Missing the Kula

David Rush

2020-05-18

Hello All -

This newsletter has been really difficult to write. Every time I sat down to start, I’d rapidly find something else to do. And i just got to feeling worse and worse about it. You’d think, as a yoga teacher, I’d have enough of a clue that I would sit with the discomfort until it decided to let me know what the problem was, but nope, I very unconsciously moved on as fast as I could to doing something. In fairness, when you live as a house-holder, there is usually something that needs to be done, so it’s easy enough to feel like doing something is actually the Right Thing To Do.

Eventually, it became obvious that the right thing to do meant taking time to just go ahead and feel bad. And it was a relatively little thing – a training with Meghan Currie that was only postponed – made it clear that I had stored up too much. After a day or so of thrashing around, I finally realised: I miss you all very much. And I can’t really put my finger on any one thing, the story we share through the community we have at the studios where we practice together has many different aspects, online’s genuinely not the same, and I Just. Miss. It. Is that OK?

Of course it is, but still, it’s been a long season of our retreat, hasn’t it? Depending on when you had to enter quarantine, it’s been anywhere from eight to ten weeks that we have been “living together, apart”, whatever that means. The important thing though, is that it’s been a while, and we have mostly established new patterns to adapt to the restrictions we’ve been living with. I’m not sure that the patterns are all good, but some of it has been for sure. Psychologists say it takes about six weeks for a new habit to be established. After that the mind considers it as the new normal, and I’ve definitely developed some new habits and the old “normal” feels very far away.

And, of course, now that restrictions are easing, it’s time to start thinking about how we put together a new “new normal”, keeping whatever goodness we’ve found, while returning to the joys of a more normal social interaction. For me as a yogini, that means taking advantage of the short commute from my bed to my desk to devote more time to personal practice (my day-job is comparatively easy for work-from-home and we won’t be back in the office for a long while yet). In fairness though, I still need to improve my sleep habits. Some things never change.

So I’m maintaining the online teaching schedule I started back in March. There has only been one change – I dropped the late Tuesday Yin class because it clearly wasn’t really serving anyone. Hopefully the online teaching has helped support your own journey through this time. Most of the big studios in Dublin have put together some kind of online offering by now, and I encourage you to practice with them so that we will still have nice places to gather in person when this is all over. Even so, I still miss everyone and would love to see you in one of the online spaces I am holding open.

 What  Where  When 
 Yoga Breakfast  Yoga Lab Twitch  Mon-Fri 0700-0800 
 Flow & Let Go  Yoga Lab Zoom  Wednesday 2000-2100 
 Thursday Night Yin  Yoga Lab Zoom  Thursday 1930-2030 
 Saturday Satsang  Yoga Lab Zoom  Saturday 0800-0930 

And I want to offer a big public “Thank You” to everyone who has contributed financially to helping me do this. My network costs have turned out to be about 50\char045 higher than I initially estimated, but our little community has generously covered it all and provided enough extra that I now have a microphone that is designed for talking in a quiet environment. The new mic is a real improvement over anything I was able to do with the gear I had left from my time as a performing musician.

So I just wanted to thank you all once again; for times past, present and future; for your generous support to me and the studios where we practice; and for being part of our community that is making the world a better place. “Your awakening is the world’s awakening” – Tara Judelle, 2019.

Om Shanti


This document was translated from LATEX by HEVEA.