What I've Been Fluttering Between

Welcome to my first stack!

^^ See what I did there?

For a while, this Substack existed only as a good intention. I've been fluttering between worlds that are each tricky enough to describe on their own, let alone together.

So here goes…

There are moments I keep witnessing.

I’m sitting around a table — sometimes at a farm, sometimes at a friend’s back patio, sometimes at a conference where soil scientists and wellness practitioners have found themselves in the same room. There’s food. Heartfelt conversation. And at some point the discussion gets real, and I watch it happen in people’s faces: recognition. Belonging. The relief of being in a room where you don’t have to explain yourself.

I’ve spent almost 30 years teaching yoga (41 years studying it), and for the last ten I’ve been moving between two worlds that don’t talk to each other nearly enough: yoga and wellness on one side, regenerative agriculture and food systems on the other.

Like a pollinator, I carry teachings from each into the other and what I find, every time, is that people in both circles are hungry for the intersection.

When I bring soil health into a yoga room, the living web beneath our feet, the way healthy land sequesters carbon, the direct connection between soil quality and human health, yogis light up. It lands like something they already knew but had never heard named.

Students go home and start gardens, tear out their lawns for native plants, start eating dandelions and telling their neighbors to stop spraying them.

What I bring to that conversation comes partly from the tantric yoga teachings I’ve studied since 1998. Tantra sees the earth as fundamentally interconnected, worthy of reverence for its rarity, and spectacular in its diversity. The body is of the earth. The breath is of the atmosphere. What’s inside is outside and what’s outside is inside.

Yoga is a method of living skillfully in right relationship with everything that sustains us. Regenerative agriculture is working toward the same ideals under a different umbrella.

When I bring yoga and wellness into the food and ag world, I find people desperately ready for it. These are farmers, food advocates, scientists working on the most urgent problems of our time, running on fumes, giving everything to the land and the cause. The slowing down, the breath, the inner work: they receive it like water.

This is the seam I live in.

The urgency is real. We all feel it: the instability, the acceleration, the distraction, the dumbing down, the decline of excellence, the sense that something has to give. We feel it in our bodies, in our politics, in the way the seasons no longer quite behave.

Soil health, gathering around the table, learning to be more present, and staying connected to nature will get us through this.

It’s hope, in essence.