What's Your Yoga Journey, 09/24
Let’s remember, stillness isn’t the absence of movement. It is harmonious movement. I believe it is a glimpse into the return to the ocean of belonging while still staying in this human form.
Slow is tricky. It is way easier to keep people busy and away from themselves, isn’t it? I’ve been reflecting on my career lately and the journey that it has been. Looking back at the path, it is Yoga.
The path of the yogi is to begin as a young person practicing a more vigorous and rigorous yoga. Ashtanga Yoga was actually created for pubescent boys to tame and focus their testosterone! A flow makes us pay attention and demands that the systems of our body and mind get clear and active. This is ideal for the journey through puberty and into adulthood (career and family building).
Sometime in my mid to late 40’s everything changed. I remember wondering where my fiery ambition had gone. I still liked a strong practice but found myself really zeroing in on fascia and long and deep holds to get it changing and shifting. Lately, in my 50’s, I am finding that I want nothing short of a deep and powerful relationship with my fascia. I want to listen to the voice of my consciousness that sits within and I can only do that in deep stillness.
Let’s remember, stillness isn’t the absence of movement. It is harmonious movement. I believe it is a glimpse into the return to the ocean of belonging while still staying in this human form.
In our mid 40’s everything does change. We make a slow shift out of Pitta time and into Vata over about 10 years. The same happened when we shifted out of childhood Kapha mode and into Pitta. In one, we are designed to speed up and in the other, to slow down.
This has been my yoga journey as a teacher. When I first moved to Hunsville in 1999, I actually taught some form of power yoga! I did a lot more inversions. I have slowed down to listen to the subtler sounds now. I have changed. A lot.
And humans aren’t always great at change.
In fact, we often make these changes kicking and screaming.
But, coming to stillness is really important. Without it, we cannot achieve the transformation we were born to go through.
The Power of The Relaxation Response
In the documentary “The Connection”, we follow a group of people dealing with late stage diseases. In their recovery process, they do the things you would expect – exercise, good nourishment, and strong social support. The thing that is the real revelation though is the addition of activating their relaxation response every day.
We have been so hellbent on exercise and cardio for the past few decades, on building and growing, that we have completely eliminated true rest.
Many of us sleep with our phones by our beds which send EMF signals but, more harmfully, might also send notifications all night. I also believe that when someone sends me a message, their energy comes to me long before the message or, since things are so ridiculously fast now, along with the message. I do believe that my phone by my ear at night only intensifies this energy hit.
How about your clock? Is it a light? This is changing your melatonin production.
Suffice to say that sleep is not actually that restful. Ask any woman my age about her sleep and you could get any spectrum of reaction, from an eye roll to a kick to the shins (we menopausal women can be a bit reactive).
Some clients might tell me that they relax as they go for a run or a leisurely walk. This might be relaxing as you enter the ‘zone’ or engage with nature, but it isn’t actually the relaxation response.
In the relaxation response, we are looking to trigger the vagus nerve which is like the best sleep drug ever invented. In my classes, I will often say that you shouldn’t be able to run or walk when you trigger this system. This is the chasm between wake and sleep and it is THE place where your cells heal.
Protection Vs Growth Mode
In The Biology of Belief, biologist Bruce Lipton describes the two modes that our cells can be in. Protection mode is the one that most of us live in and I don’t think it needs describing.
Please unclench your teeth.
Growth mode is the place where cells can grow. We are always in a process of death and birth with our cells so growth is really important in order to replace the ones that are dying off! Not only that, but think about the cut you had on your hand. In order for that cut to heal, the cells had to grow in to knit together again. Inside and out, our cells need profound growth time for healing and resilience.
The problem is that protection mode will always trump growth. If your cells sense any need to protect, they will detour their energy back to protection mode.
I remember standing in the bank during COVID and thinking about all of these masked bandits, myself included, standing in line together. I was taught as a kid that anyone wearing a mask in a bank meant something very bad and dangerous was happening! I wondered what my nervous system (lizard version) was actually doing with that moment.
How many times a day do you get notified of something?
How many times a day do you hear news of something to fear?
How many times a day do you shut everything out so that you are able to heal?
How about your students/clients?
This is Serious
When I first started teaching yoga, people would start a yawn fest within the first savasana. About 15 or so years ago, I noticed it was taking longer. It is taking longer every year that I teach. Why does this matter? Because yawning signals the shift out of protection into growth mode; out of fight/flight/freeze/fawn into rest & digest.
Even in restorative, where I am strategically coaxing people down from the treetops, it can take 20 minutes for people to start to yawn.
So what is happening to our cells if they have little to no time to heal?
What is happening to our nervous systems?
My Uncle told me about 10 years ago that the biggest worries were anxiety and autoimmune disorders, according to the medical societies and his Doctor colleagues. Autoimmune disorders, in layman's terms, occur when our stress gets so high that our immune systems turn on themselves. We are so over-hyped that we start to actually harm ourselves. Many people who contract one autoimmune will contract more like a series of dominoes. These can range from less serious things like celiac (serious but you can avoid a lot of the triggers) to much more serious like MS or Lupus.
