I walk the tightrope between practitioner and teacher. It is a fresh line of division. Both fairly new paths. This is your warning: you may not like what I am about to say.

The political race that happens every four years is fought much before election day. Much like the politics of yoga is flexed long before the final resting pose.Here at Yoga Modern, we are not afraid to dive into the controversies in yoga, clearly. Blogs, ideas, theories they hover over the heads of the yoga teachers,  studio owners, and ever deep thinking practitioners. They penetrate the yoga commUNITY. Yes? To some the very thought of joining, breath and body, or practice to the people, often divides the power over pitiful corruption, greed, ego, and insecurity. Allow me to start the discussion with  A-B-C , it’s easy as 1-2-3!

Ambassadors At-Large

The very word ambassador is defined first as: a diplomatic agent of the highest rank accredited to a foreign government or sovereign as the resident representative of his or her own government or sovereign or appointed for a special and often temporary diplomatic assignment. Sounds pretty political if you ask me. Yogis are the consumers, the mass. Yoga communities cutely wrap, brand and sell commodities. What are you an ambassador of and why? Clothing, magazines, charities, jewelry, health supplements, whatever! Believe in your heart of hearts, it stays true to you and yours, then no worries. This is not for me to decide, no but I ask you to ask yourself why and what benefit does it bring? How much is too much where ego and greed take over? Now bring on the discussion.

Bully Beatdown

If you build it, they will come. Obviously some studio owners take this famous quote quite literal. The restrictions placed on teachers to ban instruction at a nearby or similar studio is sadly real. This happens in major cities where hundreds of thousands occupy 5 mile blocks of blocks. Is there not enough trust to allow sharing of teachers? Yoga is for all who resonate with ‘said teacher’…well actually just all who attend this studio and only this studio that is.  Is it right to block the right to share and teach within a 5-10-30 mile radius? Maybe, if teachers could travel via teleport.  How much is that insecurity of studio owners? What’s that? Speak up.

Crap at the Core

The corruption of the leaders. the creators of the mega communities of yoga is REAL. Rather than trying to decide if the dictator was rotten or right, just or just crazy, there is suffering had by all. The auspicious teachers are now eyed with an suspicious glare and the entire nationwide yoga community is tainted with stink. Trust is lost between student and teacher, faith weakened in the practice and lines drawn between disciplines. Who’s side are you on? Well, who is not corrupt? Cat got your tongue?

photo credit: d.loop

Which brings me to a few letters ahead. F.

What happy go lucky practitioner really gives a flying F about ABC or (as I hope you all provide) to Z? Me thinks they care more about that sweet adjustment they got in down dog the other day or how the message in class last week really resonated with what’s going on in their life. Or maybe just maybe they are getting to know their body and spirit a little better. Isn’t that the goal? And isn’t that done by staying true to that. The why. Why? Because the why defines the how, and the how defines the what, and the what defines the who and the who defines the you. When? How about right now? Remember that whole present moment thingy?

Omm yeaaahh…

It is with sorrow and gratitude that I announce that Chelsea Roff is stepping down from her role as Managing Editor of Yoga Modern to pursue other opportunities in her writing career.

I would like to take this moment to thank all of our writers and readers for supporting the YM vision and helping to create such an amazing dialogue based blog community. At the heart of yoga is the interconnectedness, healing and wholeness that arises when we truthfully and openly share our hearts and minds. As it relates to the next steps for Yoga Modern, the YM team will get back to our readers soon with regards to the direction we are heading in.

As the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Yoga Modern, I bring my palms together and bow with great heartfelt thanks to my dear friend and collaborator Chelsea Roff. I am extremely grateful to Chelsea for her invaluable hard work, insight and devotion over the last year. As Managing Editor, her full on dedication to the mission of Yoga Modern and the incredible depth of her commitment to its success have allowed for an incredibly dynamic and creative relationship and have been instrumental in influencing its development.

As her editor, I have watched Chelsea’s writing blossom. Through her willingness to approach the most difficult questions with genuine sincerity and sensitivity, over and over Chelsea has touched our readers’ hearts and earned their deepest respect.  Her remarkable capacity to eloquently share her process from a place of honesty and vulnerability has shaped the writing standards and expectations that help make Yoga Modern the engaging dialogue space that it is.

Chelsea, from the entire Yoga Modern team, thank you for sharing your path with Yoga Modern. We look forward to more of your writing and further collaboration ahead.

