Yoga

The style question...a little deeper into my practice

Starting yoga not able to touch my toes ended up creating my teaching style. I had to break down poses because I couldn't do them all, or remembered only too well what it was like to not be making the same shape as my bendy yoga teachers. Slowly I came to realise that, while there is a place for the really intense asana (physical practices) that wasn't my place. I became more interested in getting people to find their way back to their body from their computer desk, a way back to their thoughts and gut wisdom from the scrolling, a way back to their breath from the short, stressed breath they arrived with. In many ways, the asana became secondary, a vehicle, but no longer about 'progressing' towards a pretzel. It also happened as my body began to go from 30-something, to 40-something and this year welcoming the 50's, with some of students graduating into the 60 and even 80-somethings. Some of the teachers that I had grown my practice around began to soften their practice as well, none of use are getting younger and we started to adapt.

The world is also going faster, our students are more stressed now than ever. Yoga can move with all of those changes, if we are willing to work with it. Asana are only a tiny part of the overall yoga picture and teaching the other parts of yoga often happens in workshops and retreats. For example, my Reinhabit Retreats. We are disconnected or overwhelmed or both and can often suppress energy within our body. Yoga gives us an understanding of how this energy moves in the body and once we know that, we can work with the energy. For example, through the breath, through techniques that help us open to the world, rather than shutting down. Some of the meditation techniques help us to move deeper into our body, which can be healing for those who are trauma survivors.

Trauma aware yoga is essential in these days where we are far more aware of the impact of trauma on the body. It starts with your yoga mat, cushions, and your body being your space in a class. That means I don't enter that space. I don't adjust my students with anything other than my voice, except in very rare situations and with lots of consent. Just because you have entered the yoga room, doesn't mean that you have given your autonomy away. Classes are advised to do some, all, or none of the asana. Offered a space to curl up, lie down, be comfortable, and listen deeply to their body, some people sleep. This can be challenging for someone who has suffered trauma and so it is repeated, over and over again, to create the permissions some people require to take that kind of autonomy back. Language is also essential, with classes taught without words like 'push' or 'work harder' or even 'stretch'. What if we focused on movement and release? What do those words feel like. These discussions are always ongoing as we learn more about trauma and awareness. .

from India with love

Here is a little bit of a love note to yoga. I was blessed to start yoga with the philosophy - now that is rare and yoga is poorer for it. What has cultural appropriation meant for yoga?

Yoga and cultural appropriation

There is no escaping this discussion these days and it is long overdue. Cultural appropriation discussions need to start from a place that listens to indigenous voices without getting defensive, and that comes from a place of being willing to change. So I want to direct people to www.susannabarkataki.com to lift up a voice that is speaking as a woman who is Desai and a yoga teacher. Her discussions are challenging, and yet she gives a way forward, presenting working with yoga in a cultural appreciation capacity.

What does it mean for me, as a practitioner and teacher?

I don't want anyone to leave a class or workshop with me and not feel like they have touched the roots of yoga, and been able to honour and acknowledge those roots. Those roots are in India and in Hindu ways of thinking and being. When yoga was commodified by the West, it was also secularised for the most part. Some of this was to make it more palatable to cultures that were deeply influenced by Christianity. Some of it was to sell yoga. What it did, was dishonour the long history of yoga in India, stripping yoga of its spiritual roots and where the practices have come from. What I have found is that this makes the practices hollow, and it doesn't allow for that wonderful diversity that erupts when someone who is Christian recognises that there is time for contemplation of the divine, that there are parallels in some of the teachings, or when an athiest recognises in some of the key yoga sutras (short teachings that make up the philosophy of yoga) ideas from their own view of the world.

Yet, there is a risk in touching the roots, in that this can become tokenistic. I remember 'saying grace' as a child around the dinner table and the rote way that this prayer of thanks was often delivered. I married into a Catholic family at one point in my rather interesting life and the first time my mother-in-law, with a characteristic sparkle of mischief in her eyes, asked me to say grace I wanted the floor to open up. I took a deep breath, we all held hands and I gave thanks to the earth, the hands, the connection between us all, and the love that we all shared with a rather hesitant Amen at the end, quite well aware of the lack of reference to Jesus (fabulous teacher and healer that he was) or God (fantastic way of describing the universe if it wasn't for the hideous way he's used as excuse for every violent act, misogny, not to mention the absence of the feminine). She squeezed my hand, my now ex-husband exhaled, and I was given the job of grace on event-about with my sister-in-law.

Tokenism erupts in yoga when we put a diety in the corner and paint an Aum on the wall but never give flowers to the diety, let alone spend time with that altar. It is a mala (a string of prayer beads) worn around a neck or wrist but never used. It is many things that have been adopted for their look rather than their meaning. I have been to too many yoga rooms like that.

Yoga will never not be appropriated and tainted by the colonisation of India, the inherent power and caste issues that pervade the country, and the capitalism that pervades the West. As a teacher, I have to walk that line or not teach at all.

Yoga...