Yoga practice and our patriarchal conditioning

My last blog was exploring patriarchy and the effect on our conditioning and began to touch on how this might have influenced our approach to yoga, and whether this has been healthy, especially for us women. 

What I mean by that, is whether the style of yoga we practice, whether a trend or not, is harmonising any energetic imbalances, especial from a divine masculine/feminine perspective and helping to set up free from our conditioning and perceived limitations which literally limit us and keep us stuck in more of the same.

My favourite quote of all time as many of you know is by Henry Ford,

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” 

I have become increasingly curious whether repeating the same approach to practice over and over again helps or hinders and whether repeating someone else’s approach to practice – yin or yang - allows us our freedom. 

As I explore this further, I have found it helpful to remind myself of the origins of our modern day approach to yoga and I share a little of this now. Please note that I am not a historian and am relying on information shared with me by my teachers and by what I have read previously. 

It all started with Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (18 November 1888 – 28 February 1989), who was an Indian yoga teacher, Ayurvedic healer and scholar, often called the ‘Father of Modern Yoga’. He is seen as one of the most important gurus of modern yoga for his wide influence on the development of postural yoga. Like Yogendra and Kuvalayananda, he contributed to the revival of hatha yoga because of their emphasis on the physical. 

Krishnamacharya’s students include many of yoga’s most renowned and influential teachers, notably Indra Devi (1899-2002), K Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009), BKS Iyengar (1918-2014), and his own son, TKV Desikachar. As is the traditional way, Krishnamacharya taught each student depending on their individual needs, which is the reason that they each went on to teach quite differently and yet had a massive influence on the yoga that we know today, probably infusing the style of yoga that you yourself practice. 

For example:

Indra Devi – was a pioneering teacher of yoga as exercise, having been the first woman to study under Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, alongside BKS Iyengar and K Pattabhi Jois. She went to India in her twenties (born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia) and became a film star. 

She was invited later to a wedding in Mysore where Krishnamacharya lived and worked, and she asked him if she could study with him but he refused, stating that he did not teach women or foreigners. Indra was disappointed but determined and she approached her friend, the Maharaja, Krishnamacharya’s employer, and he directed Krishnamacharya to instruct her. Krishnamacharya hesitantly took Indra as a student. Apparently, he was strict and difficult with her in the hope that she might quit.

Krishnamacharya ordered Indra to follow a strict vegetarian diet and a difficult daily schedule. To his surprise she showed dedication studying asana and pranayama for eight months alongside Iyengar and Jois.

Krishnamacharya gained increasing respect for her and his son, Desikachar, said later that Indra changed his father’s viewpoint, with Krishnamacharya later saying that “women are the future in yoga and for yoga in the West”.

While Indra started teaching in China, she moved to the US and set up a yoga studio in West Hollywood in 1947, where she taught celebrities including Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Gloria Swanson. Here she earned herself the nickname, “first lady of yoga”. Her biographer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Devi “planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s”. 

Michelle also commented that for most of her life, Devi’s only goal was to bring yoga to the West, which certainly has been the case and she played a significant role in helping to make it a predominantly female pursuit, even if the yoga that has become popular is much more vigorous than the style Devi taught – and note that the style she taught, is not the style taught to her by Krishnamacharya, she developed her own style to teach to Westerners.  

K Pattabhi Jois

Krishnamacharya started teaching Jois, an Indian, when he was only 12 years old. At that time he needed a practice that promoted his growth and vitality through his teenage years. Apparently Krishnamacharya researched an ancient text he called the Yoga Korunta in 1924 and he shared this with Jois. He claimed to have learned the text from his own teacher named Rama Mohan Brahmachari on a supposed seven year stay in the Himalayas. The practices included asana (postures), vinyayas (connecting movements), pranayama (breathing exercises), bandhas (core muscular and energetic locks) and drishti (visual focal points). Jois systemised this approach and went on to share it as Ashtanga yoga.

This is the style of yoga that first drew me in. I was very much in my masculine energy, playing competitive sports and working my way up the career ladder, competing with the men for managerial positions, wearing suits to boot and seeking perfection in everything I did. It’s perhaps not surprising that I wasn’t happy, never quite living up to my idea of perfection, suffering from eating disorder, depression, PMS and a strong dislike for myself. 

I was out of balance and yoga was a gift which entered my life at just the right time. While Ashtanga yoga is not inherently competitive, it did allow me to apply my competitive nature to it, because it follows a set sequence and one cannot progress to the next level until all the postures in the first level have been mastered. I was competing with myself as much as I was competing with everyone else in the room. 

I had been taught by my patriarchal conditioning to achieve, to prove myself, to progress in some way into a future where I would be successful, perfect, and finally experience happiness. Obviously this is an illusion but I bought into it and invested in it because I knew no different, and yoga was now offering me another path to this end goal of success, perfection and happiness, just I’d do it on my mat now. Ha.