In gratitude,

David Sunshine

Here is a note from Chelsea:

Dear Yoga Modern community,

I am feeling a bittersweet mix of emotion as I write this letter. I am so grateful to this community — our founders, writers, and readers alike — for the integral role you’ve played in my personal journey. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and questions, for contributing your time and energy to a space where we have unraveled such deep, beautiful questions together. It’s been a ride, and I have nothing but gratitude in my heart for every bit of it.

Yoga Modern has been a space I’ve both nurtured and been nurtured by. I want to thank David and Daniel, the founders of Yoga Modern, for investing so much faith and confidence in my abilities, and for encouraging me to grow in ways I never thought was possible. I would not be who I am today — personally or professionally — without you. Thank you for encouraging me to speak when I thought I had nothing to say, to “follow my bliss” when I felt more inclined to play it safe.

While I am moving on to pursue new professional opportunities, I want to assure you all that I will continue to be an active participant in the YM community. I will continue reading, commenting, and periodically contributing articles to the always vibrant and engaging dialogues that happen here. Yoga Modern is a very special space, and I don’t plan on going anywhere.

As far as what the future holds for me… I  am very excited to be the new Managing Editor at Intent.com, where I will be regularly writing and building the blog. I am also working on a large-scale seva writing project I hope to launch later this year (more info to come soon!).  

Once again, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to you — the YM community — for making the past year so rich and rewarding for me. Keep reading, keep writing, and please keep in touch.

Namaste,

Chelsea Roff

Not all men or women are meant to be teachers.  I see that now.  Perhaps I always did, and it begs the question: How do you know if you are a teacher?  I’ll talk more about that in a moment, but first let me tell you why my decision to attend teacher training was a misstep.

photo credit: kevin dooley

Quick Disclaimer: The two months I spent in LA in what came to be affectionately known as the “yoga bubble,” were two of the best months of my life. I would do it again.  No doubt.

I started practicing yoga about 3 years ago, and from the first month people were telling me that I should go to training.  I resisted the idea at first, of course.  It seemed silly to me to become a teacher of something so complex and detailed after only a few weeks, even months.  A couple of years later, I still resisted the idea.

Somewhere in my third year, however, I yielded.  I figured if other people were doing it and I was no better or worse than they were, then why the hell not.  So I packed my bags and headed off to LA to become a teacher.

I did well in the “yoga bubble,” and when I began to practice my new profession, I did well enough there too—externally, at least.  Internally, I felt like a phony.  I was no more a yoga teacher than a monkey banging away at a piano is Chopin.   The reason I felt this way, I would later discover, was because my passion for teaching yoga did not match my passion for practicing it.  The grueling hours, the businesslike atmosphere, and a jaw-droppingly incompetent co-worker, among other factors, violated my expectations.  No one’s fault but my own—expectations strangle life. In the end, I simply had to admit that my love for Yoga did not translate into a strong enough passion to teach it.

photo credit: sfjalar

The great teachers I have had, no matter the subject, have shared three essential qualities:

1. Experience. My best teachers have had years of it, years of practice under a qualified teacher, and years of training learning to be a qualified teacher.  I am not suggesting that years of experience automatically translate into good teaching, but it certainly helps.  While it is possible that the 18-year old instructor is the Doogie Howser of yoga teachers, it is more likely he is not.
2. Uncompromising devotion to students.  This one may be hard to separate in the course of the business of yoga, as concern for the business may mask itself as concern for the student.  The concern has to be genuine. But that is a loaded term, one that space does not permit me to go into.  I’ll just say that we all have an innate ability (in varying degrees) to determine when someone is genuine and when they are not — trust it.
3. Passion not just for teaching, but also for what is being taught.  There has to be  a desire to teach so intense, that the idea of doing anything other than the beloved profession—save for absolute necessity — is anathema.  Teaching isn’t something you do on the side; teaching is who you are.  Anything less and you are a dilettante.  You can have another job, of course, but the other job is the side job, not teaching.

photo credit: andriux-uk

A good yoga teacher, of course, has many other necessary characteristics; I once conducted a job analysis that turned up close to 30. However, the above three form the triangular foundation upon which the others are built—a Teaching Trinity if you will.  This is where you start; the rest you learn along the way…perhaps.   I lacked all three in varying proportions.

I also believe that one has to have an aptitude for teaching.  This aptitude has little to do with how well the teacher performs asana, or their shape, age, race, gender or intelligence.  It has even less to do with a desire to “share yoga with the world.”  It does have quite a bit to do with a natural inclination to teach, and that is something that is rare indeed.

