamas or niyamas stood out to me as something I felt drawn to teach. I picked asteya, which means truth. I felt particularly anxious that week, mainly over a dating situation I knew wasn’t good for me but kept pursuing at the expense of my peace.

As I lay on my bed, reading through my notes and trying to put together something meaningful to say, my worries spiraled. I was meant to be planning a class but I was filled with anxiety and fear, I was crying, checking my phone constantly for replies and questioning my self, my intentions and ability to teach or guide others.

Several hours disappeared that evening as I tried to put something together, but each line I read about asteya forced me to face myself. How could I stand in front of a class and ask them to be true to themselves when I remained in a romantic situation that was making me feel completely terrible, simply because I didn’t want to face my feelings alone? How could I tell people to be true to themselves when I was doing everything I could to avoid my own truth?

This is one of the many moments when yoga has forced me to face myself, when I have seen clearly that practice is so so much more than movement. When I am given the privilege to teach a yoga class, I’m given a unique opportunity to share the main thing I have learned through yoga, which is that in our natural state we are all love and that this natural state can be accessed through a consistent practice of meditation, asana and pranayama, through a commitment to the removal of noise, distraction and suffering that our current world facilitates.

Yoga has given me glimpses of peace (freedom from suffering) many times over. It is a container that has allowed me to develop the faith that things can be so much better. I hold it with such strong love and admiration, I really can’t imagine how I would move through the world without this ancient tradition as my anchor.

For these reasons, I feel completely overwhelmed with the pressure to share such a sacred tradition in the correct way. I feel overwhelmed with responsibility, guilt about the freedom I have to practice and teach yoga when it has been ridiculed for Indian people for decades, I worry that I could make a beginner student feel bad by cueing something they can’t do, that I could be upholding the idea that yoga is something for white, able-bodied, middle class women rather than something for everyone.

When I go into a room to teach, I am not yet embodying the role of teacher in a relaxed or present state, I am nervous, self-conscious and very intensely aware of the gap between what I know and what I am living. But I know that these complexities will continue to exist. I’m also aware that this gap is the space where the most honest teaching can grow, and while we live in a world constantly stripped of any sense of authenticity, sitting with these questions, discomforts, and messiness is one of the best things I can do.

((TW: sexual assault/food/violence/angry at the state of the world type vibe))

In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson posits that one of the defining factors of late stage capitalism is loss of purpose. This idea always stuck with me when I have felt any kind of uncertainty in my life; what you are feeling is in fact always, in some way, political.

We are navigating a world where any optimism around a sense of moral justness is obliterated by the habitual act of picking up our phone and seeing live-streamed genocide, violence or the reminder that men can freely rape and murder women and their lives will not be impacted in any meaningful way.

Collective anxiety is an honest response to this. It is an affect that may suffocate and consume, or it may bubble below the surface, manifesting as a kind of motivational drive towards something that is in fact arbitrary and unable to provide what we may need. Here, anxiety can morph into state of perpetual desire, reconfigured as purpose.

This entry will not unpack these sociopolitical issues, or talk about the values of fostering hope amidst these violences (which is of course an invaluable and essential point of exploration). Instead, I want to consider how this kind of normalised anxiety pushes us toward a never-fulfilled state of longing, where an external person/thing/goal/feeling becomes the object of our potential joy (the thing becomes the thing that we decide will bring us joy). I want to consider what happens when we stop believing that this thing can give us what we crave (Citation credit to Sara Ahmed/Lauren Berlant for these ideas).

Purpose through ‘self improvement’

I used to wish so badly that I would be free from the desire to change myself, not because I acknowledged I deserved to heal, but because I was TIRED of how much time this really took up: planning food and exercise, organising social activity around food and exercise, having breakdowns when I didn’t fit into certain clothes or reach certain weight goals. I am happy that diet culture has at least lifted slightly for girls and younger women today, but this took up so so much of my energy in formative years. In a way, these fixations gave me a sense of purpose and control in a world where that is hard to find.

In love do I trust

As I healed my relationship with food and exercise, I think I began to shift towards longing for another person as another practice I could shape my life around. I wanted to be wanted and I formed a whole identity around a woman who had a messy dating life. I formed friendships where we connected over this pain, I created a familiarity and an addictive loop in the dynamics I chose to participate in. The word I failed to acknowledge here was choose. Because when you are in these dynamics, the decision to leave appears so unrealistic and unrewarding, that it doesn’t really feel like you have any choice at all.

