Why This Yoga Teacher Of 15 Years Takes Beginner Yoga Classes

This guest post by Emily Burg originally appeared on Yogi Living.

I have been practicing yoga for 15 years, and teaching for five, and when I attend a yoga class for my personal practice, it is a Level 1 or restorative or gentle yoga class.

For most of my time practicing yoga, I thought that the purpose of the practice was to ascend.  To develop the ability to perform ever more complex asana. To practice more often.  To get sweatier on the mat.  To be able to hold a pose longer.

I had it all wrong.

All of those years of yoga practice experience didn’t make me a more advanced yogi, because in yoga, being able to stay connected to our beginner’s mind is what actually demonstrates our mastery.  One of the greatest challenges in yoga is to go as deep and practice with as much focus, commitment and intent in a basic yoga practice, as you would in a Level 3 all inversions and arm balances class.

This was nearly impossible for me once I became a yoga teacher, though of course when I reflect back on my teacher training, the focus was never was never to turn us into the most flexible yoginis but rather to make us the most grounded, centered and wise guides for our students.  Yet I felt that as a teacher I had to demonstrate an elevated practice, attend upper-level classes and never require an adjustment, because, as a teacher, I should have a perfect practice.  This was in spite of being a teacher who instructed my students that there is no such thing as a perfect practice, and that the core of the practice is learning to come to acceptance with whatever version of ourselves shows up on the mat each day.

Yoga, which had been a central part of my life for so many years, was no longer a source of refuge, inspiration, expression, creativity and release.  Instead going to the mat as a teacher felt like work: I was either unable to shut off teacher mode or, I was so busy watching how the teacher taught the class, looking for ideas and cues that could feed my own work as a teacher, I lost the ability to stay present in the moment as a student, I lost the unifying connection between my breath, body, and mind that yoga enables — the reason I came to and stayed on the mat for so many years.  I lost my student’s mind, my beginner’s mind.

A combination of missing my yoga practice, and missing the opportunity to be a student, led me to reconsider my yoga practice altogether and to return to yoga as if I were a new student.  Now only attending level 1, gentle or restorative classes, I approach each class as though it’s my first time on the mat, and in a way, it is: I am traveling back in time, reconnecting with the beginner yogini I was once, and in many ways I still am, now in the form of an established yogini and teacher: a woman who comes to the mat stressed and anxious, overworked and under slept, seeking solace, grounding, insight and connection to an ancient lineage of wisdom and wellness.

About Emily Lauren BurgEmily (aka Guru Em) is a former investment banker and strategic analyst turned yoga and meditation teacher. She uses mindfulness and wellness practices to address stress, anxiety, and change and help her students experience wholeness. To learn more or connect with Emily visit her website, Guru Em.

LIVING WITH CANCER: CHRONIC, NOT CURED

By SUSAN GUBAR    

June 5, 2014 12:26 pm  

Posted on The New York Times 'Well' Blog.  To view blog in original source, visit Living With Cancer     

 

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Susan Gubar is a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University and the author of “Memoir of a Debulked Woman,” which explores her experience with ovarian cancer. 

 

At the end of yoga sessions for cancer patients, we are told to say to ourselves, “I am whole, healed and healthy in this and every moment.” Perversely, since in yoga we express aspirations as if they were already so, the sentence reminds me of people who congratulate me on being “cancer free.” Stable disease often goes unrecognized.

 

Perhaps the concept of chronic cancer has been hard to comprehend because public discussion tends to focus on the initial diagnosis of breast cancer. Early detection of breast cancer yields good survival rates and many patients can consider themselves cured. Often we assume a clear-cut partition between survivors and the terminally ill.

    

In her book “Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics,” Miriam Engelberg divides a circle into two uneven segments to illustrate a divide in the breast cancer community. The larger part of the circle is labeled “Primary Diagnosis Only,” and a cartoon bubble exclaims, “I’m O.K. — Really!” The small section is labeled “Gone Metastatic,” with the caption “Damn!”

 

From the time she got her initial diagnosis in 2001 until her death in 2006, the same year her book was published, Ms. Engelberg resisted pressure to become “someone nobler and more courageous than I was.” She followed “the path of shallowness” by producing a series of droll comics on the “insanely cheerful” chemotherapy booklets and radiation technicians she encountered. She mocked her own self-absorption, trepidation and irritation as well as the social quandaries that arose as she, like her cartoon surrogate, plummeted from cancer survivor to terminal patient.

 

But for some of us, there is a middle stage in this journey. Because of advances in cancer research and the efforts of dedicated oncologists, a large population today deals with disease kept in abeyance. The cancer has returned and has been controlled, but it will never go away completely. Like me, these people cope with cancer that is treatable for some unforeseeable amount of time. Chronic cancer means you will die from it — unless you are first hit by the proverbial bus — but not now, not necessarily soon.

 

The word “chronic” resides between the category of cured and the category of terminal. It refers to disease that is not spreading, malignancy that can be arrested but not eradicated. At times, the term may seem incommensurate with repetitive and arduous regimens aimed at an (eventually) fatal disease. For unlike diabetes or asthma, cancer does not respond predictably to treatment.

