How do you begin a meditation practice and what meditation might be right for you?

How do you begin a meditation practice and what meditation might be right for you?

Moving towards meditation.

In the pausing between one breath, one thought and the next, neuroscience and the teachings of yoga come into relationship. Meditation, practiced for thousands of years and now studied  and researched shows us that there is a measurable transformation of the brain itself. Meditation practice creates density in the prefrontal cortex, weight to focus and decision making.  In contrast it lightens the amygdala, softening stress and fear responses. Studies from Harvard and Oxford show what I have witnessed, in my 20 years of teaching and therapy experience; a shift towards  safety, a return of joy,  an improvement in chronic pain, release of held trauma and a lessening of auto immune burdens.  Cortisol levels regulate. Sleep returns, inflammation drops.  Clarity, compassion, and ease are sustainably experienced.

I began practicing yoga in 1997.   Like many I came to the practice at a junction of crisis in my life, arriving in Australia after over a year travelling through India and S.E Asia. In my 20s at this junction between childhood and the adult that was to become.

‘We landed: thin, harbouring parasites, no bowel control, dizzy head spinning out of control.  I experience reverse culture shock.  The hostel’s blackboard tells us that Diana is dead and it is heralded as the day’s amusement.  But instead I feel grief and distress and feel my steadiness turning upside down in this Southern Hemisphere.

We need to work and we have a visa that allows us limited employment. I have the skills to care for people and find myself within days looking after Mannie. A millionaire now, but a jazz musician before, travelling through Russia in the 1930’s.  He fled Nazi Germany, a German Jew. Having made his fortune here selling sausage skins. He also sells ditties and jingles to advertisers on TV.  Within his penthouse apartment with a music studio and views over Rose bay, he composes.  Today the TV is on constantly following her funeral. I feel like the floor is made of jelly and push through. My body has lost sense of gravity.

The day before a doctor has prescribed medication to clear my guts of the souvenirs they had picked up through Asia.

I begin to panic at my body’s reactions. I begin to panic at the panic. I continuously sigh and it feels like the walls of the apartment are operating inwards, like the trash compactor scene in Star Wars.  This breath created by my collapsing heart,  an expandable space,  a hall of mirrors for my emotions.  Imagined boundaries of my emotions break free, I feel myself sighing, then, gasping.   Every emotion, moments of damage catching up, chasing at my heels.  Breath both betrays and forces honesty. Until this point, I have kept it together but arriving here has been like reverse culture shock untethering me.  I panic at my panic attack.  My body begins to betray my years of coping. I ring the agency saying I don’t feel well. As I am the live in carer, they send a doctor to me. Manny is in his music room, shuffling, playing chords on his electric piano, musical slogans of catchphrases of advertising. I hide this from Manny and make a reason to travel down in the lift, to meet the doctor there in the basement car park. The doctor thinks I have been overdosed with twice the dose of anti-parasitic medication. The dizziness and altered reality is a reaction to that.  She prescribes Valium to chemically calm me.

She tells me the symptoms I am feeling are not illness but fear. She tells me to try yoga.

The Studio is called Yoga Moves: ‘move into a position to change  your life’.  It is full of dedicated and driven change makers.  The practice  brings me down to experiencing the earth, through the breath, instead of words.  Moving and breathing to try and return to freedom in the body and the strong heart that is mine.   A heart full of joy.  I began. I played, like floating, not even aware of how energy is housed, simply blurring and moving into surroundings. Each movement possible and without hesitation.  Feet like feelers translating everything downwards and bringing gaze inwards, rather than making sense with outside perspective.  I am my only reference and key to the map of me. I find my way home to my heart.’

Looking back, almost thirty years later, if I had been told to try meditation I don't think it would have helped.

Research shows that mindfulness and meditation can cause negative effects in a significant minority of people, with studies finding anywhere from 8% to over half of practitioners reporting at least some adverse experience. The most common problems are increased anxiety, depression, and traumatic memories resurfacing, with more serious effects like dissociation, depersonalisation, panic attacks occurring less frequently. People most at risk include those with a history of trauma, existing mental health conditions, or a tendency to dissociate. Intensive retreat settings appear to carry higher risk.

We can’t ignore this as practitioners. It is important that our teaching is rooted within somatic experiencing as well as being trauma informed and sensitive; the teaching is as individual as you are.

