Thursday, May 28, 2015

Fat Yoga Teacher - How I Went From Yoga Badass to Yoga Fatass







This has been a really challenging topic for me to tackle. It's ever so complicated. I've gained more than 30 pounds in about a year as a full-time yoga instructor!

How does that even happen? Excellent question. Over the past year, while I've considerably amped up my physical activity, I've also quit smoking, ceased taking my ADHD meds, removed virtually every stressor in my life and substantially slowed my life down. My social life has virtually been at a standstill. (Don't feel sorry for me - everything has been intentional and mindful!)

My poor body has had to detox sooooo much stress and anxiety and tension. My adrenal glands are just now getting over their shock at the abruptness of my lifestyle shift. 

Oh yeah. I almost forgot.  I've been eating like a pregnant teenage boy. Yeah. Exactly. 

So that covers the mechanics of me adding the equivalent of a three-year-old to my yogi physique. Now, let's tackle the impact it has had on my self-esteem!

I was shipped halfway around the world by myself for high school. I was made fun of because I wasn't white when I was a kid. I've been divorced, cheated on, betrayed, lied to,  arrested (ha!) physically assaulted, humiliated, fired from a job, injured, used, abused; I've survived an emergency crash landing when I was a flight attendant and bedbugs. I've been depressed, lonely, sad, unhappy, filled with shame and fear and dread and regret. I've lived and worked with hostile conditions and chronic anger and stress.  But my ego and pride have always remained strong and fully intact. So how interesting is it that something so superficial as gaining weight is what finally cracked me wide open! 

I have struggled so much over the past year with my weight gain and become so aware of how it's inextricably linked to my feeling of self-worth. I've come to realize how pride in my physical appearance has always given me an extra boost of confidence when walking into a room filled with strangers. How no matter what happened to me in life, I always knew I had my wits and looks and charm and charisma to fall back on. 😐

So smugly I thought I was winning at life in 2012 and 2013! I left the rat race far behind. I got to: travel (before I became a POOR yoga teacher - that's an entirely different future blog); do yoga all day; actually get PAID to share my yoga obsession; idle away hours of downtime between classes at the pool or steam room or napping or relaxing. Ha! Poor suckers out there, was my frequent thought. 

Well. My laughing and gloating soon faded at the advent of 2014. I was burnt out. Teaching two dozen classes each week, seven days a week. I was too exhausted to do anything when I wasn't teaching - I literally couldn't wait to get home,  bathe (entirely optional), crash on my sofa and shovel comfort foods into my face. I had no desire or interest to socialize. And as the weight kept creeping on (my ass and boobs, but still!) it became a vicious cycle. 

I have always been an extremely social person, and until 2014, I've never felt nor looked nor acted my age! Last year was a huge crash and burn (literally crashed my Mercedes in 2013, my body followed in 2014). I spent most of last year vacillating between feeling sorry for myself and loathing every inch of my body. I tried cleansing, dieting, integral bodywork (actually gained 10 more pounds during that process) and even an ayurvedic consultation.

My energy level was seriously low, and I was generally miserable. My 365 yoga challenge helped me re-connect with my body in a new way. As my approach toward myself softened and I was more tolerant and kind to myself, there was a huge shift in my teaching and my interpersonal relationships as well. As I learned to be accepting of myself and struggled to love myself - and there was a whole lot more to love - I was able to become so much more compassionate and understanding toward my students. I truly knew what it felt like to be broken and sad and hopeless. Lots and lots of restorative classes allowed me the opportunity to slow down, feel my angst and nourish and repair myself. 

My extra weight caused physical limitations in my practice - twists and forward folds became so much more challenging and uncomfortable. So I can now understand those who come to their mats with a little extra weight, and how I can help them modify!

Everything is truly a lesson in life. Becoming a fatass has taught me sooooo much. 

Compassion 
Acceptance
To get over appearances and really focus on what matters!
Kindness
Tolerance
Sensitivity to others

And most importantly: humility!!! Going from yoga bitch to yoga fatty has humbled me to my core! And it's made me so much more mindful of my body's needs. And so extremely grateful for all of the wonderful blessings in my life.

While 2014 was to date the most challenging year of my life, I am so grateful that I had all of those experiences because it has added so much depth into my life.

