By Jane Eaton Hamilton.
Jen Pastiloff & The Hunt For Beauty.
There’s something I can’t get off my mind; it’s been nagging.
A couple months ago, Jen Pastiloff came to town. She’s the wunderkind behind the online home for great essays, Manifest Station, and a yoga/writing workshop phenom. I first came to know Jen through her site when she published my essay about Paris, ‘Things That Didn’t Happen,’ which now appears in the Caitlin Press anthology This Place a Stranger, about women traveling solo.
All this is a long-winded introduction to the fact that Jen asked me to attend her yoga workshop here in Vancouver, BC, when she came to town earlier this year at Semperviva Yoga, and, reluctantly, I went. (Jen knew getting me out of my house was like pulling teeth, but she kept at me.) Despite a background in dance, I’ve never been a yoga enthusiast, and I’m also an atheist, and morbidly shy, and the whole spiritual thing makes me roll my eyes. I slid down the wall at the back of the room, gamely played along to the limits of my creaky old body, and kept my eyes and ears open.
And, folks, a bunch of things happened.
She calls the workshop, after all, “On Being Human.”
But the transformative thing, the thing that hasn’t gone away, was this:
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