The pathway of yoga and its practices support us towards meditative seated practices but for many of us it is not the place to begin. The word for postures ‘asana’ in itself means to sit.  The movements, breath-work and interoception that comes from an asana practice begin to create the foundations and possibilities for a seated practice and more still meditative experiences.

In yoga our lifespan is described as having three stages: youth, householder and elder.  In each of these stages the emphasis of asana practice, breath work, meditation and philosophical enquiry shifts.  In youth, asana is the main focus preparing our awareness and physical body to have the  foundations for responsibility, purpose and family life.   It is developmental and has an emphasis on physical progress.  In the householder phase, where we are supporting family life and work there is an increased emphasis on protection, maintaining and energy work through breath work and pranayama as well as asana.  And in the third age an emphasis on meditation and philosophy.  All elements are relevant and practiced at every age but the emphasis and priorities shift.  Of course the stages of life are not always dependent upon age.  For many of us coming to a yoga practice beyond youth and because of our sedentary lifestyles and lack of interoception, movement and asana still remain important and in the foreground.  Not in the sense of becoming gymnasts but to support the qualities of both stability and ease in our bodies,  of their ability to work with regulating the nervous system in this way, before we work more directly with stilling the mind.

For many of us, this sitting to begin a relationship with focus is not yet accessible. In triaging the supports we put into place, in the ecosystem of our lifestyle, it is not necessarily a priority. Emotions and history lived in our body through our nervous system require a choice and priority away from thoughts and language into movement, breath work and somatic experiencing.

The practice of mindfulness and meditation without this body and breath based foundation can for some cause this described increase in anxiety, overthinking and dissociation.  Accessing and beginning a practice through virtual support or books overlooks (although accessible and affordable) the safety net and importance of how a relationship with a teacher is paramount to gauge how and what elements of yoga practice to access, on this path to balance and freedom through yoga.  If you've been told to practice meditation and it feels like a burden, understanding and guidance is needed not more effort.

Let us not create a division and polarity in our practice but make it relevant and right for each individual, and that at times can mean focusing on movement. Each tool of yoga is not placed in a hierarchy, or linear path of achievement.  The tools are placed around you, you are the hub, drawing on each to realise yoga.  Through one to one work or group classes in Reading, these tools are layered into the teaching. A few years ago when I was playing with the sequencing of postures I began practising in a layered way.  A repetitive and cyclical way of practicing asana.  I would move into and out of a posture. Then begin again and add a posture, beginning again adding a third and so on. Rather than an a to b vinyasa, instead a vinyasa that circled and cycled.  Creating what I called ‘daisy chains’, like those meditative habits of creating crowns of flowers, consumed by the process and totally in the moments. I began to explore repetition and form as a way of creating a moving meditation and somatic experiencing in our yoga practice. Bringing in elements of breath work, bhavana (as if…), and stay to create particular energetic shifts or structural changes within the body and breath.  I began to notice how students could sustain focus and time travel an hour of continuous moment into feeling like minutes. That they could access a still mind through movement.  That we could be nudged to unpeel our body through movement and build strength without burdening our minds.  That we could re-pattern  and remove calcifications in our body in a way that felt both gentle and powerful.  That we could experience both the possibility to always begin again and to find that beginners mind even to those that have been practising for some time.  This is the beauty of these moving meditations.

That we could move not only into a position to change our lives but also to find our way home to stillness.

Rehabilitation and Yoga

We get injured or become ill and in a short space of time we lose to differing extent our mobility, range of movement or strength.  Whatever your starting point, before a change occurs, yoga offers us a model and framework for rehabilitation.  Any process of working towards recovery will need support for both the mechanisms of the body and the mind.  Working with movement, breathing but also self awareness, attitude and emotions that are felt through this experience.  If you have a yoga practice before a crisis, then an opportunity arises to experience that yoga is both a practice and also an investment for these very times.  We practice yoga to make us feel good but it becomes increasingly authentic when the fruit of practice is realised,  that the support and skills are in place to do challenging work of change.

When we are floored the first thing yoga practice offers us is support through a shared space and relationship with a teacher.  Their experience and knowledge, from their own practice and supporting others, enables them to offer teachings as well as signposts.  This experience enables a faith or shaddra that the Dukha or ‘bad space’ we are experiencing; pain, weakness, immobility and fear of what that could mean will with appropriate practice be reduced.  You will be guided through a process that holds you at the centre, in partnership and in a process bespoke to you.  A dynamic process that respects that you are the expert on you and that any process of change brings you to this. A process that is both reflective and hugely practical.

