In 2020 “wellness” is looking a lot different for me in 2020 than it was during the years leading up to the pandemic. I stopped teaching classes, and I stopped going to the gym. I was forced to change up my routine, just like everyone else was, by circumstances that were out of my control. Over the course of months, I was falling into a slower pace that allowed me find some of the things that I had been running around, exerting so much effort looking for: comfort in my body, peace of mind, time to sort things out and evolve. I started a new practice of moving a lot less. I have not dieted or cleansed this year. I have not gone back to the gym, and I’m not going back to teaching yoga like I did before--ever.
On Sunday November 8th at 6:00PM I am hosting a virtual event called Deconstructing Wellness to begin inviting others into the dialogue I have been having with myself about “health” and “wellness” all year. In my event description I write:
“If you have ever felt a chasm between the essence and the values of yoga, and the values that are upheld by the yoga industry, you are not alone. I am breaking up with the wellness industry and removing the word “wellness” from my practice, and I will tell you why.”
Together we can bring more autonomy and freedom into our healing practices by detangling assumptions about health & wellness that come, largely, from the way our society values and estimates these things. We need to do the work to define these for ourselves! I look forward to reflection, meditation, and conversation with you. I wrote a post, below, for students and friends of mine who want to hear some more of my thoughts on these topics before coming to the event. I tend to be wordy whenever I sit down to write, and on this topic of Deconstructing Wellness I find that I go on, and on, and on, and on. My words & thoughts are not perfect. I am not an expert. I am evolving. I am open to conversation and even criticism. I am humbly inviting you in, and I am acknowledging that some of this process is hard. This is not all about peace, joy, flexibility, and happiness - but this grappling with terms and values is an expression of what a yoga practice can look like. Letting go of preconceived notions in order to mature our own ideas & values pushes us forward into a space that’s ambiguous, sliding around without mile markers, unclear. It doesn’t feel as safe or solid. It is worthwhile, and it is healthy.
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For a while wellness meant that my core was tight, my muscles were activated, and that my body was outside most days, in motion. Wellness meant I stuck to a mostly grain-free diet packed with nutrients, and that I kept my weight under 130 pounds. My skin was glowing, my hair was soft and shiny, my metabolism was going strong, and my energy levels were usually consistent. I exercised almost every day, and took my dog for walks, and spent time outside through all four seasons.
Hey, that sounds pretty awesome, doesn’t it? You might be thinking: “What’s wrong with that?” I am not denying that these are good & enjoyable things, or that, yes they markers of health. Here is what they also are: a full, loaded package of expectations about what kind of body & life I am supposed to have. These expectations caused me to ‘color inside the lines’, avoiding behaviors or experiences that would cause me to stray from the wellness regimen that was necessary to maintain the state of being that I had defined as “healthy”. This set of expectations may have caused me to judged others whose lives didn’t look like a picture perfect portrait of wellness; and as a person with a chronic illness who cannot avoid experiencing certain challenges including pain, fatigue, and inflammation, what I certainly was doing was judging myself and fearing myself, since aspects of me were never going to fit into the picture. I am guessing there are aspects of you, whoever you are, that don’t fit into that picture, either.
Better, bigger, faster, stronger? Peaceful, happy,, glowing, and thin? Most of us just aren’t all of those things, at least not all of the time. This particularly set of expectations about what it meant to be healthy and well hadn’t always been there for me. I actually grew up eating mostly candy, smoking cigarettes, feeling miserable most of the time, never working out, and being fine with it. This all evolved over time for me. Some of it was likely inherited (a new souped up version of the same old expectations that society has always placed on women), and some of it I learned from experience or made up on my own as I attempted to navigate living with an illness, and the trauma that came along with that. All of my ideas about what it meant to be “healthy” and “well” became something I was almost chained to. They became something I believed in.
