Body Wisdom

Yoga continually reminds me how to listen to the insights within my own body. This past weekend, I participated in twelve fabulous hours of workshops led by Martin and Jordan Kirk of http://kirkyoga.com, two Anusara teachers who hold a permanent spot in my heart. At one point, I overshot my edge in the very last handstand technique. Instead of opting to work with a spotter, I went for it and ended up falling.

Interestingly, had I remained calm in that moment of uncertainty before I found my balance, I could have used the principles of alignment to protect myself and remain upright. Instead, fear overtook me and I crumpled to the ground, bruising my shoulder in the process.

The soreness in my shoulder the next morning made me worried that I might not be able to finish the weekend workshops. But Martin and Jordan are renowned for their yoga therapeutic expertise. They showed me how to use Anusara principles of alignment to not only protect but also to help heal my shoulder.

Over the next two days, the level of wisdom that emerged from my own body astounded me. Each time I unwittingly let my side body collapse or failed to keep my shoulder blades back, my body reminded me with pain. But when I practiced the principles, I was not only painless, I felt much more freedom in that wounded area. The pain, instead of being a showstopper, actually helped me more fully embody life-affirming movement.

We often consider learning to be an external process. Women in particular are often taught to perceive our bodies through external lenses and criteria. But when we turn inward, our body can share its own power of knowing. Yoga is about learning how to listen.

The Sheepish Yogini

Hello, friends. My apologies for the delay in my regular posts. After working with John Friend in his workshops in Park City a couple weekends ago (fabulous!), and getting over a cold right before, I have been playing catch up at work. That may happen from time to time during the semester, but I will try to be as regular with my posts as I can.

I hope to get back to my schedule this weekend. In the meantime, here's an insightful quote from yoga teacher Shiva Rea to ponder:

"The yogini is a woman whose body has become her temple, her source of discovery and renewal, the place of remembering her life force."

Talking the Talk

Feminism has long noted that our language helps construct our reality. Far from being mere exercises in “political correctness,” feminists note that the language we use shapes our understandings of social issues and our relationships with one another.

Anusara yoga has taken this awareness to a new level. Anusara teachers infuse our speech with life-affirming attitudes. We recognize that language matters; the storylines we tell ourselves influence our understanding of the world. As yoga practitioners and teachers, we can take the opportunity to create more empowering storylines.

What does this sound like? Instead of squeezing or tightening our legs together in handstand, we hug in toward the midline. Instead of stretching our torso in a forced way, we imagine inner body bright, which creates fullness while maintaining a soft opening. We receive a deeper breath. We allow our experience to be what it is. And we shine forth our full potential in each pose. The difference in wording crafts a more loving and empowering tone both on and off the mat.

With its base in Tantric philosophy, Anusara takes this positive angle even further to infuse yoga practice with metaphor. Anusara teachers learn how to paint descriptive pictures for our students. We radiate our energy outward on exhales and draw in on inhales like an ocean tide. We float our leg up in Warrior I, allowing the waves of energy to ripple through us. As we transition from Warrior I back to Downward Dog, we recognize that when we flow with our breath, we can harness surprising strength.

Mere semantics? I don’t think so. In a media-infused culture that trains women to view ourselves with a critical, objectifying, and fragmenting gaze, it can be transgressive to speak to ourselves and others with language that reflects our value systems and our principles. Over time, we can sculpt a more compassionate and empowering reality with life-affirming language, much like ocean waves carve softer shapes out of hardened rocks. The rhythm of time and practice enables ripples of powerful change.

Sometimes Just Being Is Enough

The feminist writer bell hooks has noted that “teaching is a performative act.” Years of working as a Women’s Studies professor has taught me the truth of that observation. Not only is one in front of a group of people as a professor—or as a yoga teacher—but one’s job is to engage them in an active learning process. For me, it brings out a performative nature that I did not know I had growing up as a shy, bookish, only child.

But “being on” also takes its toll, especially if one is as introverted as I am. I can relish, excel, and enjoy the performative nature of my work, but sometimes I hit a wall and I just don’t feel like “being on.” And yet, as they say, the “show must go on.”

Yoga has taught me how to just be in those moments. Each week when we enter our yoga class, we are in different moods with different states of energy and different distractions. The self-reflection we develop through our practice helps us learn how to access deeper layers, regardless of the circumstances. The result is often an intensely transformative educational moment.