To support change we need to know what is happening and to intentionally make movements and breath in a way to support and change that.  One of the strengths of yoga practice is to realise and increase our interoception.  The ability to listen in and be aware of what is happening in the body or breathing.  Fully present to the  nuisances of recovery without numbing or overwhelm.  This ability to be present, feel and to direct enables a bespoke exploration.   As well as developing our inner listening skills practicing yoga also builds propreocetion, the ability to know in movement what each part of our body is doing in relationship to space and gravity and it’s other parts.  When I move in a certain way how is my spine and limbs experiencing it, both individually and in relationship.

The process of change happens in steps or Krama.  There is a reflection and communication of where we want to be, often expressed as a returning. However, even as function is established  we are never going back. The process of injury and rehabilitation and what we come to know about ourselves means we never return to the same place, instead we become established in a new place of knowledge and support. What yoga offers us is the creative ability to look at the essence of where we want to be and to create movement patterns and breathwork to counter dukha (bad space) and find sukha (good space).  Daily practice evolves, its evolution nudges us, and because it is wholly connected to breathing, thoughts and emotions, it offers us a practice that challenges, nourishes and holds us in the process rather than a chore to be done.  It meets us at the heart of ourselves.

The body is not in isolation from the other layers that make us who we are, we should also consider and take support from how it’s connected to our breathing, and our thoughts.

Breath work in rehabilitation offers us both a listening tool and a feedback system to allow us to occupy the boundary between where we are and how we respond to the practice.  Through this we can occupy that place of challenge whilst minimising risk.   When we come into relationship with our breath we can create functional and supportive breathing.  We can feel our breath reflect  and react to the practice.  We begin to know that certain changes signal risk, such as breath holding, change in rhythm and where we are breathing in the body.  Breath work can also be a powerful tool to help us make friends with the body after experiencing pain and discomfort.  It can calm sympathetic nervous system response associated with injury and illness, allowing us to be in a reasoning and intuitive state rather than reactive.  It moves us away from guarding and protection, allowing us to work on an emotional and energetic level that further supports reintegration.  At times there may be a physical limit and the realisation that we may not get better in the physical sense but that there can also be a process that increases well being and participation in life despite this.

Breathwork is the gateway to supporting our thoughts and emotions.   Particularly in a process of rehabilitation it can be fruitful to explore aspects of embodied yoga philosophy that direct us and sustain us in the work.  Santosha or the practice of contentment directs us to move to change from a place of allowing and compassion.  That there is a foundation of acceptance rather than why me or self loathing that creates the right mindset for change.  This ancient philosophy is supported by neuroscience and research, which tells us that we are more likely to do the work and the practice of rehabilitation if it is supported with self compassion and a parasympathetic response.  Rather than a harsh mind set that creates a sympathetic or stress response. Self critical motivation is shown not to be sustainable, the very thing we need for periods of rehabilitation and change.

Alongside mat work the practice of yoga helps us to notice, reflect and consciously work with all aspects of our life that effect our prana, life force or wellbeing such as; sleep, diet and how we come into relationship with others.

To find out more do pop me an email

Yours in Yoga

Marie

Boundaries

As we move again through this pandemic it is both an opportunity and a time of risk, too early to create a synopsis and conclusion but instead a process begins of breathing out and returning to the changes we have been living. A boundary was put in place, an enforced minimising of contact and activity. Alongside this, a need to tether ourselves to all the roles and responsibilities that, keep our lives and family lives afloat. A flooding of responsibility and a call to evolve in our roles and work practices.

Busy ness is exposed as an illusion of efficiency, just as sound requires space to be heard and travel through; creativity, purpose and relationships need gaps and stillness between their movements. Boredom, pottering and time in nature are needed for us to thrive. There is a headline of relief and joy in our folding back outwards. This quick summary shields a conversation I am hearing from all directions, of what we don't want to lose and what we don't want to get back, from this boundary that was set. That this experience is not consolidated, held or embodied enough yet to feel secure.

Defining, describing, mapping, protecting. We all have the desire to protect our energy, to participate fully and whole heartedly, to set boundaries and in doing so move away from resentment into a space of presence and openness. To find and establish the ground and time where we can consciously root, aligned to our values.

