Chapter 3
Love & Service
Just a reminder to hang on for the ride with these chronicles. It may seem to meander senselessly, but it all comes together. I promised you a love story in this edition. And we’ll get there but I’ll start with a kind of love that feels so accessible and nourishing.
Sol is remarkably blessed and well cared for. People, things and opportunities appear in our path when the time is exactly right. We have learned to trust that we are held by grace. And not only passively trust that, but be led by it.
Sol Yoga has had hundreds and hundreds of volunteers. I can’t list them all, but I’ll give it a start… in no particular order… Charity, Melissa,Jamie, christina, Lisa, Mic, Caroline, Pat, Lee, Claire, Wendy, Katie, Louise, Ava, Chris, Christopher, Maddie, Bonnie, Nancy, ivy, Scarlett, Shelley, Annabelle, Laura, John, Thais, John, Jake, Diana, MaryBeth, Mary, Meredith, Brian, Megan, Caroline, Kevin, and on and on…
It’s what we run on. It’s in our blood and bones. We are made of service. An act of service that comes from devotion… a desire to give of oneself, to donate, to belong, to contribute…
I propose that love and service go hand and hand. And perhaps, the key to joyful service is to be in service TO love - to the transcendent unconditional love that binds us all. The love that is beyond outcome, beyond right and wrong, beyond judgement, beyond error.
I mentioned a bunch of names of volunteers. Each one of those names blossoms into a profoundly rich and deep story of a mutually nurturing relationship - the kind where healing and transformation occurs for both parties. Here’s just a couple samples of the grace we recieve.
Pretty recently, we were discussing some simple, affordable ways to spruce up the outside of the garage. The grand renovation completed in 2018 still has some leftover pieces we’ve yet to address. In this casual conversation, Katie Stover stepped up with an offer to do a quicky paint job on the particle board. Well, within a suspiciously close amount of time to this conversation, a gentleman showed up and just offered to finish the repair. No charge, no catch. He just does this… notices a construction need and offers to fix it. Danny blew us away with his generosity. I mean, VERY generous. AND, we seem to attract these kind of special humans oriented toward service.
Another wonderful example is our longtime landlord at 256 West Patrick St - Tom Macintosh is incredibly generous. He’s a gem. An old school farmer and family man, he is loved by many. Rent has always been reasonable and during Covid he allowed us to stay rent free for sooo long… He was so understanding and compassionate while we figured out how to find our feet. It was his graciousness and support and time that allowed us to pivot and offering housing and opening our doors to Alice, Christina, Miles, John - all who would open the door to much more…. (we will come back to this)
And then there are our forever volunteers like Pat Sprankle and Nancy Moncreif who are so remarkably generous and supportive. And long lost volunteers like Brian who was the most incredible blanket folder of all time. And quite frankly, our teachers and staff that have always put in WAY more hours than they could possibly be paid for.
The spirit of service and surrender are alive at Sol. Different traditions have different names for this yielding or surrendering of self to something greater. In yoga, it’s ishvara prandihana. In religion, it’s the many names of God, in 12 step traditions, the phrase ‘higher power’ is used. And there are more philosophies and transitions that recognize the necessity of this for caring relationship for us to thrive.
On the flipside, when we are in service to selfishness, it’s usually destructive at some point, causing isolation and death. Or at the very least, quite a bit of suffering as we grasp and protect for what we think we need, closing ourselves off from what’s available.
This is such a tough thing to balance. Self care with care of the whole. As a child, I watched my mother give herself so selflessly to us, her family. I observed how delicate the balance is. Do I choose myself or yield to the need of others? Are my ‘wants’ in harmony with a broader vision or perhaps selfishly short sighted. In community, are the needs of one group overpowering another. Beyond human to human surrender, we consider the care of our environment as an example of how our micro choices impact the whole. And beyond that, how sentient beings surrender to divinity. This negotiation is ever present when we live in community. How we RELATE to and care for one another is everything.
Daily practices like yoga (but not limited to yoga) help us to discern when we have aired too much in one direction or the other - too selfish or too selfless. And being in community gives us riverbanks to follow and accountability.
The Sol Community aspires to be these riverbanks and a container in which we can ebb and flow through life’s chapters of gifts and challenges. Sometimes we have capaciousness to give and support others, other times we need to receive. It’s normal.
We also believe ‘people support what they help to create.’ We love to be built and run by the insiders. We are essentially in service to one another, giving away the thing we have.
As such, one of our new divisions as part of our re-org is our ‘Service’ division. Our service division focuses on building cooperative, intentional community, welcoming all ways of non transactional, relational giving and receiving. (Email info@solyoga.org if you’d like to get involved).
This dynamic way of doing ‘business’ keeps things interesting. It’s not a top down, standard fee-for-service kind of structure with the same people that gets stale. We are nimble and available for possibility! We are alive with a constant rotation of people cycling through.
But we had no one cycling through during the pandemic. Which leads me back to a road we started down earlier.
During Covid, people were not gathering to do yoga, but I kept getting calls about housing (remember from chapter 1 - that I’m also in real estate?). With the help of Tom, we converted some of the dusty and dormant sol spaces to residential. Our old studio sky became a beautiful penthouse apartment with a view of the spires of frederick and first housed women in life transitions (divorce, building a business). Our old retail boutique and tea lounge shut down and became transitional housing for Miles, then later John and so on. It turned out, they were all people on a healing journey. Stopping off at Sol to find thier feet again. A new kind of union (yoga) under our roof.