I am a person who feels everything deeply, to quote Silvia Plath: even when I feel nothing I feel it deeply. I have remained in a state of longing for most of my life: I have longed to be thinner, fitter, more successful, more educated, to love and be loved. My dating experiences have often been draining, painful, traumatic (to use the word lightly) and in the midst of the ‘is having a boyfriend embarrassing’ era, I am beginning to look at this consuming state of longing for love with a much more critical and suspicious eye. As in, I am beginning to fully let go of this fantasy that romantic love could offer this sense of purpose.

I realised that I have spent so long longing, that I don’t know who I am without it. There is of course value in being optimistic for change; there is value in dreaming of something you want in life. But for me this longing has meant I never truly feel okay with how things are in the now; there is always a critical voice claiming that things should be different, whether that is a better world, a different body, or a love like you see in movies. I do not want to trivialise the violences of our world by comparing them to my experience with food/my body or relationships, I do not see these things as easily comparable but instead deeply interconnected.

But I am more interested in critiquing how capitalism contributes to the continuation of a world where our base state is one of not-okay-ness, and how patriarchy works to sell us the solutions that can actually keeps us from achieving the state we truly seek: peace and ease in our bodies. This entry is also not long enough to explore this fully, but I acknowledge my thinking here is undeniably influenced by non-western philosophies of being, especially from yoga philosophy. Most recently I’ve been reading Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and I keep returning to two ideas in particular: non-attachment, and non-stealing, taking only what is truly yours.

A desperate, frantic longing is an honest reaction to a world that offers so little stability. But as I move through the next year, I want to play with sitting with the feeling of who I am without this label of longing. I want to find a balance between wanting to ‘better myself’ and create the conditions that make me happy, without clinging to an identity that was not created by me in the first place.

Tell me your thoughts if you wanna

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Last week, I went to a slow flow yoga class at a studio I haven’t visited before. Upon arriving, I learned that it was a back injury-focused prevention/recovery class and most of the yogis were in their 50s and above.

At the end of the class, I overheard a woman talking about her recent retirement. She spoke excitedly about how much she loved the sun and slow-living in Grenada, then mentioned that she practiced ‘power yoga’ (a high intensity class) every Saturday for 6 years, but had to stop because of her back pain.

Her affect remained bubbly, energised and confident. I wasn’t part of the conversation, but my sensitive-girl nature was even more activated than usual after the class, and I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach in reaction to her loss.

If you do something consistently for 6 years, it is likely bringing you a lot of peace and joy and fulfilment. If you can no longer do that thing, not because you don’t want to, but because your body says no, how can that loss not be a tragedy?

I turned around to look at the woman, searching for some sign of longing, in an attempt to make sense of her feelings. I looked for an emotion that would validate my own fears, as someone who hasn’t processed this reality of aging and no longer being able to do certain things as a result.

As a person who has a huge fear of endings, (and the ultimate ‘ending’ being death), I am always intrigued to learn about how people in later stages of their lives deal with this reality. I think about aging every day; I think about it when I see myself in the mirror as I wash my face in the morning, when I am in the gym, when I am choosing what to eat, when I talk to my parents, when I miss an old friend and wonder how time has passed so quickly. I think about aging often enough that it is a problem for me. But for many of us, I think the solution is to simply not think about it. We set goals, we try to achieve our responsibilities, do things that bring us joy; we love and we cry and we eat and we move and we get on with our days as though they were infinite.

I cannot go into a conversation with an older person with questions like ‘how do you still enjoy your life knowing you are moving increasingly closer to death everyday?’ ‘why can’t I read the emotion of longing as you talk about your adjusting to your body’s limitations in later life?’ but in the yoga studio, I listened curiously, hopeful that I would find a crumb of an answer to my existentialism. But this woman remained completely content, talking enthusiastically about her post-retirement life.

I think in a way, I felt drawn to her optimism as an antidote to my fear. I fear losing people, losing memories, losing my ability to do things, losing time and even losing material possessions. There are ways I attempt to address these fears: I try to be a good friend, I take lots of photos, I collect postcards and memorabilia from the places I travel and I write things down, I do yoga and strength training and try to educate myself on anatomy and mobility and nutrition and the best ways to protect my body as I age. Every time I take off my grannies rings at night, I make sure to put them somewhere safe and double check they are there in the morning.

Above all I know this fear is inseparable from its ‘opposite’: love. My fear of aging and attempt to grip onto life tightly, stems from my awareness of the infinite love, beauty and opportunity around me. Even when I cannot feel it in the moment, I have an underlying awe towards the sheer amount of beauty in the world that is still waiting to be lived and felt. And sometimes that is accompanied by a slightly neurotic grasping of what was never meant to be permanent.

That is all today and I hope you enjoyed my diary entry #1 💌