Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping

Yoga doesn't get you a pass on life

Here's the thing: Yoga doesn't get you a pass on life.

It's been a little bit frantic around here lately (I guess that can happen when you light a fire under your ass) and it hasn't always been easy to find time to ground myself and connect to who, what and where I am right now.

Yoga is usually how I ground myself, it's how I meet myself wherever I am.

But lately I've been skipping time for these grounding practices in favour of getting one more thing ticked off my to do list.

It's not that I'm grindingly busy. I'm excited and motivated and energised by what I've got going on. When you doing what you love you get less tired, I'm sure of that.

But the nervous system needs downtime even from enthusiasm and when I don't make time to get real with myself on my mat, it shows up in my life off the mat.

On Saturday morning I woke up early. It was a stunning autumn morning and I decided to go for a walk on the beach instead of practicing yoga inside. But before I went for the walk I decided to quickly check my email.

Ten hours later I got up from my computer.

There are compelling reasons why I spent my entire Saturday on the computer instead of outside in the sun helping my boyfriend dig out our old fence and prepare the posts for the new fence. They have mostly to do with a new website that I was planning to launch this week, which will now be launched next week.

I was certainly compelled by it at the time. In retrospect, it all seems a little less compelling. But that's what a little perspective will do for you, I guess.

So I sat at my desk all day, cursing at my abortive attempts to rewrite code that I don't even understand. I looked out the window at my boyfriend working in the garden and I envied him.

I also felt guilty for not helping him and my guilt made me exaggerate my displeasure at the work I was doing on my website. Whenever my boyfriend came in to check on me I felt the need to make sure he understood I wasn't having fun in there while he was out working. So I complained more about the cursed code and the endless links that I had to fix.

I didn't take a break.

I didn't go for a walk.

I didn't even go and sit in the sun for ten minutes breathing in those last beautiful rays of autumn sun.

By the end of the day I was a wreck. I was emotionally, mentally and physically spent.

So...

I picked a fight with my boyfriend. I burst into tears. I had a little meltdown.

It wasn't pretty.

Fortunately, thanks largely the last few years of regular yoga and meditation practice, I was also able to see myself with a little tenderness.

So I gave myself a pass on one bad day, read some beautiful poetry and sent myself off to bed.

When I shared this story with the 30 days of yoga participants one person said that she appreciated my honesty. She said that she had somehow imagined that as a yoga teacher I would be above this kind of frustration. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the idea that yoga is about transcending life's challenges.

As I understand yoga, it is the practice of meeting ourselves wherever we are. That means meeting ourselves, with courage and compassion, even when we are in a place of fear or anger or sadness. Rather than transcending our fears, it means meeting them. It means going through, rather than around, our fears and it means being able to look at ourselves, just as we are, with acceptance and love.

The vast array of practices that make up the path of yoga are all designed to increase our well-being and restore us to our original, unified, state. This state is called samadhi and although it is sometimes translated as bliss, I don't believe that it means the kind of trance-like bliss that involves avoiding all discomfort. Discomfort, like change, is a condition of our lives in these bodies.  

My understanding of samadhi is being able to remain fully aware, fully awake, under all conditions - even conditions that might evoke in us discomfort or fear.

The longer I practice yoga the more I notice a certain awareness that remains with me even as I allow my thoughts and feelings to lead me down a path of suffering. This awareness is always there and, if I make the time to connect with it through yoga, it always offers me a place of refuge amongst the maelstrom of my own dramas and stories.

Some people call that place of refuge God. I think of it as an awareness and presence which is always with me because it is my own essential nature. I can always rest back into that place of spaciousness and compassion because it is actually my own best self.

Ultimately, this is what yoga is about for me. Yes, yoga has given me the ass of a woman ten years younger. Yes, it has strengthened my abs, fixed my dicky back and healed my gammy hip. Yoga has done all those things for me and, if you practice regularly, it will probably do those things for you too. But I practice yoga primarily because it is a path back to my original nature.

On days like Saturday when my life off the mat reveals the results of neglecting my life on the mat for a few days, I remember why I practice yoga.

Yoga is not going to get me a pass on life. I'm still going to have to deal with new websites that don't work the way I want them to. I'm still going to lose my perspective some days. I'm probably even going to keep picking fights with my boyfriend at the worst possible moment.

But I will have a path back to that place of refuge, a way to recognise my true self in the midst of the drama and, if I choose to, to come home to myself.