Not only that but the athletic nature of the practise, with its emphasis on strength and flexibility, came easily to my body, it was used to me working out and pushing it. I loved that I could practice many of the strengthening postures comfortably while others struggled, and that my flexibility could be enhanced by really pushing it – I could quickly see the ‘results’ and it didn’t take me long to establish a dedicated daily practice to further ‘progress’. In reality I was really caught up in my masculine energy and had the shoulders to prove it!

This is not to say that things weren’t changing, they were. Yoga by its very nature changes things. Only that this approach to practice allowed me to bypass a lot of my body issues, making me even more obsessed about the external, feeding my obsession with it, and encouraging more of the same in my mind, increased rigidity and emphasis on a linear ‘progress’ approach, and left me frequently disappointed when I still found that I didn’t really like myself very much, despite my trying to perfect my practice. 

A year into my yoga practice, I ventured to Byron Bay, the yoga capital of Australia at that time to immerse myself in yoga. Here I discovered what was called dynamic yoga, a combination of Ashtanga and Iyengar, which I had not practiced previously.

Iyengar yoga arose from BKS Iyengar, another Indian student of Krishnamacharya, who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Iyengar had been very sick as an infant and throughout his childhood he struggled with malaria, TB, typhoid, fever and general malnutrition. Krishnamacharya asked Iyengar to join him in Mysore and improve his health through the practice of yoga postures. During a two year period, while Krishnamacharya only taught Iyengar for about 10-15 days, these teachings had a positive influence on Iyengar and when he was 18 Krishnamacharya sent Iyengar to Pune to spread the teachings of yoga. 

Iyengar’s approach to yoga postures is focused on strict alignment principles, this because he was coming at it from a health perspective and was very specific about how a student should place their body to improve their health. This of course, a different approach to Jois, who had arrived to yoga, not through ill health, but with a need for a practice that promoted his vitality during his teenage years. Both of them, Jois and Iyengar, shared the same teacher, but the practices given to them were very different and what they did with those teachings was also very different.

The way they were taught was also different. I won’t go into this now because it’s a whole massive subject all of itself around heart and compassion and the manner in which yoga influences us on that level. From what I gather Krishnamacharya was tough on his students, easily criticising them and especially Iyengar. It is said that Iyengar never really recovered from the criticism he received, and it was not unusual for him to bark at his students and be hard on them too, sometimes slapping them to wake up a part that may have been unconscious. 

Iyengar attracted his students by offering them just what they sought – usually physical stamina and flexibility.  He conducted demonstrations and later, when a scooter accident dislocated his spine, began exploring the use of props to help disabled people practice yoga. Propping in yoga has continued to this day, albeit this is not something that is used in the Ashtanga tradition. Here Jois was renowned for giving intense adjustments taking students beyond their physical and psychological comfort zone that at times caused injury in his students, and now we are aware that he was sexually abusing them too. See, a whole other subject about ethics and morality, for another time perhaps. 

Here in Australia the dynamic yoga classes sought to combine the two approaches, namely the precision of bodily alignment and the focus that this demands, (the perfection one might say) and the movement of the body linked with the breath through set patterns. Both systems promoted strength, stamina, flexibility and balance. 

I was quickly hooked not least because I felt infinitely better for the practice, but simply because of my obsession with perfecting and advancing my yoga practice and here was an approach that not only fed my need for physical workout but also fed my need for perfection, because the strict alignment principles now gave me something to work with – a right way or a wrong way, black or white. This regardless of my body and its needs, or whether putting my body in such a strict shape was healthy for it or not. That didn’t matter, my body needed to fit the pose, not the other way around. 

I was soon practising up to six hours a day with two male teachers mainly, feeding an eating disorder by living on fruit alone (I wanted to have the perfect yoga body, which I believed to be very light and lean) and it is perhaps not surprising that my periods stopped. I was jubilant, no menstruation getting in the way of my practice, but really what it showed was that I was not healthy, feeding my masculine energy, which was out of balance in the first place.

It took me a long time to let go of this approach to yoga which I taught for many years and was well received by my students because they too were often caught in the patriarchal conditioning of exercise, perfection and achievement.

Even when I found my teacher who tried to untrain me and open me up to a more feminine approach to practice, I would still find myself practising in my old masculine way, after our lessons together, because in my mind I had to push and jump around my mat if I hoped to see change. What I failed to realise, was that the greatest change, at least on the inside, would come when I let go of my yoga practice having to be a certain way – the way taught to me mainly by men previously. 

There was one other influential student taught by Krishnamacharya, namely his son, TKV Desikachar, born in Mysore in 1938. Desikachar had a formal education which cumulated in a degree in engineering. However, shortly after beginning his career in this field, he decided to become a yoga teacher after a realisation of the great skills and knowledge that his father was offering.

He asked his father to be his teacher and guide and stayed at his side and learned from him until his death at 100. Desikachar founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai in his father’s honour.