In yoga, we are working to use practices to move from dukha, or restricted space, to sukha or a place of ease. These places whether they are our bodies, minds or shared geography have boundaries that are pushed upon, pushed into, causing pressure and lack of clarity. This energetically leads to feelings of overwhelm, resentment and often anger. Heat pushing back against inward coming asks.

A cerebral approach is useful to map, list, task and orientate our boundaries but alongside this we can also take a body based approach. Using somatic interoception; body based tools of awareness and understanding, we can create actions that come from listening with sincerity to ourselves. Understanding our biology and how to support it so that we can establish our held space of well being and purpose, in the dialogue of requests and boundary pushing.

As we breath, we explore the edges of our body, a conversation between inhale and exhale that is responsive and didactic, rather than a pursuit of perfection. Working with boundaries is fruitful when it is also in conversation. When it is also responsive. When it knows our needs and how they are affected yet in turn acknowledges our responsibilities to the needs of those we are breathing in community with.

We can begin by firstly exploring a way of creating habits of listening to our bodies and from this listening, understanding. From understanding, habits of intervention that can then allow us to establish boundaries. Like a Venn diagram, exploring that overlap that comes from knowing what is required to create sukha, whilst also enabling our shared purpose and needs.

We feel the discomfort of not meeting a request;we want to support, facilitate and do. Let us find ways of pausing to make sure moving towards action occupies that sweet spot of purpose, capacity and authenticity. Or examining whether an action is needed to move away to maintain sukha.

To create this space, to be able to listen, we need to be present to our body and breathing, to be aware of reaction and our signposts of this reaction. We need to know ourselves in our bodies as well as in our minds.

Do requests create tension and where is this tension in your body? Does it disturb your breathing with excitement or compression? Does it take away the depth of you breath and bring it to flutter under the clavicles. Or does it create a feeling of expansion and space. Does our body push back or does it welcome and unfold?

Create ways of pausing to listen and then inform. To understand our nervous systems response and its effects on our thinking. Our own personal rhythms of energy and capacity. The seasons of creativity and those of rest and consolidation. Actions of allowing and accepting clutter rather than a pursuit of perfection. That the expectations and boundaries that we create for ourselves are a support rather than a prison.

Pausing to create this is not procrastination, instead we use our body and breath based practices to communicate with clarity to ourselves and others the process of boundary setting.

And in setting our own boundaries we offer a gift outwards, a culture of permission for them to do the same.

Wintering

Wintering thoughts…

We move from the shortest day and look to the lengthening light. Although January and our calendar signals the new year, nature is not yet ready, calling us to accompany a while. Nature is in need of winter; of wintering and so are we. The chill comes to cleanse and strip back. A yearly foundation and a time that we could honour, rather than rush through. As well as looking to the horizon and the lengthening days, can we learn to value and work with wintering and so create the fallow and balance that gives our lives foundation and depth.

The bodies of trees shed their veil so that we can observe what was always underneath. Strip back, to the backbone, the structure, the beauty and form made from the angles, to the honesty that the resting of these leaves provide. Murmurations roost to and are shed with each startle from these stripped back trees. Their bare canvas revealing their beauty that much more.

Can we slow enough to witness and come to know rather than to chase and create a new. Not just yet. In the undressing of this season drawing us to the fireside, draw up a chair too, of reflection, of sitting in silence and listening in. For now away from the chattering of spring to come.

The shorter days mean there are repeated ease of opportunities for seeing the sun rise and set. Within the world dimmed around us we can further see the silvery winter light streaked with the promise of pink. We can look up, without waiting, to star gaze. Sensitive to this energy, to prana at dawn and dusk.

Can we pause and be in our body. Listen into our body rather than conversations about our body. Can the pause in our breath, be in stillness and observation rather than waiting. Of homing in on a moment that asks for no growth. It encourages us to simply be with a faithfulness to the inevitable change coming. Powerfully still.

Wintering is often likened to our relationship with death but perhaps it has more to do with life’s honesty. These moments following harvest ask us to live within this reality of the smallness of our own cycle. In the industry and the busyness of valuing substantial lives there is a risk of ignoring the impact of our pursuit of worth and immortalisation, of individualism, on nature itself. Wintering is not death, not in competition with life, of proving worth, it is in harmony with it. At this time globally we are so connected to this grasping relationship with our breath, with life, with the systems that create so much division, disparity and inequality. There is risk in being occupied with personal growth at the expense of harmony. Let our growth to come support harmony.

