Authentic PrideDavid Rush |
Hello Everyone
The way my life works, it generally takes the best part of a month to go from an idea to an actual email showing up in your inbox. This makes it tricky to meet deadlines set by events in the world at large - I only finished the previous newsletter during the final week of Autism Awareness month, and you see how it’s pretty much the same now for Pride month.
These two newsletters share a few core ideas. Taking Yoga beyond a discipline of physical fitness, to a practice of intentional living involves:
Now that’s a lot and it’s really only a start. And I’m not going to try to break it all down in this newsletter. Especially when there’s an english word which nicely sums up these ideas: “authenticity”. My autistic brain stuggles a lot with authenticity, but the idea that somehow we are continuously discovering more about our own purpose and presence in the world is obvious. Every day is a new day, unlike any other. We meet it to discover our desire and achieve it. The basic message of Pride is that we are all alike in this, even if we are very different in the details.
“But Pride is an LGBTQ thing, isn’t it?” Well yes, it is, but it is that way because people from the queer community have so overwhelmingly been told that the desires which hold them together must be denied; that they must be un-truthful in their own knowledge of themselves. Nearly everybody has experienced this in some way, and as yogis we know that our own liberation is not complete until everyone is free.
I am autistic and I am also very queer. This is a very common condition for autistic people, with most estimates saying that autistic people are 3-4 times more likely to also be, in some way, part of the LGBTQ community. When I first read about this intersection, it made perfect sense to me: autistic people, such as myself, have a hard time learning social “facts” that most people take for granted. How the genders work and how they relate are some of those most basic facts, and the way that they seem to work in our western dharma has never made a lot of sense to me. In fact, my autism came to light as a direct result of therapy I undertook during 2021 related to my own queer experience.
Talking about this process of “self” study - in public - turns out to be a big part of what I need to do right now. I hope you will forgive me for the lack of personal detail. This letter is more than long enough already, and my intention is to encourage us all as we seek to become all that we might want to be in the world. Yoga practice is all about developing tools that we can use as we become our most authentic selves. So be proud about who you are. And show up in the world in the best way that you possibly can, because you are the one who decides.
If you’d like to talk more about any of this, my email inbox is always open. And of course, you can find me on the usual social media sites (FB me, FB yoga stuff, IG), or better yet, after class at Yoga Hub, or Hot Yoga Dublin.
Om Shanti.
This document was translated from LATEX by HEVEA.