The current glut of poorly trained teachers is a result of an industry (yes, industry) that, due to its unchecked growth, needs bodies more than it needs qualified bodies.  Therein lies a great part of the “dangers” of yoga referred to in the recent New York Times article, “How Yoga Wrecks your Body.”  You can’t throw a dog into the ocean and tell it to fish simply because there is a shortage of fishermen on the wharf.

photo credit: snuzzy

In the end, a teacher must understand that the moment a student enters his class, a tacit agreement is formed.  This agreement states that for the next 30 to 90 minutes, I am entrusting my body to you and your instruction.  I do this believing that you are knowledgeable, well trained, and understand the complexities of the human body: it mechanics, possibilities, and limitations.  You further agree that you will do everything within reason (I have some responsibility too), to ensure that my body leaves this room in much the same way or better than when it came in.

If a teacher is not willing or able to make such an oath, then he or she has no business teaching yoga.  It is as simple as that.

Do you agree?  Do you disagree?  Whichever it is, leave a comment and tell me your position.

photo credit: Fabian Bromann

I grew up a pacifist. Along with an entire generation of anti-Vietnam War youth, I was devoted to and energized by the Gandhian principle of ahimsa and other ideas of nonviolence. Still true to these influences in later life, I cofounded the Give Back Yoga Foundation, which supports teachers who bring yoga and meditation to underserved populations.

But the younger me might not have predicted that part of its core mission would be to bring yoga to veterans, active-duty soldiers, and their families. Or that my son’s oldest and best friend, someone very dear to me, would be serving in Afghanistan, while my youngest daughter joined the Israeli Defense Forces. Thus, now in mid-life, I find myself standing in what appears to be a contradiction: I profess to be guided by ahimsa, and yet people I love, as well as those served by Give Back, are trained not just to defend but also to attack.

At times I allow myself to wallow in the apparent contradiction and can be quite convinced of the righteousness of my confusion. Other times I understand that even the appearance of this so-called contradiction is itself based on unfair and toxic judgments that are buried deep within me and that I even nurture and protect. Sometimes I confidently paddle around in my private sea of judgment; sometimes I can clearly see the whirlpool in which my judgments have caught me.

photo credit: The U.S. Army

Recently, I joined a teleconference class called “Teaching Yoga in Military Settings.” The class was offered by Warriors At Ease, an organization that trains and certifies yoga and meditation teachers to work effectively within military culture and safely with combat-related injuries and conditions. Our first homework assignment was to examine our own thoughts and opinions about serving this military population. After three weeks, I still had not completed it. I found it so difficult to overcome the contradictions I had uncovered in myself. I was holding onto old feelings based on conflicting judgments about people’s choice to serve in wars. I needed to do some work on myself before I could do the homework.

I turned for help to the wisdom of Patanjali and his Yoga Sutras, in which he defines ahimsa as “nonviolence.” I figured out that for me, actively practicing ahimsa means replacing the judgments I cling to with compassionate acceptance, kindness, and forbearance of thought. This task will take me this lifetime, at least.

I’d hazard a guess that I’m not the only yogi who’s a prisoner of his or her judgments. Many people have an aversion to working with specific populations—whether it’s the homeless, incarcerated youth and adults, people with HIV, or people trying day by day to beat alcoholism or substance abuse. The challenge of working with underserved populations is the everyday practice of looking at that aversion and finding the common humanity in us all.

The Give Back Yoga Foundation and many other nonprofit organizations are dedicated to helping yoga teachers reach such underserved populations. Two of the most important things we do may be to model how we work with our own judgments and to help others do the same. It is this inner work that can help all of us feel inspired and empowered to step up and get involved.

Note: This essay originally appeared in the International Journal of Yoga Therapy (2011; Vol. 21).

There was a child who used to play. Escape from the entire world and all the pain. One day she stumbled into a new game with new rules, but the same play. And she learned it with strangers, old and young. Souls that took her hand and showed her things no one ever had. Loving hearts and opened minds embraced her. Overwhelmed, she found play everyday with others. From summertime sunburns to sun salutations soaked in sweat she found play forever here.

I saw this video posted by a friend and yoga teacher on Facebook and I felt torn.

Should we be granting certificates to teach yoga after only 200 hours (that’s 8.3 days!) of training?

All signs point to no, but I believe there is a lot more to be unpacked in that question.

