You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.- Mary Oliver
Where does your mind go when you feel tired? Do you let yourself sit with your feeling or do you quickly start searching for the why?
Take a moment. What questions do you ask yourself on a daily basis? Do you check in with your heart, your breath, your body? Do you ask yourself how you're feeling without wanting to change those feelings—without guilt or shame for feeling a certain way?
Or do you get straight into doing, fixing, or finding the why?
My dog sleeps all day and all night. He twists himself into a donut on top of a pile of pillows most mornings after a long night's sleep, and he snuggles up next to me while I type out this newsletter every week. I watch him doze and think about how satisfying his rest must be.
He rests without shame, without guilt, without needing a reason to be tired.
Meanwhile, when I'm tired, I immediately begin to wonder why. Did I sleep well? Should I turn the bed? Maybe I need to buy a new pillow… Did I work out too much? Did I drink too much coffee or not enough? Should I make another cup?
This immediate problem-solving mode quickly and swiftly takes me out of my experience and into my perceptions—away from my feeling and into my thinking. And I wonder why it's so easy to get there. Why is it so easy to do and so hard to be?
There's a different kind of doing in stillness—a form of productivity in rest. Just as these words need punctuation to have meaning, our activity needs time for passivity.
Rest is an inherent part of our existence and a pillar of our wellbeing. Stillness, rest, and passivity allow us to receive, restore, and regenerate. They breathe new life into our tired minds and bodies and bring us closer to wholeness.
There is no shame in being tired, no guilt in needing to rest. The next time you feel yourself tired, remember that. Check-in with the what before you run off looking for the why because finding out why won't change the present what.
If you're tired, let yourself be tired. Under the layers of activity, the layers of doing, the layers of efforting, there's a more whole version of the self calling for our attention—asking to be acknowledged.
Sometimes she's tired, sometimes she's energized, sometimes she's sad. But she's more than any of those feelings. She expands beyond these feelings and beyond the doing/efforting/changing/fixing.
When you feel uncomfortable in a feeling, remember that you are not your feelings. Let yourself get closer to them without the desire to change them. See how you might be able to slow down the race to the why and let yourself rest in your awareness of what is.
And eventually, that feeling will pass. But you'll still be you. ✨
Yoga of movement ✨
I'm teaching online and in-person this week:
Tuesday ✨ Rejuvenate 45 (book)
Wednesday ✨ Power yoga 60 *in person* (£6 drop-in)
Saturday ✨ Yoga in the fields 60 *in person* (book or drop-in)
Sunday ✨ Sunday soul 75 (book)
Sunday (29th August) ✨ Yin yang flow 45 at Lost Village *in person* (book)
Please try to sign up at least 3 hours before the start of class, and if you can't make it in real-time, you'll get the recording in your email.
I'm also available for private and corporate classes. I'm offering complimentary corporate classes to nonprofit and not-for-profit organizations. Reply to this email if you're interested!
Yoga of action ✨
I'm tithing 10% of my income from my online yoga classes to organizations that fight against white supremacy. Every month, I'll pick a new charity and highlight it below. If these charities call to you, please consider contributing (no matter how small).
My August donation will go to Survival International, a global nonprofit and movement decolonizing conservation and supporting tribal peoples’ rights. 80% of Earth’s biodiversity is in tribal territories and when indigenous peoples have secure rights over their land, they protect the land at a fraction of the cost of conventional conservation programs. But governments and NGOs are stealing vast parts of land from indigenous communities under the claim that this is necessary for conservation. Survival works in partnership with tribes to amplify their voices on the global stage, stop human rights abuses committed in the name of conservation, and put indigenous peoples in control of wildlife protection.
Have a suggested charity? Leave a comment to share.
Yoga of words ✨
Grab a pen, grab your journal. Have a seat somewhere comfortable. Close your eyes, take a breath in, and let it go. Your weekly writing prompt is below.
What does it mean to you to be well? What are the rituals or practices that serve your emotional or physical wellbeing? How can you bring them into your daily life?
Feel free to share what you've written by clicking the link below. Of course, you’re also welcome to keep this practice as just yours.
Other musings ✨
Where to get the best (The New Yorker)
Anti-busy merch: Rest is a productive activity (Female Narratives)
Recipe of the week: Scarlett’s summer tuna salad (NYTimes Cooking)
National parks are beautiful—but the way they were created isn’t (Timeline)
A storytelling campaign celebrating East and Southeast Asian heritage and intergenerational connection through personal stories (KindRedPacket)
At Fort Belknap, health workers went first, then essential workers and elders. In an original move, tribal officials also extended eligibility to staff members of nearby schools that enrolled Native children. […] Aiming to preserve their cultural heritage, nurses also put Native-language speakers ahead in the line. Tribal leaders got shots early to demonstrate that the vaccines were safe and nurses drew on credibility from their family ties as they targeted more people to vaccinate. (Los Angeles Times)
On repeat: Tears on my Window by Frankie Stew and Harvey Gunn (Spotify)
I'm here for you—for class, for advice, for anything that you need or would like to share. Always a phone call/text/DM/reply button away.
LBC ✨
P.S. If you like this newsletter, please share it with your friends! And if someone sent you this newsletter, you can subscribe below!