Early in Desikachar’s yoga teaching and studies, his father asked him to teach the famous philosopher, Krishnamurti. This led to him accompanying Krishnamurti on a lecture tour of Europe and began his involvement with Western students, many of whom then committed themselves to 2 to 3 years of practice with him in India. As they in turn returned home, they set out to spread the teachings to a wider western audience with the main message that yoga practice needs to be tailored to suit the individual, more like bespoke tailoring that “off the peg”.

This was very much the approach of his father, Krishnamcharya, who considered every student as "absolutely unique" and incorporated his knowledge of Ayurveda working with his students on a number of levels including adjusting their diet, creating herbal medicines and setting up a series of yoga postures that would be most beneficial. Krishnamacharya particularly stressed the importance of combining breath work (pranayama) with the postures (asanas) of yoga and meditation (dhyana)) to help them heal and reach their goal. 

Furthermore, he believed that the most important aspect of teaching yoga was that the student be "taught according to his or her individual capacity at any given time". Thus, for Krishnamacharya, the path of yoga meant different things for different people, and each person ought to be taught in a manner that he or she understood clearly.

I am now very fortunate to have two wonderful female teachers in my life who very much adopt this approach. I met both ladies by chance – thank you synchronistic nature of the universe - when I was stuck in my dynamic vinyasa practice when my boys were little. That approach to practice had taken me so far, and I am grateful for those teachings, but as I have mentioned, it got to a point where it was merely feeding more of what now needed to be healed and shifted and I absolutely needed to begin to let go of my patriarchal conditioning and find a more feminine approach to practice instead to set me and my students free.

The first to come in was Helen, who is a TSYP teacher, this the Society of Yoga Practitioners who follow the teachings of T Krishnamacharya and TKV Desikachar. She has taught me Vedic chanting, philosophy, especially the teachings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and asana and pranayama. Her approach has always been about what I most need and while it has been difficult at times, calming and slowing things down, I can now really appreciate the benefits of practicing in a way that is so very different to the dynamic vinyasa approach.

I was also led to Louise who is a Scaravelli-inspired teacher. Vanda Scaravelli, an Italian yogini was taught by both Iyengar and Desikachar as well as being good friends with Krishnamurti. She never wanted a lineage named after her, albeit she does have a following of students who will align with her as Scaravelli-inspired teachers. She developed an interest in the breath, gravity and the spine and her work has influenced the teachings which I receive, on a one to one basis mainly, to give me what I most need. Practicing like this has been life changing, no longer does my body have to fit the pose, the pose finds expression through my body. 

And maybe that is where I was getting to with all this. Because my teaching has inevitably changed in recent years as I have connected with parts of myself that were previously not allowed expression, the parts that I rejected because they didn’t fit my patriarchal conditioning, but which were desperate for my attention. It is in this way that my body has healed and my relationship with my menstrual cycle and what it means to be a woman and my sexuality and creativity have improved exponentially as I have reclaimed more of my feminine energy. 

Not only that but some of my fundamental core beliefs about the world and my place in it have changed as I have progressively let go of some of my conditioning and rigidity of mind, seeing through a little bit more of the illusion in the process. The joy of the Scaravelli-inspired approach to practice is one of energy and working with the body not against it. The joy of the TSYP approach to yoga is one of truly connecting with the breath and allowing more calmness because of it. Both approaches have helped me to let go of the notion of things having to be a certain way on my mat – black or white – which has been increasingly reflected in my life.

There is always more practice to be done, more to learn, and more to let go of in the process, more undoing, resting, being and trusting, but one thing that stands out as I approach 20 years of almost daily practice, is the need to honour our needs and what we most need in any moment, not because it is a trend, or someone has told us so, but because we are being increasingly honest with ourselves and the way we are living our life and what might then need to change. 

As a society it seems to me that we need less power and fast and push and rush and external, and more slow and gentle and inward and letting go and being and accepting and receiving. It’s about wholeness essentially and taking from the practice what enhances this rather than takes away from it. It’s an ongoing journey, an imperfect one at that, but this is the thing, life is perfect simply because of its imperfections and our honesty and authenticity. 

This exploration has been helpful because I can more clearly see why we have gotten to where we have gotten to these days as yoga begins to lose some of its popularity, this because people were sold more of the same – perfection, yoga body and endless calmness, happiness and joy. We have to be realistic. Life is messy and chaotic. We cannot expect a continuous state of being. Even enlightenment comes in flashes. 

Hopefully this sets us free from the patriarchal conditioning of perfection and achievement even on our mat and allows us to be more accepting of each moment as it arises and passes. We are part of a whole. My previous blog post explored this. Always a death leads to a new beginning. To try to maintain a linear approach is merely feeding more of what is out of balance in this world. Honouring our own nature is essential, so too our natural constitution. 

Practising in a way that creates greater harmony, encourages more of our whole is perhaps where the emphasis should be nowadays. This requires discernment and the courage to be true, to sift through our conditioning which runs deep. We have grown up in a patriarchal world and it has affected not only our world view but our relationship with our self and – at times – our choice in our approach to yoga practice. We need to be conscious of the effect our practice has on us. 

