If you want to master anything, you cannot be afraid of effort. ~Dylan Werner (yoga instructor, veteran, world traveler, musician)
Very recently, I have had to come to terms with a part of my shadow that was creating suffering in all its attempts at feeling virtuous. Have you ever taken a step back and asked yourself to what degree are you responsible for your own suffering? It isn't an easy question to ask. It causes our ego to become defensive. We begin to justify our actions and our operating beliefs. However, one of the most powerful things we can do for ourselves is to bring into consciousness the patterns that may have at one time preserved us, but in our current configuration are no longer necessary and therefore have become part of our suffering. In doing so, you're highly likely to experience some resistance if not an all out refusal of the mind to let go. It's pretty damn uncomfortable. In August 2018, while doing my normal Buti Yoga workout (a form that combines strong vinyasa, pliometrics, HIIT, tribal dance, primal movements, and spiral structure technique), I felt what I thought was a pulled muscle. It hurt like all hell, but I let the pain release just enough that I could push on through my workout and finish. By the time I finished my practice, I felt like I must have just strained it and everything would be fine. After analyzing what happened and what I was doing when I felt the pain, I came to the conclusion that a tight piriformis was giving me trouble. The next morning, I woke up unable to move without pain, and I have been in some degree of pain since. For two years, my normal yoga practice has consisted primarily of Buti Yoga with all of its add-on elements - SCULPT, BANDS, HotCore, and DEEP. I did the recommended schedule of 3 days of practice followed by one day of rest. I adored this practice. I certified in Buti. I audited another certification weekend. I believed, and still believe in its transformative possibilities. After my injury, I tried to push through the pain to keep up my schedule. Initially, there was some improvement, but by early December, sometimes I would give my best effort at lifting my legs and they would barely rise off the ground. I found I was having to clinch in odd places in order to perform the movements because the pain was so intense. This was causing more pain. It was then that I made the hard decision to back off of my chosen yoga form, that I had grown to love so much over the last two years, and do only the restorative version DEEP, and add in the more "traditional" yoga styles that led me to yoga 17 years ago. Even though I am a 200RYT (200 hour registered yoga teacher through Yoga Alliance) and certified in Hatha and Kundalini yogas along with Buti, it was hard for me to accept that I hadn't somehow failed myself. I had only practiced Buti for 2 of the 17 years I have practiced, but it has enriched me in all ways beyond description and made advanced yoga asanas more accessible to me. It's been a struggle to let go of the blaze it took to keep up that level of commitment to a form of yoga that at times is very high intensity. It gives new meaning to the term "ride the lightning," which normally means being put to death by the electric chair. Instead, this is the scenario where you harness the lightning and use it to become what you thought was an impossibility. I have been an athlete my whole life. I played girls basketball, volleyball, and ran cross country. I have always been active regardless of my weight. Buti helped me reach plains of being that even as a high school student, I would never have dreamed I could access. It was beautiful and addictive. This all came about during a time (the last five years) when my spiritual and personal path has taken a radical turn. Everything I thought I knew about myself is in question. Upheaval of the belief systems that have kept me afloat since childhood. It was no coincidence that at the same time, I became terrible at asanas (yoga poses) that required any form of balance. I was ungrounded. The driven fixer in me didn't understand why I seemed to be going backward in this area, and began to push for more strength, playing limits, and striving. When I found and experienced the magic of Buti, I trusted that eventually I'd find my feet under me again. I have not yet. In fact, the only improvement that I have seen in that area has been since I pulled back my practice. This past Sunday, I took a mystic yoga class that was geared toward the root chakra. The teacher created one of the most intriguing sequences I have ever experienced for the muladhara (Sanskrit name of the root chakra). There on my mat, my still small voice from within asked, "Are you all in or does your effort reflect only the trying? It always appears you are in the process, but you are afraid to arrive. What do you fear?" I used my breath to not cry. I decided instead to forgive myself and be with what my body wanted then. In those moments, I understood what had really been happening in my practice. Afterward, the teacher gifted me the beautiful smoky quartz you see me holding in the picture above. Another woman in the class looked at me and told me she had watched me practice and it inspired her. There in my weakness, my strength was recognized. I have been refusing to accept my strength for the pursuit of a body and mind that I think I should have. And yet, I'm too afraid to become the thing I think I have the potential to be because it is completely different than any state of being I have ever known. I had allowed maximum efforting to become my comfort zone. In the guise of self improvement, I was loathing myself into extreme fatigue and injury. I wasn't giving myself time to celebrate my gains, but constantly pushing. During these last two months of backing off of Buti, I am finally able to actually feel how strong I am! I was keeping myself so weak from overdoing that I couldn't recognize where I was physically. I was ignoring my body's cues in order to make it submit. I was stagnant in the familiar places of pain, discomfort, illness, shame, and anxiety while to the outside it appeared I was doing great things for myself. I didn't fully believe I could ever have another experience of life aside of that list of descriptive words because I had never known it before. As they say, "Seeing is believing." Therefore, it was true that discomfort and dis-ease had become my comfort zone. I had taken it on to heal, but instead of nurturing myself there, I was browbeating myself into submission. I had wondered why I sometimes felt states of panic when I rolled out my mat for practice. I loved my yoga. It made no sense. I had made myself blind by hiding self destruction behind the mask of self care.
