Personal Narrative

A narrative is the story of an event, or the linked set of events that form a plot. For there to be a plot and sense of forward momentum, there must be a set of driving values and a conflict amongst those values, and a sense of an eventual outcome.

I’m looking around me at these Western bodies and I see networks and layers of narrative, bodies with stories, names and backgrounds, symbols. Each body weaves language around itself like cocoons, or rather grows itself like a snowflake, configurations of identity built off crystallized cultural stuffs, expressing personal narratives. And bodies come together and communicate between themselves, creating further patterns of language that spin themselves together into community narratives, and the communities weave themselves into (and from) the larger narrative of a city. It is rich, the air here.

Montreal is a city of narratives par excellence; a city of style and interaction and art. Every individual, it seems, designs him or herself and formulates a narrative: clothes have symbolic value, alluding to one’s own system of ordering the universe. We may not all understand what each other is saying, but we see each other in Montreal and recognize that we are saying something. Clothes are not accidental.

Style extends from clothes and tattoos to values, language and employment, the key components of identity. And broader narratives form: I practice yoga, and others who are very different from me share my love of the practice and together we create a new narrative, where each of us is a word and together we make sentences and story held together by certain values: a commitment to positive and loving values, sharing, respect for the body, health and conscientious living.... We are the yoga community. When I lived in Montreal as an adolescent, I took part in a very different narrative, but one just as dense; a youth counterculture based on negative values of rebellion, shedding expectations and escaping pressures. We had our own vocabulary then also, and our own symbols. And I see any number of other narratives that I don’t participate in: there are churches and synagogues, there are immigrant and minority communities. There are other narratives that I could participate in if I lived here, and I am tempted to come back and dress myself in them again.

An individual identity is woven from its body’s own words and beliefs, and expressed in one’s own stylistic decisions and manifestations—clothes, what kind of house I live in, how I move around the city, the language I speak and how I spend my time. All these are spun ideas that dress a body in personhood. And people come together on the basis of matched values and create higher orders of narrative, dialogues amongst themselves that evolve new symbols and create new states of affairs and institutions: there would not be a yoga studio unless there was more than one person who believed in the underlying values of yoga and this specific way of realizing them. And as the community narrative consolidates, as more yoga studios spring up and the practice diversifies and more voices join the discussion, the community discourse becomes its own reality that in turn generates the raw material that minds use to sculpt the identity of their body. Someone can choose yoga as a way of dressing who would otherwise not have had the words to express exactly that feeling. Identities become more sophisticated, but also one step removed from the original being they are representing. I am no longer primarily my body: I am a yogi and a traveler and a queer and I will present myself accordingly through my manner, style and speech and the communities I speak into and from. Bodies generate their own values and identities, the expression of which creates communities; and at the same time communities generate words and styles that bodies take on as symbols of their identities.

And it continues upward: a city is made of interlacing communities, interacting like coloured threads in strip of material, creating a unified sensory experience when you take a step back and squint. New York has a million possible vocabularies, and countless intellectuals have spent their careers sorting through them and giving them names and reasons. To an insider, New York is like a mini-Europe, each native belonging to a given culture and language, and holding an opinion on the others they share the space with: the Brooklyn guys, Jersey, Long Island, punks, health nuts.... But even as an outsider, the tapestry is rich: walking into that city gets you caught in a buzz of chatter and possible language and all you have to do is hold out your hand and you’ll come back with a fist full of words that are just your size.

Toronto is a city where people go to work, and the communities have to weave themselves through the grey cement buildings of the dominant financial district, settling in tidepools of living cultures like Kensington market, the Danforth, the universities, Toronto Island....

Each city has a narrative, based on its history and the diversity of communities that live in it and how strong a voice each one is given. And each community has a narrative created by the discussions amongst the individuals that make it up, discussions made up of the unique interests and vocabularies of individuals. And each individual has her own narrative, based on the values that she embodies. And each individual expresses her values in how she talks and looks and lives; and she gains the vocabulary to express herself by listening and absorbing the symbols of the community. And the community narratives exist within a context of an urban tapestry and voice themselves according to the pressures and tones of a shared cultural space: yoga communities are different in Montreal, Toronto and New York, because the city itself has a different overarching vocabulary that sets the tone and context in which the subculture defines itself.

