September 2024 | Intercept

May 18

Written By MOSA

NOTE: This was originally published as part of my newsletter in September 2024. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive the next Om Letter direct to your inbox once a month.

Walter de Maria's Earth Room art installation in New York City

I believe I’ll always be able to perfectly recall the moment I first stepped foot in the second floor loft at 141 Wooster Street in New York. The sweetly earthy scent of soil hits you instantly as you walk through the door, followed by a humid warmth that seems to hang in the air. This has been the home of Walter de Maria’s Earth Room since 1977 - an entire apartment filled with 197 cubic metres of soil. Nothing could communicate a sense of being in nature more clearly or directly than that smell and yet, there I was in the middle of New York - a beautiful contradiction.

Urs Fischer 'You' art installation in which the gallery floor had been excavated. — Good art will do that for you: disrupt your thinking, show you the everyday, and highlight it in new and unusual ways. I wonder if there is anything more ordinary and overfamiliar to us than our own body? And yet we can become so alienated from it. Mystery bruises appear, injuries happen without any intention of causing them, we grow in spurts and eventually, we shrink back down… to quote my favourite comedy show *Seinfeld*: “if your body was a used car, you wouldn’t buy it. Too much maintenance.” To pretend that as a yogin I remain untouched and unbothered by the ageing process would be a lie.

Photograph of Agnes Denes' installation "Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan" in Summer 1982 — Each of us has their own markers - something within our lives that remains constant as we and our circumstances shift over time. Unwittingly, yoga became that reference point for me as I found this practice in my late teens, carried it through my twenties and now into my thirties. Of course, within that time my physical body has changed. Some things have become easier, some impossible, but the most defining shifts have been within my own mindset. Practicing to observe myself within quieter moments of Yin yoga or while sitting for meditation has given me the ability to look at this ageing process through more gentle and compassionate eyes.

I think back to the impositions that I allowed other people (teachers, family members, wider society) to place on my body when I was younger and shudder. Most of us have at some point in our lives allowed our body image to be misrepresented to us, and it’s often through movement and stillness practices that we can learn to engage with this ever-changing body in a way that brings that image back into focus.

Gallery installation by Olafur Eliasson's titled 'Riverbed' (2014)

Through this sharpened lens, our mundanely overfamiliar body suddenly has new secrets to reveal and even the simplest of movements can feel as though they’ve been highlighted in new and unusual ways once again. The practice then becomes a question of how long can you hold on to this sense of yourself? How well can you know your body by feeling through it? This is the somatic aspect of yoga that means, no matter how pared back our practice becomes over the years, there is still more to learn about ourselves.

I hope to move and explore with you soon as we continue this infinite learning process.

With love,

OM x