To survive wintering, to accept less, is the oldest skill. Tired; a time to rest. Not collapse into but to celebrate wintering. Spring is growth, a repetition of fractals to create expansion. Wintering is the forming and cherishing of this first and most simple factual from which we unfold to create, I hope, repetitions of harmony. In nature what appears whole on close inspection shows devision. It’s blooming outwards in repetition and relationship brings harmony, brings us back together. This wintering, this slowness is actually life blossoming in freeze frame, that this stillness is not fallow but unsung solidity.

A time to repair. What is in our lives that we need to darn, not to invisibly mend and shamefully disappear but to celebrate with contrasting stitches and a ‘sashiko’ of repair.

We need the cold and discomfort from this season. We are engineered for it. We require it to reset, to feel contrast, to feel cellular and alive. We have become numbed in our consumption, comfort and success. It is time to feel the sting of cold rain as well as fireside warmth. To feel both the challenge as well as the comfort of our practice.

Stored sunlight for the darker days is in the tubers and roots of vegetables stored, preserved and salted. Time to nourish prana and the root of our biome with phytonutrients; warmed, stewed and easily digested. Creating comfort and the feeling of warmed earth deep into our bodies.

The window of activity shortened by the limited day calls us to fire light and candles. Movement and practice bathed and slowed in it’s shadow. The simplicity of lighting the wick calling us to ritual. Of intention and other rhythms we bring to our practice that replicate the shedding of leaves. Aryuvedic practices cleanse and brush our skin ready to increase its sensitivity when we unwrap once more in spring.

Can we explore and reside in this wintering a while more before Spring comes

Breath work

Breathing happens unconsciously, simply part of the tapestry that keeps us alive but unlike other autonomic processes we can override it and influence it’s depth and rhythm through practice and awareness. 

I adore watching sleeping babies breathe.  Uncluttered as yet, there is depth, slowness and pause to their breathing.  A pause after they exhale that you can drop into as they hold a long moment of stillness.

My relationship with my breath begun as I began yoga practice, after travelling in Indian and Asia for a year I arrived in Australia, skinny, harbouring gut parasites and experiencing reverse culture shock.  To clear my infestation high strength antibiotics caused vertigo and dizziness and I began to panic at the symptoms and my breathing became disturbed.  I then began to panic at my panic breathing and my emotional health struggled to cope with the fear of being dissociated and out of step with a fundamental rhythm.  So I begun to practice yoga and I became friends with my breath again. This relationship became a powerful tool through the next 25 years of my life.  A journey to becoming more self-aware and authentic. Following the path that made me feel integrated and allowed me to use my gifts in differing ways, rather than following a path of should’s and could’s.  I maintain a conversation with my breathing. It is my early warning system, my rock and my guide.

As a teacher I have become an explorer and a deep observer of the breath, I witness peoples lives in the way they breath, their energy and motivation, their humour steadiness and resistance.

Fundamentally our breathing dispels the illusion of separateness, from each other and from nature itself.  It is our central ecological participation.  We share the space, breathing it into and out of each other bodies; receiving and giving to the trees. Respiration and photosynthesis; trading molecules, receiving and absorbing what is expelled around us.  We do not breath in a bubble and our very future depends upon us accepting and living the truth of this.

I consciously watch breathing.  As social animals, unconsciously we are effected by the breathing around us.  Like a yawn, spreading the flavour of how people breath near us;  it affects us.  We catch a sigh or pick up a rhythm of someone else’s breath though our own mirror neurones and without even meaning to begin to feel their experience in our own breath.  Holding a birthing space has taught me the truth of this and how to breath steadiness into people.

How we feel feeds down into our breath, but illness can also change the breath effecting our emotions.  Fluctuations are inevitable and what is exciting about yoga is we can notice and bring back into balance whatever has taken our breath away.  Feeling and residing in the landscape of my body, as I mediate on my breath has created a dialogue with spirit, that as I become older makes much truth and sense to my understanding of my true nature.  Sitting for Pranayama for me has never been easy but this, for me, is where the work is in my practice, as it’s depth develops.

Travelling eyes...

Travelling eyes.

I journeyed and I returned.  My earliest memories of self-reflection involve studying maps and starring out of windows with wonderings of escape and adventure.  I have been lucky enough to travel and I keep a way of this seeing; this arriving into the new, into each moment, in my heart in the day to day.

