Yoga at MOMA

I’ve been doing yoga since before I knew the name for it. Which is nothing unusual: children roll and leap and twist into asanas without knowing there are verbs and nouns for what they do. I can't remember when I learned the word "yoga" but as I grew into adolescence I searched my school library for books about the ancient art. In those days, in my neighbourhood, yoga was so uncommon as to be suspect, an activity only for freaks or hippies or beatniks. I may have been one or all of those things but labels did not affect my love of bending and stretching and breathing into poses.

Through all my journeys in life so far yoga has been a constant. It’s been with me through three pregnancies and three children. I’ve practiced with baby in lap, toddler in tow and children alongside parroting me. I’ve stretched and posed in community centres and studios and basements and hotel rooms, on planes and trains and boats, on docks and beaches and cliffs, in snow and oceans and rain. I have even done a special kind of yoga at MOMA which has since been dubbed the Rancho OOF.

Hemingway wrote that Paris is a moveable feast and I would say the same thing about yoga (I’ve also done yoga in Paris). Yoga, in other words, is not a thing outside of yourself, not a thing that you "do", so much as it is a part of you, like your legs or your breath; it’s inside you just waiting to be let out and it can happen anywhere you choose, anytime you choose and under any circumstances you choose.

One night when my first two children were wee (and the third was but a twinkle in my eye) I put them to bed then lit a candle to practice. In naked lotus I breathed and relaxed and let the day go. When I opened my eyes I saw my daughter, then five, standing in the shadows watching me. As I put her back to bed she told me: “You look beautiful doing yoga.”

It’s not hard to look beautiful doing yoga: even if you are limited in your movements, for the essence of yoga is grace and ease and strength. Even for challenging poses one aims to achieve the difficult on a breath thus facilitating more ease in the movement than strain. Like a child you let your body roll and glide and reach. And like a grown up you gently guide it, breathing with the motion, sometimes taking yourself to the edge, but always dancing the divine dance of the pranayama.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

*****

photos by Aaron Schwartz