No More Advice!
It’s the unsolicited advice. I think it might be giving me hives.
The well-meaning, often insulting, always unasked-for advice. From those people. You know the ones — the ones who believe that you should always be working on yourself. That everything, and I do mean everything, can and SHOULD be changed. Who assume that their advice is welcome. Or even, you know, appropriate. And who, by the very act of Giving The Advice, show how much they don’t know about your life.
Because you haven’t told them. Because you know you’d just feel even more judged.
Read the rest over at Recovering Yogi today!
A little love for Valentine’s Day
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!
I’ve got a bit of sweetness for you: YogiChocolate, actually.
A by-donation downloadable class – pay only what you can. It’s a video, an excerpt of my DVD, so if you have the DVD it won’t be of much use to you.
Click the yummy picture to go to YogiChocolate, then click the picture of me flying (my name is just listed as ‘Nadine’) to get at the class.
I’m going to be adding classes, both audio and video, over the next few months, so stay tuned!
And lastly, this sounds a little sappy, but too bad.
Know that you are loved, know that you are good enough. On this day, devoted to LOVE, know that you are worth loving. And that it is your RIGHT to love yourself.
Breathe to Beat Yoga Boredom
Down Dog Days
I’ve been taking photos of myself in yoga poses for some years now, and I occasionally enjoy looking back & seeing how things have changed, usually without me noticing!
In 2008, I wrote a post about how Susi Hately Aldous’ techniques had helped me get good with my body. I was in a lot of pain at the time, with my hyper mobile SI joints bouncing all over the place. Now? No pain unless I do something stupid. Cough. Not that I ever DO that, of course. Cough.
Anyway, this was the pic I took before using Susi’s therapeutics:
The after picture was better, sure:
But, look at this down dog, taken last year:
A better line between hips & shoulders.
And then there is this one:
Regular practice, with a focusing on correcting the imbalances in my particular body (which, for me, has meant getting serious about getting strong).
I think it might be paying off!
Failing Forward
Can I just say? I kind of hate learning new skills. Because, for quite a while in the beginning there, I suck at whatever it is.
I do not like to suck at stuff. I prefer to be competent, or, even better, excellent.
Unfortunate, really, since if I stuck to the things I know how to do already, this is all I’d ever do:
- Yoga
- Blog
- Sleep
- Eat
OK, few other things, but really, that’s about it. I can feel the boredom setting in already. According to this article, my fear of failure may be gender-biased. Apparently, girls are more afraid of failure than boys. Not just that, they still tend to choose ‘traditionally female’ careers. Like caring. Under which I’d class teaching yoga. Interesting.
Except that right now, I’m on a steep, steep learning curve. Learning to run a business. With actual other people working in it. Learning to write something that’s longer than 1000 words and still coherent. Yup. I am out of my comfort zone.
And, interestingly, but not surprisingly, terrified of failure. The article that sparked this post – about a top UK girls’ school having a ‘failure week’ to teach their pupils resilience – really got me thinking about my resilience to failure.
I was a typical overachiever at school -always in the top three students, straight A’s (except for Maths. We don’t talk about that, it still smarts).
Same for most of Uni, till I lost interest.
Same in yoga school. I was the one right up the front, hand permanently in the air, learning all the Sanskrit names for all the poses.
Te.Ri.Fied. of failing.
But the last few years? I’ve failed all over the place, and strangely, it does seem to have made me more resilient. It certainly seems to have resulted in me taking more risks. One brief boyfriend (he was a longer lasting friend, but you cross that line, you know it’s gonna end badly) said something flaky about the failed risk on him teaching me to take risks in my business. At the time, I wanted to throttle his sanctimonious ass. But he may have had a point.
I’ve taken more risks than I though I was comfortable with, the last few years.
Drop back from standing into Wheel? Sure, why not, I’ve had a few glasses of wine…
Start up a business to give myself time and space to write a book? It’s worth a shot.
Submit my writing to be published? Hell yeah! Tell you what though, even though I have a high acceptance rate – about 70% – I am still dealing with way more rejection than before, when I wasn’t trying. And you know how they usually DO the rejection?
Silence.
Just like a man who isn’t interested in you not calling after the first date. It’s really not that different. I guess both parties are just trying to figure out if they want to get into bed together. And, once they’ve done that, if they want to do it again.
The surprise has been how often people say yes, and how often things actually work. They work so often that when they don’t, or when I mess up because I don’t know what I am doing (learning curve etc) I am shocked, and sometimes even get a bit depressed.
The other surprise is that in that whole do-we-want-to-go-to-bed equation, it turns out I have some control. You know, like brushing off a bloke at a bar when his attention is unwelcome.
So I am learning. I know that I am only halfway competent, at best, at dong these new things. And it’s very uncomfortable, this fumbling forward, this failing forward.
