The Beauty of Community
The importance of connection and community in our modern, siloed world and how yoga can be transformational in bringing us together.
By Andrea Marcum
Reading time: 8 minutes
The mission to create a life of compassion, purpose, connection and integrity is ongoing. And we need only look to the Upanishads written nearly 1,500 years ago to see that we’ve been contemplating this for a while:
Watch your thoughts; they become words
Watch your words; they become actions
Watch your actions; they become habits
Watch your habits, they become character
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny
Purusha is pure consciousness, supreme intelligence, eternal soul, our highest Self. It is our individual voice in an infinite choir. It’s the relationship between purusha and something called prakriti that helps us evolve towards understanding. Prakriti is all the stuff our soul bumps up against while we’re here on earth. It is what Sri Swami Satchidananda calls our ‘universe-ity.’
Yoga is like an archeological dig to uncover our true Self. It liberates us and reminds us that we are citizens of the world. Stretching and enriching our interior landscape makes us more tuned in to our interconnectedness to everything and everyone else. Our yoga mats are magic carpets to look into our lives and to see the world. Or as Socrates put it: “Let him who would move the world first move himself.”
When I heard Kate Braestrup’s story on a podcast while I was hiking, I took another loop around the canyon to catch her entire interview. She’s a chaplain in Maine who accompanies the game wardens on search and rescue missions that often involve loss and disaster; people driving off the side of a snow-covered road or going missing in the wild. Because she lost her own husband unexpectedly in an instant, she knows how important it is to have people around us as we face life’s challenges. Time and time again, she sees the power and beauty of people showing up for one another during a time of need, the juxtaposition of crisis and compassion. To use her words: “The question isn’t whether we’re going to have to do hard, awful things, because we are — we all are. The question is whether we have to do them alone. There is this sense of a community that will hold us.”
In my classroom, we witness each other’s lives too. We see each other through the down economy, watch the beautiful pregnant bellies among us turn into miraculous new extended family members. Broken hearts are comforted and new exciting jobs celebrated. We’re not in the wilderness of Maine, we’re in the jungle of the city, and I am no chaplain. But human stories do not adhere to zip codes or territories. They belong to us all. To share them with each other is to hold each other close.
I think we all need a safe place to smooth out our crumpled lives, a place where we can reveal our warts and wrinkles and not feel judged. And since we are certainly smoothing out our buckled bodies and minds with our yoga it is a natural conduit to reach out to one another for connection and community.
Faith can be hard to find on our own. We fumble in our darkness, and then someone holds up a flashlight to help us find our way. When someone else believes in us, we begin to believe in ourselves — and before you know it, we are holding up the flashlight for someone else. We are all warriors with the power to illuminate one another and when we do we are as beautiful as the stars in the sky.
I’m grateful for the brave, inspiring warriors who grace my path. Here are a few of the stories they’ve allowed me to share with you.
Warrior 1: Sherry
When she came on retreat to Mexico, Sherry was terrified of the bugs, the food, the accommodations (which were luxury) and the sun. While everyone else was raving about the place, splashing in the surf and sipping hibiscus water, she found nothing acceptable. It was six days of misery in paradise. Never would I have foreseen what she proved capable of two years later.
After her boyfriend proposed with the only sized diamond she would allow, they were married and had a beautiful baby boy. Three months pregnant with her second child, doctors discovered stage-four breast cancer. It was strongly recommended that she abort the baby, as they had to do extreme chemo and radical treatment. She refused and bravely entered uncharted waters receiving the treatments while the baby grew inside her.
During this time she would often cyber chat with me. She was not able to physically practice, but the yoga she was doing, breathing through this unbelievable situation, was far more sophisticated than I could ever teach. She, who’d not been particularly focused on her mat, was unwavering on this battlefield. She wanted to find the deeper aspects of her yoga, the ‘spiritual’ ones, and we gently wandered through what that might mean to her.
Miracles can be challenging to reconcile. The baby was born healthy and she is cancer free. She is grateful, but true to form, she is not afraid to point to what is unsatisfactory. I learned from Sherry that there is a warrior in all of us, even those of us who would appear to need to outsource such bravery. We don’t know what we are capable of until we are challenged to the limit. Sherry reminded me that inspiration is not precious with the string section swelling and the lighting just so. It is human, and impatient, and still true to who it always was.
Warrior 2: Louisa
Louisa’s limbs were twisted by muscular dystrophy. She wandered in and started to set up. I was concerned — mine is a rigorous class, and I wanted to protect her without making a spectacle. It is a line every teacher walks with any new student, but her circumstances had me feeling all the more conflicted about how hands on or off I should be.
To my surprise, I marvelled at her customised poses, and how well she knew herself. Then, when she called me over to spot her in a headstand, something I would not have imagined her attempting, I realised something. She was more aware of what her limitations were than most of us, but she was also more aware of what they weren’t.She was spectacular, explaining to me that because her right arm couldn’t bend correctly, she would need me to adjust my stance to best support her. She didn’t need my counsel — what she needed was for me to find the faith that she already had.
Warrior 3: Seth
A statuesque blonde and a shorter, older-than-her screenwriter husband are not uncommon in Los Angeles. When I arrived at the door for their first private session, Seth and Elaine both had cigarettes in their hands. “You’re probably going to need to put those out before we get started,” I remember myself saying. They were fun and funny and we practiced outside next to their babbling brook.
But things were not all that they seemed. Cheques started bouncing, and hushed cash was handed to me by the blonde in secret. There was evidence of fighting, and the drama began to seep into our sessions and scheduling. After a while I stopped hearing from them altogether. This became a pattern that continued over a few years, and they moved several times as well. Then, after months of not hearing a thing, Seth found me and wanted to practice on his own. They were divorcing, he was devastated and felt deceived. It seems the money she was supposedly using for their taxes and bills had ended up financing her drug habit instead.
Heartbroken and broke, he crawled back onto his mat one more time looking for some answers. It was slow going at first. He spent a lot of time talking about her during the hip openers. Stories and recollections tended to repeat. But little by little he found his breath again. I pressed him to come to the group classes because I knew that community was the missing piece this time around. I look at him often in the front row of a crowded class now, enjoying his tribe and beaming. Somewhere along the way he stopped smoking too.
Yes, we are looking for someone to hear us, but we want a place to belong too, a place where we can shine with the other lights on the tree — a purusha and prakriti-inspired forest with deep roots and wide branches.
Andrea Marcum leads retreats around the world and is the author of ‘Close To OM: Stretching Yoga From Your Mat To Your Life’. Practice with her at: andreamarcum.com
Om Magazine
First published in November 2009, OM Yoga magazine has become the most popular yoga title in the UK. Available from all major supermarkets, independents and newsstands across the UK. Also available on all digital platforms.