Yoga is a journey to the self through the self. ~Bhagavad Gita All yoga is about coming to know who and what you are, unifying all parts of your being through the breath and practices. It is about coming in to santosha (yoga niyama meaning contentment. It is about fullness right where you are as you also see beyond your limiting beliefs. Even Buti Yoga has as one of its main mantras - Total body love. Today, see yourself where you are and think about what it means to love yourself there.
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It’s the things we spend our lives pushing into the periphery as far as we can push (as if we have no peripheral vision) that are ultimately the things we have to face head on to be truly free. Life doesn’t leave anyone without keys no matter how complicated the locks. Experience is the way we learn. It’s the impetus for change. It’s the marker on the tree that lets us know we’ve been on this path before, and asks us if we want to go there again. Bringing these experiences into focus, is the only way to transform them into the keys we need to unlock the parts of our truth that will allow us full and fulfilled expression that is uniquely our own. The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University states in a report titled “The Foundations of Lifelong Health Are Built in Early Childhood”: “Experiences are built into our bodies and significant adversity early in life can produce biological “memories” that lead to lifelong impairments in both physical and mental health.” This truth we cannot change. We can, however, decide how these “biological memories” affect our lives. 1. The way we experience the present (and through our choices made in the present – the future), is directly influenced by imprints left in our brain by past events. A simple Google search on the topic of the developing brain will show you that much of the way we live our lives is written into our being by our early childhood experiences. We come into an understanding of the way the world works in that manner. Add too that the trials and triumphs of adolescence and the lessons of the earlier experiences are either amended or reinforced. Even before we were born, as shown by the field of epigenetics, our very DNA has been written with genetic predispositions for certain physical and mental behaviors based upon these same types of experiences had by our ancestors. Yes, the physical and emotional abuse your grandmother experienced before becoming pregnant with your mother could be the cause of your natural propensity toward anxiety as much as the constant bullying by your classmates in school makes you second guess your relevance in your career and creative pursuits. 2. These imprints create our body’s experience of homeostasis and what we don’t unpack, explore, and grow to understand will be destined to be relived as we attempt to create stability and balance in our lives. Imagine yourself an infant. You give your mother subtle cues that you’re hungry. You squirm, wrinkle your nose, and wave your arms, kicking your chubby legs. If your mother is close by, she instinctively notices these cues and offers you her breast or a bottle. But, if she’s busy in the other room, and the subtle cues go unnoticed, you resort to crying. In a situation of neglect, you may cry until you are physically wiped out and become quiet, yet still hungry. You grow despondent. Each time any of these scenarios play out, your baby brain takes note of the result of your efforts so that you can more effectively communicate your needs in the future. If the neglect situation continues, you will eventually stop providing any cues and become what the medical community blanketly terms “failure to thrive”. This type of trial and error learning is the basic blueprint of how our bodies over eons of time created in us survival mechanisms that allow us to adjust and adapt to some of the harshest situations. Whether we like it or not, these patterns become our body’s calibration of normal and we’ll seek out and attract experiences and situations that give us the sensations of normalcy. Yes, that emotionally abusive stepmother is still cutting you down with her words as you look for everyone you meet to manipulate your emotions for their gain, and you find those who will so you can react. It’s homeostasis rather than stepping out in a complete unknown territory. 3. Our past contains our earliest and most basic perception of the world. Are you a natural pessimist or an optimist? Our past experiences (and, yes, our genetic predisposition) set us up to believe that the world is either for or against us. Logically, we know that the entire collective world cannot be designed to work against us. Everyone has experiences that can be labeled both good and bad. Sometimes there’s a predominance of one type over the other, but every day we can experience things that can be placed under either of these labels. However, certain types of events experienced in our past create patterns of response in us that can lend themselves to certain behaviors that really mess with the way we experience the world. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) affect our brain development and directly impact both mental and physical health. This in turn influences our social-emotional wellbeing, creating an experience of life that feels almost adversarial. Common ACEs include: bullying, death of a loved one, accidents, chaotic home life, sexual abuse, poverty, illnesses, emotional/physical abuse, separation from a primary caregiver, parental incarceration, and more. Unfortunately, many of these experiences are not as rare as we’d like to think. Our ability to “look on the bright side” is hindered. 4. Our ability to define our own truth is correlated with our ability to transform our narrative of the past. When the Pharisees asked Jesus when they’d see the Kingdom of God, Jesus answered: “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! Or, lo there! For behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” So many depictions of heaven seem kind of cheesy to me. It’s because heaven is a very individualized state of being. You are Divine and that Higher Kingdom is one you must build for yourself. Only you know what’s best for you. First, you must become intimate with how and where it all went wrong. We cannot change the past. The past is not now. There is no need to fear it, or try to fix it. Sure, it might bring up some uncomfortable, even sickening vibes. How can we release the charge of those vibes without being willing to face them head on? What if you could rewrite your story? Not erasing painful things, but finding your personal truth among the memories? 5. A house is only as sturdy as it’s foundation. In working with the imbalances life has created and, honestly, will continue to create in our basic framework (housed energetically in our bodies in our lower triangle of chakras - focused energy centers in our subtle body: 1-2-3), we shore up our foundation. Our root chakra is associated with our feelings of belonging in a body and on this earth, sense of place, tribe, and/or family. The sacral chakra takes it a step further into interpersonal relationships with friends, kin, and lovers. It’s our beginnings of self-expression and creativity. Then, our solar plexus brings us to the “I”. We become individuals based on the support we found or did not find when coming into being through our first two chakras. Blocks and imbalances anywhere in the lower triangle comes into our manifestation of reality impacting our presentation and effectiveness in life and our spirituality/wellbeing. So, just as this filthy, dark past created our experience of the present, dealing with its creation in the now, acknowledging what it left within us, and rewriting the story of what we will allow it to manifest in our future are the keys to becoming free of it. Need to Dig Through the Dusty Corners Causing Your Dark Night of the Soul? Meet A Shadow Guide9/14/2018
I cannot positively think away my trauma, the events that make me lie awake at night with guilt… the inner complaints that threaten to make me a whiner. No. I can only make the decision to put it to work for or against my well-being. I decide the narrative it creates in my life. It’s still there in all its glory, but I am the one in charge of the story. So, when I sit down on my yoga mat, write/journal, bring out my oracle cards, conduct a ritual, or assess my chakras, I’m guiding myself through those dark spaces that if left unconscious will direct my life with their own agenda every damn day. Utter chaos. No amount of affirmation, positive meme scrolling, gratitude, or loving your neighbor will process the energy of these places. It’s hard to love the neighbor who sexually abused you, the school mates who relentlessly called you names, or yourself after acting in unconscious and hurtful ways, and to be grateful for the lesson when it keeps interrupting your ability to focus on life now. When it reaches out to you through expressions like night terrors, PTSD, anxiety, social phobias, and more, you can try to forgive and forget all you want. Those dark places will keep surprising you by coming back up. These events literally wired your brain. It is through loving and accepting all of yourself that you can choose the gift that your darkness brings. Sometimes, darkness is so scary or alien an idea that we’re confused as to how to go there without getting lost in the despair. That’s when we may need a guide. Someone who has been there before with themselves and others. They aren’t a therapist, or a psychiatrist. They are a peer, and can share tools to help light the way and dig through the rock to the coal seam. That’s the work I do with clients. The realest of real. If you’ve ever been totally put off by the “happy hippie” aesthetic, the under explained law of positivity, or even counting your blessings, it could be time to face your shadow. If you don’t want to go alone, find someone who’s gone before to guide you there. Can you trust anyone who has never gone on the shaded path, but instead chose to “change their mindset” when the shit hits the fan? How will they react to heavy emotion and events? Where did their dark side go? All this time, I had been avoiding my comfort in the shadows because I didn’t want to be constantly explaining myself to the #blessed crowd. I made myself palatable as often as I could, and reigned myself in when I wanted to take a conversation into the realm of what is seen as negative talk only because it makes people feel uncomfortable with me and their selves. I didn’t want to be the person people avoid because she’s always talking about the bits that they want to push back into the dusty corners. Yet, part of facing my own truth is to accept that life has wired me for this work, people need a hand to hold, and I am rather content to offer mine. It doesn’t look like rainbows, pumpkin spice lattes, and tropical paradise, but it is damn beautiful all the same. Meet Kelli Hansel – The Shadow Guide. |
AuthorKelli Hansel Haywood is the mother of three daughters living in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. She is a writer, weightlifter, yoga and movement instructor, chakra reader, and Reiki practitioner. Categories
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