Once, when I was first learning to be a yoga teacher, I had a vibrant and witty lesson planned. Then I walked into the yoga studio to teach my first mini-class to a group of other yoga teachers while being observed by a senior yoga teacher, and all my anxiety arose. What if I wasn’t any good? These were experienced teachers, I thought; they would all be so much more talented than I. Who did I think I was?! My heart started racing.

Normally, I would have just bluffed and put on the performance. But the self-awareness and mindfulness that yoga has taught me has opened a deeper possibility: turning inward and offering a teaching from where I am at that moment.

In this case, I scrapped my plan. Instead, I delved into the fears and anxieties I was feeling, and created a class plan from what I learned through that exploration. I used my fears as a way to open and connect with students, instead of a way to shut them out. My theme for that day was how to witness anxieties without clinging to them or pushing them away, a theme which I wove throughout our poses. We were then all—students and teacher alike—able to practice how to meet our responses with skillful acceptance, compassion, and humor.

This ability to turn inward and teach the material from where I am has often produced a profoundly authentic and transformative experience, both in the yoga studio and in my academic classrooms. I have entered feminist classes with the same philosophy of allowing what is. Those classes have often become turning points in the semester for students to own the material for themselves in new ways.

What yoga has offered, then, is this simple but powerful understanding: Often, just being authentically present and self-aware is more than enough.

Receiving the Gift of Feedback

Life really is a Shakesperian comedy at times. Last week, my blog post carefully laid out my philosophy on mentoring. I pontificated, quite sincerely, about how I strive to create a supportive environment for constructive criticism in my Women’s Studies classrooms so that we can all grow to our full potentials.

Then what happened?

I got critiqued. My partner, Amy, offered me suggestions about what I was doing that wasn’t really working and how I could improve. They were insightful and helpful.….And, well, all my baggage arose. I got defensive, hurt, and a little angry.

Funny how life offers us opportunities to learn what we need to learn. It’s never easy to take criticism, particularly when it’s regarding something about which we care deeply and have tried to do our best. In this case, Amy offered helpful feedback designed to be supportive, but it wasn’t easy to receive it as such.

I wondered, as she and I processed the interaction and the feelings it brought up for both of us, why I reacted so differently to this incident than I did to the suggestions of my yoga teacher earlier in the week. What makes some guidance feel like support and others like threats?

In my Intermediate yoga class, we were doing hip openers, leading up to Eka Pada Sirsasana (Foot Behind the Head Pose). My teacher, Ali, had us lie on our backs and guided us through how to put our ankle behind our head, then how to sit up while maintaining that position. Yes, that’s right, I said sit up, with our ankle behind our head. Some of my classmates were even able to stand up.

But I struggled. At one point, Ali suggested that I pause, and then she guided me through how to more productively align my body to get my shoulder more successfully under my foot. Why, I wonder, did that moment feel so helpful while the interaction with Amy felt like criticism? Why did I take one suggestion as encouragement and another as invalidation?

I think it’s because on the mat, I am embodied first. I have let go of concerns that I might look stupid or disappoint (I am trying to put my foot behind my head, after all!) And I don’t attach judgement to my teacher’s suggestions. I simply try it and see how I experience the result. When sensations or emotions arise, the poses offer a safe place to explore and move through them to make life affirming choices.

In yoga, I have given myself the permission to be a learner, and that means allowing myself to not be good at something. That perspective is harder to embrace in our personal lives, but we can often grow much more when we allow ourselves to embody the openness of inquiry. In yoga, I am not attached to outcome. I don’t care whether I can stand up today with my foot behind my head. I am much more interested in what I can learn in the process of trying to do so, and that nonattachment helps me make more life affirming choices about how I react to things.

Relationships offer us deeply fertile ground to cultivate that resilience. With loved ones, we often get caught in our reactions instead of fully embodying them, letting them pass, and then mindfully deciding the best course of action. When we can give ourselves permission to be a learner, we can better receive the gifts of the experience.

Learning to Achieve Our Potenial

I’ve already confessed to being a groupie of the television show “So You Think You Can Dance.” It stands out from other reality TV shows in part because of the relationship between the “judges” and the contestants. There is critique. There is constructive criticism. There is even competition. But it’s all done in a supportive way that is designed to help a dancer achieve his or her full potential. Unlike most reality TV shows, the tone of the feedback is not catty, sensationalized, or cruel. It’s done as a kind of mentoring to encourage and challenge people to excel beyond what they thought they could do.

