Say It
and definitely spray it.
Down (a ways) below is a reconfigured Substack post I wrote one year ago regarding my Yoga students and our podcast platform, Bhadra Yoga House. This week I am gearing up for a second season of podcasting, getting familiar with the rockin’ new podcasting studio at the new Central Library Do Space which just opened in Omaha this past April. The soundproofed room is fitted out with RODE (my favorite brand) video on-camera microphone equipment, including a four mic-roundtable. Getting my Yogis into a podcasting studio one at a time is like herding cats, so getting three of them at once will happen in this lifetime. However, the new season starts with the wildest cat, Joanne Ferguson Cavanaugh, retired librarian-manager-extraordinaire. She will be kicking it off with me on Wednesday, June 24th, and the podcast will be available on Spotify and Audible Podcasts the first week in July.
Joanne is my world-traveler and wholly responsible for my current love affair with Ireland. A native of a Western Nebraska cattle ranching family, she is a host and traveler with Servas International, a non-profit community of hosts and travelers in over 100 countries. We will be talking about Servas, her recent hip replacement - and how she kept coming to Yoga class to do what she could do with the rest of us in class during her recovery - and where in the world she is off to next. I feel fortunate to be able to pin her down for an hour.
For the past month, I have been interviewing my longtime Yoga students who have been practicing with me for ten or more years. I invite them one by one into the podcast studio at the local library and pose questions to them (pun intended) about what motivates them to practice Yoga with our group every week, year after year. I ask them what their favorite pose is and why, and what motivated them to come into the studio for the first time. We then pull at the memory threads and chat it out. When I ask the question, “What is a fond memory you have of Bhadra Yoga studio?” one thing consistently comes up every time with everyone. They say, “It smelled so good.” It really did.
We all have our favorite scents. Recently, I wrote a piece for a UK essay contest entry about my childhood olfactory memories. They included the smell of my room, where I spent so much time reading; the smell of all that was growing in the yard - the peony, lilac, and rose bushes, freshly cut grass, and whatever happened to be wafting in from the neighbor’s yards - barbeque or gunpowder from the fourth of July fireworks. I remember the smells of the neighborhood drugstore and of the library I frequented. All the good smells of summer.
On the first podcast of Bhadra Yoga House, I talk a bit about the history of Yoga - how we are now well past the 100-year mark of when the Yogis from India came over to the States - beginning with Swami Vivekananda, who attended the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893. I wrote about it here:
The History of Yoga
No one seems to know just how old yoga actually is. Yoga teachers are known to fling off the “it’s 5,000 years old!” declaration as a source of pride - as well they should. However old it may be, America’s first yoga teachers arrived at New York from India close to the turn of the twentieth century. Now, ashrams litter the Upstate NY landscape like 7-El…
In the podcast, I discuss the plethora of Yoga ashrams in Upstate New York and the Woodstock Festival of 1969. Sri Satchidananda opened the famous and displaced concert (it took place in Bethel, New York not in Woodstock as originally planned) with the sacred chant of “Om.” His ashram Yogaville in Buckingham, Virginia, has a wonderful museum full of memorabilia from that time, as does the Woodstock Museum in Bethel, New York.
The Opening of the Woodstock Festival
With everything going on in this country and in the world, I am nostalgic for the past. I hope that we continue or reinvigorate our sacred practices, our rituals, and our faith. I want to recreate the smells and sensations of the past - the smell of my Yoga studio (Temple Incense + Murphy’s Wood Oil Soap, basically), and the smell of my childhood room. I want to hear and feel the breeze through my bedroom curtains while imagining myself as an eleven-year-old curled up on my bed reading a book. I wish I could have been at the Woodstock festival. Even in all that mud and rain.
Little sisters of the sun lit candles in the rain. Fed the world on oats and raisins. Candles in the rain. Lit the fire to the soul, who never knew its friend. Maya Baba lives again. Candles in the rain. To be there was to remember, so lay it down again. Oh, lay it down, lay it down. Lay it down again. Men can live as brothers. Candles in the rain…
Blessings & Love,
SKY WATCH:
affiliate links: RODE over-ear headphones for content creators; RODE Wireless GO Gen 3 in white; Melanie: Candles in the Rain LP; Temple Incense