Today I am thinking about legacy.
I am writing from our family land which rests in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, a space my family has come for generations and will continue to long after I am gone. This is a space where my soul is so full, so at peace, so aligned that god feels undeniable. I run and hike the hills and mountains every day for hours and often have to stop because I become overwhelmed not just by the expansive beauty but by the fact that when I come here I am able to listen better to lessons I need to hear. The lessons, the truths are so loud, so urgent, that not heeding them is impossible. They are palpable.
This is legacy in action.
I came here this summer on the heels of an exceptionally busy time, probably teaching too many classes, in addition to leading teacher trainings, managing a heavy load of private clients, as well as managing the lives of our family. I love every single part of my life, but upon arriving here, I realize I am spread too thin. I fell into a well over week long summer cold that had me floored. My body is talking, and I am listening. I am in a place of re-evaluating where I direct my time and energy.
This morning I woke up from a dream that folded in my inner conflict of teaching yoga in an often diluted pool, yet striving to maintain the integrity of my teachings and the intelligence of the evolving practice. In the dream I was trying to teach a workshop about the natural curves of the spine, but the music was turned up so loud that no one could hear me. This is ironic, I know, as I am often the one to blast loud music in my classes. Tangentially, I looooove practicing yoga to music. I curate the playlists for my classes with thought and love as a compliment to the class, not as background and never more important than the sequence, but a beautiful sister component to the poses and the stories they reveal. But I never use music in my teacher trainings. The trainings are just that - training, study, discipline. Only once we truly have some level of mastery (of course none of us is ever a “master”) of the alignment, philosophy, sequencing, do we assess whether or not adding music would be an authentic, good choice. Anyway, the dream was a manifestation of my own inner conflict of teaching with integrity. I am sitting today with the lessons it reveals.
I woke from the dream to learn of the passing of Maty Ezraty, truly the mother of teachers and co-founder of YogaWorks, the home of my own practice, and now teaching, for over twenty years. She is my teachers’ teacher, and I have studied with her. Her voice is echoed in the words of my own teachers and thus in mine as well. I have studied and now teach her system of yoga to young, blooming teachers. Maty is a force of strength, integrity, and intelligence in the ever evolving yoga world. She spoke often of the importance of mentorship, and I heed that lesson as I mentor newer teachers and hold them to a standard that often times the studios and certainly social media has diluted, and even at times forgotten.
Ultimately, this is about legacy. What we do, who we teach, how we teach, the lessons we learn and strive to impart on others. The best of Maty exists not only in so many teachers whom I know and love and call friends, but way beyond in their students and their students’ students and so on. Her legacy lives in the alignment cues I give my students and ultimately in the grace or freedom they feel as a result. That grace and freedom ripples out in to their lives, to their families, to their communities. It is infinite.
Legacy lives and breathes here in Wyoming where I write this. I sit here as a result of a grandfather I never knew, a man who died when my own father was just a little boy, a little boy who would grow up to return to this place and create a space for his own family to return year after year, long after that same little boy, my dad, would also die way too young. And now I come here with my own children and feel the presence of my father as palpably as if he was still here. I run these hills every morning, feeling as a part of them as I do my own family, feeling a state of connection which fills me up. I imagine my own daughters here with their own families after my time has passed, and I pray they continue to feel as connected to me as I do to my own father now. I am stunned with gratitude that we have this place to come and feel this way.
Everything we do, everything we say, everyone we touch has an effect. It ripples way further than we can ever fathom or could ever know. That carries with it a responsibility.
Ultimately the legacy I choose is love.
Namaste.