02.24.20 Intuition V. Discipline

I have always been a good girl. As a child, I got good at listening to the world and the people around me. I began to anticipate what was coming and figuring out how to behave in relation to that. People around me have always loved this about me. I learned how to turn my attention away from whatever is going on inside my own heart and mind so that I can meet the expectations of the moment. I cultivated great discipline in this area.

It was good that I developed this ability. This skillset probably saved my life and definitely provided more opportunities in the world than I could ever tell were available for someone like me. By training my attention on the discipline needed to thrive in the world, I was rewarded over and over again with good grades, and the right friends, and jobs, and mounting responsibilities.

I learned how to work through pain, sadness and discouragement. I learned how to stay up all night. I learned how to disregard anything that my body or heart presented as important. I learned how to keep my eyes on the prize. I learned discipline. In doing so, I became an expert at ignoring my intuition. My intuition never went away, I just decided not to trust it.

I found myself on diets that I knew damn well didn’t make sense. I trained on top of injury. I found myself unable to speak my mind in meetings. I did things that met the requirements of the moment and shushed my questioning inner dialogue. I did dangerous things. I did hurtful things.

The replacement of intuition with discipline is an outcome that is an absolute win for systems of oppression. These systems require us to respect discipline and respond with obedience. When we learn to replace intuition with discipline, it is hard to know if we are acting on our own behalf.

That is not to say that there is no rational basis for discipline. I mean, personally I practice yoga, train as a powerlifter and I am committed to the liberation of myself and everyone around me. None of that can be done without discipline and I am not ready to give up any of those aspects of my life.

I think in general, at least in American culture, we get really afraid of distancing ourselves from discipline. This makes sense, our culture presents a relentless requirement of constant performance in order to be meaningfully rewarded. It makes it hard to just call in sick or call in … anything. There are real consequences to intuitive behavior.

I think the sweet spot is combining discipline and intuition. We need to constantly re-evaluate our disciplined behaviors and ask ourselves if they are still of service to us. The judge in this trial has to be our intuition.

For me, right now I am burying myself as deep as I can into intuition. I am taking everything I have ever learned about how to be and setting it on fire. I am unlearning to work hard, unlearning how to diet, unlearning how to apologize, and unlearning how to dominate. Initially, this felt horrible. I still feel a bit untethered and I am sometimes worried that I am unlearning integrity.

When I quit my job, I just wanted to sleep for about a month. I was scared and thought there was something wrong with me. I was worried that I might not ever get up again. My husband assured me that this was a normal response to working the way I did for so many years. I decided to trust him.

Now I have time to feel things. I have time to decide what feelings I am willing to wrestle with and which ones I want to put away for another time. This feels like a real treasure.

So far what I am experiencing is that if given the chance, my intuition will not let me down. If I make the space, my intuition will point me to the areas of discipline that I need and will support this function. After all, intuition is at it’s best our most potent survival mechanism - so it seems that ignoring it, is never in our best interest.

02.24.20 Asana is a tiny little piece of yoga

Yoga is big. I find that the hardest part of teaching yoga is the way it is both so vast and so intuitive. I have been studying yoga for just under 20 years and in that time I have had dozens of teachers and read dozens of books and had hundreds of conversations with teachers, peers, and students.

I find it can take me a very long time to read yogic literature. I think this is because of it’s earnest nature, but also because I find it so exciting I can’t really settle into it. Some of these texts are so beautifully written that they make my heart flutter right out of the room. It is so exciting to read something that is so absolute in its description of the spiritual-human experience within the phenomenal world, that I just can’t focus. I have absolutely been found laying in supta baddha konasana covered in sand bags and an eye pillow listening to The Bhagavad Gita and anything else I can get in audio book format.

What I mean to say is as soon as I take in this information it’s truth is felt so fully and it lights me up so bigtime. When I think of the Yoga Sutras of Master Patanjali (multiple translations), and The Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads, ancient yogic mythology, Light on Yoga, The Journey Home, Paths to God, or other books on yoga, I feel so hopeful about humanity that I cant even even. The ideas laid out in these texts are so complete and so connected that reading them requires a huge amount of attention and capacity for taking it all in at once. It is not “snackable content”.

