Last week a friend invited me to yoga. I'm terrible at yoga. The few times I've gone, I make sure I am in the back and be as invisible as possible. But my running and cycling buddies were unavailable on Friday, so I agreed to yoga. I went with the same mindset--"Hide in the back, try to mimic as best as possible and maybe skip out a few minutes early." But it turns out that the "class" was just the instructor, my friend and me. No hiding here. It turned out to be the best session of yoga I've been to. As I reflected, I noticed that he read my every move, he knew when to move into a more difficult or less difficult pose. He gently corrected my limbs to stretch my body a little more. He knew my level and how to stretch me just enough. Then, as we neared the end of the session and were moving into a period of stillness lying on our backs, I could feel my body cooling down. And just at that moment, as I lay on my back about to start shivering, he came and placed a blanket over me. To me, it was a beautiful moment of being cared for. Of someone else knowing what I needed before I realized what I needed.
He read a passage from a poet, I'm not sure who, but the poem had this refrain--The heart is a thousand-stringed instrument. What a beautiful way to describe this strong, be equally sensitive organ in our bodies. My heart had been plucked what felt like a thousand different ways this week. Then the last line read--The heard is a thousand-stringed instrument, tuned only with love.
A few tears dropped out and melted into my face. This week I had struggled with the readings we had on caring, and what that looks like in a classroom with youth who have been burned badly by the process of schooling. I felt that something was missing from the previous class discussions and I think it was love, as well as modeling what caring looks like. Care, as demonstrated by the Yoga instructor, takes an enormous amount of knowledge of the person, identifying what needs to changed for them to grow, helping them make those changes, and anticipating what will be difficult, and what needs they are going to have, and meeting those needs. That kind of care cannot happen outside of love.
Care and love also tied to courage. I felt like running away last week, especially after a particularly difficult class. The question of courage came up again. But something my professor said made me realize that I need to reframe the question of courage--instead of asking if I can find that kind of courage, I need to ask how I can find the courage. I know it's going to take love, and care, and grace, and forgiveness.
Thank you to my friends last week who listened, who helped me process my thoughts, who sent me notes of encouragement, who took me to coffee. Thank you to the San Francisco Lighthouse community for painting a beautiful picture on Sunday of what it looks like to surrender to a higher power and trust in a God who is so much bigger than we know, but also cares deeply for the brokenness in our communities.
If anything, I've learned that we have to move past silence if we are to grow. Thank you for giving me a little bit of courage to not be silent.
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