First Book. Next Installment.

I read the following section of my memoir at the 2014 Winter Follies at Spoke the Hub. (Please never spell my name this non-way.) See if you can find one of the title contenders.

Dedicated, as always, to my amazing mom.

The year my mom died - 2013, last year - wasn't light. It sat on my shoulders and pressed me deeper to the earth, the earth they say receives us when we die. I saw the worst ravages of cancer claim her formerly healthy body. It only took nine months. She fought her physical demons and I fought my emotional ones, both of us staring down the prospect of our little unit of two being torn apart. It was unthinkable. I spent most of my childhood thinking it was unthinkable. Now it's my reality.

In another sense, though, the year was suffused with glow. It was the year I learned to take myself upside down in the advanced yoga classes I used to shy away from. It was the year I learned to lighten my own load of grief, discovering a fierce kickboxing warrior inside my runner's frame. It was a year with a lot of self-discovery and love along with grief and loneliness. It was the year in which I had to find a middle way - between that of my life with my mother and my life without her. It would take a book to tell you our story, a book that I'm writing, a book that will have this in it. It only takes a few minutes to tell you that she lived, she was so important, and I miss her with every fiber of the being that she made.

In The Long Goodbye, her memoir of her mother's illness and death, Meghan O’Rourke talks about mourners thinking that their lost loved one is somewhere else and will appear. I empathize. For me, it's like my mother is just around the corner, or behind an invisible wall that I can't beat down, no matter how hard I learn to punch. I wonder if some part of me thinks that writing this will bring my mother back. My words will somehow alchemize a turning back in time, or a sea change in biochemistry, a putting-together of rended matter. It sounds plausible to my little girl brain. The four year-old who lives in me doesn’t believe in the finality of death or what it does to the earthly body. The yoga teacher that I am now is starting not to either. It's more comforting that way, and there are holy traditions behind it.

I try to do things my mom did, to carry on her many, many small good works, working up to the bigger ones. I pledge to my local NPR affiliate in part because she always did. I compost like she did. I say, "Hey kids" the way that she did, and "I'm well, 'n you?". I wear her earrings and, when at home sometimes, her robe. I kept it folded next to my pillow for some months after her death. When I was tiny and she would leave me with a babysitter for a few hours, I would wear the same robe, and wouldn't go to sleep without it. I'm in grad school pursuing my Ph.D, and I'll be the second Dr. Ashton in our family, after my mother. I always knew it was something I wanted to do, but now I realize that it's in my blood.

Here's some of what I've learned in the year without her. Live your life as fully as you can. Don't save anything for a special occasion - use it now. Use it when it calls to you. Say the word love until you can live inside it. Make room for serendipity, and room within time. Breathe more deeply. Know that some things return. Some experiences repeat. This is the life you're living. Live fully within it. Nobody's keeping score but you, and guess what? You don't have to either. More people admire you than you even can imagine. And so many people love you. 

Yoga Is

I've been thinking about the general pressure in the fitness world to make yoga "for" something. I read a lot of fitness mags and get headlines emailed to me, and they often scream, "Yoga Poses for a Better Butt!" "Tone and Tighten with Yoga!" "Yoga Your Way to a Sexy You!" (I made that last one completely up. It seems plausible.)

Look, I'm a yoga teacher, and I've been practicing for years. I know that yoga tightens and tones. But what bugs me about headlines like these, particularly at a time of year that is all-too often focused on "improvement" and "resolutions" and "doing better" (phrases that I am all too susceptible to believing, just like you may be) - well, hell, let's keep some practices sacred. Let's let yoga be. It is what it is and it does what it does, but it shouldn't be saddled with reasons. We have enough pressure out there. Let's keep our spiritual practices empty and see what comes to fill them.

Teaching Out in the Open

All of my teachers this semester hold their tricks and challenges out in the open. Some have shared personal stories in the service of the topic at hand. All have discussed their scholarly practices. It's a level of academic engagement in the highs and lows of the profession that I haven't seen since the conversations I used to have with my mother, a professor of psychology. The communication lines were different in my master's program. Though many of my professors there shared their honest experiences, there's a level of professionalization in the doctoral context that I think institutionalizes their honesty a bit. We're being treated, to some degree, as future colleagues, which is such a meaningful move. My yoga teachers make similar moves that chip away against the divide between teacher and student. They talk about the poses that challenge them, problems they overcame, things that bother them. They do it with love, underlining the yogic belief that we are all works in progress. 

This aspect of my academic and professional training makes me think differently about what kind of teacher I want to be. There's less performative drama and less hierarchy, but more listening. I try to be this kind of yoga teacher, and next year I hope to be this kind of college teacher as well. The wall between teacher and student breaks down when these qualities come in, and it will be my challenge to keep that wall down, or at least low, in lecture settings and in situations when I need to discipline. A version of the latter scenario can come up in yoga - when a student attempts a pose for which the class hasn't warmed up, for example - and in those situations, I've found it's pretty easy to shift from warm to stern and back again. The balance of that in my college teaching experiences will be interesting to compare.