More and more I am learning the wisdom of these human bodies and find faith in a greater intelligence than the mind can even compute and comprehend. Try these on for size. 

Consider the size of the human baby and the size of the human vagina. 

Thats right people. It does not add up. Hence why they call it a “miracle”. Consider the vast differences we see amongst each other from the outside and yet how we share nearly the same genetic code. A sea of humanity in a myriad forms. Consider the size of planet earth within the whole of the solar system. A mere speck of stardust compared to the totality of it all. 

Up until recently I have been rather nonchalant and casual about my plan for birth. I know the best made planned rarely go exactly as such and I also know that for thousands of years the female form has birthed humanity into being. So I have gone about my business and figure, well, I suppose I will do it too. 

Last week in our birth class I hit a wall. I am not talking a fatigue wall where you rest and recoup. I mean, The Wall. I turned to Elliot and said, “You know, I just don't think this is for me after all. Too messy. Too intimate.”

I had hit what I call an intimacy threshold. That place where you are like. “Nope. I’m good watching from the sidelines”. I wanted to run and hide and crawl myself under a rock. I wanted not a single pair of eyes to see what I was feeling or the me I was being asked and beckoned to bring forth. Because what I am being asked to do is all too vulnerable, raw and real. 

I watched the seven other couples try different labor positions and tools that were set up throughout our room that evening. And I watched myself stand and peer out of my own skin frozen. Paralyzed. Looking desperately for the sign saying “Turn Back Here.” As grace would have it, there is no sign. There is no back. There is no way out other than through. 

Dammit. 

And so my intimacy threshold continues to be obliterated on a daily basis. In a the most awe inspiring and terrifying of ways. I suppose this is the true nature of Durga, the goddess, the great mother. 

Pregnancy has shown me the most deep and hidden reservoirs of internalized patriarchy inside myself. Imagine my horror as I come to realize that the most earthly and connected part of my own female form is the part I am most afraid to become and see revealed. Somewhere along the way, like many other women, I too have come to believe that the white virgin crowned in gold is better than the red messy drenched in tears. Pretty is better than honest. Angel is more revealed than animal.  

I am face to face with my own distaste for my bloody, brown, red, howling animal. My sense is, without her. Birthing will not be possible. If I was asking for a kind of re-wilding any where in my own psyche, the prayer is being answered whether I cognitively like it or not. 

This is the part of ourselves that is so raw and so awesome and so terrifying that we can barely look away nor can we look at it head on. It is that moment in the Bhagavad Gita when Arjuna wants to see the totality of Krishna only to find himself overwhelmed and begging for concealment once again. It seems to me as I stand on the precipice of experience and the edge of a new knowing that it is not just a baby that will be born, but a new version of woman. One that is more honest, more whole, more real.

Perhaps this intimacy threshold I speak of now is not the one between two lovers or partners or even in community for that matter. But between each of us as we come face to face with the concentrically deeper laces of our own selves.

This is the Bhakti path. The path of devotion. But the devotion is not to anything or anyone or any deity other than the innermost thrown of your own becoming. It is easy to love the beautiful, put together, organized, articulate, shiny, rose and vetiver scented version of myself who keeps her sheets and towels crisply folded and bleached white. But I wonder how easy it will be to love the forgetful, seeping, vulnerable, fullness. It seems to me that the path of devotion asks us not to crown another as Guru but instead to bow to each part of ourselves we birth, re-integrate and commune with. Bhakti is the path that asks us to strip away all other false gods and devote ourselves only, forever and continually to Love—the parts easy to love and the parts that make us turn away. 

In humaness

This blog is offered upon invitation from Kate of You & The Yoga Mat as participation in her month-long blog tour on Sequencing. Thanks Kate! You can sign up for the whole series here. There are many other brilliant teachers offering their expertise on this virtual tour.  Be sure to check out Kaya's piece today as well as Dagmar's tomorrow.

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For me teaching is a conversation. A conversation between the student’s awareness, the student’s body, the asanas and my witnessing. This dialogue makes every class, every private, every student unique. Why do I use one adjustment on one student and a gentle verbal cue on another? Its subtle. Honestly, its not a pure formula of sequential steps I learned from teacher training. Rather its a combination of the theory I know, the body I am seeing, the person inside that body I am seeing and my own sense of intuitive presence. In all honesty, the last piece is the foundation for the work I do. Let me say it to you plain. Your awareness—your sense of your internal world— is actually the gateway to understanding another. So that can be our topic for another day. 

