Samantha Wilde

In the classic Dr. Seuss book, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, there’s a page about one of the places we often end up in: The Waiting Place. Here you’ll find a brilliant description of a place some of us stay in for too long, a place where everyone is simply waiting, waiting for something, for anything,…

When I got married, my first husband and I decided that I would stay home with the children. Every one has their reasons. Ours certainly came out of the financial situation. What I made would barely cover daycare costs. But it also came out of a value-heavy conversation. I wanted to stay home with the baby. My…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…