Sometimes people critique my approach to educating yoga teachers on the intricacies of psychological processes behind yoga practice and teaching. People say I am giving all the credit to the therapists. I get admonished for 'turning yoga teachers into therapists'. I get hammered for thinking yoga teachers should ‘do more’ and that good yoga asana teaching should take care of itself.

1) To be clear, I do believe that much of what we see in neuroscience is originally found in yogic texts. Patanjali is speaking much like a great therapist would. The field of psychology is simply illuminating scientifically what we know to be true anecdotally. This is actually really great because we live in a scientifically oriented, emotionally sterile society. So in this way perhaps these findings will continue to draw people back into the source of these understandings, such as back into yoga or meditation.

When you do yoga long enough and it is working and your smart, don’t you sort of want to know what the hell is going on? Why some things work and some things do not? If you have been doing yoga a long time and you still really aren’t that nice, don’t you think its time to clean up your act? Do you not find it curious--all that shame blame guilt and jealousy we do to each other as teachers--not to mention our poor inner selves? Learning some key elements of psychology will, I believe whole-heartedly open your practice and teaching to new dimensions. It will only serve to clarify.

2) I am not in the business of turning yoga teachers into shrinks. Nor do I believe if you are a yoga teacher you are qualified to give psychological advice. But what I do see rampant in our yoga culture is one in which the teacher gets hammered with projections, and transference and they do not know how to effectively and skillfully use a very important god-given process called somatic countertransference. This one teaching I support the cultivation of in teachers is a complete game changer. This is the one skill we have taken for granted as teachers and it supports the whole shebang.

Furthermore, I teach and advocate 'scope of practice'. One pitfall in yoga teaching is in believing you have the skills to counsel someone. When I was 24 I had student after student coming up to me and asking me if I thought they should leave their marriage. To this day I still believe that they simply saw some young spirited free-bird yoga teacher who could pack all her belongings into her car. (She was also a sad, lonely, terrified, rage-aholic but of course all behind closed doors). For whatever reason, this bohemian carefree character I represented was appealing to those students. They saw something in me that they missed in themselves. Well look, was I in a position to tell someone with children that they should leave their marriage? No way! And even now, if someone came to me I probably wouldn’t give advice one way or the other.

In my days in Anusara yoga I saw the big kahuna giving lots of marital advice, for better or for worse. I am not saying the actual advice was wrong. Maybe for some people it was the thing they wanted to hear. And maybe that was supportive and healing. The point is that when you are a leader, when you are seen as a teacher, people will come to you with so many questions. You will represent something to them.

When I got married who did I ask to perform the ceremony? My yoga teacher! And you know why? She and her husband have a relationship I admire and live up to. So it wasn’t her down dog and side angle teaching skills that I wanted that day. I wanted HER. I wanted the presence of her yoagfied authentic self to bare witness on that day. So yes it was the yoga I had learned from her. And no it wasn’t the yoga at all.

So in regards to teaching about “scope of practice”, we spend ample time in my courses talking about what it means to be a teacher, what happens for students when they see you in the light of teacher, mentor, or spiritual leader. Oh you better believe that students may see you as a spiritual leader. And look, if that’s what you are up to, if that’s your intention--to be a spiritual leader and your message comes through yoga asana—great! Hallelujah! You better have the chops and integrity though to support that role.

Some teachers are actually quite good at offering a supportive listening ear and so why not cultivate further skills to support that natural offering unfolding out of that person. Does that make them a therapist? No. But it makes them an effective teacher with listening and reflective skills they wouldn’t otherwise have. This comes in handy especially in regards to teaching privates.

One of my mentors used to say, “if it smells like therapy, its therapy”. And so one of the things we need to understand as teachers is our listening and supportive limitation. We need to know when we really need to hand over our students’ issues to a therapist. We are so eager to help and please, us yoga teacher folk, that we get stuck too often in a cycle where we are covertly doing therapy. Lets stop this. Lets let the therapists be therapists and lets allow ourselves to be the teachers. Now there will be some overlap always. This is normal and fine and appropriate even. But we need to be educated enough to know when enough is enough. This education really isn’t happening in other places.

