Last week, I made a joke about a student knowing their left from their right. I started, of course, with acknowledging that 90% of the time, I can't get it right. My joke was, after the cue to move left foot back, "however you want to express your left and your right."
And I stopped for a minute, while the students were in the pose. Who cares if they are all going the same direction? How many times have I been in class and heard a teacher correct students to go "to your OTHER right side." Who cares? Is the class really disrupted by one student turned to the wrong direction? The longer I teach, the less I care about things like that. But its bigger than that. I've been in classes where teachers correct alignment ad nauseum. My theory is that if the student is breathing, if the student is safe, if they are having an experience, I really don't care if their hand is flipped the wrong direction after I've cued them. Its a bigger thing too, though. I can tell that some teachers need to feel like they control the room. They stick to their lesson plan even after its clear that everyone is too hot and tired to make it through. They stick to something even after its clear its not what the students need. They need their students to do it right. I can't and I won't fix you. That's not my job as a teacher. My job is to use what I've learned through all my training and experience to create a space for you to experience. To create a space for you to explore. Asana can be translated as "pose" but also as "seat." A thoughtful placing. Who am I to decide your thoughtful placing today is wrong? So long as you are safe, physically, it's yours. So long as you walk out of class closer to your breath, closer to your best self, it's not wrong. There's a buddhist concept that you can't take someone's suffering away from them. It is their right to experience and learn from their suffering (A note, of course, that suffering really refers to the pain of attachment and fear of loss. I wouldn't want a student to be in pain in my class and not take steps away from the pain). But if I don't take your suffering away from you, if I provide you with a space to experiment and experience, then how do I get my students to grow? How do I get them to leave behind their faulty behaviors and patterns? I can't and I won't fix you. It's not my job. The same is true for friendships and relationships. My job, in that space, as a being of love and support, is to see the problem. To maybe help you see a pattern. But my job is to support. My job is to support your change. To support your turning towards alignment. Whichever way left is for you on that day of experiencing your life. My job, in a relationship, is to believe that you are capable of change, and to support that. However you define the change. However you move towards a position. To support your thoughtful placing, even if it goes a different direction than I had thought. It is not my job to make you grow, to make you change, or to make you do something I think is right. None of my friends, just like none of my students, are broken. They are not in need of mending. My curvy students? They are perfect in the way they trust their bodies as they move through poses. Even if the pose they try on doesn't look like pictures in Yoga Journal. They are perfect in the way they explore the feeling of the pose. I don't correct their alignment unless they are unsafe. Unless they are in danger of hurting themselves.
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I work, part-time, at a garden center. I teach yoga there, under some of the most beautiful trees and plants. It's a lovely sanctuary. People go there to be delighted. People go there, in the middle of disaster, to be soothed. When my beautiful, fat, friendly, loving cat died, I was brought there. Scooped up from my house where he had started choking on breakfast and died 10 minutes later. Scooped up and put into a car and driven there, with the hopes that I would survive the day just being somewhere pretty. Kitty died only a week after boyfriend left. Walking around the garden center I picked up a beautiful succulent: a black Aeonium. I held on with both hands, as if keeping the plant in one piece would keep me whole. A friendly sales associate asked if I wanted to put the plant at the cash register while I shopped. But no, I needed to hold on. I held on to the plant because I couldn't stop kitty from choking. I held on to the plant because I couldn't stop boyfriend from leaving. I see this, now, working at that garden center. I see it in people, the need to hold on to something while they walk around. About a year before this plant-clutching incident, I lost a close friend to cancer. I lost her to the gnarly kind of cancer. The kind that eats at your bones, and makes you look like a human pin-cushion. She had been in the hospital for an extended stay while they tried a few heavy duty measures to extend her time. I visited her after work in the city when I could. One day, after a week or two of not really being lucid, the nurses suggested I take her outside for fresh air and sunshine. Wheeling her out into a courtyard, she began talking about not having strength. "Everyone wants me to fight, to be strong. But this cancer is the kind you don't recover from. I don't know how to keep fighting," she confided. Earlier that day, my brain was full of pre-trial motions; of causation and experts and scientifically approved methods for calculating doses. It was full of parts per million. I was unprepared. Nothing in my life, even the summer spent working with AIDS patients, prepared me to have this conversation. "Maybe its not about fighting. Maybe the strength is in letting go. Maybe it's about helping people let you go." I said. But people hold on. She held on, after that. She held on until right after my father died. We hold on though. To previous versions of ourselves. We hold