Stopping Sea Swimming: How it was beginning to harm me

It might come as a surprise to some of you, but I have stopped regular sea swimming! After 11 years of year-round and virtually daily sea swimming, I have finally acknowledged that my body isn’t happy with it.  I have known for a while, but I kept ignoring my body, because in my head, sea swimming is good -  and it can be, and could be again, but right now, my body has had enough! 

It’s been an interesting journey for me though, to acknowledge that I needed to stop. Even two years ago I started noticing that I didn’t always feel so good after a swim; I mean I felt good because I always enjoy an opportunity to get to the beach and be around the sea, but being in the cold and often rough water in the middle of winter when it was wet and windy, was leaving me feeling cold for a good while afterwards, albeit it ticked a box, ‘swimming done’. 

It was a bout of depression that brought me to swimming in the sea and I found it especially helpful during IVF and two pregnancies, swimming right up until birth - it was actually one of the last things I did before both births, and it was one of the first things I did upon leaving hospital, this after two Caesarean sections. Not that I was able to swim having just had surgery, but I would stand in the water, in mid-November for my first born (with extremely deleted iron levels, more fool me) and October for my second, so that I could be healed by the water and the connection to nature. 

But the stress of the quest to conceive, plus the stress of complications during both pregnancies and birth, let alone the initial shock and stress of motherhood, now with seven years of sleep deprivation and attempting to be all things, has, without doubt,  taken its toll on my adrenal glands (to say nothing of life lived in the 21st century which, by its very nature, keeps many of us stuck in ‘fight or flight mode’). None of this helped by my gung ho attitude to life; I’m not one to sit on the sofa and watch TV, for example. 

A skin condition and aching kidneys – finally - got my attention and has taken me on an inner journey to – finally - recognise and accept the extent of my ‘running on empty’ and the effect of ‘shock’ and ‘stress’ on the body and the manner in which I still, despite years of daily yoga practice, deny my body wisdom. Albeit I had a niggling, it was only when I discovered the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga practice that I started to emerge from my denial and acknowledge more of my body wisdom and listen to it.

My vinyasa yoga practice had served me well. It helped me to connect with my body and my heart and soul again to the extent that I was changed and my life changed too. But I began to notice how it was also keeping me stuck in old patterns that I was keen to let go of and move on from. I was continuously moving my body in the same way, very much focused on achievement under the guise of ‘deepening my practice’. In reality I wasn’t deepening my practice, I was instead stuck in ‘strengthening the same over-strengthened superficial muscles’ that merely fed the ‘fight or flight’ mode and was no longer allowing me to be deeply changed at all. 

It was seeing a psychologist for an eating disorder that really changed things for me. She told me that eating disorder is something you learn to live with. I wasn’t sure about that. I knew that yoga had helped to change me over the years, there had been healing, I had let go of some old patterns and core beliefs that were no longer serving me, so I had a sense that it could – if I allowed it - also help me to heal from a deeply embedded pattern of disordered eating and harmful relationship to body, and underlying feelings of loss of safety and security. 

But I noticed that vinyasa yoga was only taking me so far, and was no longer helping to shift my fundamental and disharmonious relationship with my body. Sure, it had given me a more toned, flexible, strengthened and lighter body, but it had also made me dependent on this way of practising as if to maintain all these things and ultimately control my body, forcing my will upon it. In short, my ‘athletic’ yoga practice was merely fuelling all the bits that still needed healing, not only my harmful relationship to self, but also patterns of disordered eating - it still wasn’t easy for me to ‘rest’ into myself, for example. 

Such was my attachment to this style of practice though, that even when the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga found me (and which I knew immediately was touching me in ways vinyasa hadn’t, because it involved very gentle and slow movement, which was in such contrast to my ‘fast and strong’ vinyasa practice), it took me over a year of weekly practice with my teacher, before I finally let go of the need to also practice vinyasa. 

Until that point, I would practice with my teacher and then practice ‘yoga’ (vinyasa) as I knew it to be, because I didn’t feel that I had ‘exercised’ my body sufficiently in the session with my teacher, and I was concerned I would lose my ability to ‘perform’ postures, and my body would not be as toned or strong etc. (such was my fear). 

I am not alone. The Western world is obsessed about body image and it is no surprise that yoga attracts lots of women with body issues and patterns of disordered eating. Yoga has also become mainstream now, vinyasa yoga especially, like the Coca Cola of the yoga world, to the extent that Adrienne’s online day 3 January ‘challenge’ (is life not challenging enough without making yoga yet another daily challenge) had received 65k viewers in 6 hours of being published! 

