So here’s a secret about my mother.

I learned the other day that one of my mother’s Christmas novels, Let It Snow, is being made into a Hallmark Christmas movie. A very exciting announcement for a woman who, at the tender age of let’s say less than eighty but in shouting distance of it, enjoys a fantastic success. Her thirty four novels…

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And Then I Had A Break Down

When the police man pulled me over the other night, the baby screaming in the car like a hungry, exhausted little person who’d spent too many hours at the county fair, I thought to myself: I will not cry. And I did not cry. For the first two minutes. When he walked away with my license,…

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Yoga is a Feminist Issue

Modern American yoga primarily belongs to women. Not so for earlier yoga or for the yoga of India or the yoga of long ago—the details of which are mostly lost to us. It is a feminist issue then, not simply because it is made of so many women, but because the modern practice is obsessed…

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You feel like something’s missing because it is

If I want people to feel uncomfortable, I usually tell them I’m a minister. Once upon a time, this was a popular sort of profession. Harvard, for example, was founded to train ministers. These days, it’s akin to an unsavory body odor. People will put up with it, but they won’t get too close! As…

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Your Yoga Isn’t Working

After I lost a baby half way through a pregnancy due to Trisomy 18, grief and devastation overwhelmed me. Though I have had a yoga practice since the age of 9, in the aftermath of that loss, I could barely do a yoga pose. It hurt too much. It literally, physically hurt. It was the…

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My Father Has Died and Now Look What’s Possible

It is the summer solstice and my father has recently died. It is a heat-wave. Too uncomfortable during the day for a long walk. The blazing heat, on the longest day, makes me think of fire—which changes everything it touches, either by destruction or transformation. There are many things about my father, but what I…

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Adriene is Not Your Yoga Teacher

If you’ve taken a Youtube yoga class, chances are you’ve taken one with Adriene. She has more than nine million subscribers so I’m not here to debate her established, dynamic and impressive popularity only to point out the obvious: she’s not your yoga teacher. I hear the protests rising up. But, you say, I do…

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What Are Mothers For?

Many years ago while teaching yoga at a local nursing home, I befriended a wonderful woman in her 96th year. She’d spent her life as a farmer/wife of a farmer deep in the Polish farming community she grew up in. We often spent timing talking together. She took my chair yoga class, knew I was a minister,…

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What are Babies For?

When I received the news thirteen weeks into a pregnancy that the baby I carried had Trisomy 18, the most common of the rare chromosomal abnormalities, and the one dubbed “incompatible with life,” I had to figure out what to do. But this was much more than a logistical problem. It was, in fact, a…

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Yoga is Not Porn

On an exploration into the world of TikTok, a place my children and others hip to the modern ways, recommended I take a trip, I discovered something I’ve seen before—but never so much of. I was looking at yoga posts. Because I am a yoga teacher. And that’s what’s interesting to me. But I was…

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