Lastly I will say in regards to this topic, that we have lots of rules and regulations about physical safety in classes. But not many have a pulse on psychological safety in classes. It’s not a requirement in teacher trainings.  The process of teaching whose who and what’s what helps the yoga teachers be yoga teachers and the therapists be therapists. When someone works with me they are under no obligation to believe what I say or apply what I teach. It’s a perspective, an opportunity, and an application of curiosity. That’s all. Sometimes people realize in working with me, that really they just want to teach yoga. Straight up yoga. To that I say AWESOME! Sometimes people are like “Wow, I want to be able to help people through the emotions that come up for them when they practice.” To that I say, amen! Hallelujah. Sometimes people realize they got into teaching yoga because they wanted to be in a helping profession and guess, what? The yoga really isn’t all the important to them, so they go back to school to be come a counselor. Again, that’s amazing and awesome! So in this way I am helping to weed out and separate these professions. I believe this to be a good thing.

It is far far to easy to become a “yoga teacher” these days. Many people get into it not because they actually want to teach. They want to be transformed. They are seeking a rite of passage. They want to help. They want to support. There are many avenues through which to channel your yoga teaching ‘skills’. If you are teaching yoga for the long haul, you better be dammed sure you are up for it. The long haul yoga teacher is a dying breed in my opinion. So is the long haul therapist by the way. So lets get clear on what we are doing, why we are doing it and for whom we long to serve.

3) I believe in the power of asana. I really do. I have fought with many a somatic therapist advocating the fact that yoga truly is one of the original somatic psychology methods. If you put yourself in those various shapes, something deep happens. Trikonasna is not just good for your hamstrings. There is a whole other element that we experience in practice that has everything to do with the asana and how well you line up that asana for your body and then letting the so called ‘magic’ happen. Asanas are medicine. I believe that. I know it to be true.

I also know that not every teacher of asana is for everyone. We are attracted and averse to different teachers teaching the same shapes for a whole variety of reasons. This then leads me to believe that there is something about the way one might teach, and how one is that is just as important to the thing they are teaching.

Now of course you can eliminate this factor by not having a teacher and just doing asana at home. But look, sooner or later we need a teacher. It might not even be a yoga teacher. But we need teachers.  Why do we need teachers? We need them because we need examples of how to be. We need people to respect and emulate so that we might grow into our own self-respect.

Our parents are our first teachers. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. In the cases where the parenting was not the most successful teaching in human beingness, we need to find non-parent teachers to assist in the learning. Good parenting teaches us something about the world and ourselves. Good teaching re-parents and repairs us well. That goodness, those successes, is psychologically healthy and healing. So a great yoga teacher affords us the opportunity to receive healing simply by the act of being a great teacher, and person.

Like I teach all the folks that come my way, YOU are the greatest asana in your class. YOU will be the greatest indicator of your student’s success. YOU are the teaching. I realize this puts tremendous pressure on the teacher. But I am challenging all of us to consider that we can no longer live double lives. I can no longer be Livia and then Livia the yoga teacher. It’s the same. If you see me at whole foods I am me. if you see me at the studio I am me. If you see me on a date with my husband, well, I might be tipsy from my cocktail but I am myself nonetheless.

Many teachers feel that because they have become visible pillars in their communities, when they go out they are in a fish bowl. Their moves are observed and commented upon.  My challenge is that this fish bowl does not actually exist. We are now in an age where we are all in the sea. We can comment upon our lives globally through twitter and facebook and we can instagram our entire personal sphere. Either the fish bowl no longer exists or we are all inside a giant one together.

In this manner, we must be integrated as teachers. We must be fluid in our authenticity. For me it seems that one of the greatest gifts we can give students of yoga is our authenticity as human beings. So yes, this is a mighty tall order I am calling for from my colleagues. I am advocating for a kind of transparency that we have yet to see. Being a good person, helping people when you are called, honoring yourself deeply, these are all vitally important at their essence and they are at the core healing to everyone.

It is possible to teach healing poses. It is also possible to BE a healing. And I am in the business of teaching people how to be a healing. How to be their own healing and healing for others.

We all come into this life with the capacity to offer medicine. The medicine person is no longer reserved for the tribal shaman. We are all medicine people. Its just that some of us are gathering our tools to make our healing salve and some of us are not into that quite yet. What I am suggesting is that there are a plethora of yoga teachers out there who are willing, able, and totally ready to be those healing salves for this world.

It is important to also understand that “this world” might be 25 people in your community. “This world” doesn’t mean the entire planet. It doesn’t mean 500 people at the Wanderlust festival. It means being a healing for your people, which has nothing to do with amount of people. Your medicine will be unique. The way you teach yoga will be unique. Those teachings are custom made for the ears and hearts of certain people. In some cases it is few in numbers and in others it is many in numbers.

To the yoga teacher trying to build their class numbers or teach at a yoga festival, I ask you this. “Is what you are trying to offer, communicable in a large number? Is what you are up to suited to dissemination through a large or small number? If your medicine is best offered one by one or through small groups, then why are you wasting your medicine on a mass? That would be like throwing away an epi-pen in the vital time of need. Don’t do that. Just don’t.

