Issue One: Making Space
Hello, and welcome to the first edition of Notes from the Studio.
With this first issue, we wanted to give a little introduction about why we are creating this new series.
For years we've had conversations that have never made it much further than the café after class, a walk on retreat, or the drive home after teaching. We'd often find ourselves saying, "We should have written that down."
But the simple truth is that, throughout everything Yoga x Life has been, we've been much better at doing than talking. And my perfectionism has left far too many pieces in draft form forever.
It's always felt natural for that to be the case; right, even.
We've been busy building and evolving Yoga x Life, teaching classes, running retreats, training teachers, developing the studio and trying to look after the community that's grown around it. We've never been particularly interested in telling people what we're doing simply for the sake of being seen to be doing it.
As time has moved on, though, we've come to understand that there is something valuable in sharing more of the history and the thinking behind the work.
Not more content.
There is already plenty of that, and we're certainly not interested in adding another stream of things to scroll past.
But pieces that are genuinely worth your attention.
Something useful.
Something that makes you think.
Something that offers a different vantage point for your practice, your work, your relationships, or simply the way you're moving through your week.
Some of these Notes will be immediately practical. Some will be much more pensive. And some will detail the many things we've learned the hard way.
Some will simply be the conversations that we believe are worth hanging on to.
Every summer we spend some time in Ibiza. It's already an important part of Yoga x Life through our retreats, but it's also become a place where we step away from the day-to-day and give ourselves some space to think.
We write.
We talk.
We debate - and sometimes argue! - about ideas.
We question decisions we've made.
We get excited about things.
We imagine what might come next.
For us, it's quickly become a hugely important part of the process. The space offers us a level of objectivity and creativity that just isn't available when we have our sleeves rolled up in the midst of it all.
This summer, those conversations have been the starting place for this new series.
In these Notes, we will share the ideas, the things we've noticed through years of teaching and practising, the questions that keep returning, and the lessons that have only become clear with time.
We'll talk about the many things that have tested our limits, and we will celebrate the things that have really lasted.
In many ways, these Notes are part of us trying to figure them out ourselves.
Certainly, we don't have it all figured out.
But we've certainly got plenty that's worth sharing.
And so, every couple of weeks, we'll share a new issue.
We hope they're useful.
We hope they make you think.
And occasionally, we hope one plants a seed that will grow with you for a little longer than you could have expected.
Thank you, as always, for reading, and for being part of what makes Yoga x Life what it is.
Chris & Debbie
Founders, Yoga x Life
Making Space.
For many years, we worked with the assumption that one day life would become more spacious. That if we worked hard enough, planned carefully enough and kept saying yes to the right opportunities, we'd eventually arrive at a point where everything settled into a gentle rhythm and we could simply enjoy the flow of Yoga x Life.
Actually, it once felt as though we'd reached that point.
After years of teaching, renovating, learning, making mistakes and slowly building a community, the studio had finally reached a point where we thought we were ready to settle back and enjoy the fruits of our labour.
The systems were in place.
The timetable felt settled.
We'd finished the renovations on the Ouseburn studio, which felt like the culmination of everything we'd hoped for. We were beginning to think we'd reached the stage where the business could quietly begin looking after itself, and more importantly our first month seemed to be evidence of it, both in the studio and on paper.
Then, the following month, the pandemic arrived.
Almost overnight, every assumption we'd made about the future disappeared.
Everything we'd worked for was suddenly different.
Like so many people, we found ourselves trying to make sense of a world that had become unrecognisable and shifted undeniably beyond our control.
Looking back, though, I can confidently say that the pandemic didn't fundamentally change anything about our beliefs.
It tested them, for sure.
It tested our patience.
It tested our resilience.
It tested our ability to adapt.
It revealed the naive optimism in so much of our understanding about people's motivations and capacities.
It also revealed where we'd succeeded in conveying the potency of a yoga practice, and where, in truth, it hadn't yet got beneath the skin.
It tested and changed the community that had grown around and alongside us.
And perhaps most importantly, it challenged us to really understand and define what the value of - and place for - a yoga studio continued to be.
Like every meaningful test, it also became a teacher.
It reminded us, ever so clearly, of what yoga has said to us all along: there isn't a point where life simply stops asking difficult questions. Some of those questions are dramatic enough and expansive enough that everyone notices them and is involved in them. Many of the hardest ones, though, happen quietly, behind closed doors, and are visible only to the people living through them.
