As I write, all 50 states are relaxing their isolation protocols and our country is beginning the process of reopening and returning to the next phase of community life in the time of Covid-19. In my office, a cool spring wind blows through the window, Locket rests quietly on the couch behind me, and I am finalizing my June course offerings. Since most of my work involves airplane travel and large group gatherings, neither of which seem safe right now, I am teaching online for at least another month. I have planned a 3-day All-levels Intensive, a 3-day Int./Adv. Back Bend Intensive, and another Asana Junkies Session. Additionally, I will be teaching a 60-minute class every Friday in June via Livestream with Yoga International. I hope the variety of formats and levels will provide appropriate avenues for continued study and practice for as many interested students as possible.

My days at home have settled into a predictable rhythm of morning meditation and self-care rituals, a dog walk in nature or the neighborhood, office hours with unprecedented amounts of screen time, a daily asana practice, evening meditation, and then dinner and time with Kelly. Of course, predictability during a pandemic is a bit of a moving target. I contemplate groundlessness quite a bit in my sadhana, so I am no stranger to the idea that life is never as certain as it seems, but, as my 12-stepping friend told me the other day, “Christina, this shit is a next-level lesson in powerlessness.”

So, yes, predictability is a moving target.

That being said, I am enjoying connecting to people in new ways online and walking through this time of increased uncertainty in good company, even if not in physical proximity.

During the Deeper Dive Q&A last week, we talked about community and how groups need enough in common to want to be together and enough capacity for holding our differences that the shared bond doesn’t breed insularity, conformity, or loss of personal agency in its group members. Community, like so many things in yoga, is a both-and proposition as opposed to an either-or endeavor. Non-duality, it seems to me, is not the collapse of these distinctions into a vague soup of “it’s all good,” but is the capacity for pain to live with joy, for loss to inform gratitude, and for life’s difficulties to live alongside the silver linings we often recognize as healing is integrated over time.

I personally wish there was no global pandemic, that we were not deporting migrant children, that we had a more effective leader in our country’s highest office, and that more people believed the findings of scientific research. And yet, we do have a global pandemic, we are deporting migrants, we have a corrupt political system, and a growing population of science skeptics. Since yoga begins with life as it is, rather than how I wish it was—be that my personal state of being, the state of the union, or the larger collective unfolding—all I can I can do is begin where I am.

In terms of yoga community, my guess is that between ZOOM fatigue, high rents to pay to keep studios open without live classes, missing hugs, smiles, and direct eye contact, along with the many distractions and difficulties of home-bound life, some of the silver linings associated with expanded online access to yoga are feeling a little tarnished for some. I wish I had something to say that was smart about that reality. Seems like the longer this situation continues, the only real offering to make is to face the hard parts as directly as possible and keep as much inner space as possible in order to hold the disparities of experience to which we are called to bear witness. Like a recent Facebook meme stated, “We are in the same storm, but not in the same boat.”

So, onward we go with some yoga studios opening with safe-as-possible-under-uncertain-circumstances protocols and others remaining closed. Some students are back in live classes, while many folks are continuing to stay home and practice online. And all of us—yoga practitioners or not— are examining how to venture back out into a world of not-so-masked challenges with risks that have yet to be fully determined.

I hope this entry does not sound bleak. I don’t feel bleak, although the enormity of the circumstance has grown over time, calling me to deeper levels of questioning and responding, both internally and externally. My guru once remarked, “You know, it is not like you are going to do a bunch of spiritual work and then get the good karma. Having access to the teachings, to each other, and to the means of practice is the good karma.”

So like that. Good karma is not in the outer circumstances always looking good or being pleasant. Good karma manifests when we have functional tools with which to deal with life as it is. (And yes, I know the doctrine of karma has a whole lot of issues important to consider, but that is a different post for a different day.)

For all the difficulties, silver linings, new opportunities, and losses, I have the blessing of your good company, the grace of teachings that strengthen and support me, and a set of practices that sometimes help me drop anchor in a stormy sea, other times give me the means by which to ride the waves, and occasionally offers me a safe harbor in which to wait out the storm. Whatever boat you are in, I pray that you are navigating the current storm with some measure of compassion, faith, and courage.

See you online.