JOANNA COLWELL

I taught my first yoga classes over thirty years ago, when my teacher and mentor Gayna took her annual two-month long winter trip to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and asked me to fill in for her while she was away. Looking back, I’m amazed she trusted a new yoga teacher with her precious students — I am quite sure I didn’t know what I was doing!

But all these years later I am still at it, still teaching these same postures and breathing exercises, still guiding people into states of relaxation, and still sharing yoga philosophy. The main text I use is a collection of teachings known as the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. These sutras are 196 short teachings, in Sanskrit, which were memorized and passed down orally through chanting for hundreds of years before being written down. I love chanting these sutras at the end of class, while my students are resting in Savasana, or Corpse Pose. 

It might sound a little morbid that at the end of each class we lie down in a pose named after a dead body, but Savasana is the most delicious way to finish your yoga practice. During this time of deep relaxation and stillness, our bodies and minds can integrate the effects of all the various postures and breathing exercises we have touched in our class. I often compare this to watering our potted houseplants. Sometimes when we pour water onto the soil, we see it pool on the surface briefly, before it starts to soak in, and hydrate the roots of the plant. In Savasana we lie on the floor and let the benefits of our practice soak into us, nourishing us at the deepest level.

While I have not managed to memorize all 196 sutras, I do have a number of them that I know well, and I consider these teachings faithful friends, guiding me throughout my life. One sutra I’ve been chanting recently is Heyam Dukkham Anagatam. Generally translated as “The suffering that has not yet occurred is to be prevented whenever possible.” It might be only one sentence, but it holds a tremendous amount of wisdom. This sutra makes a distinction between past suffering, current suffering, and future suffering. Suffering that occurred in the past can’t really be changed. For example, as much as we might wish we could go back in time and prevent the slave trade, or stop colonizers from giving smallpox-laced blankets to Indigenous North Americans, or block the Nazis from coming to power and prevent the Holocaust, we can’t. These atrocities happened.

Sadly, we also know that in many ways these historical tragedies are still causing suffering today. A 2015 study of the wealth gap between Black and white households in Boston found that the median wealth for white families was $250,000, while for Black families it was $8. Yes, you read that right. Slavery and Jim Crow laws, redlining and lack of access to education, and tax laws that benefit the richest Americans have all contributed to this gross inequality. Indigenous Americans have some of the least access to healthcare and good paying jobs, and life expectancy for Native Americans is significantly lower than for white people, an average of seven years lower.

The sutra Heyam Dukkham Anagatam is asking us to look at how we conduct ourselves now, in order to prevent suffering that has not yet happened. As I type these words the Israeli government is continuing its bombardment of Gaza, raining death and destruction upon the entire region, killing thousands of children, and creating a wasteland of starvation and disease. Our government is the main supplier of this weaponry. Our tax dollars are funding this genocide. Meanwhile our Brave Little State has the second highest rate of homelessness in the entire country, behind only California. Forty-three people per ten thousand people in our state have nowhere to live.

Heyam Dukkham Anagatam says “It doesn’t have to be this way- another world is possible!” It’s so important to dream of this other world. Every new thing started as a dream, a spark, an idea someone had. So let us dream together, will you join me? 

The slogan “Never Again” refers to a Jewish determination for our people to never again be marginalized, victimized, and murdered. May we be equally determined that everyone, no matter their ethnicity or identity deserves the same safety and care. Instead of bombs raining down on Gaza, let’s fund housing here. Guns and ammunition can be melted down and made into musical instruments and gardening tools. Every school could have its own small farm, teaching science, soil care, composting, nutrition and culinary excellence. No family should be food insecure, in Gaza, the West Bank, or Addison County, Vt. We can all be part of dreaming together, and building this new world.

Joanna Colwell is a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher who founded and directs Otter Creek Yoga, in Middlebury’s Marble Works. Joanna lives in Ripton, where she enjoys taking walks, cooking for Abolition Kitchen, and working with the Middlebury chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice and the newly forming Addison County Jewish Voice for Peace. Feedback welcome at: [email protected].