Because I am female, as the news pieces suggest? Or because I am human?
What do you guys think?
Are men more comfortable with risk than women? Does it show up in things like their yoga practices too?
Holes in the sidewalk & faceless pursuers
I’m in a reflective mood. As I prepare to talk about Yoga for Trauma at the Evolve Festival in Melbourne, I am coming up against myself. Believe me, if i didn’t think this work had value, I would NOT be doing it. It’s too uncomfortable.
It’s making me fall into holes in the sidewalk – something Chrissy Carter talks about here.
One thing I have learned: if you fall into a hole, sometimes it can be useful to stay down there for a bit. Make space for all your feelings and thoughts, not just the pretty ones, or the ones that fit into your self-narrative.
As Chrissy says
… parking oneself in the shadows of one’s mind is no picnic, but as the yoga community continues to tell me that I should try to dwell in a place of love and light, I feel compelled to suggest that you do the exact opposite. The answers are written on the walls of that deep, dark hole in your sidewalk.
That dark place is the yin, the feminine. The place of possibility.
It’s also the place of stillness.
And stillness is one of my Two Words for 2012. So it looks like the darkness will give me an opportunity to balance the shadow and light parts of my personality, as well as action and stillness.
Woo hoo. Can’t wait. Thrilled, really.
I SO wouldn’t prefer to be having a nice cup of coffee, somewhere brightly lit.
Oh well.
I guess my hole might be something like the well in Haruki Murakami’s ‘Wind Up Bird Chronicle’. A weird place, where uncomfortable things show up. A place you are probably quite keen to climb out of. But when you do, you will be changed. No doubt about it.
I used to have this recurring dream about being chased. I always woke up just before my pursuer caught me. I had this dream for YEARS.
Then, one morning a few years ago, on the verge of waking, I decided to turn around. You know who was chasing me?
Me.
It was me.
I’ve never had that dream again, and I think it’s because some parts of my psyche were desperate to be looked at, acknowledged. Once I did that, they didn’t need to chase me anymore. They were there, with me, welcomed, valued and integrated.
I made space for them, and they stopped chasing me.
So I, like Chrissy Carter, will be buying some new throws for my hole, putting up a bit of wallpaper, and settling in for tea with my faceless pursuer.
I hope we get cookies.
Arm Balance Prep Poses
I seldom do REAL arm balances because my wrists kind of hate them – I can.
photo: Pam McGhee
But I shouldn’t. The prep poses though? I love for the strength they develop.
Here are my three favourites for you to practice at home! I’d love to hear your thoughts…
And if the embedded video doesn’t display in your email, please click here to watch the video on youtube (or http://youtu.be/DOrFPai2aW0)
Not Quite Equinox…
A little while back, yoga-land was all agog about that sexy yoga video advertising Equinox Health Clubs.
I must admit, I didn’t feel particularly strongly about it: pretty girl, awesome skillz. Some questionable camera angles, but it’s an advert. It’s kind of what you expect from advertising.
Then the awesome Jenifer Parker of Healium suggested we show what OUR morning practices look like. You know, as a kind of counterpoint. I certainly wouldn’t be devastated if I
(a) Could do what the Equinox girl can do.
(b) Lived in that amazing NYC apartment.
But my life, and my mornings, look a little different! So I took Jen up on her challenge, and made a video…
If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is. I cracked myself up making it! (Click this link if the video isn’t displaying for you.)
And here is Jenifer’s – if you’ve got kids, you will So. Relate. Classic! (If you got this by email & the video isn’t displaying, click here to view it)
My Two Words for 2012: Stillness & Stability.
It’s been quite a task to sit down and write this post, people.
I’ve been wanting to be more still. My words have wandered off to have tea with someone else…traitors.
Anyway.
Last Saturday, a group of us gathered for the Two Words Workshop. It was really lovely. Some people I knew, some I didn’t, but everyone was open about their processes and their two word search. A bit confronting, if you think about it: having to be honest about how your life really looks!
Svasti came along, and she has written the nicest review of the day. You can read it here.
For me, it seems like I hadn’t fully arrived in 2012 until Saturday. I told the group that I’ve chosen Stillness and Stability as my words, precisely because these two things have been ABSOLUTELY missing from my life for at least five years.
And I find both confronting.
They are so foreign to my understanding of the world right now. Really? I am going to stop trying too hard? Working too much? Dealing with insane amounts of change every time I blink? Nah, that can’t be right. Best I go back to my old comfort zone…
Too late. I told my body that’s what this year’s words were, and it listened. For the last few days I have been very quiet. Still, almost. Stable in my habits, which I had hoped to be. (Let’s see how that goes further down the track: sinceI promised to write a monthly Two Words blog post, there will be no escaping the evaluation!)
I keep thinking back to the time when I was newly married, and life was ticking along in a nice rhythm. Yes, that marriage was not going to last, but I didn’t know that at the time. And life was good and stable, my home was comfortable, I was teaching yoga, but not too much, and I was doing other things that made me happy too, like cooking, meeting friends for coffee.
Just being, really. Not too much striving. Not too worried about surviving. Not too worried about my place in the world. I knew where it was. I knew where I was.
I knitted a lot. I had that kind of still time.
I’d like to find a similar mood for this year.
The last four or five years I’ve seen so much upheaval: moving country, getting divorced, losing everything I spent my twenties working for. And I do mean everything, except the clothes on my back and a few old pieces of furniture. Dealing with deep financial uncertainty as a result of that. Confronting, at last, my childhood. And losing the last vestiges of my idea of nuclear family.
I’m sick of change. What I crave, more than anything, is stability. Stillness. A chance to draw my breath.
To stand still.
Stable on my feet.
The ground underneath me certain.
A big ask. Well, it feels like one. Or maybe two!
So, more time in nature, more sleep, less work.
More stable business systems and habits of self-care.
2012 here I come! Slowly, with stability, so I can integrate all the changes I’ve been through.
What about you guys?
How are you going with your words? I’d love to hear about them, either here, or over at the Facebook Page.
Does doing flashy sh*t give the wrong impression?
There’s a big furore in Yoga-Land, over that NY Times article about how yoga can wreck your body. Well, sure it can. Anything done badly can. I am, as you know, walking proof that yoga injuries can happen. When I was young and inexperienced, and did the initial damage to my SI joints, I can say my teacher was partly to blame: she, too, was young and inexperienced and couldn’t ‘see’ what was going on in my body. Ditto that teacher in Bali. But I allowed that situation, and I take responsibility there!
I really enjoyed Bernadetter Birney’s response to the NYT article. In it she talks a bit about yogis & advanced asana:
I also like to do advanced asana sometimes. It’s joyful. It’s challenging. It’s fun. I don’t do it to stay strong and limber. I do it simply because I want to, for the love of it. Advanced asana practicioners are–among other things–elite athletes. Elite athletes sometimes get injured.
She reminded me of a quandary I faced a while back, when a student told me she wanted to learn to do Wheel Pose.
‘OK,’ I’d replied, ‘I will teach you how to get there. But you know yoga’s not just about that, right?’
‘Yes it is.’
I didn’t even know how to respond.
Noooooooooo! I wanted to say. It’s an EXPRESSION of the joy of a healthy, happy, strong body. Expression, not goal.
But how do you differentiate, when you are swamped by images of yogis doing the flashy sh*t? Yogis like me!
Here’s the thing: the practice of yoga is a very effective way to bring on the ‘flow-state’.
According to Wikipedia (bless their awesome):
Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.
According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described (below) as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one’s emotions.
To get into flow, there needs to be an element of challenge, and learning to do poses you can’t yet do can provides that challenge.
(So can learning to breathe properly, but that’s subtler and less exciting.)
It’s got me to thinking.
Well, if I’m honest, it’s got me to worrying. Does doing flashy shit give the wrong impression? Does it lead people to believe that that’s what we are all about? Despite having the ‘wrong’ body for yoga – just ask my friend Ananda – I can do some circus monkey stuff, and sometimes I do. It’s fun, it can be creative, and it looks cool in photos.
I will teach fancy poses too, if the class warrants it.
I always tell my students that although the circus monkey poses are fun, they are not necessarily going to get you into an experience of YOGA. Often, that happens in the quiet times when it’s just you and your breath, and you are in Child Pose.
So how about that student who has a long way to go before doing Wheel safely, but who thinks that the gymnastic part of yoga is the whole point?
I asked her to write an essay about what yoga meant to her. I figured that would clarify for us both what she wanted out of her yoga practice, and I would then know whether I could be of any use to her.
She wrote a beautiful piece about intention, and realised that Wheel is representative for her, of a place she was once, but isn’t anymore. A place she wants to return to. Ahhhhh. Magnificent.
So it wasn’t about actually doing the pose, for the sake of the pose, but rather about what it represents, and the discipline, challenge and practice it takes to get there. Flow, basically.
This message,I think, gets a bit lost when you are looking at the photos of the flashy poses.
I love looking at pictures of other people in fancy yoga poses. But to me, they are just pictures of people with unusually bendy, strong bodies, doing cool stuff. It’s not necessarily something I aspire to or that impacts my world. I often practice very gentle yoga, because that’s what I need.
It’s the same with fashion magazines: I do read them, I enjoy their vacuity sometimes, but those models? May as well be giraffes for all the similarity they bear to me. Therefore, I find them neither aspirational nor threatening.
What do you guys think?
Do the pictures of fancy yoga (possibly in hotpants) make you feel inspired? Alienated? Something in between?
Do you wish yoga was portrayed differently?