On the one hand, this is amazing, because yoga can change our relationship with self so that we start loving and accepting more of ourselves, but has yoga too, become something we do, just because others are doing it and we’re told it’s good for us? Are people now practising yoga as a form of exercise rather than the spiritual practice that it is at heart, are people practicing in a way that is positively changing them, or is it keeping them stuck in their neurosis, mindlessly and mechanically performing postures for the sake of performing postures, without any heart, and fuelling even more of the superficial, yet ticking the box, ‘yoga done’?

A couple of days ago, I bumped into an ex-student who has recently recovered from major back surgery to the extent that she is now able to practice “hard core yoga” again, her words not mine. Hard core yoga! This, when your spine is already held rigid by the mind, such is the stress that has been placed upon it. I got what she meant, she was delighted to be recovered to the extent that she was back to her usual hard core yoga again, but I had to wonder whether it was the hard core yoga that had merely added to the stress on her spine in the first place – sometimes we need to move on. 

Regardless of approach to yoga, do we really want a hard core, do we really want to fix our spine in space and time, reduce its flexibility and ability to allow us to truly feel and move in the world? I wonder why it is that the ‘exercise’ world has become obsessed with this notion that we need a hard core to support our spine, as if we haven’t survived for all these thousands of years without a technique to harden our core.

It seems crazy to me when our core is our soft underbelly, the part of us that digests our life experiences, that feels life moving through us if we let it. The trouble is we have been told we shouldn’t feel, that feelings are not good, especially if they are feelings of anxiety and fear that can often be felt in our centre, so we turn away from them, numb ourselves to them and try to harden ourselves from them instead.

There will be various motivations for wanting a hard core, but I have noticed that the more I’ve softened into my vinyasa-hard core, and let it go, let it soften, the more at ease I have felt within myself and the more honest I have started to be with myself, the less I want to harm myself (by strengthening my core, for example), allowing more of the wisdom of the voice of my core, of my centre, my gut and root, and the wisdom of the voice of the body generally too.

This, for me, was key to my shift from vinyasa yoga to something much softer and compassionate, something that allows more of who we truly are, beyond the superficial, beyond the layers of denial. Vinyasa yoga, as much as I used to love it, hardened me, and I didn’t want to be hardened anymore. I wanted to feel life and I wanted to give yoga the opportunity to truly heal old patterns around eating disorder and my relationship with myself. I also wanted to be more compassionate to myself, less harmful, less imposing, less wilful, less controlling.  

Furthermore, I wanted to listen more deeply, be more honest, drop the act, let go of the denial, and see through more of the illusion. I needed to let yoga change me, but to do so, I finally realised that I needed to change my relationship to yoga; I needed to let go of seeing yoga as a way to control and exercise my body, I needed to step into my vulnerability and soften into all the hard defensive places I had created in my body and kept hardening through the vinyasa practice. In short, I needed to move on. 

The more I dropped into this, the messier it became, and there have been times where I have wanted to give up, but I also know that I can’t. There is no going back, and on the very few occasions that I have attempted a vinyasa practice, it felt mechanical and forced, as if I was trying to contort my body for the sake of contortion. Yes, I could still go into all the same old poses, but to do so in the old way felt soulless and without compassion and heart; I felt as if I was being disrespectful and harmful to my body.

Through this softer approach to practice, I started to see through more of my escape routes and defences. I began to notice the tendency of my mind towards perfection and over-achievement, to the extent that the self-critic was allowed free reign. I was continuously attached to outcome, feeding a pattern of self-inflicted suffering. We can never achieve perfection however much we might try, yet our society and education system continuously feed us this notion that we can so we are always comparing ourselves to something that doesn’t exist. 

Our yoga practice can feed this, the notion that there is a right and wrong, ‘principles’ that we must adhere to if we hope to progress along the path. The more I was asked to let go of all I knew, of all the conditioning from my yoga training, and as difficult as it was, such was my conditioning towards duality and the right/wrong approach, fed beautifully by our education system and emphasis on science, which always tries to dissect, separate, control and make sense of everything (to make certain things certain), the more I was drawn to yogic philosophy for guidance.

Here I was, yet to find anything that tells us that we must practice asana a particular way, with our foot portioned here and our knee positioned there. Yet our modern day yoga will have us thinking otherwise, that there is a right way and a wrong way, and yet this merely feeds our often-out-of-balance-logical-left-brain approach to life. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras suggest that the postures are practiced with a combination of steadiness and ease, and this with a foundation of ahimsa, non-harming. How many modern day yogis can honestly say they practice like this?

So this brings me to sea swimming. What happens on our mat is a reflection of what happens in our life too. The more I became increasingly compassionate to my body and listened, the more I started to notice the subtle ways in which I harm myself under the guise that what I am doing is helpful and healthy.  Furthermore I noticed that as with my yoga practice, sea swimming had become mechanical, rushed, a tick box exercise. 

I started noticing this with others too, which made me curious. Were we truly enjoying our swims in the sea or were we doing it because this is what we did, because we held on to the notion that it was good for us, based on past experience, and because we felt more comfortable in ourselves if we swam, box ticked? 