The power of yoga and other meditative practices is in its ability to offset this series of dominoes rolling through our times.
Yoga’s aim was defined by Patanjali as the stilling of the restless mind. It holds strategies, accessible to anyone at any time, to offset stress and stop the racing train toward debilitating anxiety and/or autoimmune disorders.
Even without autoimmune disorders, let’s contemplate what we know about inflammation… It has been found as the source of all sorts of issues including Bipolar Disorder and Alzheimers, not to mention cancer and heart disease.
How do you lower inflammation? Your vagus nerve. Deep relaxation. Constant attention toward less freaking out and more trust.
I started my career of service as a Reiki practitioner. I have always been highly intuitive and my body often sends me signals. Reiki made sense to me. What I didn’t like was the mystical nature of the practice. I love mystical but its downfall is in the assumption that whoever has this ‘power’ is then all-powerful. My clients believed that I was healing them and that wasn’t okay with me. The premise of Reiki is to use universal energy to heal ourselves and others but no one really believes it is them doing the healing if it is my hands on them. In my language, my clients were giving me power over them and that didn’t sit right. Why couldn’t they get on board with their own ability to heal themselves?
When I considered becoming a yoga teacher, I saw the potential of having a tool that was easily passed on to those that needed it. I didn’t have to own it. Anyone could own it.
This is why the word ‘practice’ is so crucial. Just this morning I taught a class in which I suggested that we could activate our legs but that didn’t mean we had to be activated in our nervous systems!
Can your shoulders drop even though your legs are active? We practiced activating without freaking out. Trusting our dynamic strength without creating a immovable concrete block.
In many ways, a yoga pose is a stressful moment. In that contained stress, we can learn crucial things about ourselves like
Where do I clench when I am tired or stressed? How is that creating more imbalance and pain?
What do I say about myself in these times and what is that creating within me?
How do I talk to myself? Am I supportive? Am I abusive?
So then, we get to live through stressful moments with an awareness of these critical aspects of coping. Perhaps the next time someone pisses you off while driving, you won’t necessarily tense your shoulders. Maybe the next time you get sick or run down, you won’t stay long in the self-deprecating talk. We practice better coping mechanisms through stressful situations.
This is yoga.
Personally I need time to be able to hear those questions I asked just a minute ago. More importantly, I need time and space to become aware of their answers! I can’t just keep grooving through pose after pose. It just doesn’t work for me. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for you. AND, it used to work for me. It doesn’t anymore.
How amazing is your job?
You and I get to talk to people about this stuff! We get to bring them into a place that is difficult and talk them through a deepening awareness of how to make it easier.
Which brings me back to the quiet.
Our world is very noisy and overstimulating. There is so little space for emptiness. I crave time where no one is talking to me so that I can hear my own mind wander.
Have you heard the scholars saying that we are losing our ability to do this? Mind wandering is a pivotal part of creativity and therefore success.
As you likely know, I start every class in savasana. I do this to get off the highway and slow right down to country road speeds.
Stop.
Still your mind.
You’ve made this space for yourself, now you need to claim it.
This is hard work for most of us. How often do you avoid your own mat? When things are really hard, doesn’t this happen even more?
Like Grover avoiding the monster at the end of the story, we don’t want to turn that page for fear that we will discover the monster – that we are in fact unloveable and alone.
But Grover is a yogi.
He discovers that the monster is him and he is lovely.
We all teach differently, as we should. Some of you might help your students to turn pages through rigorous flows and inversions. There is such transformative power in a good rajasic wakeup to find yourself in Sattwa!
Mostly these days, I am inviting people into a really quiet space. I find the volume of my classes is really dropping – fewer postures, more depth than breadth. I am inviting people to come into the deeper currents in their bodies so that, like a wave can take down a dam, their breath can break up concrete.
It is both empowering and scary. We come face to face with ourselves. Yes, the people on their mats are meeting their monsters but I am too. I am a pleaser who would prefer to keep you busy and happy and laughing. Holding people in an uncomfortable place is hard for me. And it feels so right. We still laugh, maybe even more than before, but there is a depth that really sings to me, even in the discomfort.
Trust Your Soul
At the ripe old age of 54.8, I can say that I really trust my soul. This has been a sometimes arduous journey for me. Looking back, although there have been hard times and struggles, my soul has never hung me out to dry. I can see the method in the madness and the soul in the strife.
This is what carries me through teaching now. Not only do I trust my own soul and teach from it, I also trust that everyone on the mat with me has a smarty pants soul too. I know that they have been brought here by a deeply intelligent source that knows what it is doing.
And so, I go deeply into my centre, my middle, my gut and I take a deep breath. I know from experience when I am out of synch with that intelligence. As long as I can stay in synch, this will be exactly what is needed.
So we stay. We breathe. We turn a page.
This is the work.
If we truly want to still the restless mind, we might have to just get a little still.
