I found this in the annals of my notes from the end of my internship year during my masters degree. It still feel relevant now.

~~~

As clinicians and yoga teachers we must show up fully embodied as who we are and not push away or deny parts of ourselves. The more we can show up in our absolute fullness with the entire mixed bag of our life experience--past, present and future--inside of us and then regulate ourselves, the more we become a literal healing BODY for the client or student to experience.

People learn by reading books. They read the information and they also have an experience of reading the information. People learn by hearing words, sounds, instructions, stories etc. And they learn from having the experience of hearing and listening to the sound. One of the reasons poetry and myth work as they do is because the literal vibration created by all the sounds strung together creates an orchestral impact on the person listening. (Some of you know this as that whole mantra, matrika, thing.) People also learn by seeing. They learn through watching someone do the pose they are struggling with or their therapist model feeling and expressing an emotion they have not yet been able to feel.

I believe that so much of the work of being a good clinician and teacher is in the practice of showing up fully and present in my own embodied experience as Myself, not just as Therapist or Teacher. And in this showing up authentically, I am also doing the work of helping regulate the client in front of me or support the student in the classroom. In essence the very manner in which I teach or provide counseling is the healing much more so than any cool intervention or teaching nugget I give. 

If you want to help someone, be yourself. 

We spend a lot of time trying to access all the Siddhis of yoga. But in my opinion the greatest Siddhi is that of being human to one’s fullest capacity. It is the mantra of “How can I regulate you by regulating me”.  And so we empower, learn and heal by being together.

As I look outward from Naropa towards the future I am mostly working on building educational programs for yoga teachers bringing them valuable applicable information from the world of somatic psychology. It is not that I am looking to fuse the two. I think yoga is inherently therapeutic and it does not have to be psychotherapy. I also believe that the practice of yoga can be one of the most eliciting and cathartic practices one can do. In essence, doing yoga can really stir the pot of our emotional bodies. In my opinion this is a tremendously valuable byproduct of practicing yoga. Not many people though when they begin this path understand the potential of catharsis and so when it arises they feel shocked, disappointed, angry, sad or annoyed. (Just to name a few emotions).

Sometimes this leads to people no longer practicing. There is a big misnomer that yoga practice should, because it elevates your conscious, only afford the experience of greater happiness with ore smiles and laughs. Just because something affords an increased opportunity for more joy doesn’t mean the experience will always be just that. I named my business Ecstatic Unfoldment because both yoga and psychotherapy in essence involve the expansion of one’s repertoire. We come to our yoga mats and our therapist’s office often times limited to a small range of motion and/or emotion. Over time through, the practice of exercising the muscles of our body, stretching our mind, and expanding our hearts, yields a kind of expansion and growth into all the old-shut-down corners of our being.  This experience may not always be that pleasant. Though the process of expanding in this way is inherently benevolent at the core, it is not always pleasant in the process.

If you read about various mystical experiences across cultures they all talk about the awe, grandeur, splendor, laughter, and terror of touching god. If yoga is about finding god in ourselves then good psychotherapy bestows back upon us the capacity to act that out skillfully and feel it coming in whole-heartedly. So to me, it is indeed ecstatic. Not happy or catchy or anything like that.

So my intention is to use my skills gained from Naropa primarily as means for education. The skills of therapist I have cultivated I want to bring into my role as yoga teacher so that I can stand with my students in their processes without getting completely triggered myself. One of the biggest teachings I received while at Naropa which has been solidified through internship is the concept that success in psychotherapy is not dependent on the interventions the therapist utilizes but rather it is the connection with the therapist that supports the clients healing.

I live by this understanding as a teacher of yoga. I have plenty of skills in teaching asana. In fact I make a living off of those skills. I am proud of them. I am always trying to grow and expand them. The understanding of yoga asana, well yoga in all its varied forms for that matter, is not some steady target. It is a moving aim, a fluid arrow, an ever-shifting technology or device to expand awareness.

I was watching an old master class video of BKS Iyengar the other day and what struck me the most was this teaching on ‘waking up’ the muscles of the outer thigh. His whole shtick (at least at that specific moment in time) was about not being dull. “How to awaken every cell in the body to its own aliveness.” Frankly I think that’s a pretty awesome aim and like I said above always a moving target. What was dull in the relationship to the body a year ago might not be now. What seemed a tremendous feat a year ago might be easily stimulated now.

We are always growing, always expanding and always unfolding. Its not easy or always pleasant. On the loom of life sometimes we do feel as though we are being stretched, stitched and worn. And sometimes we are able to wrap ourselves in our own warmth of the life we have woven. And so we continue on I suppose. We show up. We do our work. We become ourselves even more.

And if we are really in that, those around us benefit deeply. We give them someone to lean into; a real person, a real human being, a real woven entity.

For years now I have always taught two different class themes around the hallmark heart-candy-palooza of Valentines Day. In the first theme I bring out my copy of Eve Enslers The Vagina Monologues and I read from her prologue.

 “I was worried about vaginas.”  She starts.

It usually shocks the people who haven’t heard it before. I mean, its not like you planned on paying twenty dollars to come to yoga and have your teacher sit you down and say that word we shouldn’t say.

Vagina.

I know. Shocking. Horrible. Waste of time and money. Call the swami swat team.

You came for peace and calm and the teacher is saying vagina.  How are you supposed to sit comfortably and meditate if you are thinking about vaginas. Tough eh?