Annica! Annica! Annica! BE HAPPY! BE HAPPY! BE HAPPY!!

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

365 Days of Yoga - Lessons Learned




just wrapped up my 365 day commitment to yoga; initially my goal was to show up on my mat in a yoga class each day for a year. Why on Earth would a yoga teacher need to do a 365 day yoga challenge?

One thing that I didn't factor in when I quit my big girl job to become a yoga teacher was how my personal practice would be affected. I had envisioned hours upon hours of both practicing on my mat and teaching daily. Well when I was teaching 25 hours of yoga classes each week, seven days a week,  shockingly, I really had neither the desire nor the energy for a physical practice.

I burnt out pretty quickly; I began doubting my decision to become a yoga teacher after just a year of teaching full-time. Which is when and why I decided to re-commit to my mat for one year and try to reignite my passion and love for this thing called yoga.

Here are the biggest lessons I've learned from this challenge:

1. HOLISTIC. Yoga transcends the physical. While my physical practice may have languished, I slowly realized my other seven yogic limbs had grown and deepened. Yoga is an eight-limbed path, where the physical asanas comprise just 12.5% of the entire yogic practice. I had been focusing so heavily on the physical practice that I hadn't realized how yoga had cracked me open in so many other ways! I was delving more deeply and trying to practice the yamas (morality); niyamas (personal conduct); conscious breathing and meditating; withdrawing from the external senses and cultivating inner awareness; seeking a greater union with the Divine. 

Yoga is not about unrolling your mat and twisting into a pretzel. That's the tool that we use to cultivate heightened awareness OFF of our mats. The lessons that we learn from the physical practice are to be integrated off of the mat. I had been doing this but not even thinking to call it yoga! It was missing the forest for the trees.

2. BALANCE. Yoga is about seeking balance. It's about walking the middle path. Avoiding extremes. It doesn't get more extreme than forcing yourself upon your yoga mat each day for a year! Well, I already knew how to be INTENSE. I already knew how to PUSH myself to my limits, how to GRIND it out. 

What I learned this past year was how to PULL BACK when I needed to without feeling like a failure. I learned to be KIND and FORGIVING of myself and my limitations. I learned to ACCEPT exactly where I happened to be in each moment. And I realized that I was good enough regardless of whether or not I unrolled my mat in a yoga class or not.

3. INTRINSIC VALUE. I really learned to accept my intrinsic value as a human being, a manifestation of God's perfection and love. For my entire life, I'd measured myself based on achievements, successes and my physical appearance. My value was linked to so many external factors as a way to validate my existence, which resulted in feelings of both inferiority and superiority in comparison to others. (Mostly superiority!!!)

This past year, I have found myself truly beginning to tune out the external noise - other people's opinions and expectations and, more importantly, my flawed perception of other people's opinions and expectations. For the first time, I allowed myself to sink into child's pose during a vinyasa class. Formerly, I would power my way through, even when I probably could have used the rest. For the first 100 or so days of this challenge, there were many times that I would crawl to my mat and sleep for the better part of an hour! There was a time that would have filled me with a sense of shame, embarrassment and a harsh judgement of myself. It is quite liberating to follow your intuition rather than your ego!

4. SUBSTANCE. I moved away from optics and moved toward substance. The visual image of a beautiful yoga pose is certainly pleasing to the eye, but the culmination of a certain pose is really the smaller view. The big picture stuff in yoga is finding equanimity, precision, focused breath work and contentment in a pose. It's having balanced awareness of all of the sensations in a pose, especially the more subtle ones.

It's having the confidence in myself that I am moving in the right direction in my life and in my practice without focus on how it appears to others or what it "looks like." I'm no longer comparing myself and my practice to others. I'm competing with myself to be the best that I can be; not in the hopes of impressing or winning over others but with the intention to honor God with devotion, gratitude and service to others.

5. COMMITMENT. I've realized that I am totally and completely committed to my practice, because I have finally totally and completely committed to MY LIFE. I've spent my entire life afraid to truly commit, always feeling that there was something bigger and better out there for me. And there always was. But the problem with living with the philosophy of constant striving for  something "better" or different or more exciting is that it is never enough. You get caught in a cycle of misery - yearning for something better, receiving a false and fleeting feeling of contentment when you get it and then the cycle starts again. And repeats. Again and again and again. Until your happiness is no longer in your control - it's owned by all of the advertising and marketing people trying to sell you something!

