What does your yoga look like?
Perhaps it shows up for you as a weekly class, where you explore moving your body in and out of shapes.
Perhaps your yoga is stillness, as you guide your consciousness and soothe your nervous system through meditation. Maybe your yoga shows up as patience and compassion.
Yoga is all of these things. I happen to love all of its components, but I especially love the philosophy that informs the tradition. In my philosophy class last week, my teacher, Hali Schwartz, asked us what our impetus for studying philosophy. What moment in my life provided a push to seek to see myself and the world more clearly? Some of it is chalked up to my nature. I have a mind that loves to ask questions and to seek out the answers.
This pairs nicely with my orientation towards social justice. In addition to a brief stint as a professional activist with Oxfam Canada, I’ve spent most of my life analyzing my relationship to privilege and fostering my capacity for both compassion and action. Take the above ingredients and toss in a system of philosophy that asks for radical discernment and you’ve got a match made in heaven. Taryn’s heaven.
So why do I continue to study? Because unearthing my ignorance feels good. Having a clear lens to access, beyond my murky conditioning, helps me to SEE (in a much deeper sense than light entering my corneas). And once you see things like unconscious bias, there’s no turning back.
A brilliant text called the Aśtāvakra Gita has a line that’s stuck with me for years.
It reads something like this:
Use the fire of your knowledge to burn down the thick forest of ignorance.
Burn it down with me.
Yoga is much deeper than poses we place our bodies into. It’s deeper than the breath we measure and hold during pranayam. I feel deeply honoured that I can share the breadth of this practice with the Awakened Spirit community.
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Taryn (she/her) will forever call herself a ‘new mom’, despite having a five year old. Her entry to yoga was through movement, but her passion resides in studying its roots in Eastern philosophy. She is unabashed in her commitment to cheesy jokes and not taking this thing called ‘life’ too seriously. If she had to pick one modality to be monogamous with, it would be Yoga Nidra. Through nidra, Taryn is able to express the golden nuggets embedded within the philosophy of yoga, while also facilitating some meaningful rest for her students. Taryn holds the Yoga Alliance’s highest certifications, ERYT-500 and