My body is a living organism with this brain that forms complex ideas. There are things that I feel are true and ways of being that I believe lead to the best possible world, and these are my values. I look for ways to make those values take place in the world around me and I express them through my being and through my ideas: this is my identity. When I share my ideas, I communicate with people: this network of communication is a community, and through a community, new ideas are formed. I borrow from this culture, and my identity expands. I am no longer only a belief in health and the body, but I am a yoga teacher and practitioner, as opposed to other things (and in addition to other things.) My identity becomes one step abstracted: I can call myself something, and I can dress the part and people will know something about me. Many communities, perspectives, possible realities weave together in a cosmopolitan Western city, and my symbols take on different meanings depending on the context, and accumulate a different momentum based on how broad or narrow my vocabulary.

It is different on Phnom Penh. In Phnom Penh, each person holds up their own narrative: this is who I work for, this is my business, this is the country I come from. I articulate my own definition based on the scant resources of the city. There is usually only one person per identity here, and we each present ourselves for who we are, not for the culture we embody.

Maybe that is why underneath the traffic and karaoke, Phnom Penh always feels so silent. We make our own identities by our actions. We create our own communities as an act of will and they disappear if we turn our backs. There is something liberating about this, and limiting, also.

Spending Time with Words

Back in the West, back in Toronto. The air is dense here with thought and verbosity. Opinions abound, style, literature, publications, galleries, every carefully crafted individual human entity, self, vying for airtime. My friends are artists, writers, curators and I am exhausted spending days with them and their anxiety.

The world is buried somewhere under here. “Remember these,” I‘d like to say. “There are bodies here, things that live and eat and fart and get sick and love and hurt and want. These things that hold our clothes up and move the pens and paint brushes around, these things that do actually have their own set of feelings, even before we write an essay about the complex conjunction of forces and relationships that have come together in such a way so as to cause this particular event that we no longer even recognize to be an emotion.” But I can’t find them here. They must be here somewhere, bodies. I know they exist.

We’re obscured under the waves here. Each desperate and abused body churning in this ocean of identity, unaware of its own movements, watching the surface, hoping that one of the ripples will be me, mine, my visible being. Only if I make a ripple will I exist. True: only if I make a ripple will I pay the rent when I’m a painter, a writer….

We are bodies here.

The city is full of ideas, solidified in brick and cement--a university, shop, government building, hospital, Buddhist temple, a home. We all agree. We all know a bank is a bank and my world rests on the fact of that bank and the fact that these colourful bits of paper will buy my bread and beer. Here, ideas are so forceful that the concrete world shapes itself according to them.

Where I come from, my land of Cambodia, ideas live on bodies, and it is our responsibility to make them real. Red light means stop by virtue of my stopping. (In Toronto, a red light can be ignored like a brick wall can be ignored--only if you’re really drunk would you consider going through.) Where I come from, torn US currency has no value; in Toronto, the banks determine what counts as money. Where I come from, law is context-dependant. Where I come from, a hospital is a set of walls and white coats, not a concentration of knowledge. Where I come from, when I look out the window I see a chaos of movement.

In Toronto, when I look out the window I see ideas in the shape of buildings and behaviour. And I see people, loads of them, masses and throngs and herds of them, all immaculately put together in the shape of their ideas--this scarf, this job, this part of town and set of words. They are fine sculptures, these residents of Toronto.

The ones I talk to are not happy. The ones I talk to that are happy are insane.

I don’t think they even believe in bodies over here anymore.

Layers of Understanding

Reality settles in in layers. Something happens and you know it’s real; and then you stay with it and learn about it, and it becomes more real. And then something opens and all of a sudden it’s really real; and what you knew at first starts to look like a vague cloud of seeming and you start to think that the world you were looking at before as a figment of your own imagination. But, of course, it was real at the time, too.