Heard of the 10,000 hour rule? It is said that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. That’s 416.7 full days of yoga study. Or 10 years of 1,000 hours each year, 100 hours each month (divided by 10 months–which assumes 1 day off a week x 52 weeks is almost 2 months) of 25 hours a week. 25 hours a week divided by 6 days a week is 4.2 hours a day.

Truth is I have taught yoga for eight months, and I see the lives it helps every day. How many hours do I need until I see how teaching is sometimes just by reminding people to breathe? Or a light touch on back in a resting pose. The role of yoga teacher is powerful indeed. I am nowhere near where I may end up. “Expert, master yogi.” Call it what you want. But that is okay, because I am exactly where I need to be. On a mat, speaking the only truth I know, and maybe, just maybe helping another expose their mind to the moment of now.

Currently I am finishing a 200 hour  teacher training program, led by instructors who helped me develop immensely on and off the mat. I have practiced yoga consistently for approximately 17 months. Over that time my flexibility may have changed 10% for the better. But my mind and spirit soar well beyond that. I know 200 hours is nowhere near the dedicated years of practice to know my own practice much less someone else’s, but in the face of all the negativity, flexibility, over-sexuality, and whatever else stereotypes teaching this practice, I cannot care. Throat chakra is now open in full force.

So here is what is going to happen. I am going to tell you my story of pain and help you fly. The way I was taught: strong fundamentals in pose building, meaningful sequences, how I found myself on the mat and how  I let go and play. How humbling deep breathing can be, how stretching opens pathways to untapped strength and better understanding and how much it touches me to share this moment sharing what I love with you.

I believe people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. I care because this practice, this community cares for me. This same care will lead me to the (k)now. But a wise friend and yogi told me once, “it never ends, there is always somewhere to go.” I am a student forever, hopefully well beyond 10,000 hours, but today I teach by the minute.

I am JUST beginning my personal practice: on the mat. But I have played.

Tell me, is it wrong to do this? Lead and teach others even while so “young” in our personal practice?  I want to hear your story. And whatever it is, I will listen with an open mind and loving heart. And trust me I will play. Forever.

A few years ago, I was at a yoga intensive and the teacher was cuing another insanely long hold. I’d done a similar practice with her before, and my mind went straight to: “I am going to freak out, I need to get out of here, I hate yoga, maybe yoga is not for me, that’s it, it’s just not for me!!!” Over and over again. I felt like a fake yogi, a total sham.

photo credit: lululemon athletica

Just a few days earlier, one of the teachers at this intensive had taught us about how trauma manifests in our bodies. So on this day, in the midst of that difficult pose, I started to question my process a bit more… Why am I so scared to hold this pose? What will happen if I just stay here? What is the feeling coming up underneath the thought? I realized what I was experiencing was anxiety, an old friend of mine.

You see, I started having panic attacks when I was about 8 years old; full on, terrifying, paralyzing anxiety became a regular companion in my life. Of course I worked on it in therapy and with alternative healing techniques, but yoga was really not that helpful. It was only sometimes helpful; mostly, it felt good at the end when I passed out in savasana and felt peace in some seated poses. But in the middle, I just wanted to run out of the room screaming and crying.

Anxiety as a kid always made me feel trapped. Claustrophobia was part of it. I had fears of bring trapped and not being able to escape. So when a teacher puts me in a long pose, it triggers my claustrophobic and feeling like I am trapped, every single time.
When I sit with the feeling, I can see that it reminds me of feelings of being a child in a difficult, scary situation I had no control over and couldn’t get out of. I didn’t have the tools as a child that I have now. Once I could recognize that it was anxiety coming up in these poses, I could sart to make friends with it. I no longer judged it and I had a lot more compassion for myself.

Now that I understand this tendency, I am much kinder to myself. I can invite myself to be in a pose knowing I have choice. I am an adult with choices and tools. Sometimes I choose to stick out the pose and I see my strength and my ability to find peace in challenging situations. I am getting better at that. And sometimes I know I am not up for it, and staying in the pose is more harmful than helpful on that particular day. I will then move into child’s pose with compassion and love for myself and see it as a choice I can make now as an adult to take care of myself.

photo credit: maewe

Yoga can bring up our dark and scary stuff. It can be ugly and scary but that is the beauty of it. It gives us a safe to place to work it out, to explore our emotions that are stored in our bodies. So what are your scary places that come up in yoga? What do you struggle with in class and how do you handle it? Exploring the deeper layers of what is showing up in our consciousness during a yoga class leads us to so many opportunities to heal and grow. And isn’t that what yoga is really about anyway?

