Not the best and not totally shit either

Being (real), moving and Substack this year

I’ve been teaching yoga for eight years now. Over this time, I’ve come to realise that if I view what I’m doing as a performance - if I try and perform teaching - it feels horrible. It works better if I can turn up as myself, my teaching reflective enough of who I am and how I feel that day. That seems to allow an authenticity into the room, giving other people permission to be themselves/with themselves. A performance puts the onus on the performer and suggests something people receive in a more passive way, but this is conversational, a meeting between bodies in a room, a live and living thing.

It removes the pressure to feel that things must be perfect, too, or always polished or serious. We laugh a lot in class and sometimes people cry because that is yoga. There are many moments that feel profound to me, where I feel we - the people in the room - are re-connecting with simple, pure truths: the gift of coming back home to your body and your breath. Of feeling your internal messaging system pare back to share only what’s necessary with yourself. The way that movement creates change, always.

Over the years I do think I’ve become a better teacher - that’s just about practice and working up to/beyond your 10,000 hours, I’m sure - and I notice more how special, how much of a privilege, it is to share this experience with people. Perhaps I’ve become a little better at being myself, too.

Being ourselves has an inevitability about it, in the end; perhaps it’s all we’ve got. Inhabiting the person I am and the skills I need to draw on to teach constantly reveals myself to me. “Showing up”, in the modern parlance. It is one of the most revealing experiences of my life. Wonderful sometimes, agonising others.

It has a lot in common with writing, which I see as an invitation to be with ourselves in a way that feels real, feels truthful. Many of us here write to understand ourselves and the world around us, to draw lines between things, to shine a torch into their murky corners. Perhaps we are also working on accepting ourselves, even as we try and craft something from unformed things, making ourselves a little new in the process. It can be unpleasant to dig down and perhaps we wonder whether an unexamined life is better, less painful. But we don’t have a choice, not really. It has to be this way.

Writing is also a way to hold out a hand in the dark, hoping someone reaches back. I started writing on Substack in November last year, after writing in different places on the internet for 15 years or so, always about things I wanted to write about, always for small audiences, always without much ambition.

I probably still need to work on that ambition, and I still just want to write about what I want to write about. I still don’t want to obey internet writing best practice and put in loads of subheadings or make

• Small

• Lists of

• Things,

not because I’m disinterested in what an audience wants, but because I want to write for my people, for those who reach beyond these things to connect to what I have to say. (I suppose we look for readers who are like us, at least a little). I feel slightly inadequate for not using Substack in any kind of strategic way, content-wise or in a technical sense, and I definitely had no idea what I was doing when I turned the paid subscriber button on last year. At first a just few close friends who were keen to support me paid to subscribe (thanks mum!), for I which was very grateful, but I felt unsure of the monetary value of the volume of my work, even if I felt that the writing I was putting out was good.

When I started offering regular online sessions it felt like it made more sense - it was a clearer offer and it required me to put regular work in to plan sessions and content. This was the kind of commitment I’d I shied away from a quite sensible fear that I didn’t have enough time to give to Substack, and though it’s still often a bit of a mad juggle, I like that it’s a cleaner exchange - a subscription fee in exchange for regular work (my creative energy and my time), not just whenever I am struck with a creative urge! Things have grown slowly, which is a great pleasure.

I am a very small fish on Substack, and I don’t have much time right now to learn and develop here, but I suppose I want to say (partly to myself) that that’s ok. I have a few different jobs/income sources which means that any kind of increase in skill or results can feel slow, and though I sometimes fear I’m a jack of all trades, master of none, I try to remind myself that I don’t have to be the best. I am not the best yoga teacher, or writer, not by a long stretch, but I’m not totally shit either (I feel like maybe this could go on my gravestone?) I don’t want anything I put out to feel mediocre, but I don’t need to reach the great heights of my very favourite teachers or writers in the whole world.

I often think of the most astonishing piece of writing, David Chase’s eulogy for James Gandolfini, and of a sentiment he expressed there:

I remember how you did speeches. I saw you do a lot of them at award shows and stuff and invariably I think you used to express the thoughts on a sheet of paper and put it in your pocket and then not really refer to them. And consequentially, many of your speeches didn’t make sense.

I think that could happen except in your case it didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense because the feeling was real, the feeling was real, the feeling was real. I can’t say that enough.

James Gandolfini was an extraordinary actor but I think the above is in some ways an endorsement of imperfection, of attempts to scrabble the truth even if we fumble, if we don’t succeed in perfect eloquence or original, earth-shattering expression.

I have found both spectacular readers and writers here, and also most unexpectedly, extraordinarily generous women, ones who share each other’s writing and comment and answer thoughtfully and collaborate and generally champion each other. Kind hands reaching back in the dark. If you’ve read anything I’ve written, shared it, sparked conversations, commented or paid for membership, thank you so much, it’s been the most surprising and wonderful thing.

When I open Substack and go to create a new draft - that gorgeous font, that clean interface! - I have a genuine sense of pleasure. Perhaps it’s a place for writers (of all kinds).

I have some loose plans for a few new things next year, and I’m looking forward to the continued anchor of my regular online circles and the privilege of hearing from such wise and open-hearted people every 6 weeks or so. I’m excited to see how they develop next year. Beyond that, I don’t really know what will happen, but I know I’ll be writing: trying to find the right words, being with myself, reaching out hands in the dark. That feels like a pretty great thing to have to look forward to.

Thank you for interacting with me this year! I hope you have a restful holiday period