Yes, I use the word believe here because wellness, otherwise referred to as self-care culture, can take on the status of religion. Why is it said that “health is wealth”? Sometimes it is hard to remember that, as human beings, we do not seek wellness for the sake of itself. We do not necessarily place intrinsic value on being healthy. Wellness and health are valued because of what these states of being make possible. Something we will talk about during Deconstructing Wellness is ableism. This is a value structure that judges health, strength, and ability as GOOD and VALUABLE and conversely judges sickness, weakness, and disability as BAD or WORTHLESS. Health and ability are valued to such an extent that this becomes an unexamined point of view. We forget why health is valued, and we also judge and reject anything that looks like the opposite of health (enter fatness, mental health challenges, aging, chronic disease, and also what’s perceived as ugly or unhappy) without remembering why our society judges those things as bad.
We should be able to engage in healing practices without having ableism sneaked into the sauce. In my experience though, it usually has been. What this has looked like has been teachers ignoring me when I inform them of my physical limitations, implying that my chronic disease is a result of a spiritual failing, and/or judging my abilities as a teacher based on my failure to cure my body of all its maladies. Yoga is too often presented as a CURE ALL that should be able to solve our problems away and perfect our bodies.
In Deconstructing Wellness we will also have to talk about intersectionality because it is impossible to talk about ableism without also talking about racism, capitalism, and the patriarchy. Someone who is sick is judged as worthless because capitalism is what underpins our society’s value structure. Someone who is fat, or who is perceived as ugly, or who diverges in any other way from the current dominant standards of beauty, is judged as irrelevant or even harmful to the patriarchy.
(Access information for the Sunday, Nov. 8th 6:00PM Deconstructing Wellness event here: https://mailchi.mp/51f90dc1cfe4/deconstructing-wellness)
When I am healthy I can work. When I am healthy I have energy I can use at the end of the day to start a hike, or go dancing, or to cook dinner with a friend, or to start a creative project. When I feel reasonably confident about my health I can plan future travel, or I can set a new goal like learning how to rock climb that involves pushing myself physically. I feel great, and I look great too. I am available to date men and to put a lot of energy into being a giving partner.
When I am not healthy I do my work from home in bed. (By the way, I acknowledge that my ability to do this a huge privilege. Some others miss pay when they are feeling sick, or they push through their illness and discomfort, probably suffer worse outcomes later.) When I am healthy I take breaks from the workday for naps. My free time might go to visiting the hospital, or to spending time on the phone with doctors. All of that energy and time for creativity, movement, friendship, and travel? Most of it goes away. I feel crappy, and I probably don’t look as great, either. I stop being as desirable to men when I am in this kind of a state, and I don’t have as much that I can give a partner. I actually need to receive care myself.
If I was a lesbian or a queer person practicing yoga, how different might my experience have been? Perhaps I would have seen through the smoke screen a little more quickly and figured out that not all of my teachers were qualified to teach me how to love my body intrinsically and to nurture myself on my own terms…. because some of them were too caught up using their practice to maintain the body image that men desire of them. The more beautiful/sexy/healthy/fit the teacher, the better? Wrong, it turns out.
Health is a state of being that certainly has a lot of importance in most of our lives. Health is the backbone of what makes it possible for us to pursue dreams, start businesses, to build houses, to pursue education or to learn trades, to bring children into the world, to be caregivers. The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. In this “not merely the absence of disease” there ends up being a lot of room for interpretation, anxiety, and striving.
I have gained some weight this year, and I feel just as beautiful as ever I have spent a lot more time reading, some writing, and yes, watching t.v. I devoted time--time that previously I might have devoted to outdoor adventures--to financial planning, and as a result, within a week, will become a homeowner for the first time. I have also had a harder health year than almost ever before, and so I am spending a lot of days in bed, just getting by. I am not saying that all of these changes are better. They don’t represent progress. These are JUST CHANGES. By letting go of some rigidity I am allowing for shifts in my life. I feel good about allowing space for evolution.
One of the things that you see/hear a lot of in wellness marketing is talk about comfort, joy, body love otherwise known as body positivity, and also talk about optimization, actualization, productivity, higher energy levels. People talk about “hacking it” (whatever body feature or life reality “it” may be that’s under scrutiny at that moment)—but the truth is that change isn’t always about finding peace and joy. Change isn’t always about making improvements, and when we force this expectation, we suffer. Wellness isn’t about bigger, better, faster, stronger. Sometimes it seems we are all just following a script, performing “health” and “wellness” without remembering why, acting like children who pass tests in order to receive gold stars. What do the stars mean, that we are better than the rest of the class? That we are somehow winning?
