From my research to yoga ...

I’m aware I haven’t written anything on here since New Year’s Day … apologies! Mostly, this has been due to the time demands of my therapy practice and working on my thesis.  I want to find more time to write again though as I move through the next steps of both my PhD / research journey and my personal journey; both of which are intimately interlinked …

I’ve also been practising yoga regularly since September and so have been spending time reading around yogic practices and philosophies.  Yoga is a practice I’ve dipped in and out of for many years, but hadn’t really found a teacher / school which compelled me to stay.  Until last August when I was introduced to ‘Forrest Yoga’ through an organisation called ‘Jambo Yoga’ …

Forrest Yoga is more physically intense than other approaches I’ve experienced and encourages an internal focus alongside the physical, which is partly what makes its philosophy so similar to my own.  It encourages its students to connect more fully both with their bodies and their authentic selves.  As stated on the ‘Forrest Yoga’ website (www.forrestyoga.com); “The practice challenges students to access their whole being and to use Forrest Yoga as a path to finding and then cleansing the emotional and mental blocks that dictate and limit their lives.”

As much of my PhD journey has been serendipitous, it seems that I was led to Forrest Yoga at just the right time.  My research was leading me to conclude how just how much of our self experiencing is situated in our bodies.  I was also thinking more deeply about the disconnect between mind & body, so commonly experienced by people with eating disorders and other disordered eating / body image concerns.  This mind-body disconnect is very prevalent in western society and I think it plays a huge role in the rising numbers of people we see experiencing eating disorders, obesity, disordered eating, body image concerns, etc.  Seeing our own, and others’ bodies as objects to be manipulated into looking a particular way is common practice in our culture; and this takes us away from our authentic embodied experiencing. 

In my work with eating disordered clients, I see how disconnected they are from their body’s experiencing.  Their body has become a ‘thing’ which they want to control or change.  They don’t experience it as part of themselves.  They don’t experience their body as their embodied self.  Their body has become the problem. 

I also find many clients, with no eating issues who are disconnected from their bodies and their feelings.  Our feelings tend to be experienced in our bodies; as sensations, as ‘feelings.’  But many people focus too much on what they’re thinking.  It’s amazing how often a question about how a client feels about something is answered with, “I think … “ 

Our bodies have a lot of wisdom and learning to listen to our body can tell us so much about ourselves.  Our body communicates in many ways; through its unique internal sensations, through its posture and movement, through ‘psychosomatic’ manifestations and much more.  Our body is what allows us to experience the world around us.  It’s what allows us to relate to other people and it’s from where we present ourselves to the world.

In a Forrest Yoga class, I experience myself as being fully in my body for the 90 or so minutes the class lasts.  My mind chatter stops and I can simply be fully in my body in way I don’t think I can be anywhere else.  I experience no judgement of my body from anyone else in the room; teachers or other students.  And nor do I experience any judgement towards anyone else or their body.  And more importantly, I don’t experience any self judgement or criticism towards myself or my body. 

For the first time in as long as I can remember, being in a Jambo Yoga class is the first time I have felt absolutely no self-consciousness about my body.  I experience no concerns about how ‘it’ looks; I step into my holistic (and authentic) embodied experience and out of the disembodied objectified experience of western society.  I experience the ‘assists’ offered by the assistants as nurturing and supportive and powerful in enabling me to connect even more fully with my own body and its abilities.  In short, I feel alive.

In that class myself and my body are one … authentically and without judgement.

I’m working on increasingly being this way outside of the yoga room, and also on finding ways to enable my clients to connect more fully with their embodied experiencing and authentic selves …