But what seems pertinent as a skill set to share with you at this moment is one of the distinctions I balance with every student, in every class, in every private. The distinction between Affect and Effect. Balancing Effect and Affect allows you as the teacher to use all the good science you know to actually help the student in the vein of what the yoga can offer them. Allowing for their affect, or their inner life and emotions to be present, calls on you as the teacher to stand in witness to what is actually unfolding in the moment for the student. 

Only teach the student and we risk missing the education of the actual movement form. Only use my perception and risk too much self error and subjective viewing. So to find the interest and value in the complex dialogue I use a very clear distinction between what I know the yoga can do for someone, the Effects of the yoga, and a spacious being with the student’s experience as it arises on the path, known as their Affect. 

Depending on your lineage, your style, and your interest in asana you know a certain amount of prescriptive protocols to establish a desired result from the yoga or to resolve a certain issue. Think about depression for a moment. Depending on where you come from in your teaching you know that a certain set of poses or poses done in a certain manner will yield the effect of brighter mood and less depression. 

I am not here to say this is true or untrue. I do not really believe in any one set of protocols and I see tremendous value in many of them. If you say “Oh, backbends are good for depression because they open the ribcage, encourage deep breathing, lift the chest and take the energy of the body up”.  I would say “Yes. I agree.” But I would also not be expecting that immediate response from a student. You see the road to the desired result can be long and arduous. So if the student is working on lifting their mood. I might have a whole slew of appropriate poses aimed toward a desired effect on their body, mind and nervous system. But I am also keenly aware that anything could happen along the way. 

In order to reach that desired effect, they might experience tremendous grief. They might experience a kind of rage. They may at times look even more despondent. The nascent teacher assumes that the effects of the asanas will invariably coincide with a matching affect. And when there is not that matching an assumption that the yoga is not working often arises. The point I am trying to make here is that there are plenty of times where what is happening in the moment and where you are headed may look and feel different. 

So yes, have your protocols and know the effects of the poses in such away that you can use them in your private work with clients towards specific issues. Know the science of the yoga and the asanas and build your sequences. Yes. Awesome. Keep doing all the good work. But also know that where you are headed is not the same as the experience of where you are going. Students need (hell, we all need) free reign to experience whatever we experience in yoga.

My suggestion as you begin working with this distinction in your teaching and facilitating is to continue the good work based on your science and knowledge of the asanas and human beings in asanas. And then observe. Keenly observe what happens for your students in each pose. Observe their fascial gestures. Observe their breath. Observe their energy. Listen to what they are telling you. In fact, a deep emotional expression or even the experience of numbness along the way toward depression or anxiety relief or healing a disordered eating pattern is not only shall we say fare game. It is a sign of health. You can remind your students that all of them is welcome on the mat. And that experiencing their process towards the aim of the yoga is part and parcel to what you are up to any way. 

Now one side note here that is not such a side note. Your ability to be with what arises for students then becomes critically important. But that we leave for another day.

Years ago I got it in my mind that yoga would solve everyones issues. Specifically I simply knew that anyone recovering from an eating disorder would benefit from a yoga class. And specifically a type of yoga that was boundary enough in its alignment technique and completely unabashedly heart-affirming in its philosophy. I assumed this because in large part it worked for me. So I set out to develop a Yoga for Eating Disorders program I entitled Amaryllis. (Named because after my complete neglect and forgetting this bulb was buried in my car it bloomed anyway. So the metaphor seemed rather catching). I pitched this to a local out-patient network I was volunteering for and we set sail. A few folks came. And returned for more.

But here is what I saw happen.

Firstly, as I suspected, their emotions rose to the surface. They got angry and sad and would shake sometimes. But what I had under estimated was myself. I thought I had it all worked out and dialed in. Wrong. I didn't know what to do with all these emotions flying around in yoga class. I didn't know what to do as I felt myself pulled into someone else emotions. I stuck to the yoga and the philosophy as a crutch. Hobbling along insisting it was enough for these students.

Wrong.

As time went on, some of the students symptoms and disordered eating habits reared their ugly heads even worse. They were slipping. The yoga was so eliciting it was triggering a return to the old and familiar shores of self harm behaviors masked as self soothing, I-am-in-control behaviors. I was devastated, ashamed and leveled as I witnessed my teaching technique fail me. And then, I noticed my symptoms and behaviors were creeping back in. Years of hard work could not stop the binge and purge. I felt like such a royal sham. I remember distinctly thinking to myself and knowing deep inside that I could never be the kind of yoga teacher I wanted to be if I did not gain more ground and more skills specifically around shock and trauma and even more so in how to deal with everything else other than just asanas.

