Transition

'Honour the space between no longer and not yet.' Nancy Levin

This time last year in the UK we celebrated Spring Equinox with a sense of being pulled back from blossoming and outward growth, and being pushed inward, into our home spaces and losing freedoms we had taken for granted.

This time last year I taught my last in-person class before lockdown. I then taught my first online class, it was titled ‘The steady centre for worry and anxiety’. (you can find it on my video library of classes from the last year.)

This time last year we had no hindsight, no experience of what was to unfold, and for a while a sense of novelty and ‘this will all be over soon’.

My April 2020 blog post was entitled ‘Waiting’ you can find it here. I wrote ‘We all find ourselves waiting. Waiting for this phase in human history to be over, for the solution, for the answer. When we project ourselves forward into a future we cannot know, we are missing what is happening NOW...Try not to just wait. Try to enjoy the now as best you can. No-one can predict the future, but we can choose to live our lives in the now.’

Today I am celebrating a year of teaching classes online, all that it has taught me and the students who’ve joined me. I’m celebrating the teaching of the steady centre that yoga brings us. How coming back to centre and spending more time with our ‘self’, has been one of the things we’ve been thrown into, has most challenged us and possibly has taught us the most.

This UK Spring Equinox we are hopeful of not being pulled back from blossoming into the spring warmth this time, we are hopeful of being set free from our current lockdown and using the transition from our long winter into more daylight as an opportunity for growth again.

This year we have hindsight, we have more experience and we have learned that there is no waiting for an end because there is no such thing as an end. That there is no return to normal or even a new normal, because there is no such thing as normal. There is constant change and transition, it was constant in the world that we deemed normal a year ago and it is constant in the world that we now live in. Yoga teaches us to navigate change and transition, whether challenging or welcome, by coming back to the steadiness of our centre beneath all the flux, and find the now.

And in the now as Nancy Levin says we can 'Honour the space between no longer and not yet.'

We are no longer the world we thought we were, the world of ‘normal’ and we are not yet a new world emerging. We are still in transition. We are still navigating change and always will be.

So a year on I look back and I see the changes I have made, my family has made, the world has made. At each new phase coming in and out of lockdown I have learned more about myself, my yoga, my needs and wants. I have learned what is most important to me, what I need to let go of, especially in terms of my perception of ‘normal and what I think ‘should be’. I have learned new things, established new ways and habits of working, practising yoga and living and many of those things are keepers. I have learned more about how I respond to transition and change and challenge, more about myself, more about how to come back to the now, more about being comfortable in that space between no longer and not yet. I have also learned what changes I still need to make in my own life, and how waiting for ‘normal’ is just not an option.

“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” Sonya Renee Taylor

It is my intention to welcome this current transition into spring with a sense of gratefulness, openness and curiosity. With a willingness to keep practising coming back to the now, to new opportunities and hope.

How will you welcome Spring?