My beloved yoga studio closed at the end of July. It feels as though, when I say that, most people don’t understand why I’m ugly-crying - aren’t there, like, a million yoga studios in Seattle? Not like Sangha Yoga, there aren’t.
As a kid growing up, I wasn’t part of any organized religion. My parents were both raised Christian and grew up going to church, especially my mom, whose mother was a church organist and music teacher. After many years of church several times a week, once she got to college, my mother joined my father in letting go of her practice of going to church, and never looked back. To this day, I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve gone to church with my parents, and it was usually during a summer holiday to visit my relatives, when we’d go to hear my grandma play the organ and my aunt sing in the choir. My sister and brother and I were raised with loosely Christian values, but exposed to people from many other religions and encouraged to ask questions and stay curious about spirituality.
For me, that resulted in extreme skepticism and disinterest in spiritual communities. I’ll just admit it - I did and still do have a bad impression when I hear the word “church.” I didn’t learn that from my parents - as I said, they stopped going to church but never really said anything against it, either. But because I was always questioning, because I knew a lot about lots of religions, it all just seemed kind of…silly. As a teenager, it seemed to me that all of the biggest problems in the world stemmed directly from organized religion, and it just felt so insane to me - that people would really fight to the death over whose idea of God was the right one, each faction so sure that their road map to God was the ONLY right way. To quote my favorite movie from the fine film Napoleon Dynamite: “Napoleon, like any one can even know that.”
There was a period of time in college when I started to wonder, though - was I wrong? Was there something wrong with me, that I didn’t believe in anything bigger than what I could actually see and feel? What was I missing by not being part of a church or spiritual committee that everyone else felt so attached to? I went through a phase of trying out church - going with friends or romantic interests to their places of worship just to see how it all felt.
Spoiler: it all felt bad. Weird, bad, foreign, alien, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sit through a single sermon or service without finding myself irritated or angry about whatever was being said. It just felt so wholly and completely NOT for me, so after a few years, I stopped experimenting, and I stopped caring about the question of God and a spiritual community altogether. I focused on my relationships with friends and family and the communities I was part of through work, theater, and music. For a really long time, that was actually enough.
Fast forward to my early thirties, when I began to realize that the obscene amount of worrying I had done every day for all of my life was maybe not normal, and that the periods of depression I had experienced never seemed to fully and completely go away. With age, I was falling deeper into depression and anxiety, and starting to understand that maybe I needed more help after all in caring for myself. Maybe I needed more support. I had a miscarriage during this time and realized that I had isolated myself during that experience, choosing not to ask for help or say yes to the help that was offered. And suddenly, it all felt wrong. I realized I was spiraling.
My sister suggested I take a yoga class. The first studio I went to was close to my office, and it’s a good one - it’s still open post-pandemic, and it’s been operating for a really long time. But after a few classes, I realized I would need something closer to home in order to really dive in to practice, and that’s when I found Yoga Life on Queen Anne, just two blocks from my home. I started going three times a week and pretty soon I was hooked. I realized that when I was on my mat, my mind was quiet. I was busy moving through the postures and focusing on my breath, and for an hour at a time, I could hear my true Self underneath all that chatter in my mind. I attached to several teachers and made friends at the studio, and yoga became a pillar of my self-care. I realized that God doesn’t have to have a name or a face, it’s just a force that exists, an energy that connects and binds each one of us, no matter what we believe or where we’ve come from. I learned that the divine is in me, and in everything.
Sometimes, though, it would get hard, and I’d avoid my mat. Now that I am a teacher, I know that’s incredibly common - when things are hard, we often avoid that time with our Selves. Whenever I avoided yoga, things were harder in every single aspect of my life - physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically - all of it, harder. During a particularly hard period in my late thirties, I avoided my studio for most of an entire year, and it was during that time that Yoga Life was sold and became Sangha Yoga.
I remember getting the emails and feeling the stirs of anxiety and concern - someone else was buying the studio? What if it changed and wasn’t as wonderful as it had been? What if the teachers were let go? What if, what if, what if? I used the turnover as an excuse to keep avoiding my practice. But I started seeing the signs of the new brand popping up - signs in the neighborhood with an enticing new logo and name - Sangha, which means community. I peeked at the new website and saw many of my favorite teachers still on the schedule. Eventually, I worked my way into the space and was so delighted at the changes - the owners, Heather and Scott, had made it ten times more beautiful and welcoming than it had been. And even though it was different, it felt like coming home.
Sangha wasn’t like the other studios. It was truly about all eight limbs of yoga - not just the physical postures. Classes and trainings always included philosophy and history and acknowledgement of the roots of the practice. The student body was diverse - from teenagers to octogenarians, all sizes, all colors, all backgrounds. I had aunties and grandmas at the studio, who helped to make up for the lack of contact I have in my life to my real aunties and grandmas, who live so far away. People brought each other gifts for no reason, and remembered birthdays, and showed up to support you for outside events. It was so, so special.
I started practicing regularly again, this time spending more time in restorative and yin classes contemplating stillness and silence. At a particularly awful juncture in my professional life, the studio announced a 200 hour yoga teacher training. I started to think, what if. What if I learned to teach yoga - especially restorative yoga - and I could help people, like my favorite teachers were helping me? Josephine and Nancy and the others who held me energetically each week while I worked through endless amounts of personal challenges. What if I could do that same thing - help others through the struggle? So, without having met Heather more than once or twice, I signed up for the training.