The truth is that all that I have been seeking and looking and yearning for from external sources could never provide true happiness and satisfaction. That is my job. And it's an inside job. My commitment is to trust in a higher purpose and surrender to life as it unfolds. That doesn't mean to give up or to cease efforts to improve; it means to move forward with RIGHT EFFORT and NON-ATTACHMENT. Never giving up and always letting go.

Yoga is a path toward self-realization. My practice has transformed as I have transformed. My expectation to sustain the same intensity of my physical practice does a disservice to the deepening of the other seven limbs of yoga. My 365 day commitment to my mat was successful because the World Is My Yoga Mat. My practice is not limited to being in a hot, sweaty room for an hour each day.

So grateful for the past 365 days. Annica! Annica! Annica! Be happy! BE HAPPY! be happy!

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Merging in traffic





Who would have thought getting called a fucking cunt would serve as a milestone in my spiritual journey?

Last week, I was heading to take a yoga class and merging with the flow of traffic onto the expressway.  Suddenly this normal looking white male in an SUV sped up, pulled right next to me, blocked me from merging in front of him, opened his window and shouted at the top of his lungs: "Get outta my way you fucking cunt!" There was so much rage and anger and actual saliva spewing in my direction, I was literally stunned!

In that split milisecond, between the stimulus of his venomous outburst and before I knee-jerk reacted, I had a huge revelation: I had broken a deep sanskara. Not so long ago, I would have matched his anger with my own, spewing profanities back at him that would have made a sailor blush. Moreover, at one point, I would have been HIM, snarling and personally affronted that an unknown driver deigned to merge in front of ME! And truth be told, a little bit of anger sparked somewhere deep within me, but it sputtered and never really had the juice to fully ignite.

Even with the sheer force of his rage sitting squarely in my chest, I really felt sorry for him. I immediately smiled and hit my brakes so that he could triumphantly pull in front of me. And I merged behind him and kept moving to the far left lane to leave his negative energy far, far behind me. In his epic battle to outmaneuver me, he got stuck in a pocket of traffic while I sailed away to take my beloved 90 minute level 3 yoga class taught by the iconic Carla Cooper.

The force of his energy lingered with me, but my heart remained light and unaffected by his obvious pain and misery. Eventually,  the energy dissipated, leaving me with the certain revelation that my long term pursuit of the ever-elusive equanimity was proving fruitful.

The thousands of hours I've spent on my mat, relentlessly strengthening my parasympathetic nervous system, has finally begun to take root. The truth is that I feel sorry for that man. It was 8:30 on a Thursday morning, and he was absolutely miserable as he fought for his lowly position in the cattle call on the Eisenhower.  He clearly was not looking forward to going to work. I'm speculating that he worked in a stressful environment filled with pressure, and his aggression toward me was nothing more than his sense of feeling trapped, impotent, unappreciated, overlooked and ultimately unfulfilled.

How many of us live like this each day? Stuck in a place that we absolutely know doesn't honor our highest, best, shiniest selves? Yet we stay. (Safe and unfulfilled, cause it's good enough. That's an entirely different blog post  about Taking Risks.)  In some, like that guy driving the SUV and me, that discontentment is externalized, we lash out at those around us. Others, I've found, wouldn't dream of hurting others, but internalize their anger and hurt themselves.

We may manifest differently, but when we scratch the surface, pain and fear are the culprits. Once we tap into our own source of pain, insecurities, fear, anger and shame, we are able to recognize it in others. And find compassion for them. Shared emotions bond us together as humanity - when you've felt anger and rage, you understand what it tastes like to a person as they are experiencing it. It tastes exactly the same for all of us - we just learn to express it or repress it. And recently I have found a third option: to let it pass without reacting to it or internalizing. Just letting it sit and eventually dissipate.

And the truth is, who knows how I'll react the next time this type of situation arises? I'll just continue to take it one breath at a time, learning each step of the way.

Annica! Annica! Annica! Be happy! Be happy! Be happy!





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