Admittedly, as a veteran of nine years of psychotherapy and three years of psychoanalysis (yes, daily visits to the couch to get to know my unconscious mind) and a graduate of a Ph.D. program in Clinical Psychology in private practice, I was somewhat skeptical that I would find anything new or anything mind-blowing about myself.  I felt as though I knew me, I felt as though I loved me, I felt as though I was attending the workshop to find out more about how to incorporate my two passions:  yoga and therapy, especially as it related to working with girls and women with disordered eating and distorted body image.   All of that was true, but what I hadn’t yet considered or ever been exposed to was Off the Mat’s approach to shadow work as a necessary prerequisite to service in the world.

At the intensive, I learned that it was precisely the traumas and the heartbreaks that had been so hurtful in my life that were my greatest opportunities for growth, for resilience, for the creation of something to be, to give, to offer.  I learned that the injustices and tragedies in the world that most poignantly break my heart are not random, but rather that my heart strings are pulled by my own set of circumstances, my own “story”.  I finally fully understood why girls hating their bodies is the issue that, more than any other, breaks my heart.  And I understood that I had to get out of my own way in order to really do something powerful and meaningful about the way girls and women treat themselves.

Photo Credit: Robyn Thayer

Early in the week, we were led through an exercise about limiting beliefs — those ruminating, critical voices that we allow, at times unconsciously, to get in our own way.  I discovered during that process that my strongest and most forceful limiting belief was actually that I was too much.  As a young child I was asked to step down or away from roles of leadership for various reasons, and over the years I became afraid of my own voice, of my own potential power.  I learned to quiet and hold myself back and down because I was fearful that I would be overwhelming if I allowed myself to show up completely.  This limiting belief had stopped me from being a visionary, from using my voice authentically and purposefully, from showing up fully and radically in love.  And this limiting belief has an evil twin critic who tells me that I am not enough, that I cannot do it, that I will not make a difference and how dare I think I could?

As I began to set both of those old critics aside and instead feel into the new mantra that my cohort at the workshop helped me create, “I am exactly who I am meant to be in this moment,” I saw that if I could stop holding myself back, I could be of better service in the world.  And if I would stop “playing small”, as Marianne Williamson famously stated, I could allow others to show up in their brightest lights.  That realization freed me.  The intensive took us into the dark places in order to show us the way into the light.

One day, towards the end of the week, we were asked to do a journaling exercise about our purpose in the world.  I felt empowered and inspired to discover, even more fully and without internal criticism, that my purpose was to create a world where all unconditionally love their bodies and, therefore, themselves and others.  I was asked to boldly embody that purpose and interact with others in the workshop.  I felt then that I had set the intention and that it would therefore become a reality.  The intensive created space for me to find the ways in which I was holding myself back, and learn to get out of my own way so that I could step into my purpose.  I began to dream.

That was last March.  Only twenty months later the magic has unfolded in ways unimaginable.  My three collaborators and I have opened the doors to Embody Love Movement:  a center for psychotherapy, yoga, and nutrition.  We use an integrative treatment approach to help girls and women recover from disordered eating and distorted body image and to find their already unconditionally loved selves again.  We have led workshops and retreats and currently have a group of recovered young women who are inspired to be the next generation of embodied love; they will be leading workshops this summer to middle and high school aged girls and have created a mentoring program to help those who are currently struggling with Eating Disorders.  Each of these recovered women’s names are written in my journal from the OTM intensive last March.  I just had to stop questioning myself and get out of my way so that I could see the truth and love within and all around me.

 photo credit: nattu

I knew that a revolution could begin, and I believe that it has.  I learned at the intensive, and from Seane, Suzanne, and Hala, that I had to start with me.  I had to be willing enough, brave enough, uncomfortable enough to see into the places that scared me in order to understand that my shadow is not something I have to run away from, but rather, it is my teacher; and if I can hold it sacred, and all parts of myself as sacred, then I can begin to see the sacred and the magic in each moment and in every situation.  Off the Mat has taught me to serve without overpowering or assumption, but with an experience of the unconditional forgiveness and love that exists in every moment and within every human being, including myself, all of the time.

I could never have anticipated what a life-changing experience the intensive would become for me.  I am just so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from those who have done the self-excavation necessary to hold the space for me to see more fully into myself, to find my purpose, and to create change in the world as a result.