on to our previous statuses. Student. Daughter. Up and comer. Full of promise. We hold on to patterns even when they don't serve us. I see this in yoga students. I see the need to hold on. Clutching shoulders to ears as tight as possible. Holding on to always doing the hardest version of a pose. Holding on to wrenching yourself into a bind in a forward bend even though, on that day, your shoulders want only softness. We hold on, because sometimes that is what holds us together. If I asked you to abandon a dream, long after it was clear it was impossible, would you shatter? Some might. We hold on, because those patterns tell stories about us. If we've always dated women who found that we came up short, then we always have something to move on, to move towards. Self-improvement is an anesthetic. Ambition is a pain killer. Holding on to the idea that we aren't right yet, keeps us from experiencing the day to day. Especially when the day to day is too hard to swallow. The strength is in the letting go, each day, repeatedly. The strength is in the letting go, with no idea of where to put pain. No idea where to put longing or grief. Where to put the discomfort of a change in life. But as a teacher, I know that holding on is sometimes what holds us together. If the hardest, twisty-est pose keeps you from drowning, then by all means, carry on. The plant, the one I clutched, it held on, despite my various attempts at killing it. Succulents don't like corners of kitchens without sun. They prefer water, from time to time. They don't like being moved twice in cold air in the same month. It held on until it was through with me and left me with just my pretty pot. While I should probably avoid disclosing my plant-killing ways, the truth is, I bought another one. I promised this one, that it would be free of threats of planticide. I put it in a window, with sun. No holding on. I won't take someone's choice to hold on or let go away from them. But maybe I can make a little space to show that there is a choice. I teach vinyasa flow classes. I teach vinyasa classes, laced with the hatha training I had 8 years ago, with a healthy dose of the integral yoga I practiced for years and learned at the ashram, and coupled with Curvy Yoga and trauma training.
My classes are trauma-informed. But what do I mean when I say that? I have been bumping up against a lot of trainings over the last year that say they teach trauma-informed classes. And when I decode it, they are speaking of classes for those who've survived sexual violence. An important topic. Something every yoga teacher should be educated about. But that's not what I mean when I say trauma-informed. In her very excellent book on trauma and the body, Babette Rothschild speaks of how we hold memories in the body. How the body refuses to be ignored in the processing of the trauma. But all trauma. All trauma impacts the body. A lot of trauma is about the body. Being thrown violently from a horse you trusted. A nightmare car accident injuring your closest friends you couldn't stop no matter how you screamed at the other driver. The rape survivor holds her/his memories in the body differently than the grown up version of the 8 year old who watched his father beat the crap out of his mom, powerless to intervene. Both survived trauma. One may want to feel empowered. For another, there will never be enough power, there will never be enough strength. One may need to feel safe. Another may need to feel. Every person's experience of trauma is different. Every person's body's reaction to trauma is different. The goal in teaching a trauma-informed class, in my mind, is to pass on the knowledge of how the body works, how the body responds, to students in the moment of experiencing their body, so that they can, in their way, on their time, make sense of their own experiences. The goal in teaching a trauma-informed class is not to bubble-wrap the trauma survivor so that they can be protected as they move through life. Obviously, a caveat for those newly processing their trauma. But the goal in any process that supports healing from trauma is not to allow the survivor to remain static. It is to allow the trauma survivor to integrate the experience, find meaning, and move forward as a whole person. That is our right, as humans: to have a whole experience. Let me just emphasize that again. That is our right, as humans: to have a whole experience. But short-sighting what trauma means to only include sexual violence denies that right to others. It denies the suffering of the cat lover who watched her beloved die in front of her, powerless to stop it. It denies the suffering of the mother who watched her newborn baby slip away to a genetic anomaly. My students arrive in class with their whole selves. I teach them. I teach every part of them, every experience they are willing to show up with. I teach them, hopefully, to feel; to make choices; to experiment; to take care of themselves; to dig in when being intense feels like what's needed and to back off when being soft is the hardest thing they've done all day. I teach them breath. I teach them mindfulness. I walk in with a lesson plan and carefully, deliberately, (and often repeatedly) ditch my instinct to heal or fix my students. That's what I mean when I say I teach trauma-informed classes. Yes, this blog post is going to involve a yoga selfie. I normally don't go for that kind of thing, though I like looking at other people's selfies in crazy yoga poses when they have that "HOLY CATS, I CAN'T BELIEVE IT" look on their faces. So recently, I have been trying to nail tittibhasana. Firefly pose. Because its about the light. Because my spiritual practice these days has been to remind myself, continuously, over and over again, that not only am I full of light, but I am the light. So much so, that I can give it away to others. So thus, the quest began to nail that yoga pose.