It doesn’t help that sea swimming has become trendy these days, with doctors even recommending it to depressed patients. But I’m aware that we have to be careful with trends. Look at the boot camp trend that people embraced in their masses until the number of injuries became so great that people began to realise that maybe it wasn’t so good for them after all – it was harming! 

Anything done to excess or anything that stresses our body is not healthy for us, how can it be? But we don’t always listen to our own wisdom because other people tell us that it is good for us and we believe them. Furthermore, in our quest to help ourselves, we have to be mindful that we aren’t doing more harm, creating greater suffering by allowing more of our tendency towards addiction and attachment, feeding our neuroses rather than healing them.  

I finally began to notice how the drive to ease suffering can cause us more suffering if we cling to it, hold onto it, to the extent that we don’t know when to let it go. This was my issue with vinyasa yoga; I knew that something needed to change, but I didn’t realise that it was my practice that needed to change until Scaravelli-inspired yoga appeared in my life and showed me another way.

It was the same too with sea swimming – my body made it clear to me that it was not enjoying swimming, the poor circulation and the fact it took me half a day to warm up after the briefest of dips, let alone the kidney ache in the early hours of each morning - and the more I noticed my resistance to stopping, the more honest I had to be with myself to the extent that I recognised that sea swimming had become yet another attachment, albeit one under the guise of being ‘healthy’. 

This doesn’t mean that I won’t return to swimming in the sea in the future, but for now it is not helpful. My body is happier, less cold, the kidney ache has gone, and my life is not quite so rushed without the need to get to the beach every day, albeit life is always full, such is the way I live it! It’s not been easy though, because of my attachment, but I could no longer ignore the signs that my body was giving me and I had to finally honour it as my patterns around harm have eased. 

Sometimes we need to accept that we’ve changed and what we need has changed too, so that we can let go and move on into something more aligned with where we are in any given moment. This takes courage because we have to be truly honest with ourselves and compassionate too. But we can be sure that there is always a way, a kinder and less harmful way if we allow it; we just have to pay attention and allow more of our deeper body wisdom. 

Supporting Guernsey Mind through yoga nidra and Reiki

Thank you so much beautiful people for helping to raise £308.50 for Guernsey Mind through yoga nidra and Reiki this evening.

I’m probably biased but I just love a room full of people channelling and receiving Reiki, it’s powerful stuff! I also love sharing a yoga nidra, so it was the perfect evening for me, especially as I taught yoga first too. The Reiki share was a particular highlight, where we linked palms and shared Reiki around the circle, my hands were buzzing!!!

Thank you very much to my helpers too, so much appreciated.

Sending love and Reiki.

Emma xxx

Yoga Nidra!

With the Yoga Nidra session for Guernsey Mind soon approaching I thought maybe I might share an article I wrote that was published by a European yoga & health magazine about seven years ago now. This was before children so I do not reference the way in which my journey with IVF deepened my experience of yoga nidra and helped me recognise more than ever the transformative and supportive nature of this practice.

I write about it in my book, Dancing with the Moon, but yoga nidra really helped me to maintain a positive mind set when it came to my journey to motherhood and I worked a lot with the Sankalpa, “I am pregnant with a healthy baby”. I practiced Yoga nidra a lot, perhaps daily at times, during the post natal period as I found it so incredibly healing and helpful when i was depleted from C-sections and sleep deprivation.

Only now are we beginning to get more sleep, almost seven years on from having our eldest and I still practice yoga nidra a few times a week. It was helpful earlier on this year when I was initially exploring sobriety, and throughout lockdown it helped enormously in managing my angst at not being able to physically teach yoga or give hands on Reiki. It has been extremely helpful in recent months as I work through some old patterns around boundaries and self-worth.

That’s the thing with yoga nidra. It not only makes me feel better, but it actually helps to completely change things, we are potentially transformed by the practice, if we can make the time. This is the reason I am so keen to share it, not simply as a deep guided relaxation, although it is this, but because it literally transforms our mind in a more positive direction if we allow it, almost re-programmes it then. It’s quite remarkable.

Anyhow here’s the article…

When I initially started practicing Yoga almost 10 years ago now, I simply could not relax.  It was impossible.  At the end of the Yoga class when the teacher announced Savasana, I would try and find any possible excuse to leave the class early so that I could avoid the last few minutes of relaxation.  

It was not so much that I was adverse to the idea of relaxation per se, it was more so that I found relaxing so mentally uncomfortable.  There were simply too many thoughts, too many tick lists, too many things I should be doing, rather than simply lying there on the floor trying to relax.

When I first ventured out to Byron Bay in Australia to immerse myself in Yoga a year into my practice, I shall never forget my first 2 hour Yoga session (the normal length of the classes out there at that time).  While I loved every single minute of the asana practice, the problem came, however, with a 20 whole minutes of quiet relaxation at the end of the class.  Proper quiet that is, with no music, no distraction, nothing.  Those were the longest 20 minutes of my life, or so it seemed in that moment! 