Yoga Modern is featuring a series of essays inspired by Off the Mat Into the World’s Yoga, Purpose, & Action Intensives.For a list of upcoming Off the Mat, Into the World leadership trainings, click here. First up: Austin, Texas in March. 

When I first found my way to Facebook, I reveled in the ability to reconnect with long lost friends — suffice it to say that thrill is gone. But a few short years ago in my Facebook halcyon days, I found myself friending a woman I had once worked with at Outside Magazine. We cyber ooohed and ahhhed at photos of each other’s children. We basked in the joy of our newly rekindled friendship. Then came the message:

“Okay Amanda, you have to fill me in on the past 10 years. I want to know everything you’ve been up to aside from motherhood; unless, of course, you’ve found yourself through yoga. I’ve got one too many middle-aged yoga teachers in my life.”

That was the moment I realized I had become a cliché. I might have realized sooner had I still been living in Santa Fe (or some other yoga mecca), but I was in Bend, Oregon where trends tend to take their sweet time arriving. The yoga boom was still slowly making its way up the west coast from LA and San Francisco. I admitted to my Facebook friend that I was indeed a newly certified yoga teacher and that I was currently developing a yoga & creative writing program for teen girls. I secretly hoped that the philanthropic aspect of my yogic venture, along with the nod to my journalistic roots, might soften her stance. It did not. I considered myself defriended.

In the years since that first realization, I have had to come face to face with my clichéd life. I now walk into yoga classes and see reflections of myself everywhere –  40-something blonde ponytailed women wearing lululemon from head to camel toe. We all drink green smoothies, eat bushels of kale, and cleanse on a regular basis. We say all the sh*t yogis say, wear mala beads, and set intentions every 5 minutes. Personally, I am drawing the line at getting a Sanskrit tattoo.

photo credit: lululemon athletica

The funny thing is, I like my clichéd life. That is a tough confession for a life-long rebel to make, but it’s true. I like that my yoga sisterhood has grown from a handful of closet asana junkies into a force over 15 million strong in the United States alone. That feels more like a community than a cliché, more like a movement than a trend. As a rebel, I like the idea of a yoga movement. As a yogi – well, we always like a good movement.

Consider that 90% of women are dissatisfied with their body image, 50% of women in the United States are on a diet, 20% of women will suffer from depression. Personally, I see yoga as a movement in the right direction. I love that middle-aged women are beginning to see this time in their lives as less of a crisis and more of a chrysalis – an awakening to something new and exciting. Will teaching a middle-aged woman to stand on her head change the world? No, probably not. But it will change her world. It will turn it upside down. That sounds pretty rebellious to me. I love seeing that same woman refuse to be turned out into the menopausal pasture and leap over the societal fence rails in search of a bigger sense of purpose. That is definitely worth the occasional Facebook defriending.

photo credit: Rev Stan

 If choosing bakasana over botox and  chakra cleanses over xanax binges is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. Call me a cliché or call me a rebel. I am Middle-Aged Yoga Woman, Hear Me Om.

(Translation: OM is the sh*t middle aged yogis say instead of ROAR.)

Photo Credit: Cleveland Groove

This weekend at the Yoga Journal Conference San Francisco, I took decided to venture just a little beyond my comfort zone and dip my toe into the world of Acroyoga. I walked in expecting circus tricks, silliness, and maybe (if I was lucky) some good stretching… but I found was that PLUS a practice much more deep and rich than I’d ever imagined. After class I sat down with Jenny Sauer-Klein, one of the founders of Acroyoga, to chat about some of the surprises that had arisen. Enjoy the interview!

CR: To start off with, what is Acroyoga?

JS: Acroyoga is a combination of acrobatics, yoga, and healing arts that cultivates trust, connection, playfullness and community.

CR: Awesome. And you’re one of the developers, correct?

JS: Yes. Jason Nemer and I created Acroyoga eight years ago.

CR: How did that happen? Was it intentional, did you set out to create a whole new style of yoga?

JS: (laughter) That’s a good question, how did we develop it? A lot of experimenting, a lot of playing, a lot of jamming! You know, Acroyoga is a grassroots movement in the very literal sense of the word. Our office is Dolores Park in San Francisco, and we used to go there and play all the time.

We definitely had previous background in acrobatics, thai massage, and yoga… So we already had a lot of the building blocks. It’s like, we had the words but we were creating totally new sentences. We were taking the backgrounds we had and saying, what happens if we combine this with this? What if we link this with this? What if we put three people into this? The first couple years were a pretty big free-for-all. A lot of imagining and just letting it reveal itself.