So, as a teacher when I want to create a dharma talk before class, I have to synthesize a tiny peace of a philosophy that is by nature vast and connected. It is heartbreaking to break off a small piece of yoga to talk about and hope it brings my students to the rest of yoga while they engage in their asana practice.

Once my teacher offered to my cohorts in YTT something to the effect of “when people show up for exercise and fitness, we give them yoga”. That stuck with me. I think that statement assumes two important things:
1. Not everyone in a yoga class has decided to take in the vastness of the yogic experience - which is fine.
2. Trust that yoga is so connected and effective that a person could jump into yoga at any point in its continuum and the observer would have access to everything yoga has to offer.

When yogis practice only asana, I feel like they are doing real, work that is important and healing. A healthy asana practice can offer so much in the way of balancing energy and pulling our attention out of the mind for a bit. While it feels like the tip of the iceberg, It is important to remember that the tip of the iceberg rests on a profoundly deep foundation.

I made that graphic (above) about the 8 limbs of yoga and I realized immediately that the 8 limbs of yoga falls short of describing all of yoga. That entire graphic is just a small piece of yoga.

Did you know that there are different paths to observe yoga? These explanations are perhaps oversimplified, but will work for our purposes.

Raja yoga- a path focused on meditation and adherence to the 8-limbs (shown in the above graphic).

Karma Yoga - a path focused on service and selfless action.

Bhakti Yoga - a path focused on devotion to the divine and all of the expressions of the divine.

Jnana Yoga - a path focused on scholarship and wisdom.

Tantra Yoga - a path focused on sacred ceremony.

And that isn’t all of it either! There are hundreds of stories of deities. There are parables. There are poses and stories about poses and purposes for poses. There are sutras and mantras and mudras that all mean something. There is pranayama and chakras and the koshas.

I truly love leading people through an asana practice, but we are leaving a lot on the table in terms of our modern western yoga practice.

If any of this is interesting to you, ask your teachers about this stuff. Talk to other students about these deeper concepts, form a yogic study group, read the books. Ask me or other yoga nerds questions.

Always, as a westerner, think about honoring this information and it’s origins. Consider the philosophy in its totality and how you should engage with it. I am not here to give anybody answers to questions about that. How we each engage with yoga is very personal.

For me as a westerner, US-er, white, woman - I tread lightly. I consider my own culture, and roots in this lifetime. I consider my human right and responsibility to seek union and wholeness with my complete self. I consider the karmic obligation to reject racism and racist appropriation. I do the best I can do the next right thing in front of me. I pray for grace, empathy, strength and the ability to listen.

I practice liberation and peace by practicing yoga. To me, this is a bigger picture of yoga. I would love to know more about your path. Drop me a line and tell me about what parts of yoga resonate with you.

02.13.20 Non-Harming Practices and Diet Culture

My dear friend sent me a link to the Yoga is Dead Podcast - Vegan’s Killed Yoga Episode and it was like a breath of fresh air. First of all, if you are a yogi, especially if you are a white yoga teacher, please subscribe to this podcast immediately. The two Indian-American hosts offer some thoughts on the practice of yoga in the west from the perspective of two South-Asian yoga teachers in the US. This podcast is a gift.

The primary focus of this episode was ahimsa or the practice of non-harming, though there are many definitions. Ahimsa is one of the 5 Yamas named in the 8 limbs of yoga. In Yoga is dead, Tejal Patel and Jesal Parikh share a long-awaited discussion about the broader implications of ahimsa beyond veganism.

It feels important to say that I have a huge amount of heartbreak around the meat and dairy industry. I actually don’t believe that eating meat, or bugs or root vegetables is necessarily a karmic problem in all instances. More than that, I believe that the constant ongoing cruel and willful pain that is caused to animals and people in the meat and dairy industry for the sake of profit is a painful symptom of an injured society. Furthermore, I believe that consumerism and consumption of all things from steak to genetically modified tomatoes and petro-plastics are symptoms of the same problem, which does have massive karmic implications for all of us.

I am an omnivore and a devout yogi. My inability to adopt veganism has been a quiet and hidden source of shame. That said, as a fat woman, it is very easy for me to apply shame to myself if the topic of food is anywhere near me. As a woman, and specifically a fat woman, I have been deeply manipulated by diet culture, which is extremely harmful. As a yogi, I am constantly seeking to unite the pieces of myself that have been fractured by deep wounds from living in an irrational society. It is the work of the yogi to evaluate what is inherent and natural about the human experience and what is just confusion brought on by our relationship to Maya. To that end, I try a lot of things with food while I try to reclaim my full human intuition with food. This means I no longer make policies for myself around food (other than eating when hungry and stopping when full) and that sometimes means I eat meat and dairy.

Tejal and Jesal left me with a few important things to think about:

Yoga is always about liberation and union. Ahimsa, as I interpreted it is about the greater practice of non-harming. I always have thought about this in a broad sense. Causing harm in any way separates us from our goodness, the divine, and our sense of self. Practicing ahimsa is important in the goal of union with the divine and liberation from the forces of confusion and oppression.

The way ahimsa was taught to me was very connected to the non-harming of animals and pointed to veganism. This is very easy to get. This has never bothered me. However, I also think of ahimsa as interrupting harm and cultivating peace both in the mind and in practice. For a person who has pretty disordered eating, I need to think hard about what this means for me.

Ahimsa and food are complicated for me. One of my favorite teachers once directed me to meditate on creating peace and nourishment before eating. This is a beautiful practice and like all practices, it is imperfect. When I eat meat or dairy (or anything), I try to make it a point to find gratitude for the nourishment. There is some karmic math about my food choices that may be relevant, but currently, it is too complex for me to intellectualize. For now, I focus on doing the next right thing for the body that I am in since that is the gift I was given. At this moment, that means healing the hurts of body shame and diet culture. I believe that when I can heal these roots and create peace for myself, my thought and actions will full of peace.

Let’s not forget that yogis must also decide to not harm other humans. I have met many yogis that do a good job of thinking well about animals but are less engaged by the systems of oppression that impact humans. I am talking about racism, classism, sexism, and discrimination of all kinds. I am also talking about human trafficking, prisons, poverty, environmental violence, and pollution. I am also referencing spiritual bypassing to avoid opposing broad social and political movements that are construction systems of harm that will last for many generations. None of us are here to judge; we all take on what we can. We listen for the dharma of our lifetime and we do our best to follow that. It’s ok if you missed a march or have not yet ended racism. You will not be kicked out of yoga! However, as a yogi, it might be useful to expand the aperture of your ahimsa scope beyond veganism.

Diet culture has permeated yoga and veganism. Mostly, this is because it rode in on the coattails of capitalism and whiteness (aka racism). At this point, we are pretty clear that diet culture is a servant to capitalism, racism, sexism, and classism. If you want more information about that statement, I’m happy to chat with you or just consult the internet, there is lots of information about it.

I have observed some vegans out there in the yoga community that are hiding their anxiety about gaining weight in veganism. I am saying this out of love. Our reasons for committing to anything matters - even if the thing you are committing to is well-meaning and inherently good. Also, I want to say, there is nothing wrong with being thin, or being vegan.

Here is why it is important, If we are practicing non-harming in an effort to comply with very harming oppression, then we are not practicing union or liberation. This cannot be yoga.

As a person in a fat body, this is what I ask of yogis: Take a look at diet culture and how it has impacted you personally, the people around you, your relationship with food, pleasure, and your environment. Take a moment and consider living in a fat body. What might that be like for you? Does it give you anxiety? What would the social cost be? Take a look at people around you who are non-compliant with diet culture. Does that look like a safe option for you? Do you have a peaceful relationship with food? Are you providing yourself nourishment? Are you able to experience pleasure? Do you feel guilty about eating anything?

