from suffering to awakening
From Suffering to Awakening: Evolving Yoga Practice Through Fascia Intelligence
It is estimated that 36 million Americans practice yoga, making up about 10% of the population! When this blog was published, it was estimated that 15% of Americans had practiced yoga within the past six months. Yoga has already proven to create some pressure release from stress, but through my own journey of practicing yoga since 1999 and teaching for over 16 years, I hit a block at one point in 2015 that required me to evolve my own practice and methodology for teaching.
The way I was practicing felt good at times, providing an opportunity to practice mindful movement and be more present in the moment. However, I noticed that the traditional way I was practicing was actually building tension in my body and mind systems. Since I was going through a kundalini awakening, emotional portals could be triggered through practice, opening up at high speeds, but then my system would freeze back up, inhibiting any healing or releasing. I was stuck in a cycle of suffering.
By 2015, I was deep in depression with nothing but despair in my perception and physical pain in my body. I had been exploring the inner terrain of fascia for a couple of years and had an exquisite practice of mindfulness that was foundational in the body. This taught me so much about the nervous system and how our ways of looking at our experience could either build more suffering or unclog and release it. It also taught me about my conditioned responses and gave me moment-to-moment opportunities to upgrade my perceptions, which were more resonant with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s framework of mindfulness and the 7 attitudes (more on this in another post).
So, what shifted? I had to come into a more physical relationship with my body—literally touch it and get to know how the fascia felt through my own hands. This gave me lots of information and I was inspired to do so after hearing Bo Forbes talk on a podcast about how moving fluids in the body was a sign of physiological regulation. I knew I was nowhere near a regulated state and missed the fluid flow that would awaken through my mindfulness of body practice I was regularly engaged in before. I immediately started dragging my fluids and tracking how fascia was highly responsive to this. I noticed immediate relief and a shift in my conscious awareness. My brain felt like it was waking up in new parts. I was fascinated and entered into a new dimension of being a human at this moment.
Since I experienced such a drastic change in how I felt and processed my living experience, I wanted to begin to share this with my students. Many of them also began to reap the benefits, while others resisted and were turned off by coming into a more intimate relationship with their bodies. I was in the Bible Belt at the time, and there was a lot of religious programming around the body being the place for sin and that it was selfish to connect in those ways with oneself.
Even though there was resistance, I found a way to continue to evolve and move forward in this evolution of teaching. I immediately became inspired to create a radical shift in the way others taught yoga, and nine years later, here I am on a mission to fulfill my soul’s desire to support an evolution in the yoga that is taught.