~~~

But that’s the thing; yoga is meant to bring us to the edge of what is uncomfortable physically, emotionally, culturally and cosmically. Krishna says to Arjuna that the battle must be fought, regardless of opinion. Yoga is the practice of confronting what seems separate and integrating it through a process of investigation, parsing out, bringing back together and discovery. The fact that it is tough to hear or read vagina--the fact that it is squeamish--is partly indicative of like the rest of society, we as yogis are not above the devaluation of the female body, form and psyche.

If you think gender inequality is not present in yoga, look again, its right in front of your face.

~~~

I was once denied a time slot at a studio because I wasn’t a man. I had been told I would get another class soon. A few months, later I was told, soon. A few months after that, still soon. My class did well by the numbers and I met all the criteria. So when a prime slot became available I hoped I would get that one.  I did not get the slot. Even though I had built a following, been at the studio a while  (longer than the person who got the class actually and I was told seniority of service to the studio was a major factor in getting classes) and met every teaching criteria except for one, I was a woman, not a man. When I asked, I was even told explicitly that’s why I didn’t get the class. I was told they needed the power of male energy in the slot. 

I never told anyone this actually. I was too shocked, hurt and embarrassed. I let it go at the time because it didn’t seem worth it. It felt like a fight not worth having. But I should have said something. The fact that I didn’t is an example of the weeding away of the female psyche and presence in our overbearingly male dominated, misogynistic world. I should have made a stink, not for myself, but for everyone.

~~~

Me believing I should have been granted that slot makes me entitled. But for the male teacher who wants time slots, its not entitlement. It is just he trying to break into the female dominated yoga teacher industry.

A male teacher who is strict, clear and sets rules in the classroom is referred to as such. A female teacher who is clear and strict and has rules is mean. I have been called mean. I have been called a bitch. I have been told I yell at people. And my personal favorite was being called “an angry teacher”.  I do not see my male contemporaries being told they are yelling or being dominating. I see them being praised for being so clear and robust.

If I express outrage, I am hysterical. And yoginis don’t have rage. They smell like rose petals and sweat gold.  (I mean we do, but you get the point). If a man is expressing his outrage he is speaking up for his people.

It goes on and on. And it continues to become even more twisted in a see of double standards no matter who the teacher is or how they identify.

In yoga, as a female teacher I should look sexy to sell my brand but not too hot because then I am ‘selling out’. I should look awesome in my really tight spandex. But I shouldn’t flaunt what’s underneath it. I should be sexy but not sexual. I should look like sex but never say the words.  The man showing off his ‘yoga body’ is strong and virile.

But also If a man wears tight spandex shorts to practice in, especially if he is the teacher, then he must be trying to get some or he is gay. And he should get looser shorts.

A man who sleeps with his female students is just another guru gone awry. Well, tisk tisk and shame on him. A female teacher who sleeps with her students is a slut and a home wrecker.

In our efforts to reclaim what is right and righteous and reset the course, we have decided to go on guru hunts against all male sexual predators in yoga. I actually think that is a good thing. Perpetrators should be brought to justice. There is no such thing as consent when it comes to a relationship where one of the parties has power and privilege over the other, such as in the student teacher relationship.

