Find Your OM, 08/24
Our OM is found in the struggles we have had. It is in the traumas, hardships and gristle of life that we find our true superpowers.
Last fall I pulled together a program that to me felt and still feels like a cumulation of my life’s path and work. The irony is not lost on me that the title of it is Living Your Om and it has literally pinpointed my ‘om.’
What do I mean by that?
Everyone has a unique harmonic resonance and this course was me in total resonance. What I didn’t foresee were the ripples that would emanate throughout my life from this pure sound…
Your heart beat is different from mine, just like our fingerprints are not the same. When we were conceived, there was a resonance in the universe to mark our individuation from the whole, from the great ocean. That was your OM. This is your dharma, your path, your gift to this time in humanity.
There was a time when you knew without a doubt that you were a gift to the world, but you may have lost your connection to that after having a normal person's upbringing filled with trauma, incidents and hard times.
The story of Adam and Eve is such a great description of the way in which we all fall from grace, making us forget the magnificence from which we came. We fall from a place of pure belonging and we get utterly lost. Our clients arrive on the mat looking to once again find their resonance and belong on their path. Whether they know it or not, they are looking to reconnect to their OM.
This is why somatic work is so powerful! True somatic work allows us all to find our fascia’s yearning for freedom. And isn’t that the goal of yoga? Moksha?
Sometimes we become yoga teachers to pursue a spiritual quest, sometimes a physical feat and other times to heal emotional pain. For some of us, it was all of the above. In the end, whatever brought you to the mat was actually fueled by a much deeper driving desire to go home to you. We want to return to this knowing. We want to return to loving ourselves right.
And this is where yoga really can shine, if taught without the ego as the charioteer.
My teacher was Esther Myers and hers was Vanda Scaravelli. Vanda asked that the style we do never be named after her. She didn’t want people studying her! She wanted them to study themselves. This is the truest iteration of yoga I’ve ever heard.
We come to the mat to know ourselves better, full stop.
What happens when we know ourselves better? We know what we need to be well; to evolve; and to grow in the way our souls intended us to grow.
We live from our OM.
I love yoga festivals and shows for the gathering of minds and hearts. I despise yoga festivals and shows for the endless mission to strike the perfect pose in the perfect yoga wear for social media prowess. Like so many things, yoga in the West can carry a real vanity, entirely missing the point of the practice.
It is when we discard the facade and the photo ops and dive into the muck that we find the lotus within.
And, until we do that, we won’t find our OM.
Our OM is found in the struggles we have had. It is in the traumas, hardships and gristle of life that we find our true superpowers.
If you want to know how to grow your yoga business, you will need to take a hard look at the hard things that yoga got you through. You will need to take a hard look at the hard stuff that you constantly spiral through in your life.
Flashback to January 2024 when Living Your OM was starting…. 17 amazing women enrolled in this course and put their heart and souls into the work. It was amazing. In many ways, it was the most effortless work I have ever done. In other ways, it was the most grueling.
We met every other week on Zoom, but otherwise the work was self-directed, pre recorded material. What that means is that I filmed myself doing the writing exercises and deep dives that I was asking them to do. What that means is that I was churning up just as much muck as they were!
As you and I both know, when the soul gets a whiff of work being done in the right direction, all of the trains start to roll into the station.
The first train to arrive was the death of my Mum’s brother after Christmas. It wasn’t an easy relationship and it left my Mum and therefore all of us working through some old feelings. Then my Father-in-Law was hospitalized and nearly died over the span of about 6 weeks. This is also a difficult relationship in my household and so left a lot of grit in the water.
The dooziest of all however, was the dredging of my mum’s very close friend Sue Tice’s murder, 42 years later. The trial was all over the news because they had used groundbreaking DNA technology to find the guy that had killed Sue and also another younger woman, Erin Gilmour. Sue had been murdered the year following my parent’s divorce and our first night in our new house in Toronto (moving from a much smaller place), was for her funeral. I was in the throes of puberty, launching into adulthood in a new huge city where women get murdered and families fall apart. This 2 year time period was the storm of all storms for my family of origin. Coincidentally this winter, I was spending a lot of time at my mum’s condo to avoid our kitchen renovation. This allowed time for us both to be able to do a lot of healing of very old wounds. Sue Tice being murdered made a massive imprint on me and, I believe that I was always meant to be part of her story and she mine.
Running the Living Your OM program forced me to travel through these stories with authenticity and vulnerability. I was up to my eye-balls in my own muck but so were the 17 participants that I so admired. I could never pretend to them that it wasn’t going on, however I still had to hold the program together and lead in a way that they could rely on. It was a dance.
Together, we walked through our herstories and saw the ways in which they made us the powerful women we are today. Through the compassion that was both felt and mirrored, we were able to see that our surviving and even thriving was essential to those around us. Like the story in It's A Wonderful Life, if I wasn’t ever born, things would be different. Equally, had I not been challenged with these events or body image issues, my teaching and my career would have been very different.
I could have been the teacher from ‘on-high,’ pretending to be unaffected, but that isn’t ‘the work, is it? The work is in humbly walking alongside our clients and students while subtly lighting the way forward. Like the tightrope walker, we can’t get lost in our own stories but we must know them and use them as fodder. How much do you disclose without leaving your students feeling a need to help you or teetering in some kind of imbalance? They are there to be held and guided by you, your training and knowledge. However, your humanity and relatability is what will keep them there. Your ability to not get buried in the muck but hold a healthy respect for it will be their lighthouse.