That training has completely changed my life.
I ended up making some of the most amazing friends and connections of the last decade of my life, and learning more about myself than I ever thought I would. I got clearer on my priorities and decided to leave my full-time career in communications to do … something new. I didn’t quite know what it would look like, if I’d teach a little, or freelance, or some combination of the two. I just kept learning and exploring and saying yes to new opportunities that came as a result of being more involved in the community. When my training came to an end and it was time for me to step into the role of teacher, many of the people in my classes were the same people I’d been practicing with for years, showing up to support me as I learned how to be a teacher. Giving me room to make mistakes and try things out and grow into myself. I felt so held, so cared for, and so seen.
For years, I felt held in that cradle of community. I worked my way up to a full-time schedule teaching yoga in several other studios as well as at my home base, Sangha. Things were moving forward, doors were opening, and all the while I continued to roll out my mat among friends and colleagues in the space that felt so safe and warm and nourishing to me.
And then the pandemic came.
Seemingly overnight, we were torn from physical spaces and isolated at home, forced to connect over Zoom screens. It felt like having a lifeline ripped away - and then, so quickly, the owners at Sangha put together an online schedule and brought the community to us at home. I can’t even explain how fundamental it was to my mental health to be able to continue to practice with my community during those times of lockdown and isolation. 75% of my work and income and 95% of my social interactions had been ripped away from me. I no longer had the safety net of a full-time corporate job that I could do completely remotely, and I was lonely, sad, and concerned for my business in the long-term. Depression came in hard, but the community stayed strong. There were days when I just had to get out of the house, and I would go to the studio, which was cold and empty, and just sit there, to feel the comfort of the space. I don’t really know how I would have made it through two 80+ day lockdowns and 2+ years of uncertainty without Sangha, the physical space and the community that refused to be torn apart.
Eventually, we were allowed to resume in-person activities, and we all felt SO much joy to be able to come back together. We put together a hybrid setup so that folks who were still at home could continue to practice, and we welcomed some people back into the physical space. We wore masks for a long time, and then eventually the masks were optional. New faces started to come into the space, and it felt like maybe, maybe we were going to make it through to the other side.
But it wasn’t enough.
Many people who had been faithful online practitioners grew weary of Zoom and stopped signing in to class online. And some people just never came back into the space - wouldn’t or couldn’t get off Zoom and resume with us in person. Some people had moved away. Not enough new people were finding their way into the space. It felt like the only thriving studios were either heated or owned by teachers with huge Instagram followings. The studio struggled along and ultimately could not make ends meet. The owners grew exhausted and burnt out and ran out of funds to keep things afloat. It became clear, the end was coming.
And y’all - I don’t have words to describe how that felt. Knowing the ship was sinking, trying so hard to bail water and salvage it but never getting far enough. I was even tempted to buy the studio myself - and believe me, I considered it. Seriously. But ultimately, I knew I didn’t have the time or resources to make things work in the time frame that they needed to. And I started to accept that I was going to lose my community, my church, my spiritual home - the one I had stopped looking for and found by accident.
So what does one do, when a spiritual community closes its doors? How do you keep the community alive? That’s the question we’ve all been asking for the last month, and the hard truth I’ve come to is this: we can’t. Not in the way it existed before. It inevitably must change, as all things do. Saying goodbye is hard because we know that as soon as we step through the threshold, things will never be quite the same ever again. We’ll never assemble the same group of people in the same space to the same end as we did before. And there is a heartbreak inherent in that truth.
It reminds me of how I used to feel when a theater project came to an end. At the end of the run of every single show or concert or production I’ve been a part of, whether it was dance or music or theater, there’s a let-down. A sadness comes, as the end of an era stares you in the face. For however many months or sometimes years, you’ve worked on the same project with the same people, shed sweat, tears and sometimes, yes, even a little blood achieving a goal together, and ridden a wave of emotions as a group. And then that group disbands. We tear down the scenery, we pack up the costumes, we put away all the props and turn out all the lights, and the entire thing we made is over and gone, never to be real again in the same way. It used to make me so sad, every time we closed a show or ended a run.
But there was always a new project, another performance, another production to get to work on. We had to shift the focus, rally, and regroup. When the loss isn’t just a production or performance, but a spiritual community - that feels harder to do. The period of mourning is longer.
That said, my days in the theater have helped me maintain a little shred of optimism underneath all the sadness - that someday, somewhere, I’ll find myself in a group of people with a common purpose all holding each other up again. Maybe it will even be mine to build next time.
I wasn’t ready to buy the yoga studio, but I did decide to lay down some roots of my own. I rented the office space down the hall that Heather used for years, where I had many sessions of teacher trainings, streamed classes during the pandemic, and spent many hours planning classes and designing workshops. Four other teachers who are my friends and who have shared the Sangha Yoga space with me are going to sub-let the office space, and our little enclave will continue on together, carrying the memories and the bonds we made as Sangha yogis with us into this new adventure as we curate our offerings in Suite 9.
Change is hard. But community is everything. That’s what I learned from my spiritual community. And though we’ve disbanded, my heart is forever changed, and eternally grateful.
xo,
This is great, I love hearing about people's spiritual and community-focused journey! Also YES to this -> "Maybe it will even be mine to build next time." <3