Being somewhere for the first time anchors you into truly looking and watching.  We are birthed with a curiosity and we begin our listening and looking.  This is before we become armoured in our bodies, before our thoughts become directed toward achievement, tasks and time traveling, replaying and rehearsing.  When I am looking and in turn my thoughts are quiet I am listening loudly.   I have space for connection, reflecting back a smile or instigating one.

If you cannot follow your itchy feet and you yearn to travel?  Take a breath, soften it’s flow to the edge of your body, so that you feel it’s entire volume. Soften your eyes but then open them fully and notice.  Scan for beauty and connection.  Notice what is new about the day but also what is returning, taking comfort in the familiarity of our seasonal life.  Looking, really noticing, as if you have never been before. Then everyday we are travelling even if we cannot adventure far.

Travel into your child’s eyes as you listen.

Travel into the sound of nature competing with our dominance.

Travel into the itching of the woolly jumper on a cold day.

Making the Shift from Class to Home Practice.

Yoga practices create change and the tools of transition are met daily within a personal, solitary, practice.  Photographs of yoga practice can be inspiring and create community; sadhana, but they are not a representation of practice. The rhythm of practice is marked by the accumulation of patterns of wear and tear on our mat and words in our journals, as we move into and out of stillness, creating cycles of turning inwards to work and outwards in relationship.   The change that yoga can support is one of clarity and care.  In relationship to ourselves but also to those whose lives we occupy whether that be an interwoven relationship or momentary meetings.  Care not only to the physical but the emotional lives we lead.  A curiosity about our minds as well as our body, these silent conversations, that are incessantly in flux and a practice that moves us behind and beyond to the core of us.  A core of sure and steady knowing of our body and our minds. 

From our experience of yoga being in a group situation, being held through a practice by a teacher, how can we make that shift to this rhythm of practice, self-reflection and development?

Creating the space to bring yoga daily into our lives in a very practical experience and sometimes an uncomfortably honest one. 

Most of us have daily habits and create space for them.  Some of these habits serve and strengthen, others create distance and disconnection.   We have a set pot of time that we are working with.  Our practice works when it becomes high value enough in our lives that we allocate time for it, often replacing another habit with our practice.  What we replace is important, yoga is not a path of renunciation or withdrawal.  Our practice moves away from yoga if it at the expense of participation in life, family and community.   In time we can acknowledge and notice what no longer serves us or what we can reduce to allow time for practice.   I am excited to see that self-care is being acknowledged and addressed, it is vital we begin our path by caring for ourselves, coming into knowing with ourselves.  Encouraged by viveka, this self-realisation and healing, it is in turn vital to be aware of our ripples of effect on those around us and in our relationship with the environment.  How we are, what we buy, how we eat, our footprint, all become part of our practice; yoga.

Often our initial desire to practice at home regularly comes from a real and present need that is affecting our quality of life; back pain, insomnia, anxiety or from an increasing desire to know more.  A well-known chant sounds that only through yoga, yoga is known.  We can read and talk about yoga and this can be a huge support, however only from a regular and repeated turning inwards and an increasing subtle understanding of our body, breath and patterns of thoughts can yoga begin to be known.  So how do we make our practice high value and how do we work compassionately with how difficult it can be to get on the mat?

There are lots of housekeeping tips and nudges that can help.  Making a special space; think hygge, think unplugging.  Be realistic, short and doable can make all the difference.  Find the right time of day for you.  Be accountable to your practice without shame or burden.  A teacher working in relationship and partnership with you designing a practice that is relevant and personal. Take support from something for your practice, offer and make intentions for your practice to something more than yourself.  All of these things will help.

However, the crux of making a personal practice habit, is not a beautiful space or simplifying our days to create more space and time, the crux is make it relevant, make it kind, make it honest and create space for listening and change. 

Reflecting on the people over the years that I have supported into a personal practice and my own practice over 25 years,  bringing your practice home from class to a personal practice  is about finding the right support from your practice to come into a loving, honest, compassionate and content relationship to oneself.  Valuing and elevating your body whilst learning not to be fearful of the stillness and the thoughts that occupy. Beginning to experience the clarity that comes when we begin to see we are not these thoughts.  We experience how our day is left in our body and the signals it gives, when we witness the connection between stress and shoulders or weak bodies from being in our head too much and we shift this through yoga practice. 

