Looking back: PLY in a nutshell
I’ve been thinking back to those early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were all getting used to new tech and new ways of working. In 2021, a number of you joined me, either live or on replay, for some mini trainings via Crowdcast. I still love the platform, and I want to do more on it again. One great thing about it is that when you’ve run a session, the recording is very easy to share and to download, and therefore to keep and to edit.
The first training I did on Crowdcast was a version of the ‘introduction to post-lineage yoga in a nutshell’ that I had, up to that point, only offered in person. It’s a more than a training to me: every time I run it, I get to see how the concept is landing for a new group of people, and thus my understanding of it evolves and improves. After all, the concept of post-lineage yoga was only ever supposed to be a way of me helping all of us to understand what we do, and how we work together. It too is a reflection of a saying I use a lot: communities produce knowledge, not individuals. Therefore every new community or group that I run it with tells me more about it.
Thus running the session in French (eek!) at Satya Yoga in Paris helped me understand the subtle specificity of French yoga communities, and running the sessions online helped us all to think through how community agreement works online and thus across time and space.
In order to run the session online, however, I had to find a way to play a game that is standard in my in person versions of the workshop, and a series of dear friends hopped onto Zoom to help me do that. If you’ve done any version of that training with me online, you’ll have seen this video. If not, please don’t share this widely. Let it be our shared secret, but do enjoy it with us. It’s great fun. It was a lot of fun playing this in Paris too.
And for paid subscribers, down below, after the photo of another game from the Paris workshop, I’ve dropped in a clip from the original Crowdcast recording. It’s just over 10 minutes long, and I think it’s a good recap of some points that it’s always useful to reflect on, when thinking about post-lineage yoga, and pedagogy in yoga more generally. As I say in the clip:
“We’re all trying to understand each other, but we also have to know where we stand.”
And please do get in touch if you’d like me to run this workshop for you - it’s a way to learn more about your own yoga community as much as about my research.
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