I needed relational skills. I needed healing skills. I needed regulation skills. So I set out on a mission. I decided to go back to graduate school. Now mind you I was completely adamant about not taking the GRE so part of my mission was to find a school where avoiding that dreaded standardized test would be acceptable.

Flash forward I found myself at Naropa University in Boulder, CO. Now, Naropa is its own story for another day. Upon moving to Boulder I also met one of my most important teachers and mentors still, Melissa Michaels. I became intricately involved and apprentice to the teachings of Somatic Psychology and Psychotherapy via my studies at Naropa with amazing teachers like Leah D'Abate, Ryan Kennedy, Chrisitne Caldwell, Wendy Allen and Arielle Schwartz. Simultaneously I became deeply apprentice to the teachings Melissa provided through 5 Rhythms dance, Earth Based Spirituality and Rites of Passage. I learned and began to embody the understanding of how activation and shock runs through one's body and how one can find healthy ways of moving it. I learned what resourcing truly looked like in my own system and in hundreds of other people. I learned Trauma first aid and movement-based ways of working with big emotions and stuck emotions in the body--in my own--and in others.

I continued to watch, observe and listen to my yoga community and to the students who came to classes. Little by little I began implementing my studies and experiences into my classes and privates. I watched and listened to how it landed and what result followed. I experimented more. I watched and listened more. Over time I refined this 'method' into a kind of trauma sensitive yoga class that was not so much or even at all specifically "Yoga for Trauma" or "Yoga for PTSD". I simply formulated for myself some ways of seeing, being and working through yoga that no matter what anyones story was, the class was safe and effective.  I took to heart the teachings of yoga in a new light that yielded effective results so that students could be themselves more fully and experience their own bodies in ways I know are in the long term far more useful than simply "feeling better after yoga". 

No one needed to self-select themselves to go to trauma sensitive yoga. They could just come to yoga class. Because let's face it, we are all wounded. We are all traumatized at some level and "We are all in shock" as Stephanie Mines writes. 

I do not believe what I am up to in this manner is rocket science. Nor do I believe it is yoga therapy or yoga psychotherapy (Although I did write a paper on that very blending-- a yoga based psychotherapy which was published a few years ago). I believe this is Psychologically Sound Yoga. I believe this is a yoga that capitalizes on the therapeutic and even psychotherapeutic benefits yoga inherently yields sans the mystery and seeming magic of it just being "better than therapy". I believe this is Re-Sourced yoga. I believe this is a yoga that asks the teacher to be the greatest healing of all. It is a tall order I know. But frankly, the world is pretty messed up. The yoga industry is to what it used to be and we have work to do.

Having watched and studied hundreds of people moving their bodies at the same time, I know that when one person is disregulated in their nervous system, the entire field is altered. Similarly, when the leader or teacher of a group is deeply rested in their system they are far more capable to be dynamic, spontaneous and gregarious in their ability help regulate others. That very ability can heal at the non verbal level by setting in motion a host of feelings and sensations towards greater health and wholeness. 

So I ask you: Have you realized you needed a few more skills to get the job done in a way you truly wanted? Have you ever felt so pulled into your students crisis you cannot see straight. Have you ever felt like a student in your class took the psychic and energetic reigns before your could do anything? Have you ever seen students eyes rolling back in their head? Have you had a student who could not stop crying? or talking? or laughing? Have you ever had a student whose eyes were so wide they looked a little vacant but you really weren't totally sure what was going on? Have you ever found yourself preaching the yoga is going to work and to your dismay (but of course you won't admit it) it isn't totally jiving?

These gaps became intolerable to me. So I went out and sought an education and an experience to close the gap in my own body and in my own teaching --hoping somehow and in someway-- maybe in a far a way land and in some distant future, I could just maybe change the industry of yoga. 

Born from my own frustration, shame and grief. Born from my own longing. Born from my own being completely leveled by the work of teaching more times than one. Born from deep study in this realm. And born from the understanding that not every yoga teacher needs to go to graduate school for psychotherapy, I created Applied Psychology for Yogis. There are other pieces to how this larger work got conceived, gestated and birthed.

But that can be for another day. 

And that is sort of how it happened.