Do I continue to find a daily practice difficult? I do.  However, I am constantly reminded and aware how the simplest discipline has the most profound effect not only on myself but on my relationships around me.  My practice can be a warm bath or a kick up the backside but it’s constantly evolving and yet staying grounded in structure and tradition.  There is nothing woolly about the discipline of yoga, it goes beyond a picture and a quote of inspiration, it is work.    Ultimately in our personal practice we are our own teachers, there is independence and autonomy, and this is held in turn within a relationship to our teachers and this shared cherished space.

For those of us who are teachers a personal practice is an ongoing requirement of authenticity to this path.  As teachers it can be helpful to be aware of whether our practice shifts towards being a rehearsal for teaching, and to find support for making our yoga a practice for our own story.  We bring this journey to our teaching and our teaching to others’ and our own journeys.  Parallel but separate paths.    It is vital that we bring what we know from our own experience of yoga to our teaching, and that we apply what we know to the people we work with translating into a practice specific and relevant to them for change.

I often say make your practice like wiping your bum, not an optional extra in life!  Make it compassionate and true, let it be however it is, but just keep returning to the mat with your heart open and held.

A blog begins...

A blog begins....

I'm not one for blogging, I don't love social media but I also see what a huge support it can be and sometimes I read something that hits home and makes a difference in my perceptions and practice.  I'll try to offer a thread now and again that binds us together.  Here goes.....

Staycation- Surviving being with yourself.

It has been a stay-cation summer of puppies, fishing,  camping, cooking outside; it's brought a lot of joy.  And dog pooh.  Thoughts about my practice, with no work and travel, have been deafening.  Quietening my mind with daily writing about my practice and it's relationship to happiness as well as processing reading about the science of happiness has fueled me.

We have been renovating inside and outside the house, it's been filthy, it hasn't gone to plan and what I crave all year; escape and travel has not been possible.  There have been some days of illness and  fatigue.  My hormones are changing and how I respond to food and exercise is shifting and creating challenge.   Does it challenge happiness?   Yep.  In this self enforced stillness, staying,  witnessing of chaos, this being, I have had the opportunity to observe my own relationship with what makes me happy,  and what I 'think' makes me happy.  Well being- the cognitive and physical processes that get in the way, as well as simple practices that make a significant difference.  I am a developer, an adventurer and have a strong work ethic.  Whether that's about teaching yoga or making sourdough, I am busy. I have been able to do this because of my practice, my daily stillness, movement and breathing that counter-poses life. I've realised that happiness can often feel like it's at the tip of my tongue, just around the corner, at the next stop, when I'm done, finished, completely or achieved.  That I am busy practicing for happiness.   In the same way I remind myself on the mat that it is not a rehearsal for practice but this is THE practice.  Here and now, dukha or sukha, good space or bad space.  Happiness will not come from achievement or what I get done.  I'm not describing a profound set of achievements but feeling that peace will come when all the socks are paired.  Instead I am increasing space for being and restoring off the mat as well as on.  I always strive to create a life around my children that has both love, security and adventure.  That they come home to a warm environment and good food.  That life with my partner is sincere, loving and full of growth.  Waiting for things to become does not bring happiness.  What if we radically decided to embrace ourselves, our lives, the people in our lives as they are with a sense of gratitude and acceptance. (of course not those that abuse) What if our greatest rebellion would be to be content.  I value seeking pleasure, I value growth through challenge.  I will continue to keep a path of Kriya yoga, discipline in practice, self reflection and yoga being more than just practice on the mat.  But let the Niyama Santosha (contentment of life as it is) be the new hand stand in our practice.

Written in the Body

Written in the body

At some point in our lives we experience trauma.   An event that overwhelms us and during its happening our bodies freeze, we are unable to respond with our normal skill set of words, actions and strategies.

In survival mode we may fight or flee trauma but also in our most basic survival ‘being’ we freeze.  The act, the history of the trauma not only creates a memory, it is also left in our body. It becomes written there. We are left with ongoing symptoms and physical reactions to the event.

There is no hierarchy to what we find traumatic; from the tangible trauma of an accident or attack, to the powerlessness of a child trapped in a dentist chair, to flying consumed with fear but silent in embarrassment. The trauma women experience through childbirth when their lack of support leaves them without a voice, within a birth state which inhibits cognition and self-advocacy.  Even when there is an opportunity to reason and to cognitively explain, a memory, a shadow of varying hues remains in the body.  Written in shapes of tension within our frame, in the response of our breath and heartbeat to the mirror of smells and sights that reflect and echo the trauma.  
 
