As we prepare to move from DC to Providence, Rhode Island, I’m thinking about some of the places I will miss. Today, when I should have been packing, instead I went down a rabbit hole of looking at my pictures from the Tregaron Conservancy. Over the past few years I’ve taken hundreds of pictures and spent so many hours there. It’s truly one of my favorite places on earth. The Tregaron Conservancy is 13 acres of historic gardens, meadows, and trails in Northwest D.C. It’s free and open to the public every day and it’s right across the street from my apartment building. But I only discovered it ..read more

If you’ve experienced chronic pain, you know it’s hard to describe. The difficulty is in conveying with anything close to accuracy what it feels like to live with pain. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to write about my own persistent pain experience, and the results just never feel adequate. But recently I had the opportunity to join in a conversation about pain and how mine has evolved and shifted over the years. And it was actually kind of … fun! Here’s what happened - I was invited to be a guest on From Pain to Possibility, a podcast hosted by Calgary-based kinesiologist / yoga t ..read more

  If you’ve joined me for yoga-from-home classes, you’ve met Albert, or at least caught a glimpse of him on your screen. Often during class he would wander through the frame on his way to the kitchen, always on his own time, never on cue. Or he would sit on the couch, just out of the camera’s reach, and watch me put on a show to (from his perspective) no-one. Sometimes - but not always - he’d pause, gaze into the camera, and say hello. Once in a while he would hop up on the chair I was using to demonstrate. Or chew on my computer cord. Or drink out of my water glass. Or sit on the mat and ..read more

Stock photo (not actual nephew hands).   One of my baby nephew’s first words was “HOT!” I’d help him wash his hands and he’d exclaim “HOT! HOT!” no matter what the temperature was. Even though he’s a grownup grad student now, I still hear his little voice saying “HOT! HOT!” every time it’s hot. Which is pretty much all the time these days. The heat is so physically debilitating, even for those of us fortunate enough to have all the fans and all the AC we need. (It’s also depressing and distressing, which doesn’t help with the physical part, and vice versa.) One of my daily struggles with ..read more

  Photo by Emma Weiss. Some weeks ago, a longtime student sent me a note.  “Stick to the yoga, Beth,” she wrote, in response to a message I had shared with my email list. “I enjoy your class, but I don’t need to hear your political views.”  I thought long and hard before responding that I didn’t think I could do that.  Believe me, I get the desire to compartmentalize our politics. (And you will never hear me discuss my political views during classes.) But I didn’t think I could just stick to the yoga, and if that meant she needed to unsubscribe from my list, I would be tru ..read more

  Born and raised in a family of intellectuals, I am hardwired for uneasiness when it comes to talk of spirituality or anything approaching the unscientific. (This orientation can be something of a liability in the yoga world, but that’s a story for a different day.) So I was surprised, when, after a year or so of enjoying yoga for its stretchy exercise benefits, the practice began to deepen for me, morphing unexpectedly into something much more intense and slightly destabilizing, something for which I had no useful frame of reference and no adequate language to describe.  I was fami ..read more

What is yoga, really? Is it, as we often hear, a timeless practice handed down to us, intact and unchanging, from teacher to teacher, over thousands of years? A growing body of research reframes yoga as a living practice, evolving from its very beginnings, with a rich and deeply nuanced history of adaptation and creative innovation across time and geography. Does this view diminish its authenticity? To my mind, not at all - the twists, turns, and nuances of yoga’s complex history just make it all the more fascinating and powerful. If you’re interested to hear a few perspectives on this topic ..read more