But that happens in every permutation of relationship regardless of sex and gender.  The goddess can perpetrate too.

Though, to be honest, I sometimes wonder if the goddess has been forced to perpetrate because in her subjugation she has been left with no voice and few options. The world listens when things are loud and obvious and stick out, but easily ignores the subtle, subliminal, non-verbal and internal.

We both patronize and tear down the male guru and we both vindicate and validate the female who does the same.

We ask women to sell their yoga bodies but we criticize them for doing so. We ask yoga men to keep it in their pants but teach shirtless.

Not to mention yet, that very few of us have taken it upon ourselves to ensure that yogis regardless of how they identify are welcome. The fact that I am using man and woman and a binary scale to define and distinguish people who do yoga is incredulous. I know people who do yoga who identify with the pronoun ze or they, not he or she.  

The belief that we are better off as yogis meditating above it all, rather than living down on the ground in the blood and the dirt and do the battle we were asked to do, is a belief instilled within us through privilege and dominance, usually male.

The whole system has literally been fucked.

~~~

For me, reading works by and standing in solidarity with people like Eve Ensler who are using their whole bodies to be the example of healing, reclamation and bold buoyant presence in a sea of misogynistic madness for all beings is hope inducing.

So yes, like Eve, I am worried about vaginas too. I am worried about our double standards. I am worried about the ways we have formed yoga into just another egotistical escapade. I am worried that more of us are not worried. In some ways we have become obsessed with getting poses of perceived value instead of being poses of inherent worth. When one sex wins the species goes extinct. So like usual, I’ll be bringing Eve to class this Valentine’s Day. And like always I bring all unheard voices every day. 

You would not expect your teacher to do your practice for you. So why do we think social justice is for any one else but us? 

When I asked on the Applied Psychology For Yogis Facebook page why people taught yoga, the responses were lovely, heart warming and frankly, as I suspected. Mostly those who responded, reported wanting to 'help' others. They reported wanting to 'offer' or 'pass on' the health, healing and discoveries that changed their lives. The ‘change that people  Yoga it seems, is a way people can transmit their message.

What I find ironic is that no one said specifically (two of them were close to the notion though) that they teach yoga because they love asana. Perhaps this is a given. Perhaps the love of this kind of movement is just assumed in the question. But the fact that everyone chose to write something yoga offers rather than the yoga itself, leads me to believe (or rather I should say, confirms my hunch) that those commenting all see, realize and know yoga asana is a vehicle for something more.

It seems we can agree that yoga is a method of change, expansion, shifting, creating self-love, etc. It seems though that the skills needed to transmit and share the teachings listed above is different in some ways than teaching asana.

Now don’t get me wrong. I believe a lot can get done through the asana practice itself. The shapes have potent medicine for us when we open to their possibilities. At the very least, teachers of yoga should know when to stop preaching their teachings and let the simplicity of the shape be the profundity of the practice. There are the teachings of yoga, which everyone is free to receive through asana. And there are your teachings. Or I should say perhaps, you as a teaching. In my book these are linked but different. I believe we should know when to offer which. I also believe teachers of yoga need to know when to steer their students to qualified professionals in other complimentary fields.

This leaves me with some earnest questions for my colleagues.

Why do you teach yoga? If the answer to the why is something underneath the asana's or something the asanas may afford, then do you have the skills to transmit THAT? Do you think you learned those skills of transmitting and transformation in your teacher training when you took it? If not, did you get them elsewhere? Do you think you need other skills?

I see many teachers wanting to use asana as a method or vehicle to some other end. It is that saying ‘Its not about the pose’. Teachers know that asana is the beginning, not the end. It seems teaching great asana is half the issue. It is a big part of the picture obviously, but not the whole picture. Good asana teaching skills are absolutely necessary because you need your technique or vehicle to be strong. It needs to be strong to carry the teachings you have inside them. The stronger you make your vehicle and the technique that built it, the more powerful and sustainable your teachings carried by it are.

So lets say you are good at teaching asana and you want to really teach self love. Let’s say self-love is your core value and at the end of the day it is what yoga is about for you. What are the skills then that you are using to teach self-love? It is not only the asana itself. If you try to incorporate this into a theme by saying 'love yourself' that is not teaching. That is talking.