I work with people who have suffered from traumas in their past, of the sort and degree that it is beyond my imagination to conjure an understanding of. I meet them and start teaching them, and they are who they are: smiling, happy, shy, innocent, giggly, with some undefined history of ups and downs that shapes their identity and brings their own set of limitations and motivations to their yoga practice; and we work with it. We work past the “I can’t do that” reflexes, or the “that movement is inappropriate for a girl” notions; we learn to hear our own voice chant without melting into awkward snickers or laughing-so-hard-I’m-crying hysterics. Together, we deal with teenage stuff, girl stuff, body image stuff, the same everywhere; and even though I know, because of what I’ve been told, that these girls have endured things that nobody should have to even think about, I have no idea what that really means. But, if you were to ask me of course I’d say I know what it means to have had these experiences and I am even designing my classes to accommodate what they might be carrying around with them. But, really, all I know is this person with this body, this name and this personality, and that we have this relationship. Their past is no more real to me than that.

As my relationship with a student deepens, two things happen: one, they get a sense of what we’re doing together, and they find ways to express themselves through the practice. The other thing is that I learn how to understand the vocabulary of their individual body. As a teacher, I engage a dialogue with these bodies, not just with the personality that inhabits it. And this is the case with all my serious students; no matter how radically different our personalities or backgrounds might be, even if we could never be friends or even connect in conversation at all; bodies speak to each other. Some bodies open very quickly, and before I’d even recognize their face on the street, we have a relationship. I was reminded of this the other day teaching a group of people who have survived acid attacks. I noticed before I started teaching that these people were disfigured, but when you lay your hands on someone with no eyes to show them what a twist is, everything that a body is sensitive to takes over, and a relationship between two living beings speaks.

It is beautiful to connect with someone at this level, before all the differences and defenses of the cognitive self; but the fact is, bodies have it rough. Bodies are innocent &mdash minds, not so much &mdash but bodies are all innocent in the way that trees are innocent; horses are innocent; children are innocent. And they suffer, sometimes from the actions of others, often from our own actions and decisions. And bodies carry these traumas innocently, and bodies change under their burden. Minds retaliate and hate and cry for justice and revenge and want, but bodies speak more quietly; bodies receive and process and deal with the world as they can.

Something that i know becomes really real to me when I become able to hear what it sounds like spoken from a body, not just from an intellect using words to describe a past event. With the young women I work with, I still don’t know what they have been through: we have never spoken about it; I have never been informed by their councilors. But now when certain topics and phrases enter conversation, they are not just bad words or ideas to me; they are faces and the personal challenges of these young women I know. It is a reality that some people make a living selling other people; it is a reality that some people live to buy other people. I know this, but those are just facts, ideas; and “human trafficking” and “sexual exploitation” are just phrases, bad ones.

But now they are not just words. The kids that come in to practice with me are bodies that speak, and they speak of energy and willingness and the commitment to make a space for themselves and each other. These are bodies that want to grow and want to love and reach out of themselves into things they don’t understand because they trust the people around them now. And they have such hurts on them, and such greynesses that I don’t see in words, that I don’t see in facts, and don’t even understand. And now when I hear those other words, those bad words, I hear them not as “real things that happen,” but as what my students live with and move through every time they move their bodies.

It boggles the mind what a burden some of us are asked to carry. It’s no wonder that we keep things safely stored away in words and sentences that we can pull out and use as needed and then put away again when they get too noticeable. It’s no wonder why we live so much in our minds, and are afraid to move into parts of the body and ways of feeling that threaten this linguistic net we spread out in front of us to catch the world before it gets too close.

The experiences of these young women are testament to the magnitude of evil humans are capable of; and by accepting the people around them and the practice of coming back into their own bodies, by growing and creating and trusting, these girls defy this same evil. They are the best yoga teachers I've had in a long time.