The easy way out
I don’t write much about yoga, because as proudly corny as I’ve become over the last year and change, I still have my limits. It’s also a part of my life that I resolutely do not want to transform into work, which is what writing about it would do. Still, I’ve been doing yoga for more than 15 years, and as you may have heard it can be a profound experience. So sometimes I will have something to say about it, and you will just have to deal.
A lot of yoga is learning how to notice your body’s natural instincts and tendencies, as well as how to safely and productively work against them. Your body is always looking for the most efficient way to do things. When a particular position or movement is challenging for one part of the body, other parts will often jump in to help. Take, for example, twists. If you lower your hips into chair pose and then twist by turning your upper body to one side, your hips will always try to help by leaning into the twist. That will make one of your knees pop out in front of the other one. Voila, you’re twisting! If the goal is to twist as far as possible, your body has found a great way to help you do that. But contrary to popular belief, the goal in yoga is not to twist as much as possible, or go as far as you can into any pose. You want to twist your upper body only as much as you can while keeping your hips and knees aligned. That’s harder, and you won’t twist as far. It’s also the thing that will help you grow stronger and more flexible. Letting your hips help with the twist won’t help your body learn anything new. It’ll just retrace and reinforce the same old patterns, the ones that come naturally.
We’re in one of the rare moments, individually and as a society, where we actually have a chance of escaping our old patterns. The first step is noticing them, and the pandemic made the previously invisible (or ignored, or accepted, or suppressed) newly obvious and undeniable. Now we can do something about them, and we are. The flowering of mutual aid. The protests of last summer. The verdict of last week. The refusal to return to or continue to put up with shitty, exploitative jobs. (I’m even seeing this in Mexico, where the jobs are generally even shittier and more exploitative, and also even more inescapable.) These are small steps. They are also exciting.
They are also hard, and they will only get harder. Our bodies, our minds, our societies, might genuinely want to change, but they also want to take the easy way out. They’re kind of designed that way. At every point, the easy way out will call to us, as it does in yoga. We’ll want to throw our hips into the twist and be done with it. The easy way out lets us go through the motions. It might even make it appear we’re getting farther, faster. But that’s an illusion. True change is slow, even imperceptible, and it requires uncomfortable work.
This is why rest is so important. (lol of course this is where we were going.) If you’re exhausted, depleted, burned out, or under too much pressure, you have to take the easy way out. You simply don’t have the energy to do anything more. And it’s not like the easy way out is always bad! Sometimes all you can do is go through the motions, and that’s ok. Really! Going through the motions can keep you on the path, and staying on the path is more important than pushing yourself so close to the edge that you fall off. There’s a lot of power in the easy way out. It’s just not the place where true transformation happens. True transformation happens when you can invite in difficulty and discomfort, instead of feeling so overwhelmed and burned out that you have to use your last drop of energy to shut them out.
A couple weeks ago I wrote, “No one can be their best self, or do the hard work of building a better world, from a place of exhaustion and depletion.” This is what I meant. The easy way out won’t take us where we want to go. Resisting it requires intense focus and effort. It’s harder, and it feels might feel worse in the moment. You might feel like you’re twisting and twisting and getting nowhere at all. But as in yoga, you can’t rush through this part, not if you want real change. Sticking with it, even when it’s hard and uncomfortable and maybe even feeling a little bit pointless—that’s the work. So rest up. We have a long way to go.
My writing
This week I wrote about yet another scandal at an archaeology conference! The Society for American Archaeology, which you may remember from their sexual harassment controversy of 2019, accepted a talk at this year’s virtual conference arguing against the law that gives Native American communities the right to ask scientific institutions to return the remains of their ancestors. I’ll be honest: at first, I didn’t want to write this story. I was tired, had a bunch of hard things to do already, and didn’t want to add another one, among several other good reasons. Then I took a three-hour nap. When I woke up, I knew I wanted to do it, and I knew I could do it. Naps! They work!
Note
The linked-to photo of chair pose is of Jessamyn Stanley, from her book Every Body Yoga. I’ve also enjoyed her Instagram, back when I was enjoying Instagram.