CR: One of the things that stuck out to me most when we were in class earlier was that all the exercise we were doing really felt like a reflection of what you do in a relationship with someone. Trust building, sharing power, communication…

JS: Oh, yes.

CR: I wonder how developing Acroyoga has influenced your personal relationships… not just your intimate relationships, but across the board?

JS: It’s been huge. I think of them as one in the same. When I was going into college I knew I either wanted to study Psychology or Theater, because I’ve always been fascinated with interpersonal dynamics and how we relate. And I actually ended up doing theater because I felt that theater was like embodied psychology. It was a way of understanding the way we are from the inside, from our own experience. And Acroyoga has been another step in that direction in terms of really working with our consciousness and relating not just on the level of consciousness, but through a physical practice.

So, I’ve always intended this work to be about relationship. Even though it seems like I’m teaching Thai Massage or acrobatics, what I’m really teaching about is principles of how we can work with one another. For me, it’s infiltrated all parts of my life — my friendships, my intimate relationships, my family. It’s been really deep to walk the talk… to not see what I’m doing on the yoga mat or  as a teacher as separate from what I live in our everyday life. It’s held me to this really high bar of honesty and compassion, and really speaking my truth.

CR: Can you give me an example of one of those principles?

Sure. We often speak to this concept of benevolent curiosity. For me, that’s been super powerful. To me, benevolent curiosity is about always assuming the best in other people. It’s assuming that everyone has a good intention, and if there’s something that upsets me, it’s like… I assume you have a good intention and that I somehow misunderstood it. Instead of reacting with, “I can’t believe you said that! How could you have done that?” my question is, “What was behind that? What were you thinking when you shared that with me?”

It’s really a practice. It’s a practice of taking time to pause, to filter, to flip things around, and then to communicate from that place of, “I want to understand and I want to be connected form my heart.”

CR: For someone who has never practiced Acroyoga, they might hear you talk about benevolent curiosity and be like… How the heck does that come from a people playing around and flying one another in the air? So, for someone like that, how do these relational concepts emerge from the practice of Acroyoga?

JS: Well, often when you work with people (and especially when you get into acrobatics) you have an active base and an active flyer. So two people are having a very dynamic conversation through their bodies, their voices, their intentions, and their minds.

It’s wild. I feel like the body is just so revealing. When I teach people and watch them practice… if they only knew how much I am learning about them in like five seconds! When I observe the way people work together, I learn so much about their psyche and their emotional life. Do they trust themselves? Do they trust other people? It’s just so very revealing. And there’s also risk involved. You’re taking people’s weight, they’re off the floor, and when that happens all of our fight or flight instincts come to the surface.

So it’s just very revealing. And the really beautiful part is you get to use the body and the relationship as a laboratory to shift those emotional patterns. To discover how you can trust yourself, how you can learn to trust others, how we can take these step-by-step, physically embodied activities to transform our mental and emotional lives.

CR: Yea, and I can imagine it seeps out into all your other relationships? I mean, we say that all the time: This practice carries off the mat. But with this, you are quite literally playing out…

JS: …your whole life story!

CR: Yes! It’s amazing. You’re literally practicing how to be in relationship with others.

JS: Yes, absolutely. And often times we try to help people learn tangible things, like asking for what you need. For example, we talk a lot about solutionary feedback. So instead of, “Ow, that hurts!” it’s “Can you soften your foot? Can you move your hand?” Intead of just pointing out that something doesn’t feel right, offer a solution to your partner. Invite your partner to give you something that will work for you.

CR: Man. It makes me think… wow, this could have such a tremendous impact on a communal, on a collective level. I know you’ve done a lot of work internationally and with global communities. What are you seeing the effects of this practice be in your students and their communities?

Photo Credit: Acroyoga

JS: It’s been amazing.It’s giving people a forum to connect in a very intimate, non-sexual, safe, and nurturing way. In a time when we have so much technology connecting us virtually, it seems like we have less and less opportunity to have that real life, human, vulnerable interaction. There are so many people who don’t get touched everyday, who don’t hug anyone, who go to an office and stay in an embodied bubble all day long. But we need touch; we need nurturance.

This practice is about breaking down the barriers between people, the assumptions, the projections about otherness. It’s bringing it back to the remembrance that we all have the same human experience, the same emotions, the same fears.