I figured, anything more than a second or two of my feet off the ground would count. It's what I tell my students anyway. But here's where the magic happens. At some point, repeatedly doing the same thing over and over, with more emphasis, or determination, or core strength, nothing much happened. I extended from one second of feet off the ground, to two or three. But last night I remembered a cue, to drop your pelvis/hip area towards the ground. To literally sit back into the pose. And before I knew it I was flying. The change was literally moving my hips back one inch. One single, small inch. Small things have a great impact. Sometimes, the change only has to be small. With the seasons changing, it seems helpful, sometimes, to remember that we can change. Whatever you are stuck in now, it can't last. If change is the only constant, then the uncomfortable can't remain forever. The terrible job? It will eventually go away. The problematic relationship? Eventually one of you will let go. We are beings of potential, of stories yet to come. I teach people mindfulness. I teach them mindful breathing and practices. I teach mindfulness based meditation. But sometimes, sometimes the key to the witches in your head telling you lies about your competence, your skills, your place in the world, is more than mindful breathing. Sometimes the key to dismantling those witches lies in the space of your body. The key, I think, to undoing the black magic of overthinking, is to occupy your body for a little while. To find some respite from all that negativity and judging by feeling the sensations of what's happening in your body.
Mindfulness has us experience our bodies, our experiences, our sensations breath by breath. It calls for a moment by moment noting of what is going on around and in us. If your brain is chaotic, then mindfulness can help it slow down to just one experience. But if your brain is the culprit of a wave of negativity that wants to try to pull you under, gripping at your feet until you lose your balance, then mindfulness may not be the key to getting away. You can't wash away the water with more water. Instead, practicing embodiment may be the fire needed to dry up some of the watery mess of overthinking. Staying still and feeling your weight pressing into the ground, the chair, your bed, can help you get out of your head. Of course, a mix of mindfulness and embodiment needs to happen on a daily basis, to operate in the world without going loopy. A friend and I were talking about the amazing life changes another friend was weathering with a kind of grace that, from the outside, looked superhuman. This superfly friend said of the other one, "that's where her yoga took her." Which made me think, I should really get back to my practice so it can change me more.
And then. And then beating myself up about not having my financial house in spitshine state, I stopped myself with a breath of compassion and thought, "Oh wait, I did that big career change thing. That thing other people told me I was stupid, crazy, or both, to do." Maybe my yoga had changed me, liquified parts of my heart that were cemented over and allowed them to flow, just a little, back into my daily life. So yes, I need to post up all the beautiful little bits of inspiration I use in teaching my classes. I need to tuck them into this little blog like a chickadee tucks scraps of paper into her nest. I need to update my playlists on this blog to include three more playlists, that yes, all involve that one Duran Duran song. I tell my students at the end of class, "It took you an hour to slow down, don't rush to wrap up and leave." So I offer myself the same advice, it took me all year to learn to melt. No need to rush to document it. Taking yoga off the mat, for some people, involves the idea of self-less service or seva. We most often use the tern seva to mean work performed without any reward, without any thought of repayment. It is work, most often charity work, that is done to better one's community. But if we are bettering our community, aren't we then receiving a reward (e.g. the better community that we can then live in)?
