Holi powder chakra yoga
I spent a year photographing yoga, and it cracked me open. It literally taught me how to open my heart, and what that even means.
The parameters of the project were this: the photos could not be about perfect postures, but about the process, the imperfect, the personal and the real. It was about the practice, not the performance.
It helped that the yoga studio was a five minute walk from my house; convenience took away one of the blocks to showing up. It was easy to be there and I wanted to be there, both taking classes and photographing them, because it was a safe space where it was okay to play and experiment and open myself up to new rituals and creative ideas.
And while it feels uncomfortable to admit this, it only took a few months – maybe even weeks – before I got bored. Same poses, different day. It became a challenge to create something new and interesting every time, because the easy way out would be to do the exact thing I wasn’t supposed to do – look for perfection in a posture. Seeing beyond what the poses ‘should’ look like to what was happening on the mats, that was deeper than just a body in a shape, required learning a new way to see. It required trying out new techniques like slowing down my shutter speed to find motion even in stillness and seeking out interesting lights or colors to make double exposures. My brain was trained to look for the moments it shouldn’t miss, and instead, I needed it to be able to pause to listen, to create something that looked like what my heart could feel was happening under the surface of all of the sweat and bodies my eyes were taking in.
That thing my heart could feel – I know now that it was energy. But in order to know that, I had to show up for my own practice too. At the end of the year of taking photos of classes, I decided to do a teacher training, thinking it would help in making better yoga photos, and maybe lead to making photos for yoga teachers or anyone who wanted to celebrate their practice. The three week teacher immersion course that I found in Sayulita was a beautiful respite from the hustle of daily life, but I didn’t leave feeling like I knew that teaching would be the path for me or what the right next step even would be.
Instead, it piqued my curiosity to learn more about the connection between my body and my mind through meditation, energy, and sensory experiences. And I needed the tools I learned through the practicing and training of yoga and meditation in my own life more than ever to help cope with moving halfway across the country, which also meant leaving behind my favorite yoga studio five minutes from my house and the community that supported me there.
A few months after moving, right at the point when it felt like I might never have friends again (which was right about the time when I actually started to make friends), I decided to try a session with an energy healer. And here is where I admit that I was super nervous about doing this session. Saying yes to trying energy healing meant overwriting some of the stories I learned growing up about spirituality and religion and how to find healing – all stories that were creating unnecessary fear in my life and keeping me small. The session itself brought up nothing unexpected and yet was still nothing like I expected, but afterwards I felt lighter, like it was no longer quite so hard to breathe.
We worked through some energies that were stuck from the past, but more than anything that was cleared, the thing that stayed with me the most after it was over was that the energy in my third chakra, my solar plexus and self-love/confidence chakra, was low. And maybe that sounds super woo, and maybe it is, but it made me curious about raising the energy level of that chakra and how to do it. The chakras were something that I heard about from touching the yoga world, though not something I really understood – but they involved energy and COLOR, and so I had to know more.
I bought the book about chakras recommended by the energy healer. I read it from cover to cover and even though it didn’t “cure” my underperforming chakra, it started me on the path to slowly re-energizing it – one that is ongoing. And I used it in teaching a couple of yoga classes on a farm, which I said yes to to see if maybe teaching yoga was for me. I’m still not sure of the answer to that one, but for now, I don’t think it is. Teaching makes me sweaty and nervous and it reminds me of singing my senior recital in college and being judged. It requires using my voice and saying things out loud with authority and confidence and it makes me feel like I’m pretending that I know what I’m doing, not that I actually know what I’m doing.
And yet there is this part of myself that I’ve shown up for, that I’ve invested time in and that I want to share with the world – the part of me that feels the things beneath the surface, that sees and honors the movement of energy, and that wants to say – hey, maybe there’s another way, a way that feels fun and that gives us a different and still useful set of words to describe what’s going on in inside. It’s a side that gives me space to find my voice and to show up with the courage to believe in what it has to say, with acceptance and without judgement. For now, if I’m short on the confidence to teach from that place, and while I’m looking for a new yoga community to find connection in a new city, I still want to use the tools I have to share it by making photos to tell this story.
Huge thanks to Karlie Lemos for helping with this shoot and playing with Holi powder on a chilly December afternoon. Also, a few words about honoring culture – yoga is a deep well of which I have likehly not even scratched the surface, but one I deeply admire and from which I hope to continue to return to and learn from. To those who have done and continue to do the work to share the traditions and practices, I will be forever grateful. These images are intended as a tribute to and celebration of the intention of the practice, and the words are specific to my journey which is very much still beginning.