A new shala baby
I'm so happy to share the good news with you all that our lovely students Peter and Caroline Cronin, had a beautiful baby boy a couple of weeks ago. Like many ashtanga practitioners, they're already used to getting out of bed in the middle of the night for a labour of love, so they're already better prepared than most new parents!
Their little baby boy is the second AYSD baby, i.e. the second baby whose parents first met at our shala. It's mad to think that if our little shala didn't exist those two tiny humans might never have been born!
The birth of their little boy makes me very nostalgic for the pre-covid days, those days when we could all interact normally.
It's unthinkable that a couple of practitioners could fall in love, get married and start a family, having met at an online yoga class. It just wouldn't happen, would it? The lockdowns that we've experienced since March this year have taken away part of our very humanity. That why we need to get back to being together, acting and interacting in a normal, human way.
There's something about ashtanga yoga shalas around the world that seem to spontaneously build a strong bond between practitioners. The practice tends to strip back some of the layers that we build up around ourselves. There's that feeling of a shared experience; the mutual support; a deep, non-verbal understanding between people who are on the same path. To try and replicate that online, through a screen, with everyone muted, is completely fruitless. And I'm not even talking about falling in love here, I'm just talking about building relationships that can support our practice.
Before I started teaching and we had our own shala, I was a dedicated student at two previous shalas. On those mornings when the alarm would sound at 5:30am and I would feel like rolling over, pulling the covers over my head, and going back to sleep, it was often the thought of my absence being noticed by my friends and fellow practitioners that got me out of bed, into the shower, and into my car. It was the feeling that, if I don't go, someone will notice. Social accountability.
We can, of course, have that accountability on zoom but only if we've built up such a relationship with our fellow practitioners that they would even care to notice that we were missing, and, I know I'm repeating myself here, but that relationship is so much easier to build in person.
We're struggling to keep on keeping on. We've all become so used to living our lives in our small cocoons. But when something as momentous as a birth (or indeed a death) happens, it jolts us back into realising that this "new normal" is not normal at all. We need other people. Even introverts like me.
I hope we can get back to normal human interaction sometime in the next few months. The progress of the vaccines is encouraging to me. I know some of you will have concerns over the speed at which they've been created but more money, time, and sheer force of will have gone into a vaccine for this particular disease than probably any other medical treatment or vaccine in history. Personally, I feel that, if approved for use, the vaccines will be safe and effective and I will be in line as soon as possible to get the jab.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 is still a dangerous disease for the most vulnerable people in our society. That's why we have decided to keep the shala closed for now.