That is the environment that I strive to create in my feminist classroom. One that is inspiring, mutually supportive, and challenging. One in which the collective elevates every individual to strive for their best. For me, feminist teaching and mentoring means helping students think outside their box and creating a collaborative learning environment in which everyone grows together in different ways to create a whole that is more vibrant than we could have imagined.

But that type of environment is a bit counter-cultural. It’s unfamiliar for many of us. Far too often, U.S. culture breeds a kind of dog-eat-dog climate, in which only one person can “win.” Look at the typical reality TV show—it’s rarely about collaborative teamwork so that everyone can accomplish a goal and succeed to the end. Instead, people undercut and betray each other, play on each other’s weaknesses, and strive to win at the expense of others. These shows continue because viewers like to watch that drama.

Unfortunately, higher education is not immune to these cultural pressures. Students know that they need to work in groups, but they haven’t necessarily learned true collaboration. What’s worse, there is often still this underlying ideology that one can only succeed if others do not. That the places where one has not yet achieved one’s potential are weaknesses and flaws, rather than possibilities. That one grows by declaiming someone else. Women in particular have often learned to compare ourselves to one another and consider it a failure if we find ourselves “deficient.” As a feminist teacher, I have to work against these cultural tenets to create a more supportive yet challenging climate in my classrooms.

Anusara Yoga has offered me some techniques for doing so. In my Anusara classes, we genuinely cheer one another when someone has a “yoga moment” and does a new pose for the first time. We are inspired when someone embodies a pose we cannot—it invigorates us rather than invalidates us. Our practice is a journey of growth, not a race to the finish line. While we admire and support our fellow classmates, we don’t compare ourselves to them. As John Friend describes it, it’s a philosophy of “Yes, I see that I’m good and I can also expand and evolve that goodness in its artistry.” It’s also about embodying the “intention of wanting to help each other experience the ultimate freedom in every expanding moment of the artistry of life.”[i]

My Anusara classes have truly shown me what it feels like to learn in an environment in which we are all already enough. It’s a climate I strive to create in my feminist classrooms. We all have potentials to grow into. We start from a place of validity and worth, and we support and inspire one another to blossom from there into directions we haven’t even imagined.

[i] John Friend’s Blog, “The Art of Feedback.” Anusara. 13 August 2009. http://www.anusara.com/index.php?option=com_wpmu&blog_id=2&Itemid=250

Finding Our Place in the Family of Things*

I just returned from five days visiting old friends in Central NY, a place that still rings as home to me. There, I reconnected with people I consider family, nourished my love for the Finger Lakes countryside, and relished in the sense of belonging that I felt in my bones the minute I arrived. Jamming to the Bee Gees, sailing, kayaking, and hanging out by a bonfire under the moonlight, I was reminded of the centrality of interconnection to a sense of well-being.

In Tantric philosophy, Divine energy pervades every living being and therefore weaves a deep web of interdependence. In fact, Anusara™ Yoga places the yoga kula, or community, as one of its top three principles. The collectivity of the yoga kula raises the quality of everyone in it. It creates a symbiotic relationship wherein the collective strengthens the individual, which then in turn strengthens the whole.

Feminism also emphasizes the relationship between the individual and the collective, the personal and the structural. Large scale change occurs when we work together, each taking our responsibility for our part in the greater good. Both Anusara™ Yoga and feminism recognize the value of community. It helps us feel connected. It reveals our interdependence. It offers us support and the gift of supporting others. It helps us find our place in the “family of things.” In doing so, it enables us to blossom into our full potential.

Try it:

Vrksasana (Tree Pose): Gather in a circle with your Yoga Kula, interlace your arms, and take tree pose. Then, striking a balance between standing on your own and leaning on one another for support, lean back. You can more easily add a small back bend to tree pose when you can receive the support of one another.

Partner Stretch: Take a good Tadasana. Your partner will stand behind you, take a good solid stance, and hold your wrists. With that support, you can fall forward as far as feels comfortable, trusting that your community will support you. Lead with your heart, and communicate with one another to ensure a safe and exhilarating stretch of body, mind, and heart.

*The title is a reference to Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese”