In, down, and out
Learning how to teach, how to breathe, and how to be
Find a comfortable seat. Place your hands in your lap, and inhale through your nose, take in another sip to descend air down into the belly, and then release to exhale. Repeat to a count of your liking.
Breathing in this manner (in, down, and out) sends air to the bottom of the lungs, where parasympathetic nerve lubrications live (sympathetic (fight or flight) nerve endings are located at the tops of the lungs). Sending the breath down tickles the parasympathetic receptors signalling to the body that it’s time to rest and digest. Hence why breathing like this can be a tool to help calm us down.
Manipulating the way that we breathe can manipulate the way that we feel, therefore allowing us to experience life in different ways.
I spent the past month learning all of this and more during a yoga teacher training with The Sacred Fig. The experience was a profound one, and left me wanting to give yoga teaching a try. Does this then mean that my social media presence will strictly be back bends in front of a Balinese sunset? Maybe not. Figuring out the story that I want to tell with these tools, is a journey I am excited to embark on.
Digesting the past month is the first step, and luckily the breath gives a helpful template to follow.
IN —
Going to a yoga teacher trainings, I expected to come out of it learning how to teach yoga. What I didn’t know, was how many modalities I could pull from to create a yoga class — the kind of class that I want to teach. The Sacred Fig’s curriculum gave me a tasting platter of various practices (both modern and ancient) for me to then pick and choose what I wanted to put on my plate. Three weeks later, I came out of the training knowing the anatomical planes of movement and an understanding of what a bandha is (energetic lock) and how to use it. The entire teaching methodology was done in a frame that excluded absolutes, which encouraged us, the students, to make the call for ourselves. So rather than teaching one way to do a downward facing dog, we were given options and an understanding of the different characteristics are, so we could pick and choose which dog we want to teach based off what one’s intention may be for that particular class. No variation was deemed better or worse than others — all dogs were loved equally.
DOWN —
Contrary to what I had previously thought, yoga isn’t only the poses one does on a mat. This is just the surface of what yoga really is, when in fact so much more of yoga is what happens off the mat — turns out that shirshasana is the easy part.
The physical poses are only one of the eight limbs of yoga — the other seven touch on ways of existing and interacting with the world. For me, my relationship with myself bubbled to the surface because I realised that the way I interact with myself reflects. how I interact with others. In this, I found that there were some thought patterns that held me back from experiencing life in the way that I want to. This, in combination with being around thirty new strangers, opened the door for me to see what would happen if I engaged with myself, and others in a new way. These strangers soon became friends, but the blank slate of not knowing someone gave me freedom to be — without the fear of perceived expectations of how I should or shouldn’t behave. By acting in accordance to how I was feeling, parts of myself that I had previously kept under the covers came out to play. These acts of vulnerability showed me that expressing these sides of myself don’t hinder, but rather help me move towards accepting myself.
To me, I think of these moments similar to kintsugi — the Japanese way of filling cracked ceramics with gold. When I show others my cracks, they become filled with gold because sharing inherently acknowledges the role this crack has played in my life, but also allows for it to turn into something beautiful. The cracks in my life make me into the person that I am, so why hide that from the world?
OUT —
Reconsidering and reevaluating my relationship with myself pointed me towards the direction that I want to have when interacting with the world around me. A big slice of this is moving without assumptions. Inspired by The Four Agreements (required reading from the training), I noticed how the assumptions I made about people, places, and things, clouded my vision of the world. When learning how to give physical adjustments, the first step is to look and admire the body in front of me. The body, every body, is someone’s home. A home that someone moves through the world: sitting on the train, filling taxes, going on a run, hugging their family. Looking, admiring, acknowledging, and appreciating this humaness before offering an adjustment is not only how I want to approach people who take my classes, but also who I interact with off the mat.
I was going to title this piece: Eat, Stretch, Love — but rather than piggy backing off Elizebeth Gilbert’s wondrous tale, I figured why not write my own.
In, down, and out. I don’t know where this journey will take me, but at least I’ll be able to breathe.
Cover and last photo captured by the beautiful Paula Ayet x
What a great time in your life to experience all sorts of modalities and be able to integrate into your daily life what rises to the top.. over and out