This is the work of finding your OM and none of us gets out untouched or unchanged. It has no known borders.
I wasn’t expecting the acute after effects of this very successful course to drag on for 5 months and more! Even as I write this, I am still taming the saboteurs that arose from me stepping into my harmony.
The rhythm of LYO is to
Figure out your elements & doshas so you know your pitfalls and strengths
Identify your ancestral messaging & shraddha
Name and understand your saboteurs
Find your alter ego and use it to chart a path forward that is all about living truly in harmony with you and your path.
What I heard a lot from the participants in our one-on-one coaching sessions was that it was very hard work. There were some very dark patches for a lot of people when we started to look at the concept of Shraddha – faith – for example. Like all things yogic, shraddha has a dark and a light side. You may have faith in the Universe that it will provide you with abundance but you might also notice a habit you have of sabotaging yourself when that abundance arrives. You know the story of the lottery winner who is bankrupt after a year, right?
We might say out of one side of our mouths “I am magnificent and can do X.” and out of the other side we ask “Who do you think you are?” Shraddha, ancestral messaging and saboteurs have an all night rave when we step forward into our Om, or our true calling! Imagine my gang and the feast they had with churning my past up, keeping me out of my own house and all while leading an extremely powerful and successful course that was exactly my life’s work. Wowsers.
Since March my saboteurs have been having me for breakfast, lunch and dinner! In particular, my maternal Great Grandmother Gummy, has been showing up. Gummy experienced a lot of loss in her life – the death of a son and two husbands. She was a classic Anglo of her time who pushed joy down every chance she could. I felt her cautioning me against feeling too proud of this course or my own career or my life in general. Her shraddha, passed down through the lines to me is that you will be punished for feeling good, so for the love of all things holy, never say you are happy or successful. Do you know that one? I think a lot of cultures carry this duffel bag of stones.
This is the bag that I have been born to unpack.
I never met Gummy but I feel like we’ve spent a lot of time together, mostly with me telling her that I believe that there can be loss/sorrow while there is also joy. My peacemaking with Gummy lies in realizing that her way of loving is to try to keep me safe. I take Gummy’s hand and I tell her “I know there is loss. I’ve experienced it. And I will have lots more. But that doesn’t mean I can’t also have joy. Walk with me and let’s find where loss and joy meet.”
In my words this is me taking action to build trust, which is resilience, which is also my harmonic resonance. This is me learning to live in Sattwa instead of the raucous tumult of Rajas. Life is going to keep pummeling all of us with hard stuff and we will always have a choice of how we hold ourselves through the impact. Will I brace and say “Told you so! I’m so stupid to have thought this was over!” Or will I trust that after the rapids there will be a calm pool? I constantly tell my classes to notice the calm pools and use them to build our strength back up. Don’t spend your calm pool worrying about the next set of rapids!
I have faith that many people around me will die. I also have faith that, before they do (and even after), we will love deeply. Isn’t that what it is really all about? Sharing love? Isn’t that what got you to the mat and keeps you coming back?
What about you? Have you stepped out into the light only to haul yourself back in with harsh words and critiques or caution about the risks? Our egos are very attached to staying in the pack. I know that ego is often the guy we blame for arrogance but truly, egos want to keep us small. It is safer if you can’t be seen by the predators, right?
Couple that with our ancestral messaging of foreboding joy and friends being murdered and we should all be cowering in the corner!
My strategy of late (for a few years really) is to find my scared inner child while in my morning practice. I usually find her inside of my ribs and sometimes in my belly. She is completely terrified. She seems worn out. When I look at her I can see how this career I’ve chosen has been hard for her and us. We’ve had to ‘out’ ourselves daily to earn our bread. I share me when I teach and that comes at a cost. Although I joke about how I could have been a dental hygienist and life would have been easier, this is only a joke. I was born to do this work. And this work spirals around my wounded child. I do this work to heal me.
And isn’t that the heart of why you are a yoga teacher? Did yoga help you through something hard? Is that what inspired you to want to share the practice?
No one really cares if you can do a headstand. They care about what you carry in your heart and if you have walked through fires like they have. They care that you can relate to them and make them feel less alone. Yes, absolutely inspire people with your practice and your postures but that isn't going to keep clients over your career. What will give you career longevity is your humanity. What will make you a long time and well loved teacher is the way you support yourself in heeding your soul’s calling. Keep digging, keep growing. Your students will benefit from your constant evolution.
Yoga should be a very selfish practice that enables selfless service. The more you feed you, the more you have to give to others. That is true as a teacher too. Maybe even more so.
Do your practice. Show up on your mat. Find your inner wounded child. Do the work that your soul planned for you to do. Yoga teaching is part of your dharma but your real purpose is to grow you.
And trust me on this one… The further you get and the deeper you go, the more your saboteurs will pull you back to being small. Your Great Grandmother will tap you on the shoulder from the spirit world and remind you that life is hard and you are going to suffer.
In the end, all of us have one OM in common and it is love. We came from it and we will return to it. And in the in-between, we are meant to get lost, bruised and healed over and over again. This is you fully living. Dance with your saboteurs and tell them how much you love them. Get bruised. Get hurt. Bring it to the mat and use it as your lesson plan, your theme and your inspiration. This is where the joy lies.
Find your OM and teach from there.