Meanwhile, I was on a healing journey of my own. Recovering from separation and divorce from my high school beloved.
The short story is that I spent 6+ of the 20 years of Sol Yoga living abroad. I left Fredrick with Adam in Jan 2014 with a 5, 3 and 6 month old and eventually made my way back to frederick with my three kids for good in Dec 2019. My personal story has been shared and continues to get unpacked but my time in New Caledonia was filled with glitz and adventure and a life that looked like a dream but was also a dark night of the soul kind of journey. I got back to America right in time for Covid.
Mid covid, mid divorce, I was up to my eyeballs with solo parenting small children and trying to save a small business, like so many. I was also deeply surrendered to my meditation practice and powerfully connected to my sense of divinity, grace, universe, god, God. My life was upside down and super uncertain, but I was alive with connection and felt very held. So much so that I really felt like it might be time to devote my life to service and path of love. I had a little fantasy of becoming some version of a modern day nun. I truly had no desire or plan to get entangled with another man. I felt complete with co-creating with humans and thought I’d like to uplevel and cocreate with the divine. In a walk in the park one day, I had a little chat with the universe and made a specific call for a teacher to help me deepen my relationship with spirit. I told god, “i’m ready!”
Alas, God is funny. And no sooner had I made that demanding prayer for a teacher and the declaration that I would never have another human partner, that a special man showed up at my front door. One of those real estate calls I got was from my far away brother asking if I had any small rentals available for his friend. The call was right on time as the generosity of Tom Macintosh (remember, the landlord) was waining and it was time to start paying rent again. I had the thought to sublet the empty old (now dusty) sol yoga boutique to generate some revenue. Within a few weeks, a humble gentleman arrived on my front stoop.
I sorta kinda knew this guy from another life but not well. We had had one memorable conversation and a few sightings. After a period of loss, he’s be moving to Frederick for healing. His journey had been a hard one. It only took a few weeks to realize he would be the teacher I called for. But not the guru kind I thought. My teacher would be human relationship again - such a fertile ground for practicing what I preach and helping me heal all my wounds. And a partner to be in devotion and service with. A fellow seeker on the path of truth. A devotee and servant to love. Two is better than one, when you can work together for a higher calling.
What does this have to do with Sol Yoga? You’ll see. Need to take a pee break, maybe heat your coffee or get more popcorn? It’s intermission. A pause is good.
It was mid pandemic when I met Miles. It’s a love story for another Marvel movie and one I’m happy to openly share, but not today. Suffice it to say it continues to grow and deepen. It’s the real growth relationship I longed for.
He came from other healing traditions and paths of truth. A voracious reader, he had read thousands of books I hadn’t and vice versus. So we swapped theology, methodology, stories, experiences and discoveries. We went to different spiritual gatherings, churches, workshops and classes… Different but the same. All leading to the same conclusion - connection (union) with ultimate truth. And all offering daily practices and community connection and service. It’s a passion of mine, to discover the ways in which we are similar. To see our commonalities and discover how we are alike and how we belong to one another despite the superficial external ‘differences.’ Yoga has taught me this.
Beyond studying with my new ‘teacher,’ my day job remained mothering, solyoga-ing and still a little real estate on the side. I’ve been a landlord for 20+ years. I had about 7 rental units until my portfolio shifted after my divorce. With the remaining property, I took a leap of faith and started a co-housing experiment focused on affordable transitional housing, specifically for people on some sort of healing journey. Whew! What the heck is that?!
The cost of housing is insane - purchase and rental markets. Do you know how hard it is to find an affordable place to live if you are solo? And then if you are in transition from married to divorced, unwell to well, old to older, young to older etc. It’s just hard to afford a place on your own. Not to mention, the isolation of living alone is counter productive to successfully healing or recovering from trauma, loss, disease, etc. Co-housing is a way to have the best of both worlds, built in community + affordable living.
Miles was the catalyst for this and the first of over 25 residents that have now passed through our doors in the past 21 months. It’s more than just a room rental as all residents recieve an unlimited membership to the yoga studio, attend other connection focused healing groups we offer and we gather on Sunday nights for a meeting and community dinner. The concept of healing focused affordable co-housing allows people to immerse is a healthy lifestyle.
I can’t wait to share more about it and all the people that are part of our sol community family. And more about healing and recovery and the many paths back to wholeness. We’ll focus on that in the next edition of Sol Chronicles.
And I’ll share more of my personal story of healing. Miles & I continue our respective recoveries and it’s not always easy. Partnership and relationship are where we get to practice our yoga off the mat. We take all that theory and put it to the test. Can I actually practice what I preach? Can I BE all those cliche things I say - ‘the balance between effort and ease,’ ‘aware’ and ‘accepting’ of my feelings, non judgmental, loving and kind, ‘comfortable with the uncomfortable,’ ‘honest with myself,’ ‘speak my truth,’ without doing harm (ahimsa). Yeah, tall order. Just ask Miles how I’m doing :-).
I honor you for reading this far. I hope you are feeling connected, invited and inspired by our mission. And I welcome you to come recieve from us, or come offer your gifts.
And I’d love to hear about YOUR healing journey. Write us a story. And come read it at Brave Space.
Until the next edition…
Dorcas