You know, we have a lot of students who have been victims of sexual violence. They come and they’re not necessarily comfortable touching or being touched. But through this practice — because it’s permission based, because it’s consensual, because it’s nurturing — they’ve been able to start to rebuild that kind of trust with people. That’s been really powerful.

When you fly with someone (so to speak)… the beauty of it is you get the opportunity really deeply connect with a stranger in just five minutes. I don’t care what their name is, how old they are, what they do for a living… because we’re connecting at essence level. It shows people what’s possible when you open the heart, let go and just trust in humanity.

If you’re interested in learning more about Acroyoga, you can check out information about upcoming workshops, trainings, and events on their website.

As a woman with a long history of food and body issues, I usually try to keep as far away from anything labeled “detox” or “cleanse” as possible. I find it difficult to separate concepts like “detoxification” and “diet” in my mind, and I often wonder if all the zeal about juicing and raw food diets in the yoga community is a sort of collective eating disorder dressed in pseudospiritual clothing. It took me years of therapy and cognitive re-training to finally release beliefs like “my body needs to be fixed,” and frankly anytime I find myself immersed in all the fear-mongering about toxins and pollutants ravaging our systems from the inside… it brings all the old crap (pun intended) to the surface.

Photo Credit: Cleveland Groove

So when the first thing out of Seane Corn’s mouth at her Detox Flow intensive Friday morning was, “A detox is not a diet,” I felt myself breathe a sigh of relief.

Often, when we talk about detoxes in our society, what we are actually referring to are very radicalized individual health regimens. It’s the five-day juice cleanse, the wheat grass enemas (yes, you heard me right), or maybe if you’re lucky you’ll actually get to chew your food with a weeklong kitchari diet. For many of us, our desire to detox emerges from a deeper-seated belief that we don’t talk about so often… the notion that we are dirty, contaminated, not okay as we are. If we’re not careful, we can become so obsessed with clearing the toxins (that realistically do exist) from our bodies that programs designed to instill more health and well-being actually become more abusive than the toxic lifestyle we are trying to remedy to begin with.

With all these reservations, you might find it surprising that the first class on my schedule for Yoga Journal’s San Francisco Conference was a six-hour intensive about detoxing. The truth is, as off-putting as I find our cultural obsession with cleansing, I also feel inexplicably drawn to it. There’s a part of me that still feels like, “Well, if I could just eliminate that desire I have for sweet foods…. maybe then I would feel more happy, more vibrant, more nourished by my life.”

But here’s the thing… Seane’s version of detoxification is not your typical let’s-sweat-until-you-smell-like-what-you-ate-last-night kind of class. By the time we made it to the first twist, what I felt seeping from my pores was not the grease from last night’s dinner: it was tightly-wound tendrils of pent-up frustration buried deep inside my muscles. “The biggest cause of dis-ease in our society,” Seane said, “is our lack of self-care, lack of self-worth. If we want to alter the state of the world, we have to start with a revolution within.”

And this, I suppose, is why I find myself coming back to these classes over and over again. “On a deeper level,” Seane reminded Friday’s class, “this is about much more than the health/wellness we create in our individual bodies. This is about how we’re treating our planet on a collective level.”

One of the things I appreciated most about this approach to detoxing was the fact that it really did embrace a holistic perspective. Sure, we talked about how processed foods affect the digestive system and how unexpressed emotion can wreak havoc on the adrenal glands. But the conversation also shifted to the macro-level — to the truly abominable food being shelled out in elementary school cafeterias across the country and how government subsidies for agribusiness make healthy, organic options inaccessible to lower-income families.

My big take away from the class? It’s all about the balance, baby. For me, it’s much more comfortable to talk about the need for detoxification at a collective level… Let’s boycott Tyson! Create alternative fuel services! Get the gunk out of our food! What’s more difficult for me to sit with is the discussion that Seane stuck with for most of the class — the idea that our relationship to food is most often a poignant reflection of our relationship to ourselves. If you find yourself gorging on sweets every time you visit your mother, perhaps it’s worth looking at what gaping hole you’re actually trying to fill. And if you want to enact any type of meaningful, long-standing change on a collective level… well, you’re not going to get anywhere if you’re not taking care of yourself.

I know I wasn’t the only one in that room who had struggled with food/body issues (who hasn’t, right?), and I can only imagine how many readers of this blog have walked a similar path. So, how about it? What’s been your experience with detoxes and cleanses? How do you ensure that your detox isn’t just another self-deprecating diet in disguise?