Fireside: Week Four
The Fireside Series brought us a focus for the month of January, and the start of a new year. In this blog we reflect on our Fireside series focus on Tapas, and our continued work with self-discipline as it relates to technology, health & safety, anti-racism, and personal reflection and growth.
We stepped into 2021 with self-discipline, Tapas as a focus. Thank you to all of the yogis who joined us virtually for the month for our pre-recorded content, and our live workshops. We know many are still enjoying the virtual on-demand package, and will continue to do so well beyond this winter. Thank you for your support, and enriching this yoga community with your presence!
The month of January brought a sense of excitement, freshness, and also more confusion, division, turmoil, and unknowns. We are doing our best to continue to improve ourselves both personally and as a small business. Sometimes that happens in a public way, and more often we are doing a lot of this work behind the scenes.
A few examples of what goes on behind the scenes are:
TECHNOLOGY - Our knowledge about how to provide pre-recorded classes has involved 10 months of trial and error. Failed microphones, recording ourselves and not realizing the sound wasn’t working, spending hours and hours teaching classes that ultimately had to be scrapped because something went wrong during filming, etc.. We’ve come a long way! We are really excited about more opportunities to connect with our community throughout the year utilizing technology. We are also planning to include virtual classes and journaling prompts for retreat packages going forward, so yogis can take a few classes with us before arriving at a retreat, and after they get back home. Overall - bringing a full and well-rounded experience!
HEALTHY & SAFETY - We’ve also shifted our way of thinking- how can we offer in-person yoga safely? This led us to create more retreats and training at Birchwood Wilderness Camp on the edge of the BWCA at the end of the Gunflint Trail. And we cannot emphasize how thrilled we are about this partnership. The location is an ideal fit for our interests, and the large yoga deck will allow all classes to be outside and socially distanced. We are learning to be more flexible and creative with scheduling, utilizing rotating small groups, etc to ensure safety. As is so often the case in life, just when we finally think we have something figured out, a new obstacle presents itself. We are learning that we can handle these unknowns and that we are more resilient than we could’ve known.
ANTI-RACISM - A third example is our continued work in self-study on cultural appropriation, white privilege, and inclusivity. How can we learn and grow both personally and professionally? What are sustainable practices and systemic changes we can work to create and maintain? Current approaches include continuing our black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) scholarship for yoga teacher training. We are also working on diversifying our required book list for yoga teacher training, and determining how we can work with and hire/pay more women of color for training, events, and speaking/teaching engagements. Lastly, we are continuing our personal education and growth with buying and reading books from diverse authors, listening to podcasts, taking trainings from women of color as much as we can. If interested here are some books, podcasts, and trainers we recommend:
The end of our first month of 2021 brought me a great sense of awareness. As we approach a year of being in this pandemic together, I found myself in a reflective state. It feels surreal.
Pandemic life has definitely taught me a number of things. I will say I certainly haven’t mastered the many lessons that have come my way, but I’ve noticed some interesting realizations and improvements.
After over 10 months in, here are a few:
1. Appreciate my health
2. How to handle disappointment
3. How to deal with change
4. Adjusting my expectations
5. Move my body everyday to feel good
6. Meditation and breathing everyday is non-negotiable
7. Nature is gold
8. I can do hard things
9. Empty space on the calendar is freeing
10. Letting go is a good practice
Life, and yoga, are a constant humbling practice and experience. We take the tools and lessons that come our way, listen to them, observe them, and mold them into something.
We hope that you find yourself thinking about what nearly a year in the pandemic has meant for you. We hope that you revisit your Sankalpa from our first Fireside workshop together. Does it still ring true for you, or is it time to recreate/envision for the next 30 days?
Life is a journey. Sometimes the path is laid out clearly in front of you, yet we have found that more often it is muddy and unknown.
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path.”