I work through my church with a volunteer matching program called Growth Through Service. The idea is to match church goers with volunteer activities at the church that track their interests and spiritual growth. Sometimes people can't grasp the idea that service or volunteer work is more than grudgingly making the coffee after church. It's more than showing up to rake leaves because that's what you should do. In doing that volunteer work for the church, I've run across a few quotes that struck me about the relationship between service and spirituality. One that sticks with me is this one: There is a higher purpose to your life, a special contribution you came to make. Part of your reason for coming to earth is to evolve yourself as well as to serve humanity in come way. We will call the process of evolving yourself your life purpose, and the service you came to offer humanity your life's work. They are intertwined, because as you serve others you will naturally evolve yourself. As you evolve and radiate more light, you automatically serve others. --Sanaya Roman When I went to Haiti after the quake to do a needs assessment at a school for children who had lost a parent or significant family member, I went with the intention of offering what I knew: how yoga can calm, restore, and ground. But I was profoundly challenged by being in a developing country, one where as a single woman from the US many men thought it was open season to harass me, and where I saw crushing poverty up close. I was changed. The service I did struck me, made me look at my own life and what I had to offer. I returned, not dispirited or disillusioned, but with a profound understanding that my offering of service didn't need to be huge or complex or anything other than doing what I could for people immediately in front of me. To offer service, to do volunteer work, I had to be slightly uncomfortable. To grow, to change, to move in any new direction, we have to get slightly uncomfortable. A friend and fellow yoga teacher Susi Costello often says that the healing power of yoga is that it teaches us how to get comfortable with being slightly uncomfortable. So if yoga teaches us how to get comfortable with the space for growth, and service provides us with opportunities for growth, then it makes sense that seva is such a part of yoga, right? Except for that self-less part. If what we do is done with the idea that we will get no reward, then how does it fit in with the idea that service and spirituality are linked? I think the better explanation is that service helps us be less self-focused. In doing any kind of service, we prepare to give up a little on who we think we are. We let go a little on an attachment to how we define ourselves. Service in this way is self-less, in that it allows us to be less and less about the self. I admit to being obsessed with anatomy these days. I can never get enough. All my years of teaching body positive yoga sometimes comes down to trying, fervently, with the passion of a preacher in a field, to explain to yoga students just how insanely intricate and amazing our bodies are. We truly are made beautifully, intelligently, and fiercely. When I stop and think about how the hip joint works, there is no space left for thinking about whether my hips are bigger or less round or flatter or any judgment word than they should be.
So too goes for how the stress response system works in the body. We ache in our hearts when we are hurt. We have physical pain in our guts when we try to act or do or follow through on something we don't believe in or feels fraudulent. And so too goes for curling up into ourselves when we are stressed or feel vulnerable. I taught an entire class on the sneaky psoas muscle - the one that teachers mention that you can never quite find - the muscle that involves both lower back and hip flexors. But I stumbled upon this quote that sums up again, the relationship between the body and mood and all things. Part of the stress response hard wired into our nervous system is the contraction of the major flexors of the torso - somewhat like the response of a caterpillar if you poke it with a twig. A verbal jab from a co-worker, the close call on the freeway, a long-standing argument with your spouse, free-floating anxiety - all of these elicit a contraction of the flexors. As with all responses to stress, the problem is that the response becomes habitual, resulting in chronic tension and contraction which we experience as our "normal" state. Our yoga practice is an opportunity to undo this chronic tension, and establish a deep and abiding sense of harmony in the body and mind. The full article on the psoas is here, from Yoga International. But my invitation stands - start seeing your body as miraculous, preciously made and you will start crowding out space for judging it. |