This simple truth has become, for me, part of the basis for the radical compassion that yoga asks of us. If everyone is moving through life with different experiences, different capacities and different understandings, then discernment and compassion become equally essential. We have to learn to see more clearly before we can respond wisely, and in order to respond more wisely we have to first prepare to have our eyes more widely open.
This is one reason I find Patañjali's pairing of practice and discernment so useful. In the first chapter of the Yoga Sūtras, he describes the cultivation of an enduring practice alongside the development of discernment - a practice that remains available to us irrespective of circumstance.
What we are cultivating, then, is an increasing capacity for responsiveness whilst remembering what is core; which is one of the great challenges of this practice.
To remain flexible without becoming unrooted.
To adapt without losing ourselves.
To respond to what is actually happening rather than simply repeating what worked last time.
There will always be different questions, different uncertainties and different opportunities to learn.
One śloka that has become a central part of my understanding comes from the Svacchanda Tantra:
Yatra yatra nirūpyeta nāśivaṃ vidyate kvacit.
Wherever one looks, there is nothing that is not Śiva.
There is a lot that can be understood from this seemingly simple verse. Just one way we can translate the word Śiva is as ‘that which is auspicious’, or ‘that which bestows blessing’. One of my teachers describes this sloka as a reminder (and perhaps a challenge) that everything has the potential for being filled with blessing energy.
It's not always easy to extract. But it is always there.
Perhaps that is another way of thinking about the tests we encounter.
Not that everything that happens to us is necessarily good; and absolutely not that difficult things should be dressed up as blessings - indeed, the felt need to overlay a positive narrative is a part of the problem - but that within whatever circumstances we find ourselves, there remains the possibility of something to learn, something to understand, something to respond to, or something to become.
In our future Notes we'll explore many more of these lessons, but perhaps a simple truth runs underneath all of them, and the starting point for this series is simply that there is no perfect time for anything.
We can plan carefully.
We can practise.
We can prepare.
We can do our best to create the conditions we think we need.
And then life will do what life does.
It will change the circumstances.
The question is not whether we can create perfect conditions. Perhaps the question is whether we can become sufficiently adaptable to meet the conditions we're actually given.
Waiting for life to appear ready is a little like waiting for the sea to stop moving before going for a swim.
It simply isn't going to happen.
Perhaps that's why we're writing these Notes now, after years of thinking we’d write a book instead.
For years, we'd shelved so many projects in the name of waiting for the right space. Now we're working around the clear understanding that space is something we create, and that actually, there are things we want to share even though they are still certainly imperfect.
Hopefully, these notes will become something that you make space for, and something that helps you protect some of your own space.
Because one thing we have seen very clearly over decades of teaching this practice is that the people who seem to protect their wellbeing most successfully aren't always the people with the least to do.
They're often the people who've realised that certain things deserve protecting.
An hour for yoga.
A walk without headphones.
Breakfast before looking at a phone.
A cup of tea in a quiet corner.
Whilst these moments are so blissful when they seem to arise out of the blue, they rarely appear by accident. Life has a relentless habit of replacing one finished task with another waiting patiently behind it and Yoga has always understood this. Every time we step onto the mat, we're quietly making a decision.
For the next hour, this is where my attention belongs.
Not because the rest of life has disappeared. Because it will still be there during, and afterwards.
That hour isn't an escape from life. It's practice for more fully living it.
Practice in paying attention.
Practice in noticing.
Practice in remembering that we have some say over where our attention goes. And actually, that with practice we can have considerable influence over where our attention goes. Certainly one thing we've grappled with as social media has evolved - and can you believe that when we opened the studio, it really didn't matter that much? - is the balance between contributing to the noise and contributing something genuinely useful.
Perhaps that makes it an appropriate subject for this very first Note from the Studio.
Because we don't want to make anything simply because everyone else is saying that we need to be making more content.
We want to make things that are genuinely worth somebody's attention.
We don’t want to challenge you to try and find empty hours hidden inside an already busy week. We certainly don’t want these to be another thing on the ‘read later’ list, ready for a time when life is easier and more spacious. Rather we want to be part of helping you, however imperfectly, to protect a few of those spacious moments that help you become more fully yourselves.
A Small Practice
This week, notice one ordinary moment that you would usually hurry through.
The walk to the car.
Waiting for the kettle.
Rolling up your yoga mat.
Don't try to make it into anything.
Just notice it.
Notice what happens when you don't immediately move on to the next thing.
Perhaps that's all making space needs to be sometimes.
A little less getting there, and,
A little more being where you already are.
Until next time,
Chris & Debbie