In 2020 I took walks in the hilly, open, undeveloped area behind my neighborhood that is full of scrub oak and pine and juniper trees. Oftentimes I walked until the sun set on top of me because I found that, more than anything, that allowed work to leave my mind, and helped my day to feel complete. I found that I did not want to return to normal. I watched the spring, and then the summer, and then the fall creep in. In the world and in my life waves of disturbances kept happening. In April weekly anti-racist marches and vigils started happening in my town. In May all of the trips and plans I’d made for the year dissolved within a matter of weeks dissolved, replaced with flight vouchers. Shortly after I got a mysterious rash on my belly that hurt like hell. In July what doctors called “presumed Covid-19” knocked me out for a week. In bed I sweated and shook. My fever lasted for 5 days. During that week of sickness I never left my bedroom for more than a few minutes at a time. At one point I felt well enough to get on the floor and move my body for a little bit, improvising, shifting through poses that felt like yoga. I felt so grateful just to be able to move. In those moments I felt clearer, and sharper than I had felt…. Since when? I was grateful to be alive. I was grateful that a sickness had shown me something I had been resistant to for so long: that suffering, suffering along with everyone else, sliding always a little bit closer towards something that appears to be a major disaster, maybe isn’t such a bad thing.
As a human being I have inherent value. This is true on days that I stay in bed and my joints hurt and feel like crap, and this is true on days when my skin is glowing and I feel great and I climb mountains. I don’t want to get caught up in judging myself as bad or worthless just because I am ill. Have ever been told that, regardless of whether you have a fancy job or a high salary, you matter? That exactly as you are, you’re okay? That actually, although you may be weird, you’re beautiful?! That it is okay to stop and rest? Statements like these fly in the face of ableism. You are worth something in this world, regardless of how productive you are, or how much you do for others. People don’t always want you to believe this. It’s a bit dangerous. When you believe this, you might be inclined to jump off of the hamster wheel that you’ve been running on, and to start coloring outside of the lines. What does a good and meaningful life look like to you? How do you want to feel? What do you want to believe in? Do you know??? Do you even permit yourself to wonder?
The search for wellness aka “rightness” is over for me. No matter how much yoga and meditating and cleansing and climbing and purging and hiking and running and being in the sun and screaming it out and crying and swimming and being massaged and using energy using spirit using prayer using anything using song using love and giving up and being in it and sending light and then trying again, my body is always going to be in pain. Also, my body is always going to be holding trauma. I think this is kind of true for all of us.
We are here together, moving through a world that is going through a lot of turmoil and pain. We seem to be moving through some fears, some horror, some violence. There are a lot of anxieties and unanswered questions. A lot of things we were certain of we are finding can’t be trusted, and things we were taking for granted are eluding us now, and falling apart.
Do you ever feel like the world is just falling apart, and each one of us along with it? Yes, let’s each one of us do what we can to take care of ourselves, and of each other—but if we let go of “wellness”, then we can make our practice (insert yoga practice, spiritual practice, movement work, or other) about something else entirely. We can practice ALLOWING for change and evolution. We can BE WITH all that’s be happening, and be students of it all, without being so quick to judge anything as healthy or sick or wrong or right.
Students of Tarot know that death = transformation. People who spend a lot of time in forests watch these cycles of death and regrowth happening, too. Maybe after Deconstructing Wellness there is space that will open up for a RE-WILDING of the body and soul, falling gracefully out of tightly controlled regimens and into more complicated, processes, feral and vital? On the other side of some burning, some decay, the new growth that would come after falling over and failing apart , who would we be??? I don’t just want to explore this on my own. I want to do this with you. These questions can be our movement, our play. Tag, you’re it. Let’s practice!
Access information for the Sunday, Nov. 8th 6:00PM Deconstructing Wellness event here: https://mailchi.mp/51f90dc1cfe4/deconstructing-wellness