Shame-free Yoga Part 2: Can shame be a positive learning experience?

I had so many interesting comments and responses to my post last week about shame and yoga that I found myself with more questions on the whole topic of yoga and shame.

In particular, my friend Nick suggested that there was a difference between a teacher "creating" shame, on the one hand, and "triggering old shame" on the other. He wondered whether there was any difference between triggering old shame and triggering any other kind of emotional release through yoga, an experience which I freely admit is a part of my experience of yoga and something which I accept and even embrace as an important and positive part of how yoga brings me home to my authentic self. 

I believe that the yogic path is the path through, rather than around, our shadows. So I can see Nick's point. If this teacher's style, tone, words or action reconnected me to old body-shame that I've been carrying around, then he created a powerful learning opportunity for me. There is no doubt that through this experience I've become more aware of the shame I still carry in my body, despite the powerful and positive shifts that yoga has brought me.

As I said in an email to a friend about this experience:

"It seems despite seeking out compassionate yoga teachers, I still carry the hard taskmaster, the shrill critic, within me.

I don't think that this teacher shamed me, he just triggered my own internal critic, who does a very good job of making me feel 'not good enough' - which is pretty much my definition of shame.

That internal critic gets a lot less airtime these days than in the past, so it caught me off-guard - very much off guard! But it was a useful learning experience. "

So, if I was carrying this old shame within me, and if it needed to be released or at least recognised, then didn't the teacher last week do what all yoga teachers aspire to do - i.e. create an opportunity for me to learn and grow and deepen in my yoga and my life?

I think he did. But shame is a very powerful emotion. It has the capacity to paralyze us. It certainly has the potential to send an otherwise curious new yoga student away from a class with no intention of ever returning.

I have no problem with the idea that I am not the teacher for every yoga student. If I was we would all be in trouble. So, if after one class you decide that I'm not the teacher for you and never return I won't be upset at all.

But if in your first class, or one of your early experiences of yoga, you feel so shamed that you decided never to try another yoga class, then I would be very sorry.

Shame is a much more powerful emotion than many of the others that arise in our yoga practices. Many of us will experience frustration as we begin (and, for that matter, as we continue) to practice yoga. Some of us will feel waves of almost inexplicable sadness as we release layers of grief that we may have been storing in our bodies. These feelings may be very frightening for some people, but research indicates that none of them have the almost universal ability to paralyze us that shame has.

It is for this reason that I am especially mindful, as a yoga teacher and as a human-being, of the most common shame triggers. Sadly, our bodies are one of the most common sites of shame.

I agree with Nick that once a teacher comes to know a student well, and once that student knows and trusts the teacher, there is a powerful space in which a teacher may gently encourage a student to extend themselves beyond their comfort zone. A wise and intuitive teacher will know what each student is capable of doing, which is often more than that student suspects.

I've certainly have yoga teachers encourage me to try poses or go to places in my poses that I believed to be beyond me. When I trust those teachers enough I'll go even where I believe I cannot go. That is the beauty of a trusting teacher student relationship.

In this case, it may be that the teacher has such strong intuition that he saw that I not only carried 'shame' baggage but that I had the strength and the self-awareness to be able to process that shame. He may even have knowingly poked into my weak spot to show me what was lying beneath the surface. If he did, he certainly created a profound learning opportunity for me.

It takes careful judgement to know when a student has the support and tools to process a stored emotion as strong as shame without creating new shame.

I'm happy to admit that I will generally do what I can to avoid triggering shame in my classes, but I also accept that at the end of the day I cannot control what arises in people as they practice with me. I'm quite sure that there are people who have been in my classes who could tell us all a story about how my choice of words or adjustment triggered their own feelings of shame.

Shame is such a widely shared experience and can leave such deep wounds that all yoga teachers and yoga students are likely to need to face it at some point. I only hope that I can create a safe and supportive environment in which for my students to experience whatever may arise as they practice yoga.

Shame-free yoga: teaching yoga without triggering body shame

As I grow into my role as a yoga teacher I've been thinking a lot about how I can create a truly safe space for men and women to explore yoga. In particular I've been thinking about how powerful the messages of body-shame are in our culture, and about how this affects the process of teaching yoga here in the West.

I want to tell you a story to explain what I mean.

