02/03/2025
About Hope Hamling, one of the co-creators of Moving Forward Practice
First and foremost, I’m the mother of two teenagers, and I’m grieving that we have to live in a world that is full of injustice, normalized violence, power-over dynamics, and the destruction of our natural world, social fabrics, and whole communities by the inhumane powers that be.
When I first regularly began practicing body-based modalities about 25 years ago, it was just for me. So I could feel better. So I could stand to be inside my body, even though it didn’t feel like a very safe or happy place. So I could soothe the person who needed soothing, and do my very best to care for her.
However, when I became a parent, my view of the world broadened dramatically. I no longer was taking care of myself just for myself, but for the humans I created, for the world I wanted to see. I began to embrace my ability to guide others to feel better within themselves. I began to truly want to share my skills and my practices with others. I began to feel the dissonance from spaces and people that didn’t align with my values of creating a more just world.
Something that I learned – the hard way – is that you can’t practice yoga and make real issues dissolve. You can’t breathe away the things that make you angry, you can’t calm yourself to the point of not caring when things are fu**ed up. You can’t yoga away systemic injustice, you can’t meditate away problematic situations you find yourself entrenched in. So I practiced facing the hard and scary things, taking the bold leaps, reminding myself that I am a capable human being, even if I feel like I am wildly unprepared for the tasks at hand.
I opened a studio. I got divorced. I faced a debilitating health diagnosis and the subsquent hospitalizations, surgeries, and recovery. I grappled with what it means to be a single mom with very little support. I relied on the help of friends, community, my dear sister, and therapy to get me through my darkest times. I finally have a partner who understands what true support looks like for me.
But life never stopped tossing me curve balls, never stopped the barrage of chaos to deal with, to work through. And so I stopped wishing life would get easy. I stopped hoping for the future to unfold in the way that I want. And I started getting real about what it would take for me to survive and thrive in this wild landscape of hatred, violence, predictable tragedy, and sadness.
In her poem “Starfish,” Mary Oliver wrote:
What good does it do / to lie all day in the sun / loving what is easy? / It never grew easy, but at last I grew peaceful
Peace, for me, does not come from circumstance. It does, however, come from feeling capable, from feeling supported and heard, from feeling a sense of dignity no matter how I have to show up to the party. It comes from having community to rely on and to be present for, it comes from knowing that I am capable of working towards the greater good.
I wonder what will bring you peace? It’s not the same for everyone. But I do know this – that the practices we offer at Abide and through Moving Forward change things for people. They’ve changed how I move in this world. I’ve become sturdier, softer, more loving and reflective, less reactive. The clarity that comes with embodying these practices every day is invaluable, but I’ve also found so much more comfort in the murkiness and confusion of life.
I wonder what’s possible for me, for all of us, as we move into this next chapter of world-on-fire. A curious heart and calling to serve guides me.