So yes, my critics are correct then. I am asking yoga teachers to buckle up, and giddy up. News flash: the world is not starved for asana anymore. The world is starved for YOU. It is starved for healthy whole and embodied people. So yes I am expecting a lot of yoga teachers these days. Healing is no longer reserved for the therapist’s office. Healing must happen everywhere and all the time. In a world gone completely mad we must take ourselves up with the highest respect and curiosity so that the more integrated, whole and healthy we become, that solid ground and rich healthy sea of BEING translates out to support the whole.

In the end, BEING HUMAN is a tall order. 

It feels important to say that in my mission to bring more and more refined psychological concepts into the world of yoga, that I am actually not teaching anything that is not present in the ancient texts, anything not already embedded in the primary teachings of yoga itself and anything we haven't learned from the effective cosmology charts of different lineages.

If you study Hindu myth, the same teachings of psychological concepts are there. And I dare say these concepts existed in the ways of yoga before the therapists and neuroscientists started catching on. Freud, Jung, Perls, Bowlby, Siegel and the like, all the heavy hitters, they didn’t invent things. They showed and have continued to show in a different way and in a different language what it is the yogis were saying for years and years.

Also, we have seen an evolution in the world of psychology. Much of Freud is outdated for where we are now in our cultural conception and modern conventions. We are all built on someone else back and this is surely true in the psychology world. Although much of Freud we may toss, we also have built major understanding for each other and ourselves because of his crazy ideas.

This too is the case in yoga. Each stream and method built in response to or out of connection with another. We are always comingling, mixing, evolving. We know both theoretically and experientially that when we experience inertia or we are constantly stuck on one channel or one way of being we develop neurosis.

Options allow for health. They force our discernment.

The fusion or rather I should say, overt connection of yoga and psychology gives more options one either side of the same coin. Imagine making a penny worth more than one cent. This is what I am up to. It is what many of us are up to. We are increasing the worth and value of both systems as the call for integrative evolution quickens.

Far too many people turn toward psychology in the great void of loosing our mythic consciousness. If we go after our minds and leave our mythic allegories, our faith, our devotion, and our practices behind, then we are just as lost as when we only live in spiritual naiveté. We know in our modern western culture we cannot simply yoga our sins away. Rather yoga becomes the tool or the method through which we can both observe what is and create change. Productive witness function and a healthy humble mind are keys to making accurate discernments as well as lasting changes. Similarly, if we leave the body behind we may never access the breadth and depth of wisdom actually contained within us.

I want to assure my fellow yogis that all those yamas and niyamas, all those paths to samadhi, they are still revered in the psychology world. They just come under other names like emotional regulation, mindfulness, distress tolerance and the like.  For me I believe it is more about making these processes sacred to the yogi overt to the modern human being rather than allowing them to appear as purely magical yogic experiences.

The blending of yoga and modern psychology may afford us the understanding that the seeming magic and miracles of yoga are not chance or happenstance. They are real. They can be repeated. They can be used in overt ways to facilitate huge change at the personal, interpersonal and intrapersonal levels.

My hope is that the yogis and therapists alike feel less and less threatened by one another. Without some kind of body-based ritual, sorry therapists, your work will, dare, I boldly say flop. Your clients should have faith in something much bigger than themselves, or you, for that matter.

Faith is a marker of psychological health. 

Without the rich understanding of the mind and our behaviors, we are too easily swayed. We too easily succumb to the perils of spiritual practice including bypass and manipulation as well as inefficacy. Spiritual practice as well as body-based practice does not excuse behaviors in the daily-life realm. We have evolved too far for that to be enough. The realities and practicalities of modern western life are now out of the bounds of what the sutras say. Psychology concepts can help the yogis reinterpret and re-attune to the truths of the age-old texts. We may find these teachings more applicable, and hence more meaningful to our current times.

Yoga has always been the evolution of a revolution. Why should it be different now? 

Lastly, I have to confess as both yogi and therapist I still do agree with Patanjali. Above all, when all else fails, pray to God. 

I often tell my clients that it is important to deposit into their Gratitude Bank on a regular basis. Little comments like “Thank you for doing the dishes” and “Thanks for making the bed” actually go a long way. It is too easy in our daily routines to miss the little things we do for each other in partnership to keep our homes running smoothly.  Sure, I know that even if I don’t say please and thank you, Elliot will do the dishes. But I also know that when I do say please and thank you he feels appreciated.