Teaching is giving someone an experience of the topic so that it becomes their own. Talking about it might land at the intellectual level but experience lands in the cells of our bodies not to mention stimulates the emotional centers of the brain. Our brains pick up the emotionality or the context of a sentence before its content? Teaching is creating an environment for the embodied actions of the topic to arise. If you say 'love yourself', sorry, you aren’t teaching self-love. You are teaching asana and talking about and around self-love.  But if you emanate self-love, if you are the teaching of self-love, if you create an environment where the experience of self-love is more likely to occur, then the person learns.

But of course the difficulty here is that self-love is an individualized experience. It’s presumptuous to assume we have what a student needs. So then we come full circle.

Perhaps it is better to teach plain asana. Perhaps it is better to let the experience of good ole’ fashion asana practice elicit whatever it is going to for each particular student. Perhaps it is better to let each student glean their own teachings from the practice, whatever they may be. You learn self-love through asana practice. You do. You do not need a teacher to knock you on the head with it always. I mean, sometimes maybe, but not always. As teachers how do we be overt enough and clear enough with our teachings and core values without being overbearing or suffocating? It is grand to be on a mission but not at the expense of a student’s own path.

Even if we only taught straight up asana for the sake of itself and let the teachings unfold student to student, you still need skills to help students regulate themselves. Obviously I do not think yoga teachers need to be their students’ therapists. I just think that sometimes teachings come to us, and its actually not some joyful experience of pleasantries. Sometimes those teachings come to us and it hurts like hell. The student-teacher relationship gains much of its preciousness through the power of witness. Students pay not only to learn, they pay to be witnessed. As teachers we need to remember the great weight we carry, the great honor really, of being a witness. The witness needs skills to hold space and keep the container of a class or session safe. Otherwise, why have a witness?

So lets take away all the theme-ing in the world. Even then, we still need skills to be good witnesses of what happens in asana. And anything can happen in asana. I think the psychology world would say these witness skills are called ‘psychotherapeutic’ skills. Frankly, all psychotherapeutic skills are simply being-a-good-human skills. Many people conflate psychotherapeutic skills with analysis.

While analysis is one skill required in psychotherapy, it is about 5% of the entire picture. The majority of psychotherapeutic skills are things like, listening, unconditional positive regard, witness, etc. I am not advocating for yoga teachers doing psychoanalysis. I am advocating for the usage of psychotherapeutic skills because although yoga is not psychotherapy, it is inherently therapeutic. A lot of these skills you do actually learn in yoga teacher trainings but certainly not all of them. And I think if we want to be good teachers. And I mean like really deep amazing teachers we need those extra ‘psychotherapeutic’ skills.

I think there should be delineation between asana pedagogy and training teachers how to use the asana technique as skillful means to teach their core value. Asana teaching skills is one part of the pie. It is a huge part. But what if the person wants to use asana as a vehicle? We may actually need to take them through a process that helps them know and understand what their core value is. This process is really what rites of passage work is all about. What is your core value? What is the thing you must give back to the world?

Once someone goes through this threshold, skillful means must be trained. This is where yoga asana pedagogy comes in. It is also where psychotherapeutic skill training comes in.

So I say we need to ask ourselves what is it we want to teach? Is it asana for the means of asana? Is it asana for the means of a core value teaching? Is it a combination of the two?  You could teach asana. You could teach asana and have good application of psychotherapeutic skills to maintain the health and safety of the room. You could teach a core value through asana. The trainings for these might overlap but they are different.

We now have an oversaturated market of yoga teachers who teach asana. Mostly because we keep putting people through the same kinds of trainings regardless of their intentions. Most teachers though, are desperately trying to make a difference in peoples lives through asana. Few of us, as leaders in the field, are asking them (let alone ourselves) what their core value is and giving them the skills (a combination of yoga and other things too) to teach that through yoga. We keep using the same hammer of ‘yoga teacher training’ to meet a whole variety of needs. I think its time we choose some other tools. Like maybe some of us need to be leading rites of passage. Maybe some of us need to be teaching pure asana pedagogy. Maybe some of us need to be teaching the psychotherapeutic skills. 

its just a thought.