There are so many reasons to practice veganism as part of ahimsa. When we cause harm to other beings (and eating them certainly qualifies), that harm becomes a part of us. I know that to be true. When we cause harm to ourselves and other humans the same is true. Sometimes we take a karmic hit in order to take a stand and maximize our opportunity to create a better, more connected experience for ourselves and other beings.

Maybe a commitment to veganism is actually the best most healing practice for you and it creates maximum peace for you and other beings. If that is the case, please continue on this path. All I am saying is that it is not the only way to practice ahimsa AND If veganism is based in a fear of fatness, it might be causing more harm than you realize.

I actually don’t think I said this any better than Tejal Patel and Jesal Parikh. I just felt I needed to reflect this back through my experience as a fat yogi. Listen to the podcast, it’s really great.

02.11.20 Anti-Diet and Rage

This book is amazing. It made me mad in the best possible way. Y’all, I have rage! So much rage. I have a transformative quantity of rage.

I have been out here for a minute talking about my experience in a large body. I have been devotionally compliant to laws of female embodiment by trying with unceasing effort to solve the problem of my body. I have had successes and failures, and ultimately the last decade has had me abandon all hope of wishing on the skinny star. I have not been sad about this at all, except for the little voice in my head suggesting that maybe I am a failure. I am excellent at silencing that little fucker, but its work, for sure.

For the most part, I have been on a quest to make peace with my body while exploring the question of my own health. I have brought the question “Am I healthy?” to support groups, yoga practices, counseling, and meditation. On one hand, what a powerful question. On the other hand, what a fucking waste of time. The answer is yes and no. I am mostly healthy. I am fat AND healthy. At least as healthy as everyone else in their 40’s with comparable habits.

If you have never been in a doctors office hearing the phrase “morbidly obese” in reference to yourself, while you feel healthy and are in fact a competitive athlete and yoga teacher, you may not have spent quite as much time obsessing over what that phrase means and how it actually relates to your health. Fun fact, it doesn’t fucking mean anything. It is a phrase that was invented by the same asshole who invented bariatric surgery. It is just another well crafted trigger to send us all into the arms of a solution provided to us by capitalism at extreme financial cost and danger to our health. Doctors, who I am with gritted teeth going to concede, care about their patients, are attuned to respond with urgency to the word “morbidly” and whatever words follow it. So, they get in line pretty quick with the anti-fat agenda.

A few years ago I decided to give up dieting due to the simple observable fact, that diets have never worked AND in actuality, have resulted in continued weight gain throughout my life. I have been dieting since I was about 10 years old. There isn’t a diet I have not poured my heart into. Still….every once in a while, I’m like “Keto sure sounds stupid, but it’s working for people, maybe I should try it.” Goddamnit.

A few years ago I decided to really track and measure all of my food. I worked with a doctor who claimed he wanted to help me. I was eating under 1200 calories on most days - if you don’t know, that’s not enough. This was not because I was trying to diet, it was just how I ate from years of dieting. He thought I was lying and offered to prescribe me diet pills. BTW, that guy, also told me that I was “pre-pre-diabetic” because my blood sugar was “almost on the high side of normal”. For those unfamiliar with garbage disguised as medical advice, that means my fucking blood sugar was normal.

The last doctor I went to bravely broached the topic of my weight. I could tell she didn’t want to have this conversation with me and was doing it because she really believed it was her responsibility. When I referred her to my gorgeous lab results and my healthy lifestyle, she responded with “Well, it’s your life”. Which I took to mean, “I guess if you are good with letting your fat ass kill you, there is nothing my respectable doctor self can do for you.”

RAGE!

There isn’t a workout I have not done. At the age of 39, I dragged my brave-af-300lb-ass into a crossfit gym and ended up having the time of my life. I did loose weight for a minute and then gained it back plus some, but I was strong as hell and had a resting heart rate of 50.

I taught myself to swim in my 20s and I used to swim a mile four times a week. I was still fat.

