You're not a fraud!
It’s been in the ‘field’ recently, because a number of people have shared with me how they feel a fraud for working in the capacity of Reiki healer or yoga teacher when they are still healing themselves and dealing with their own trauma, insecurities and lack of self-worth.
I have fallen into this trap in the past too, of believing that I had to have all my ‘stuff’ sorted to work in a healing and yogic capacity. I used to put all my yoga teachers up on pedestals, for example, thinking that they had it sorted, that they were wiser and somehow better than me; healed and enlightened. Not that I had any evidence that this was the case, beyond my own perception of what it might mean to be a ‘proper’ yoga teacher and/or Reiki practitioner.
And this is often the problem that we face; our own minds and what we believe to be right or wrong and our (mis)perceptions and expectations of what a particular ‘role’ in life might look like. Others will feed into this with their perception and expectation of what they think your life should look like too. Many yoga students assume that yoga teachers are vegan-eating, calm and centred semi-enlightened beings. This couldn’t be farther from the truth!
We are all human and we are all doing the best we can, and those of us yoga teachers and healers are trying to find our way just like everyone else. As E always says, we’re probably more neurotic than most, and it is this, and our own suffering, that has led us to yoga and healing in the first place. More fool anyone for putting themselves on a pedestal and putting out to the world that they are sorted, because it will always catch up on you in the end.
I suppose this had been on my mind, when quite by chance, or not perhaps, I stumbled across reference to Michael Stone on a yoga website a few weeks ago. Michael was a psychotherapist, yoga teacher, Buddhist teacher, author and activist, committed to the integration of traditional teachings with contemporary psychological and philosophical understanding. He hosted sell-out seminars, retreats, conferences and workshops related to Buddhism across Canada and around the world.
Married with two children and another on the way, he died from a drug overdose in Victoria on Vancouver Island at the age of 42 in 2017. Unbeknown to his students or the outer world, Michael was suffering quietly with bipolar disorder and several months before his death, his mania began to cycle more rapidly. Until that point he had been managing his mental health through Buddhism and yoga for years, but had sought medical help in the months leading up to his death.
A statement at the time of his death said, “He went to bed early. He ate a special diet…He saw naturopaths and herbalists and trainers and therapists. As things worsened, he turned to psychiatry and medication as well. Balancing his meds was ever-changing and precarious”. The statement went on to say that Michael kept his condition private because he “feared the stigma of his diagnosis…[but] he was on the cusp of revealing publicly how shaped he was by bipolar disorder and how he was doing”.
I was shocked when I read all this and felt sad that Michael hadn’t felt he could share his suffering with his students, as if he might be judged, or his sharing might somehow negate his teachings, cause others to question them. His website reads, “Michael was on the cusp of revealing publicly how his life was shaped by bipolar disorder. It was complicated though. As a spiritual teacher for whom so many looked to for stability, he wondered if it was better to hide his own fragility. As a psychotherapist, he was trained to put his own stuff aside in order to work with others. He was also a human who felt—and was allowed to feel—the stigma, shame, and self-consciousness that comes with a mental health diagnosis in a culture that largely doesn’t know how to deal with neurodiversity.”
It is complicated. There is a certain vulnerability that comes with being deeply authentic in this world with all its expectations, and especially when we have such high expectations for ourselves too. As many of you will know I have a history of depression and have been trying to write about it in a manuscript these last few years. The writing has taken me on an inner journey as I have been required to dig deep and resolve those aspects of self that still held an emotional resonance, that were still impacting on my mind, feeding into false perception and continuing to support – in many respects – my suffering.
During lock-down I dropped into a dark night of the soul and the depression felt all too real. It was all part of the process, and was necessary for my writing and own self-healing. A friend asked how it was that I could continue teaching and I remarked that it is in the teaching and the attempt at being there for others that keeps me grounded and helps support my own healing – life continues anon and I want to be a part of that, not hide away from it, because I feel that my life should look a certain way if I am to be a compassionate and effective teacher or human being.
This is reflected to a point by Michael’s website, which further reads, “Michael loved his students and he loved his work. The practices he shared through workshops, retreats, and writing were a life raft for him. His work inspired and grounded him. As a neurodiverse person living with internal instability, he channelled his challenges and the insights gleaned from his experience into tools that he could share with others. It could be argued that it was in experiencing these challenges that Michael became so effective as a teacher and communicator. For someone facing his kinds of suffering, he did really, really well.”
This raises a very important point, especially for those who are battling with their ‘goodness’ and ability to teach/heal others when they are going through the mill themselves. It is only through our experiences that we grow as conscious human beings, that we gain insight and are en-lightened of the human condition. Let us not forget that we are in this together – we are all connected and are a micro of the macro. Our challenges are here to help us to grow and it is through our compassionate sharing that we can help to support others as they too navigate their challenges; empathy, understanding and compassion are paramount to the healing process.
Authenticity is crucial too. Without this, we are kidding ourselves as much as we are kidding others and we are setting ourselves up for a fall. This also comes with experience, the dropping away of the layers that prevent us from being honest with ourselves and allowing more of our vulnerability. It is a never ending process and demands patience and kindness towards the self. Unfortunately our ‘quick fix’ culture, especially influenced by the allopathic world, does very little to support this, and it is common place to find yoga and Reiki students grasping for the ‘cure’, the course, workshop, training and/or attunement that will suddenly make them whole and fix them.