A little over a week ago I went to a yoga workshop with a visiting international yoga teacher. He's pretty famous and several of my yogi friends had recommended him. The way they talked about him I had the impression that he had something special going on, something above and beyond your average yoga teacher.

Obviously, I wanted to learn all I could from him so, although he taught in a style that I don't practice regularly, I went along.

The first morning, after dragging myself out of the house at 5.30 am, I found myself on my mat in a setting that although in some ways familiar was in many other ways quite, quite foreign to me.

Unlike my yoga teachers, who have been mostly women, this teacher yelled instructions across the room.

"Straight that leg!' he called to the person behind me, "Staight that leg!"

I glanced back to see that the person behind me was in a pose in which, according to my yoga teacher training, insisting on a straight leg before the hamstring is naturally ready to open could compromise the spine.

My mind was suddenly busy. It leapt into 'judgment' gear, as I assessed whether or not - in my opinion - each of the cues he yelled out across the room was in fact 'safe' for the student at which it was directed.

Moment by moment I struggled to pull myself back into the full presence of my own practice, my breath and the sensations of my own body. But eventually, as I found a rhythm in the flow of the familiar poses, I was able to release my grip on my own ideas about what was happening and just experience it.

It was going well.

Until, that is, he decided to direct his attention at me.

He approached my mat as I worked gently to ease my body into a complex twisting forward bend, one that demanded a little more openness in the hips than was available to me at six in the morning.

"Why is your knee there?" he asked. "Why don't you lower the knee?"

"It doesn't seem to want to lower this morning," I replied, not yet too disconcerted. I'd been in many classes before when my knee wasn't ready to lower and teachers had generally left it at that.

But not this guy. He sat down beside me and shook my knee with his hand.

"Tight." he declared. "You are very tight."

He wasn't saying tight as thought it was a complement, in case there is any ambiguity. It was clear that tight was not what my hip was supposed to be. He slapped at my knee a few times in what appeared to be an attempt to convince my hip to suddenly release and the knee to lower. The slapping didn't produce the results he was hoping for.

Instead, I felt a surge of heat in my face. My heart began to beat faster and I suddenly realised that I was about to burst into tears. I started breathing even more deeply and closed my eyes in an effort to stave off the tears. The closed eyes and deep breathing must have looked like a profound yogic moment to him because he said:

"Yes, yes. Very good. Keep breathing and this tightness will go away."

Much to my relief, and thereby proving his own point, he then went away.

Then the tears came. They surprised me. I've experienced tears in yoga. Tears sometimes come as I breathe my way into a deeper opening in a pose and, in doing so, let go of emotional baggage I've been carrying in my body. I've come to recognise and even welcome those tears.

These were not those tears. These were tears, I see in retrospect, of shame.

Reading Dr Brene Brown's wonderful book 'I Thought It Was Just Me' has helped me recognise shame where I previously might have suspected grief. There has been so much grief in my life in the past ten years that every unexplained outpouring of pain and tears tends to get passed off as a release of stored grief.

But this was not grief. This was shame.

Because like so many women, like so many people, I have been raised in a culture that is rife with messages of shame about my body.

Our bodies, we are told, are too hairy, too lumpy, too noisy, too big, too scarred, too heavy and too smelly.

Then you begin to practice yoga and, for one thing, you begin to appreciate your body for what it can do. It can hold you in a balancing pose. It can carry you through a flowing sequence of standing poses. Your arms grow stronger and that matters more than whether or not they look good in an evening gown, especially since you never wear and evening gown. Your legs grow strong and that matters more than whether or not they look like they did when you were twenty.

But shame can be insidious. As I began to shed some of my shameful feelings about my body, I accumulated new ones.

Those damn hips that simply wouldn't release into the deceptively named 'easy cross-legged pose' became a source of shame for me.

Over time, I found yoga teachers who led me past that shame into an even deeper experience of true body love. Those same teachers told me that my readiness to teach yoga depended not on the openness of my hips but on the openness of my heart and on my own personal commitment to my yoga practice.

But the traces of those decades of body shame remain.

On my mat last week as a well-meaning and, I'm sure, quite compassionate man slapped at my knee and deemed my body to be "too tight", my own private body shames were triggered.

I suspect that his style of teaching, handed down to him as it was by his teacher in India, was quite suitable for Indian men. Perhaps they had not been raised on the diet of shaming body messages that we have been raised on in the West. I'm sure it is suitable for some people in the West as well, people who have already found a deep ground of resilience in the face of body-shame triggers.