It can feel like it’s ongoing effects come from no where, that we are stuck. A separateness and dislocation from ourselves occurs. Healing from trauma goes beyond thinking and talking it through.  Along side talking therapies the experience can be reintegrated and disempowered by finding a safe way to work with the body.   With support, when we return home to our bodies, move and unravel from the shapes that trauma leaves in our muscles and in the way we hold our frame, we can provide a pathway to healing that goes beyond words. We can create safe incremental opportunities to work and release the traumatic energy from our bodies so that the replaying and the symptoms left in our body lessen. We find a pathway to re-becoming whole.

We become friends once more with the body that to survive froze, was passive and overwhelmed. Where we were squashed we can re open and reclaim the space our bodies wanted to occupy.  We can re-establish boundaries that were blurred or lost. Not as a project to be fixed, but as a body a person,  full of continued growth.  By finding the language of movement and breathing, reclaiming awareness and connection to our body through yoga we can grow from the trauma. Through finding the right asana practice, we can find connection to our bodies, slowly, without being overwhelmed.  Through meditations on gratitude and forgiveness, especially self-forgiveness, if we feel we did not protect ourselves and can not understand why we froze, we can learn to be re-present in the now.   The toxicity of fear and anger can leave the body.

 
Self love teaches us to normalise trauma that it happens not to us alone, we are not singled out. Yoga offers an approach to personal integration, a safe unfolding space where we can sit with feelings and sensations to allow them to mature from the body.  It is the opposite of relooping the trauma it is about becoming fully present to now. 
The opposite of reliving; in this moment, now, I am alive, I am whole. Yoga can give you the tools to become unstuck from where you were and allow and guide that part of you to time travel into the present. We can soften the armour we created, we can give stability to the boundaries that we lost. Through practice in time, we can enjoy being in our bodies without distraction and welcome stillness in our thoughts so that we can really begin to notice where we are.  Safe and sound.

As a teacher I work to teach what I know as it applies to you, as an individual.  When I support people through yoga my own experience gives me skills but it does not occupy your space.  Observation and listening to you can only occur deeply when the space we share is not about me, so I offer my following experience to break down barriers of feeling alone in trauma and to offer some light for you if sitting within your body sometimes feels dark.

I have lived beyond traumatic events, one of which was diagnosis and recovery from breast cancer. These have shaped my practice on the mat and my teaching.  They are the story of who I am.  Reflecting on the latter experience with distance I now find intriguing and sometimes use elements of it as signposts with those I work with.  During diagnosis and treatment from cancer I was resilient, focused and in every cancer cliché ‘strong’. I was in fight mode even though I find analogies to battling breast cancer incongruous.    Cancer was my body gone wrong. I was never battling myself. I was fighting the fear of illness and death and it’s impact for my family and my children.  Following a mastectomy, When treatment finished and the prognosis couldn’t have been better, after an initial euphoria I became undone.  The physical trauma of amputation, treatment and the emotional trauma of fearing death had left their story in my body and in my actions. The reality of the level of what I had experienced could only now find a safe space to unfold.  What was frozen now began to thaw.  Your body and mind protects you and gives you healing in stages, when you are ready. I at times felt irrationally angry and exhausted.  holding the experience I was able to unravel and heal through movement, breathing and meditation on my mat.  I could make friends again with my changed body and my changed expectations for mortality.  I am for ever grateful to the years of yoga practice prior to this that gave me the skills and language to heal in this most integrated way.  It’s interesting to look back at a poem I wrote during this time I had a dream and I wrote a poem about it, about how the body tries to talk to the mind about what it experiences about hurt but also about healing.  We just have to create the space to listen.

Missing

it’s not missing I know where it’s gone
I was just sleeping on it’s exit

A part parted but still whole

It’s not my body that has changed but my soul’s framework
The rawness is a gift and a monster of mortality
I dreamt about my part
I dreamt and felt it’s weight separated
I saw the bin
I felt the weight in her hand as she lifted it to the steel vessel
In my waking I do not mourn it’s missing
And yet when I dream my body talks to my mind
It talks of being immobile
unconscious
My body tries to retell
Amputation
My visible missing a legacy of reminding