It will all help, of course, but it takes time and honesty, getting out of our denial, and the tendency towards self-sabotage and the misperception that we have to have it all sorted otherwise what right do we have to help others – buying into the idea that we are indeed a fraud. It’s tricky territory, because as soon as we start buying into this, we start to give ourselves a hard time and our internal critic reigns as we feed into the negative self-talk and add to the weight of our lack of self-worth, which underpins so much of this.
I went through this not that long ago so write with some degree of experience. Fortunately my healing friend, Jo, pulled me up on it and I am more aware of catching myself now. I have had a skin condition for three years now, which has gotten worse over that time. I have been trying to treat it holistically, mainly through Ayurveda. I can see so clearly why it is there from an Ayurvedic perspective, but have ‘struggled’ (this word is the give-away!) to heal it myself. I felt like a fraud – how can I possibly help others to heal Ayurvedically, when it didn’t appear to be working for me.
This train of thinking did nothing to ease the bout of depression. I was giving myself a really hard time, to the extent that my spirit flagged and I questioned whether I might continue working in a ‘healing’ capacity. I went to the doctor in the end, which was a big deal for me, because until that point, despite the many lessons I have learned through my experience with conception and birth, I still held onto the notion that allopathic treatment is bad, holistic is good; the mind was buying into the separation and thus creating some inner-disharmony.
The doctor diagnosed peri-oral dermatitis, which was a huge relief, to finally have a diagnosis and something to work with and I wished it hadn’t taken me so long to ‘surrender’ to seeking allopathic help (and having to therefore let go of my notion of right/wrong, good/bad – it amuses me how we create so much of our own suffering through our perceptions). I was prescribed three months’ worth of anti-biotics, which caused me to actually laugh out loud in the doctor’s surgery, because of course I know only too well that what we resist persists - I have been a vocal advocate against antibiotics for a good while now and this was strengthened when I saw for myself the damage they caused when Eben was prescribed them at birth; even now his tummy is still not healed.
It was a big deal for me to take the tablets, and yet I learned so much about my mind during the experience, that has been helpful. It kickstarted too my research into peri-oral dermatitis, which is of course not straight forward to treat, why would it be, how would I grow if there wasn’t a healing challenge to resolve! The anti-biotics will help to an extent, but will not get to the cause - any skin condition, as I know only too well, is linked to the heart and involves a good look at self-love and the manner in which we self-harm, and it is intrinsically linked to stress too, which is ironic, is it not, for a yoga teacher to be stressed!
Yet stressed I can be, in my effort to be all things, to live up to my cultural expectation and my own inner drive towards achieving and being of some use and purpose in this world - living life to the full, helping and knowing more of my own mind in the process; in short, becoming conscious. Reading about Michael, it struck me that this might well have underpinned so much of his motivation too and I couldn’t say it better than the words used on his website:
“Considering his practice and teaching, it’s easy to wonder how he could’ve died. We could instead ask, how did he live so well considering the power of his neurodiverse wiring? What can we learn about our own minds and hearts from someone who visited the front lines of the mind? There is an all too common theme in yoga and dharma worlds: if you practice deeply enough, you will heal, and if you don’t heal, your practice or something in you is flawed. This is not true.”
I agree; I know that those teachers and friends who have inspired me the most, are those that have gone through, and are going through their own mill. These are the people who are doing work on themselves, who embrace the challenges, because it gives them something to work with. Yoga and meditation are practices, they provide us with tools to help us navigate our way through life, they are not the cure in themselves, it is only when we work with them that we might come to heal more of ourselves. So it is the same with Reiki and Ayurveda – we adopt the principles so that they become a part of our life; we live them.
There are times when we need help from others, when we need counselling or therapy, when we need allopathic medicine. All of these I have called on over the last few years; nine months ago I went through a course of EDMR because the yoga and the Reiki and the Ayurveda had got me so far, unravelled some of the trauma, but I was struggling to let it go and EDMR helped me through this process and I shall be forever grateful to Marni Alexendra for that (life changing) processing.
We should not feel it is a sign of weakness or be shamed by the need to seek professional help or to allow our students to know what we are going through; we are all only human, even those of us teaching yoga. We need to give ourselves a break and allow the break downs to help us to break through whatever is getting in our way. Sometimes we are our own obstacle because we feel we have to look, act or be perceived a particular way. It takes a lot of energy to keep up this pretence and half our problem is letting go of that and this idea of an image that we want to present to the world.
I am grateful to the depression and also to the peri-oral dermatitis, for both have given me a reason to dig deep and learn more about healing and about myself. My learnings have helped me to be kinder and more compassionate to myself, forgiving and letting go of stubborn unforgiveness and having greater compassion and empathy for others too, so that my experience informs my work and I may share from a place of deeper awareness and integrity.
I suspect the depression will always come and go for it is a messenger that shows me where I need to let go of holding in my mind, of mental constructs which are limiting me and the process of letting go allows me to breakthrough to another level of consciousness so that the world appears brighter, with more potential than I could have ever possible imagined - as if a new world awaits if only I could get out of my own way (depression helps this). As for the peri-oral dermatitis, I’m not quite sure where this is taking me, but I’m flowing with it as best I can and increasingly accepting that we are more than the face we put out to the world!
To those of you battling with this idea that you have to be whole and healed to do the work you do, give yourself a break: it is your humanness that will inspire others, and allow them to be more of who they are, not your denial of it. The more you can allow your authentic self its expression, with all its messiness and contradictions, the more it gives others permission to awaken and acknowledge those aspects of self that might require attention. It is in our healing that we help others to heal, it is in our growing and expansion that we allow others to grow and expand too. I’m grateful to Michael, for his story has allowed me to own more of my truth - thank you.
Love Emma x
