Jordan Goes Electric

In early twenty twenty one, I attended one of my first postpartum (post?-pandemic) public yoga classes. Despite already having a daily home practice, it was the first time in a long time that I really felt alive. As we lay in savasana bliss, soft music hovering in the atmospheric inch above my body, I listened to Bob Dylan’s voice wash over me.

“The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. The answer is blowin' in the wind.”

This struck me as funny because the day before, I had rewatched the Coen Brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis, and Bob Dylan’s discreet cameo at the end of the film, which always moves me, had done so again. Dylan seemed an odd pick for savasana, but the timing felt like synchronicity, the love language of the universe.

I left yoga, grabbed a “loving-kindness” latte, and popped down the road to Book People on a whim. I listened to more Dylan in the car on the way. As I sat upstairs at Book People, perusing the shrink-wrapped coffee table and art books, I overheard a man asking whether they would be carrying the new Clinton Heylin biography on Bob Dylan and whether he could pre-order it. That felt like another nudge, another small sign that Dylan’s fresh presence in my life was insisting on my attention.

Now I’m a believer in synchronicities, so at this point my attention was thoroughly caught. “What is Bob Dylan trying to tell me?” I thought to myself. That night, I googled the best Bob Dylan documentary and, of course, was met with No Direction Home, a legendary 2005 documentary directed by Martin Scorsese. At the end of the three-hour and twenty-eight-minute documentary, I was captivated in a way I hadn’t felt in years. Dylan’s rise, reinvention, and refusal to stay where others placed him began to resonate in my bones. “Dylan Goes Electric” became one of rock and roll’s most mythologized turning points.

I spent the entire summer of 2021 utterly and completely obsessed with Bob Dylan. If you were my hair client, my then-husband, or even a complete stranger who encountered me during that time, I’m genuinely sorry. In an online forum I was part of, I began to be referred to as “Bob Dylan” Jordan. I was completely fascinated by his story, but it was also as if there were a mystery I needed to solve, a deep and personal message I was meant to receive. In my own life, I was struggling. I was unhappy in my marriage, in my chronically ill body, in how I participated in my role as a mother, and in my almost twenty-year career as a hairstylist. An ancient, very deep wound from my family of origin had recently been reopened, leaving me all but crushed. I was yearning for a different life, one in which I wouldn’t feel so very far from myself. One of my few sources of solace was my yoga practice. I couldn’t yet put words to the ineffable qualities the practice was providing me, but I knew there was some strange magic afoot. When not practicing yoga, I walked or ran and listened to Dylan. Visions of Johanna for my warmup, Hurricane and Like a Rolling Stone for the run, and sometimes Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust for the cool-down. If that sounds like a short run, you would be correct. I had never run before and probably never will again. What I did not understand at the time was that I was in a season of deep grief, and Dylan was providing its soundtrack.

During this time, I was enrolled in school to become a yoga therapist. My yoga therapy cohort classmates will surely recall my Bob Dylan affliction. I had found my way into yoga therapy school, which is essentially yoga grad school because the deeper I studied yoga, the more questions I had, and the suggested intensity of this level of schooling felt like it could finally provide the answers I was seeking. Two things occurred simultaneously: my practice deepened immensely, and I had more questions than ever. I began teaching at a local studio, and practice or teaching became two of the only places I felt like I could come up for air. I gulped in every deep breath I could get, lost the chaotic contents of my mind in mantra practice, and I sang loudly to drown out all the internal noise. At the same moment, I immersed myself in community. I listened to and loved on strangers, and I remembered joy, but it widened the chasm between the life I wanted and the one I was living at home. I began to feel incongruent, like my insides were completely different than the outsides. I felt inauthentic, dishonest, and I was becoming so sick of myself. Yoga can be confrontational in that way if you aren’t walking your talk. I knew I had to tell my tender truth if I wanted my life to change. And I wanted my life to change. So I lit the proverbial match and tossed it onto the gasoline-covered kindling that was my own life, and boy, did it burn. And yet, when things went kablooey, despite having kind of started the fire, I found myself genuinely surprised by the size and scorch of the flames.

In the aftermath last summer, I went to yoga class after yoga class, trying out different local studios and teachers, attempting to salvage my practice from the rubble of my life. I was hoping to find a place I belonged, feeling broken-hearted, lost, and deeply confused. I also felt incredibly determined. I finished school for yoga therapy, which was genuinely no small feat. I found a new place to live and made it a beautiful home for my kids and me. I put up with endless chatter from people I had thought of as kind acquaintances, dear friends, or even my own family. Many unkind and often untrue assumptions were made about me, which is actually quite normal when you change your life, while many others are afraid to do so, but for every friend I lost, I gained a better new one. The depth of my relationships with real family and close friends came to the fore and carried me when I couldn’t carry myself. With time, I was finally able to reclaim my personal yoga practice. I learned that what remains is what matters and how beautiful each moment really is. I learned just how little control we actually have, especially over how others perceive us, and how surrendering to that truth is, in fact, freedom. I learned just how deeply I can trust myself. I danced with life. I saw that the depth of my grief was actually mirrored by my capacity for joy and happiness. I learned what it actually means to operate from blind faith and developed a trust in myself and life that will carry me through the rest of my days. While I have realized I am perhaps not going to be teaching yoga in the modern-traditional studio sense, at least for now, I am eternally grateful that I have maintained and held onto my practice. The depth of my understanding and love for yoga will undoubtedly carry me through the next half of my life and will inevitably be shared through whatever medium I choose to create in. I realize now that the lesson I learned from both Bob Dylan and yoga is actually one and the same. It is to honor the mystery rather than try to master it. And as I sit on the precipice of forty, I can say with a degree of certainty that while I don’t know what the next half of my life might hold, I do know it’s going to be electric.

Welcome to This Magic Moment. Thank you for being here.

*cue the harmonica solo

**Another small synchronicity unbeknownst to me at the time, this was written close to midnight on the eve of Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday. HBD BOB!