I want to write this carefully, because the women I am about to describe are not metaphors. They are real, they are alive, and most of them would be embarrassed to see their names on the internet. So I will keep their names where they belong — in my prayers, in my quiet thanks, and in the small voice I carry with me when I teach.
I started teaching yoga because I had nothing else to offer. I had recently left a job that I had built my identity around. My body was tired in ways I did not yet have language for. And the only thing that had ever helped me was an early morning teacher in Marrakech who said almost nothing and whose room smelled of orange flower water. I wanted to be someone like her, for someone like me.
The first circle
My first regular class was held in the back of a friend's atelier, with five women who were mostly there because she had asked them to come. None of us knew what we were doing. I taught the postures I had been taught, and afterwards we sat on the floor and drank tea, and someone always cried, and someone always laughed at the wrong moment, and we left feeling lighter than when we had arrived.
Three of those five women have been coming back for four years.
A circle, I learned slowly, is not something you create. It is something you allow.
I used to think a teacher's job was to give. To pour wisdom into the cups of her students. I now think a teacher's job is mostly to make the room safe enough that the students can give things to one another. The wisdom in a circle of women is already there. The teacher is the one who lights the candle, who says the first sentence, who keeps the silence honest.
The elders
There are three women without whom I would not be here. I will describe them as briefly as I can.
The first is my jeda, my grandmother, who died nine years ago and who never called what she did yoga or spirituality or anything else. She prayed five times a day. She kneaded bread without measuring. She sang songs in Tachelhit when she was alone in the kitchen. She is the reason I trust silence. She is the reason I trust my hands.
The second is a French osteopath named C., who works out of a small room in Casablanca and who put her hands on my sacrum in 2019 and said, very gently, tu as oublié de respirer pendant longtemps — you have forgotten to breathe for a long time. I cried for an hour on her table. She did not move her hands. That hour is the entire reason I teach.
The third is a circle of women in their sixties and seventies who meet every Thursday in a riad in the medina to drink tea and complain about their husbands and pray for one another's daughters. They invited me to sit with them once and I have been going back ever since. They do not call themselves teachers. They are.
What I am trying to carry forward
I do not believe in lineage in the way some of my colleagues do — the certificates, the gurus, the long pedigree from the Himalayas. I believe in something smaller and more useful. I believe that whatever you receive in a room of women, you are obligated to pass on. Not the postures. The atmosphere. The permission. The willingness to be undone in front of one another and not look away.
If a woman comes to my class and one day, years later, she sits with another woman and says tell me what is really going on and means it — that, for me, is the lineage. That is what is being carried.
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For you
If you have not yet sat in a circle of women, I would gently encourage you to find one. Not a class. Not a workshop. A small group of women who will see you regularly, who will not look away when you cry, who will know your cycle and your mother's name. They are out there. They are often hiding in plain sight — in your aunt's living room, in the dance class you keep meaning to try, in the friend who keeps inviting you to just come for tea.
Go. Bring something for the table. Stay longer than is comfortable. The women are waiting for you.
— Ghizlan