I used to say that anger didn’t exist in me — I thought I was too good for anger; that it was an emotion reserved for those less evolved than myself and that it was a waste of time

I have humbled myself or

I myself have been humbled since then

I have embarked on a journey into my anger — or perhaps alongside her — I want to know where she hides and what she might have to teach me.

What makes me angry is your expectation that I may clean up your mess. Paradoxically, though, to you, it’s maybe not even a mess!

It’s you and not me who moved across the world for a man’s career and children. It’s you and not me who never finished my degrees. This is not my sink, my kitchen, or my house!

This is supposed to be about yoga and it really, truly is.

My asana practice, a sort of vehicle for change, transports me to some place where I more easily remember that I am not what I have, I am not what I do; I am, simply, who I am. Where I now sit, I find myself attached so securely to what I have done, where I have been, the stories I can tell. I see my anger clearly; I have a wound associated with people I love and trust telling me, with words or otherwise, that I’m incapable.

I cannot help but hypothesize that it’s your dirty dishes here in front of me — it’s your experience that tells you that I cannot do the things I say I’m going to do. And when I accept your invitation to be angry — when I take the bait — I say, “let me help you clean these dishes.”

And I don’t know if it’s at all helpful to you. I don’t know if you went bed last night and thought to yourself,

“Wow. Alex is a very capable human being. A woman really can do lots of very cool and brave things.”

What I can do is stop trying to wash those dishes for you. Because I didn’t dirty them. What I can do is stop trying to convince everyone that there is Good going on in the world. What I can stop trying to do is attach myself to outcomes entirely uncontrollable.

This seems a lesson on personal responsibility

on non-attachment

on dirty dishes

on generational trauma

on “let them”

on injustice

on working with a team

On Svadhyaya:

It’s wildly uncomfortable, wading into these turbulent waters, chopped and full of rage. I don’t know what to do when I get there, wherever there may be, face to face with it. In the world, I avoid eye contact with the people around me and I second-guess what I have to say and I try too hard to make myself seem important — these are patterns that indicate I am in an uncomfortable section, new territory. I show up intensely self-conscious.

Here, though and still, I can notice one side of my body shorter than the other. And I can notice when I am eating to soothe. And I can notice myself pulled from my breath at night.

Thank you, Goodness.

This morning, I withdrew my good morning to Pamela because her back was to me, her front facing a sink of dirtied dishes. Somehow so certain she hates tidying messes she did not make, I decided to not poke the bear. Considering Pamela is a house-keeper, there’s a good chance she expected this task at work today; there’s even a great chance the sight of that sink did not immediately fill her with rage. There is a chance I projected my anger onto Pamela this morning. There is a chance my own anger kept me from wishing her a good morning.

On Anger that is exclusively mine:

I can do whatever the fuck I want! Actually!

And I’m started way up the pyramid on that one — what an immense privilege to believe that I can do whatever the fuck I want in this life of mine!

BUT, Alex, if you really believed you could do anything, would you get caught up washing all of these dirty dishes that are not yours? in a sink that doesn’t belong to you? in a kitchen whose drawers you don’t well know? in a house that’s not yours?

Haven’t you made these dirtied dishes yours?

If I really believed it, wouldn’t I have my quiet confidence? wouldn’t I approach my grandmother with more compassion? more curiosity? Wouldn’t I be unbothered when she says things like,

“well, I don’t think girls should play cricket and rugby.”

or asks my family,

“who drove you to town?” and then responds with a gasping

oh

when she finds out it was me, her fully-grown adult granddaughter who drove everyone to town AND BACK THANK YOU VERY MUCH. How many mountains do I need to climb to get you people to take me seriously?

or when I found out my uncle is the kind of racist whose brother and mother and cousin think he would blow up Christmas if he found out his DNA test confirmed his 7% non-whiteness

and that’s 4% Solomon islands, by the way

or when I show up to my auntie’s birthday and all of the men stand around the braai, drink beer, and char butchered and pre-marinated sheep meat while all of the women sit around a low table, mutter about what ingredients are going into the salad 14 days from today, and sip red wine mixed with soda water — because, well, Fred forbid any lady get herself drunk.

or when I realize I’m entirely absent from my own heart-to-heart connections with lovely innocent bystanders, busy trying to fix my parents failed marriage instead. or when terrorists attack the powerless.

shouldn’t I remain stoic in the face of these abominations if I really believe that I can do whatever the fuck I want?

Cheers to this journey deeper into these ugliest parts. Cheers to finding out to whom precisely do I owe a thing? Cheers to the resistance. Cheers to leaving dirty dishes in the sink for now. Cheers to knowing the ants will happily help me clean the apple juice from the knives, to knowing the woman I become will catch me when I fall.

and so Pamela went un-greeted for a long while this morning

until I worked up the courage to just wish her a really Good morning. Until I allowed her the space to do with that greeting whatever the fuck she wanted.

Until You Know Better

I actually just typed here, completely unironically: “Believe in yourself because other people will look at you and believe in themselves, too.”

and what I’m trying to pound into my own head is,

“Believe in yourself. Literally just because.”

Great Artists Steal

In my yoga mentorship course last week, I consumed a conversation about how important it is to, as a teacher, create space for students to meet themselves exactly here in any given moment as opposed to superimposing onto them some hyper-positive rhetoric or aspirational vibration — especially in moments of collective grief.