Still with me attending these 2 hour sessions once or twice a day every day for a month and unable to leave the class early (many teachers will understandably discourage you from doing so), I quickly developed my own way of dealing with the mental chatter.  I imagined in my mind a train line with open trucks in which I placed each of my thoughts and then watched them pass by, one after the other, until I was able, eventually, to experience some relief from the constant background mental chatter.

Over the next year I practiced a lot of Yoga as I developed my practice both on and off the mat, qualifying as a Yoga teacher in the process.  My ability to relax improved hugely, but it wasn’t until I assisted on a teacher training course at Govinda Valley, Sydney that I discovered the joy and indeed benefit of Yoga Nidra. The relaxation became something I enjoyed rather than something that I endured at the end of a Yoga class.

I can still remember the experience of that first Yoga Nidra clearly.  There we were, the whole class of students, lying comfortably in the corpse pose, a bolster under knees and a blanket covering each of us to keep us warm as the teacher’s gentle voice soothed us into a state of cosy bliss as we relaxed each part of our body part by part, experiencing sensations and bringing awareness to the natural breath; it was a journey like no other I had experienced previously.

Time lost all meaning, what was actually 30 minutes felt like 5, and before I knew it we were back in the room, on our mats, in our bodies, feeling much more centred and grounded than I had felt at the beginning of the class.  What was also noticeable was the fact the mental chatter had eased, I had managed to drift beyond it into that wonderful state of being between being awake and asleep, the hypnotic state, where real healing takes place.  I felt brighter, lighter, rested and renewed.  

Essentially Yoga Nidra is a powerful meditation technique inducing complete physical, emotional and mental relaxation.   During Yoga Nidra one appears to be asleep but the consciousness is functioning at a deeper level of awareness so that you are prompted throughout the practice to say to yourself mentally, “I shall not sleep, I shall remain awake”.

Before beginning Yoga Nidra you make a Sankalpa, or a resolution for the practice.  The Sankalpa is an important stage of Yoga Nidra as it plants a seed in the mind encouraging healing and transformation in a positive direction.  The Sankapla is a short positive mental statement established at the beginning of the practice and said mentally to yourself in the present tense, as if it had already happened, such as “I am happy, healthy and pure light”, or “I am whole and healed”.

A Sankalpa can also be used to encourage you to let go of something in your life like smoking or overeating, focusing on the underlying feeling that leads you to smoke or to overeat such as “I love and care for myself and my body”, or “I choose to eat foods that support my health and wellbeing” or “I am relaxed and contented”.    In fact simply having the opportunity to establish a Sankalpa is powerful in itself as it gives you a focus and enhances your awareness of self.

It is actually in connecting with yourself that you come to realise all the deep seated tensions that Yoga Nidra helps you to release.  These are all the unconscious and unresolved issues that are playing a role in some of the unwanted habits and behaviour patterns you are noticing consciously.  This is the stuff that goes through your mind time and time again, the stuff you resolve to change at the beginning of each year but that “will” alone will not change.  What you need to do is get to the root of the problem and Yoga Nidra provides you with a means to do this.

With all the letting go of this “stuff”, such as trapped emotions and feelings, you become lighter and there is more energy available to be used in a more positive manner.  Plus with the power of intention in the form of Sankalpa, that which we attract into our life also changes.  It is in this way that Yoga Nidra offers us so much potential for transforming our lives in an even more positive direction than we can ever imagine.

Of course let us not forget the physiological benefits too, such as lowering of the heart rate and blood pressure, the release of lactate from the muscles that can cause anxiety and fatigue, a more restful night’s sleep and, ultimately, a calming and unwinding of the nervous system, which is basically the foundation of the body’s wellbeing.  So you see our physical health and sense of wellbeing can improve too.

Over the years Yoga Nidra has helped me in so many ways.  At times of crisis, when I have been tired and exhausted, sick and stressed, it has helped to restore, renew and heal me.  At confused times in my life when I have been unclear of the way forward then it has provided me with much needed clarity.  At other times it has helped me to let go of unhealthy addictions and behaviour patterns, the most profound was changing my relationship to myself and therefore enabling me to effortlessly let go of the need to smoke tobacco after so many years of battling with this nicotine addiction.

These days relaxation comes easily to me and I positively seek out and embrace any opportunity for Yoga Nidra for it is just such an amazing practice. In this stressful and fast paced world we live, where we can feel so disorientated and fragmented, it really helps to bring us back together and connect with ourselves again. Needless to say, I cannot promote the benefits of Yoga Nidra to you enough.

But of course you cannot benefit from merely intellectualising these things, and reading about it will not necessarily change things.  What you really need to do is make a commitment to take the time out for yourself.  Lie comfortably, cover yourself with a blanket, close your eyes and allow yourself to be guided through a Yoga Nidra session.  I doubt you will regret it, in fact you may find it a life changing experience. 

