Category Archive: Contribution

Can you believe you are worth seeing: 5 minutes of asana

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It is a daily challenge of faith to walk into the world and believe you are worth being seen, even as the world around you seems to give no signal that is true. There is an extreme comfort and social preference (too often) for focusing on likeness, and disregarding connections over difference. This is a challenge for identity groups pushed to the fringe by the mainstream because it is both critical to create safe(r) spaces and risky in that it may replicate a pattern of disregarding differences. Do you dare celebrate the loneliness of your uniqueness and recognize that makes you one distinct expression of the universe? Loneliness need not be isolating, but there is an awesome (fearful and amazing) power in the realization that, in fact, you are the only one of you. What will you do with your differences, and why are you the one experiencing them in that way. For me, this question is in the form of being black and transmasculine, being raised a Muslim, being raised in the greatest educational privilege while coming from a dispersed family without much financial flexibility. This comes from only recently finding myself in spaces that are predominantly black and being in an interracial relationship. This comes from loving data and measurement at the same time as I love astrology and tarot. This comes from feeling displaced in my body and obstinate in my refusal to surgically alter it unless I have to. This comes from developing a successful career but wanting to run away to farm and meditate and go inward to wrestle with all the other unique factors I'm not sharing. So, does this make me lonely? Sure, but I don't for a second believe I'm isolated from others in this exquisite strangeness of living in a capitalistic knowledge economy that profits by replicating and falsely solving broken systems. 😏🤔🙃 Also, here's half a morning asana sequence. . . . . . #netineti #ishvarapranidhana #svadhyaya #visibility #transvisibility #blackandtrans #blackyogis #transmenofcolor #transyogi #transmenofinstagram #transmenofig #ardhachandrasana

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Life Story Through the Lens of Yoga

Regardless of how the physical practice can get distorted, like with any flow state experience, the feeling is something that is both embodied and brings mental and spiritual ease. The bonus with asana is that it has a tradition, literature, philosophy, and sister sciences wrapped around it that can provide a pathway to experience all of life through this flow.

I absolutely don’t know anything about making podcasts, but I’ve been putting together little bites of content to think about what topics spark me most and to test out different media. Check it out and comment with ideas or questions!

As I’m finishing up with my graduate coursework, I have space to think more clearly about what the accumulation of my skills, interests, and knowledge point toward. Here are a few thoughts that are helping me build the walls of the house of my vision.

  1. Leaders matter.
  2. Everyone is a leader of something.
  3. How leadership is modeled determines how people place themselves in, or exclude themselves from, leader identities.
  4. What got us here (oppression on the brink of apocalypse dressed up in world class technology and quality of life) won’t get us there (liberation giving rise to rebirth marrying new and old technologies for sustainable and equitable futures).
  5. Our internal worlds of embodied experience are fractals of the experience of the groups, organizations, communities, and society we are a part of.
  6. Creating ways to visualize, observe, and study these fractals enable leaders to scale change from the inside out (from them through their sphere of leadership).
  7. New leaders must support each other in a network to crystalize their practice and create new fractals.

Curious about this? So am I. Let’s see what comes next.