In my thirties, I took up spin. I loved it. I would ride a few times a week. On the last Saturday of the month, we would do a two-hour ride. I lived for it. I was still fat.

I had a baby in my late 30s. It wrecked my body. I dragged my beautiful, fat, brave-af-300lb-ass back into a yoga studio barely able to move and faced myself. I got yoga back. I rode that wave into a teacher training a few years later. I was easily twice the size of all but one other student.

I have fought through everything to stay connected to my body. I have faced unimaginable discouragement in every single fitness space and doctor’s office because I care so deeply about having a full and beautiful life. The problem with that is that I could have JUST BEEN HAVING A FULL AND BEAUTIFUL LIFE!!

Rage.

Sigh. You know, I think about 98% of the women I know are organizing their lives around being a good woman and eating in a virtuous way because wellness and lifestyle…blah blah. I guess that’s fine.

Here is an exception to that. My sister, genuinely just want’s to eat a tomato a day. People are mad at her because she is too fucking skinny and that is apparently not good either. The thing is she can’t smell, so she can’t really taste that much and she doesn’t give a shit. She is the only person I have ever met that truly wouldn’t mind gaining few pounds, but doesn’t actually care enough to think about it. Other than her, I am pretty sure that everyone else out there is just fucking terrified of being fat.

And, I hate to say it, but not wanting to be fat seems to be a totally valid fear. Who want’s to be targeted like this? Fat oppression is brutal. Those of us who are fat are constantly being treated like shit. Spaces are not made for us. We can’t expect health care. We are constantly being told that we should have more willpower and spend MORE of our time trying to achieve the right body. When we can’t we are shamed.

I sometimes think that fat-oppression reminds me of gay-oppression. It’s like fat people are doing it wrong, refusing to get with the program and we should make different choices AND the whole world would like us to be in conversion therapy (dieting) for life. While homophobia seeks to terrorize people more acutely, fat-fobia operates with a low-key and thick constancy. In both examples we are told that we can and should be different.

If you can believe it, diet-culture presents a bigger problem than being gas-lit and attacked all the time. Christy Harrison goes into some detail about how Fat Opression is actually harming to your health in the Anti-Diet book. To me, the biggest problem about the war on obesity and the broad acceptance of diet-culture is that we are separated very quickly in our lives (particularly as women - who get the worst of this opression) from being able to know what we want. This to me is a sin beyond absolution.

Y’all, I love women. I love all of them. I love the ones that nobody loves and the ones that everyone loves and the ones that nobody sees. I think women are fabulous and brave and they always do the best they can in any situation. I make it a point to be close to as many women as I can. I have met very few women that can easily say what they want…about anything.

“What kind of work do you want to do?”
”I don’t know.”
“What do you want to have for dinner?”
”I don’t know.”
“What would you like from your political leaders?”
”I don’t know.”

I am not by any stretch saying that women cannot find an answer to these or any questions, I am just saying that a great many of us need a minute to go through the filter of what answers could be acceptable. I believe strongly that this is a maleffect of diet culture.

I have a daughter. Obviously, she is a bad-bitch, totally amazing piece of awesome. I love everything about her. She is nine. I see her struggling with her body already. She has shame that she won’t name and I sometimes think it’s because she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings as a fat woman by showing anxiety about her own shape. I am certain that I have more slack around bodies and food than my own well-meaning mother, but I know my parenting has not escaped the scars of diet-culture but I try damn hard to keep it away from her. All of that being true, when she was six-years-old her pediatrician asked her what her favorite food was and she was like “Broccoli”. “Broccoli”? Da faq?

Think about that for a moment. A six-year-old who only wants to eat mac-n-cheese, did the quick math in her head to answer a question about her favorite food and came up with “Broccoli”. She knows she is not supposed to want what she wants.

Not being allowed to want what you want is a mind-fuck that is problematic beyond my understanding. That is why we cannot tolerate this any longer.

“We demanded to have our needs met (when we were born). We knew those needs were valid and didn’t second-guess them; we never asked ourselves whether or not we were ‘really’ hungry. We owned our hunger. No one had to teach us how to do that. It was programmed into our brains - the same way that baby sea turtles are programmed to skitter into the ocean right after they hatch on the beach.”