The yoga body?

“This yoga is not about gymnastics, contortionism or pushing, pulling and stretching the muscles. This yoga is about unsystematically undoing the tension in the body, so the body becomes freer and expresses an aliveness, clarity and beauty.” 

— Christine Borg

The moon, the moon, the moon…we have a super new moon on Friday and a whole heap of planetary stuff going on that is just adding to the general chaos of life lived at the moment.

The best thing I believe, would be for us all to retreat away for the rest of the month until the next full moon on October 31st has passed! Everyone is being squeezed a little, even us here on Guernsey who are fairly exempt from the covid and lockdown chaos seen elsewhere around the world.

I’ve talked to a few people who are all responsible for managing others and they all say it is a complete nightmare with anxiety and insecurity and depression running high and people sick and off work worrying about their potential covid symptoms and others just fussing, there’s a lot of fussing going on.

I’ve been questioning where yoga fits in all this because in theory it should have prepared us for this. Yoga teaches us how to be able to stay centred in the midst of uncertainty and wobbly times. It is a spiritual practice that helps to cease the fluctuations of the mind. Yet I have a sneaky feeling that much of the yoga that has been passed to us in the West is not really the yoga that the ancient rishis talked about and Patanjali codified in his Yoga Sutras.

I feel a bit peeved about this as many of you know, about the way yoga has become little more than an exercise class when it can be so much more than this if we allow it - if we allow ourselves to get out of our tiny little minds and see the world differently. The trouble is our education and society has conditioned us in such a way that it is difficult to see life differently, to let go of the rational mind as it has become and to access other parts of it that are not at all interested in what is right or wrong, but in something far more sacred and special and different altogether that cannot even be spoken of because it has a whole different language and vocabulary that is beyond our rational mind.

It’s even difficult to imagine this and I know that some who have come to class recently are challenged because the yoga that I practice and teach is one that is less driven or determined by the rational mind and therefore is not as rigid as it might once have been. Not to say that rational yoga is not without its benefits. It got me this far and I have definitely let go of many of the samskaras, the negative patterns and grooves in my mind that were there when I started, and I have managed to release the memory of trauma form my body so that i am able to enjoy greater intimacy in my relationships with others and with myself, and there has been a complete shift in the way I live my life.

But something still needed to change, and into my life this practice appeared that has been confronting and challenging and asks me to go deeper than I could have ever imagined and as difficult as this has been at times with the increased vulnerability and the need to let go of my notion of that which I thought was right (and many of my judgements along the way) there is something that keeps me attentive and engaged.

There have been a few times when I have thought, “to hell with it, what is this yoga anyway if it is not just postures for the sake of posture” and practiced in the old way and yet it feels so dead, so forced, so insincere and unkind to my body and to my soul. I lose my awareness drifting off, and while I might still rest at the end of the session, and there may be a sense of euphoria of moving energy and breath, the mind is not so free and calm and light, and the soul, hmm, the soul does not have as much expression, or room for expression as it might like.

Is this yoga?

It’s something I keep pondering on. We all have to start somewhere and anything that begins to tame the mind can only ever be a good thing. But when do we know that we need to move on? When do we know that we have gotten ourselves stuck? A student mentioned this week about taking a friend to class and knowing that he had a yoga body and that he would be good at getting into the advanced poses. Does that make him a yogi I wonder? If so are all the gymnasts in the world yogis?

I don’t think so. But I do believe that this is the illusion sold to the west and reinforced by all the many yoga images we are fed these days. Would a photo of someone attentively moving and connecting with that which cannot be named but is accessible though the body really help to sell anything? Maybe not, and yet to me it is the most beautiful thing, when you see someone moving in a way that encapsulates the ease of being in their own skin, or being in their own nature, of not denying this, of not pushing, pulling or forcing, of having no ambition beyond being their true self.

For the last few years I have been inspired by Christine Borg’s video called “Moving with Attention”, which is just beautiful and motivates me to practice in a way that allows more of my own nature, and to teach in a way that allows more of my student’s own nature too, that might make me appear to know very little, but allows me to access parts of the mind that at times makes me feel mad, but I know also makes me feel very alive and very much in my nature in a way that I haven’t felt in all my 17 years of daily yoga practice.

Just watch this, and right to the end too! http://www.christineborgyoga.com/practice/ It might just inspire you too!

This is what the moon is bringing up for me, this need to keep listening in and living from that space regardless of how difficult it can be because it means that life is often lived differently from the majority and that can trigger feelings of vulnerability and a little insecurity too, because there is nothing concrete to hold onto anymore…only more uncertainty in a life that is lived less and less in the right/wrong. Yet there is no other way, not when you have began and if madness and quirkiness is the result, then mad and quirky I shall become!

As Vanda Scaravelli said, ‘Yoga must not be practised to control the body: it is the opposite, it must bring freedom to the body, all the freedom it needs.’

Happy new moon!