But for the rest of us, for most of the women I know and most of the people who come to my classes, I'm aware that yoga can all too easily become simply another place in which to beat ourselves up about the inadequacies of our bodies.

As a yoga teacher my commitment is to be mindful of that context in which I teach. My commitment is to teach in a way which, as far as possible, reinforces positive experiences of and messages about our bodies. My commitment is to teach without shame. 

Have you ever experienced body-shame while practicing yoga? What do you think a yoga teacher can do to help avoid creating more body-shame in yoga classes? Do you even think that this is something yoga teachers should be thinking about?

30 days of yoga: special offer for 'veterans', sponsor a participant

If you missed the announcement earlier this week, the good news is that we are doing another 30 days of yoga. Read here for more details and to find out how to join me.

I have two announcements to make today. The first is a special offer for returning participants (people who took part in the first 30 days of yoga). The second is an opportunity to sponsor someone else to take part.

Special Offer for Returning 30 Days of Yogis

If you took part in the first 30 days of yoga then you can choose the "Exactly What You Need" option this time for only $50. That's half price. It's my way of thanking you for making the first 30 days such a success. You all rocked.

Email me or leave a comment here if you'd like to take up that opportunity.

Sponsor a Participant

Maybe you've experience the healing power of yoga and would like to share it with others. I have been approached about the 30 days by some amazing women who just don't have the resources for the full package right now but who I know would benefit so much from it.

I don't want to betray their privacy so I'll just say very generally that some of these women are doing some amazing work of service in the world, some of them are healing from powerful traumas, some of them are fabulous creative activists. If you'd like to sponsor one of them to join 30 days, just email me (use the link in the side bar on the left, just above the "Categories" link) or leave a comment here.

30 days of yoga is coming back

The 30 days of yoga challenge I hosted here in January was such a success that I've decided to repeat the event in March.

Starting 21 March I'll be hosting another 30 day yoga sadhana. For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, it could be a fantastic way to begin spring. For those of us in the south, it can be hard to maintain our regular yoga practice as the days get shorter and darker - this is a great way to get the support we all need to take the best care of ourselves possible.

As with the last 30 day sadhana you'll have a choice as to how you participate. You can choose between the "Exactly What You Need" package and the "I Know What I Need" package.

Option 1: Exactly What You Need

This is the fully supported approach to the 30 days of yoga. If you are new to yoga or need an injection of new enthusiasm for your practice, this is the package for you. I'll make sure you have a practice which meets your needs, fits into your life and addresses your specific issues. 

How do I do that from all the way over here in New Zealand? Easy. You'll fill in a short questionnaire so that I can select the right practice for you and then I'll send you a customised video for you to follow at home each day.

You'll also get weekly emails from me encouraging you in your practice and you can email me any time with questions about your yoga practice. You'll be part of a community of people around the world who will be practicing alongside you.

What do people who have done the 30 days of yoga "Exactly What You Need" package have to say about it?

“It’s wonderful! Honestly, you couldn't have known my entire history and written a better program for me there.  When I first did [the pose], I honestly almost cried.  I've NEVER come across that before in any of my classes or books and it's EXACTLY what I need."

                    Cath, 30 day yoga participant

“Marianne, I am finally starting to understand the breathing thanks to you! I know this is such an important part of yoga, but no instructor so far has really explained when and how to breath like you have and I have already felt the breath move my body through the poses you have laid out.  I also like the segments, and I can pause your video and go through more of the segments my body wants that day following my breath.”

                    Mel, 30 day yoga participant

The 'Exactly What You Need" package costs $100, including your own yoga video and ongoing support throughout the 30 days.

Option 2: I Know What I Need

This is a great option if you already have a strong foundation in yoga and have a regular home practice, perhaps one that has lapsed. You'll sign up for the 30 days of yoga and practice along with us, but you'll be doing your own practice.

There is no cost for this option but you'll still get regular emails from me encouraging you in your commitment to a regular yoga practice and you can join our Twitter chats or join in discussions with other 30 days of yoga participants here on my blog.

Register your interest

Have a think about it and if you are interested, email me by using the link in the left-hand column (just above the 'Categories' list).

If you are in any doubt, I'll let Melanie have the last word:

“If you want to do yoga at home, Marianne is your girl... Wow Marianne, this yoga routine is blowing my socks off.”

                 Melanie, 30 day yoga participant