Be Here Now
Remember: Mind the Loop
A good friend of mine says I remind her of that scene in National Lampoon’s European Vacation—you know, the one where Clark Griswold gets stuck on the inner loop of a roundabout, circling endlessly. “Hey look kids! Big Ben! Parliament!” Over and over again. That’s what ADHD can sound like to neurotypical people.
But for me, it doesn’t feel like the world is spinning. It feels like I’m spinning the world—a million sparks turning around me, like a merry-go-round that doesn’t just circle, but moves forward, back, and in every direction, so fast it warps time.
And yet, I’ve built a life around teaching people how to slow down. How to be present. How to ground. Even after twenty-four years, it still strikes me as ironic that I’m a yoga teacher.
It was Claudia who first clued me in to the small fact that my merry-go-round was showing. Keep in mind—I’d been teaching for a while by then. Five years at least. I was teaching a lot in those days; two or three classes a week, so let’s say, conservatively, I’d taught well over 500 Hatha yoga classes. And it had never once occurred to me—until the night Claudia From Front Row (as she’s still saved in my contacts)—pointed out that no two of them had ever been the same. Not even remotely.
“Every week, something totally unexpected! That way, we have to stay present, right? That’s why you switch it up every time.”
Here’s the thing about Claudia: At that time she had five children under the age of ten and a husband who traveled four days a week for work. She started coming to my Tuesday night class when her youngest was still a newborn. I’ll never know the mountains she moved to get there each week—on time and without fail—first to a spot in the very back by the door, then inching her way forward to the front row as her practice deepened and her confidence grew.
It’s a sobering thing when someone so intentional in her own practice is looking to you for presence. Claudia was aligning with her highest self and moving heaven and earth to do it. And what was I doing?
I’d always believed it was best to move with my nonlinear, overabundant, pinging focus, rather than try to quiet or swim against it. I never bought into the idea that I had a deficit that needed fixing. But maybe, in embracing that freedom, I’d skipped over the part where discipline might serve me. Maybe it was time to try following a map of my own making—to master the part of my mind that never stopped circling, darting like a firefly in a jar.
So I tried. I went as far as to sketch out the arc of each class, posture by posture, breath by breath, from the first “om” to the final seconds of savasana. For two weeks, I started every class with a page of notes and a plan to stick to them.
But almost immediately, something would shift. A breath. A rhythm. A silence that wanted more space than I had given it. And just like that, we were back in my native language—movement guided by instinct.
I entertained the idea of stick-to-itiveness, but in the end, I followed the current. Like I always had. And I realized something: my students weren’t looking to me to direct them on how to be grounded. They were trusting me to find the stream. From there, they could make their way. What anchored them wasn’t the sequencing. It was the presence.
I thought structure might be the key to teaching with more clarity. But the truth is, my brain has never moved in straight lines. It listens sideways. It follows the thread others might miss. There is no script in that space. Only instinct. And when I trusted that—when I let go of control—that’s when the magic happened.
I had more of the kinds of classes yoga teachers live for. The ones that buzz. When the whole room breathes as one, and the air hums with energy. I gave up thinking I could reverse-engineer those moments; that’s just not how it works.
I let go of thinking it was my job to be everything to everyone. That let me see my students for who they were and what they needed. Some of them needed the constancy of knowing the person in the lead kept a map at the ready. That was okay. I became fully present in my teaching when I started helping get those students where they were meant to go, and stopped interpreting their needs through the lens of my own self-doubt.
Remember: Be Accessible in Big Moments
September 11, 2001. My first yoga class, if you can believe that. It had been planned for weeks. I joked with friends in the days leading up to it that I was running out of time to find my Zen and become that serene, incense-burning yogi archetype I didn’t resemble in the slightest. I was restless, a little cynical, and prone to sarcasm. However, I was also serious about teaching and committed to the practice.
That morning, when the world stopped turning, I thought surely they would cancel class later that night. But they didn’t. The YMCA in downtown Raleigh stayed open. And that evening, I taught my very first yoga class. I don’t remember what I said. I don’t remember what poses we did. What I remember about that night was Matthew.
He was a retired military man. So solid a soul you could feel the gravity in his bones. He didn’t speak much. I made a feeble speech of some kind or other at the start of class. No one moved. Including me. Until Matthew made eye contact, first with me, then with everyone in that room. Then he unrolled his mat and said, “Let’s get started.” And that’s exactly what we did.
Remember: You Know the Way
I have a teal blue art print in my office with Be Here Now—the book made famous by Ram Dass in the early 1970s—complete with a groovy Boecklins hippie font. It’s both a taunt and a tether; a reminder of how hard it is to stay present, and how necessary it is to keep trying.
I’ve never arrived at being present the same way twice. I forget. I get caught in thought-loops and task-switching and sensory floods. And then something pulls me back: a cat rubbing against me for attention, a text from my daughter for no apparent reason.
That’s the work of grounding. It’s not about being still, but about being anchored in motion. And remembering that you know the way back. No matter how unmoored you feel, there is no distance so far from center that you can’t come back from.
On the cover of Dass’s book, the word “Remember” is repeated four times in a loop. It isn’t a command. It’s an invocation. A quiet pulse to guide you home.
Be Here Now is the single biggest challenge of my life. And also, my compass. It threads through every class I teach, every moment I forget, every return. That’s what grounding has come to mean for me. Not the absence of chaos, but the return to the self.
And always, always, it’s the practice of yoga that invites us to begin again.