— Christy Harrison

We have to put the diets down for everyone, but especially women. Can you imagine the amount of time we would have? Can you imagine what it would be like to wake up, listen to your body hear what it has to say, not spend time rearranging that, and just get moving. You would get moving in the direction of your heart, all the time.

If we didn’t learn to not want what we want right away, our hearts desire wouldn’t be sitting around like a loose tooth ready for someone to pull. It would be so difficult for the forces of domination to pull us away from our desires. We wouldn’t be as available for manipulation by capitalism, racism, sexism and all the rest of that crap. We would be running towards each other just looking for enjoyment and pleasure because we know that is what we all deserve.

Rage. A transformative amount of rage.

12.30.19 Intentions

The body has so many ways of protecting itself from the will of the mind. When we overextend our muscles the stick together forming adhesions to protect our body’s from permanent damage. When we walk around in our bare feet, our skin manufactures calluses to protect us from wounds and infection. When injuries do occur, our bodies send pain signals to the brain to tend to the injury. Bodies are so smart.

But what happens when we apply emotions and memory to this system? It complicates things. When we are afraid, or determined, or hurt repeatedly, the messages the body sends us can get hard to hear. Sometimes if I personally don’t like the messages that my body is sending me I let them pile up like email notifications on my iPhone. Once I had over 60,000 messages and I was relatively unbothered by it.

Here is the problem; the body is going to win eventually. The body is the proverbial rubber that meets the road. Our minds, our emotions, and our ego will only go as far as our bodies allow them to go. Once the body goes, the nature of our existence changes.

“A body without a soul is a corpse. A soul without a body is a ghost.”

- Anodea Judith

Optimally, we can have the mind and the body move together which will help to balance our emotions and create a nice space for the soul to reside. Whether or not we achieve alignment of our body and mind in this lifetime, remains to be seen, but nonetheless, the soul does reside in the space of our bodies - our “spacesuits” as Ram Dass referred to them.

So here we are, these infinite beings walking around in these smart bodies/spacesuits - smart suits! And our minds and body’s are constantly chattering and arguing while our soul is just witnessing and figuring out how to maneuver.

This is yoga, so we start with the mind. We sweetly bring our thoughts to a stop. I like to think of a meri-go-round that is turning and turning until someone stops pushing it. The first step in our practice is to just stop pushing the meri-go-round. We may watch it spin for a while as it slows down.

When the distraction has stopped, we can start to be in the body. First the breath. We can stop and notice the breath. For me personally, my first instinct when I notice the breath is to begin to manage it. I will start to even it or deepen it or make it very soft. It takes a certain amount of time and safety for me to allow it to exist - to relax the diaphragm and the throat and the jaw and let life happen. For me personally it takes a substantial leap of faith to know that breath is actually truly involuntary. Regardless of all of the things I control, my breath is just happening on its own. My lungs fill themselves and keep me alive all by themselves. This is true for you too.

If we quiet the mind and let the breath sustain us, we can tend to the body. We place the body in a safe and comfortable posture and leave it there where it can talk to us. The body, much like the mind may need some time to stop moving. Our hips or shoulders or jaws may talk to us. We can give them our attention until the noise stops.

Through a process of extreme reduction, we may now find ourselves as actual as we have ever been. This is when we finally become available to listen to the body. We can soften our muscles and our calluses. We can allow sensations, feelings, energy, and thoughts to move in and out of the body. We can give and receive. We can let go. In these moments, we can notice the empty spaces that used to be taken up by distractions, noise, pain, worry, and exhaustion. We can admire these new empty spaces or fill them with some kind of nourishment.

As we share this space of community at the end of a decade, consider the safety here. Let these moments to soften your whole being. Allow the body and mind to become permeable enough to let go of what does not serve you and allow in the matter that is magnetized by the soul. In this way, we will till the soil and prepare the garden for our seeds of intention.