  

Still, quite a few patients with some types of leukemia or lymphoma, prostate or ovarian cancer live for years. While in the 1970s 10 percent of women with metastatic breast cancer survived five or more years, today up to 40 percent do. Chronic disease may lack the drama of diagnosis and early treatment; even friends can get bored by mounting details. Its evolution does not conform to the feel-good stories of recovery that most of us want to read. But neither does it adhere to the frightfully degenerative plot of quickly advancing tumors.

 

On a number of websites, people with chronic cancer discuss the succession of therapies in which they enlist. When one drug fails, another combination of drugs begins. Complex dosing schedules, multiple tests and hospitalizations take their toll. No matter how grateful these patients are for their continuing existence, it requires not the spurt of sprinters but the stamina and sometimes the loneliness of long distance runners.

 

Ms. Engelberg’s “path of shallowness” can alleviate strain, especially from disabling byproducts of persistent maintenance: sadness, anxiety, anger and then remorse about all those roiling emotions. When repetitive and arduous regimens weary the spirit, it may be impossible to value the preciousness of life, to adopt a healthy lifestyle, to visualize one’s harmony with the universe, to attain loving kindness, to stay positive, to meditate to a state of mindfulness, to greet each day as a prized gift, to enlist the power of now. The social pressure to be upbeat can get anyone down.

 

The shallow path enables the cartoon character Miriam to circumvent the guilt trips induced by a gaggle of past and present cancer gurus. Instead of going inward, she often distracts herself: zoning out on “Judge Judy” or attaining “trivia nirvana” through crossword puzzles or joking about the need for a support group to cope with the jolly advice of her support group. Eventually she decides to make cartooning her “spiritual practice.”

 

If I am low during a yoga session, if the warrior, the goddess and the star feel impossibly strenuous, I take the shallow path with the supine pigeon and a revision of my wonderful instructor’s final words: “I am as whole, healed and healthy as I can be in this and every moment.”

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The Downside of Positivity; Giving Yourself Permission to be Real

Sara Zuboff is a certified Yoga instructor, massage therapist and thyroid cancer survivor.  Along with Sharon Holly, she teaches a monthly, 2-hour, yoga-based workshop at the Cancer Support Community-Benjamin Center entitled 'Revive & Thrive' in which cancer survivors create mind/body shifts to overcome overwhelm, stress and struggle.   For information on this and other free-of-charge CSC programs, please call 310-314-2555 or visit CSC's website at www.cancersupportcommunitybenjamincenter.org

At a workshop I taught last week, one of my participants had difficulty completing one of the exercises that included writing a letter of encouragement to herself.  She explained that she felt mired in feelings of sadness, anger and loss and she felt guilty over having these feelings.  Sometimes, I think when we’re going through something difficult there is a pressure to find the positive, to be positive, even when we’re not feeling up to it.

 When I received my own cancer diagnosis I had two family members who were diagnosed with different types of cancer around the same time.  Shortly after I finished treatment, they both died of their disease.  I was so wracked with guilt over my own survival, and whenever I spoke about these feelings, well-meaning friends or family encouraged me to be positive, to remember the joy of my six month old son and the beautiful family I had started with my loving husband.  And while I did feel those things, the truth is I also felt an incredible heaviness from this guilt.  Unexpressed, it cast a dark shadow over my days, making me short-tempered and on edge.  Which leads to an incredibly inconvenient truth about emotions; left unprocessed they will come out sideways, disrupting your life in unexpected ways until you turn around and face them.  However, I promise you that once acknowledged and processed you may find that your journey to positivity is much more ease-filled.

So, I write this in hopes that you’ll give yourself permission to feel all your feelings, even the scary ones.  I do have some tips that have helped me deal with mine and I hope they’ll help you deal with yours.

1.       Journal--Consider using your journal daily or whenever the mood strikes.  Write in a stream of consciousness style with the intention of leaving it all on the page.

2.       Move--Walk, run, dance, box…let your body move!  Not only will this release” feel-good” endorphins it will help release trapped, negative emotions.

3.      Speak Your Truth--Whether it’s your family, friends, therapist, or you have to go out and find a tribe of folks who have or are going through something similar, find a safe place to verbally express how you’re really feeling.  Words have power and by giving yourself space to really express ‘what’s up’ goes a long way towards empowering yourself when it comes to taking care of yourself and those powerful feelings.

4.     Feed Yourself Really Well--Whether it’s fresh whole foods (and I know that sometimes during treatment, eating is the last thing you want to do but do the best you can) or books, movies and social media;  seek out that which nourishes and uplifts rather than that which further shuts you down.

5.     Remember That This Will Pass--It may feel like forever, but these feelings, given proper care will pass and new ones will take their place. 

One of the gifts I got from going through cancer shortly after the birth of my first son is realizing it is possible to feel more than one feeling at a time.  I had periods of intense joy followed by astounding fear in a short span of time.  The trick is being present to both and allowing them to cycle through; because no feeling, when given space, is forever.  That’s the beauty of being human.