How on earth do you start a community, anyway?
Mary Taylor
“You’ve got to start a community,” was the advice I got from an eager student in the early 90’s. It hit me like a ton of bricks! Over the years Richard had gradually moved from teaching in living rooms and basements with three or four students, to renting a space at the massage school, until eventually we got our own studio space and naming it the Yoga Workshop. The best part of our own space was that Richard finally had the luxury of not having to squeeze into a car packed with bolsters, blocks, and straps as he drove around town. We also had a dedicated sign-in notebook to keep track of who came to class, if they had a phone for emergency calls and whether or not they could afford to pay. We’d press typed a master for the schedule and would hang posters around town in places we’d frequent like Hannah’s Restaurant or Crystal Market. We felt pretty organized, but then my heart sank, how could we have been so careless as to forget to start a community?
So I wondered. How on earth do you start a community, anyway? I focused on the problem with such rigor that it felt like my head would explode until it finally dawned on me that you don’t. Starting something means you see it as an object, a definable, limited entity. Though there is some commonality that draws people together within a community, a real community is not contrived. It is not something that is engineered or branded. It is not founded with boundaries or borders and preconceptions. Instead, communities are organic, living processes that emerge and unfold. They are not about any one person or any single idea or doctrine and most importantly they belong to everyone. Communities emerge and morph over time—people come and go, ideals and practices evolve and the community, though somehow consistent, is never the same. It has many living parts that play off one another and if any one of those parts tries to own or control a community, something goes terribly wrong; at best it quickly turns into an exclusive club, and at worst it transforms into a cult.
Community occurs when we weather things together. When our crazy uncle is sincerely loved just as much as is our brilliant neighbor. Community is strengthened by births, deaths, turmoil and joyous events alike because these things reveal not only our shared ideals and illusions, but also our vulnerabilities. With others we witness and experience the good parts alongside the turbulence that taps into fragility, fear, rawness and confusion. When we experience the full spectrum of what it means to be alive with others who care nearby, we can learn to trust the process of life and we can grow. When we grow, the others flourish and we do too. That’s a healthy community. It’s actually what yoga is too. Fostering healthy relationships, finding commonality, expressing one’s essence with the well being of others in the forefront of mind defines community, or what in Sanskrit is called sangha.
Though, indeed, I had not thought to “start a community” when I was at the store buying the sign-in book, thankfully the sangha had started to materialize itself while I wasn’t looking. My head stopped hurting. Creativity returned and I wondered what I could do to support the feeling of joining together that was happening spontaneously around the Yoga Workshop. So we printed a newsletter to keep us connected outside the walls of the studio. Remember it was before the glorious time of the Internet, so staying in touch usually stopped as we stepped out the door. We called the newsletter “The Laughing Elephant.”
I’m older now. Richard turned 70 in May and I’m right on his heels. We’re still practicing every day no matter where we happen to be. We live in Boulder sometimes, in Thailand at others and we’re fortunate enough to know dedicated yoga practitioners all over the world. Once more, we feel part of an even bigger sangha that has spontaneously established itself in the rich soil of friends drawn together through a love for learning, yoga, and respect for others. The urgency of taking steps toward waking up, finding ways to connect with and serve others, and taking actions motivated by a yearning to relieve as much suffering as I can before I’m gone, has intensified dramatically since that panic attack about my stupidity of not remembering to start a community. I find the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, alongside an alarming disregard for the environment, and global political turmoil fueled by greed, separatism, and a total disregard for others, as great motivators.
Though these times make me sad, strangely, I’m also filled with hope and joy. Because it has become indisputably clear that there’s work to be done, there’s life to be lived, there’s love to be shared. And what better place to do so than within a community? So more than thirty years later here we are resurrecting The Laughing Elephant online. Not to sell anything, but to nurture seeds of connection, commonality, and compassion that give strength to all of us who have found yoga to be part of what it feels like to come home to the essence of who we really are and what this life is about.