Small deposits in the gratitude bank can also look like “You look nice today” or “That shirt looks great on you” or “I can see how hard you are working these days”. Small acknowledgments that do not seem huge in the moment pay big dividends later on.

Just like we deposit money into our savings account, its important to regularly deposit into our emotional savings. It might not seem important now, but down the road it will matter. Down the road when we need to really pull out some of those resources it will be important.  When our partner gets a job and we have to move, we will need those resources in the emotional bank account to help remember all the reasons of being together. When we argue or go through tough times we are withdrawing from our emotional reserves and Gratitude Bank accounts. So if we have not been depositing into it regularly, then when we find ourselves in a pickle, or shall I say it bluntly because don’t I always? When the shit hits the fan, we will be glad we said please and thank you, gave little gratitudes, appreciations and encouragements.

Of course I often think relationships are exactly like asana practice. In fact some of the greatest insights into my own relationships have come via my practice. The mat is the testing ground so to speak. In general I find that how people treat their mats, treat themselves on the mat and treat each other on the mat is exactly how they are behaving in every other circumstance in their lives.

I just spent four days doing some intense asana work with one of my most favorite teachers and people in general, Christina Sell. In our time together we spoke about how one approach we can take to working on the more challenging poses is to practice them like little deposits in our asana practice bank. We don’t have to expect to hit them every time we practice. We do not have to set up the perfect sequence and work to the apex challenge pose--which sets us up for elation when we hit it and devastation when we don’t.

Instead another approach is to touch in on these poses regularly. Not in an apex kind of way, but in a  ‘Oh, here is this pose’ kind of way. Frankly I like the slight nonchalance of this approach that is actually not nonchalant at all. It has intense purpose actually. The idea is that if we put these asanas into our practice accounts regularly, then when we do the apex pose sequence strategy we may find our selves closer with less drama. There is also much to be had in the sense of making small deposits until the day we cash in and the pose comes. And in the meantime, no time is wasted. We still gain the benefit of practice. We are gaining strength, agility and dedication in and through committed practice.

It’s not like it costs me anything to say: “Thanks for making the bed honey”. If anything it costs me more when I notice the times he doesn’t make the bed and then grumble to myself “Argh! Doesn’t he know he should make the bed?!” That is like expecting a yoga teacher to know all the little nuances we like in our practice to get us into some pose. So if the teacher doesn’t put that pose in there for us, then we are left blaming the teacher or the sequence for us not getting the pose. In psychology we have a word for that; it’s called codependence. We also have a word for giving gratitude and appreciations to our partners; it’s called generosity.

I can tell you that since I started investing in this depositing gratitude practice with Elliot, I have found our times of conflict less severe, and more easily recoverable. On a similar note, I used to mainly practice the peak pose strategy. I got some poses. But I also got a little injured, sometimes blocked, and my practice in some ways felt draining rather than fulfilling. More and more (inspired by Christina) I have been working on sequences with repetition of strong fundamentals while then dabbling in a few harder poses into the sequences without some huge pomp and circumstance. So this weekend when I went into the fiery cauldron of intense group practice, I hit some poses pretty solidly I had not before.

Additionally it seems like this continued practice with harder poses consistently placed as regulars in the sequence, builds a kind of foundation in practice where when I get the pose its not happen stance or arbitrary. Because I have been building strength and flexibility all along the way as the secondary gains of my deposits in my asana bank, it’s not the sequence that gets me the pose. I get me the pose. I am big fan of making things less by chance and more predictable, especially in asana.

So it’s not the circumstances that make or break the argument. It’s all the other deposits I have made until that argument. Have I been consistently withdrawing or even over drafting emotionally? Or, have I been regularly depositing?

Strong balanced asana practice I am finding yields a similar stability physically, emotionally and energetically. I find my practice more grounded than ever, more ferocious than ever, and more whimsical than ever. I also find my relationship to be rewarding, loving and challenging. Elliot and I have had to withdraw a lot from our emotional savings this year being so far apart. But we have found ways to continue to deposit back in as well.

There will be times when our asana practice asks a lot of us—we will have to take huge withdrawals to get the challenging poses. Remember challenge in asana increases because the shape is asking us to be balanced in something unstable and flexible in something beyond our flexibility. Hmm, that sounds a lot like marriage and ongoing relationships to me.

The times get tough when our partners ask us to stretch far past what we think we can, could, or would. The times get tough when our foundations of stability decrease through space, lack of appreciation, illness, etc. So I think of the emotional deposits like supporting the foundation for when we need it.  I think about repetition in practice as solidifying the foundation for the less stable poses—when I really need it.

And so it goes.