Listen Now

00:01                                     Hello and welcome to change the face of yoga teaching toddlers through golden oldies. I'm very excited to be talking to lots of yoga teachers who will explain their passion for teaching yoga to students with different ages, physical fitness levels, wellness levels and different goals. They will explain the benefits of yoga for these students and we'll be including teacher tips and pose modifications. I am Stephanie Cunningham of yoga lightness and I've been teaching over 50s for 10 years. So this area is my passion and the passion of many other yoga teachers that you will be listening to in this series. Thank you so much for listening and let's get started. 00:49                                     This is episode 129 of Changing the Face of Yoga and this is the last podcast of the year. As in previous years I am developing a meditation as a thank you to the listeners and to the guests. There would be no Changing the Face of Yoga without either one of you. So the topic of this particular meditation is cultivating authenticity. I have in all areas of my life the concept of authenticity coming up a lot in the past two months and as I work my way through my particular ideas of authenticity, I thought it might be helpful if this meditation also addresses that issue. 02:05                                     If you listened to the podcasts in November of this year that were about supporting yoga teachers and yoga therapists in their yoga business, all of the guests talk about authenticity in some way or another. And how our business must reflect what is authentically us. It was quite an interesting set of podcasts and I realized how much that was true. We have to reflect what we truly are to the outside world, whether it's through our business or through our connections or relationships. 03:01                                     This particular meditation has the following structure. It is based on Yoga Nidra. It will then have a breathing session. Then I will give you some prompts to start you on your way about thinking about how authentic yoga is in your life. Then relax again and then slowly come out of the meditation. So the first thing to do is to get very comfortable. This will probably take about 20 minutes or so. So you want to be in a comfortable position. If the body is uncomfortable, sometimes that can interfere with your meditative state. So you want to be as comfortable as possible. You can be lying down, you can be sitting, whichever is best for you. 04:08                                     So get into a position that you can hold for a while and is comfortable. I want you to set your intention for this meditation. What do you want to achieve? What do you want to get out of it?                                                 I want you to concentrate on a part of the body that I am going to give you in a minute and release it and relax it after you review it. 05:14                                     We'll start with the top of the left foot. Left toes, the sole of the left foot, the left heel, the left ankle, the left shin, the left calf, the left knee, the front of the left thigh (the quadriceps) back of the left thigh (the hamstring), the left hip. The left side of the waist. The left ribs, the left shoulder joint, left upper arm, left elbow, left forearm, left wrist, back of the left hand. Left fingers, left Palm, left thumb. Top of the right foot. Right toes, right. So, right teal, right ankle, right shin, right calf, right knee, top of the right thigh, back of the right thigh. Right hip, right side of the waist, right ribs, right shoulder joint, right upper arm, right elbow, right forearm, right wrist, back of the right hand, right fingers, right palm, right thumb. Groin, abdomen, lower chest, upper chest, buttocks, lower back, mid back, upper back, shoulders. Neck, throat jaw, lips, eyes. Eyebrows, space between the eyebrows, forehead, scalp, head, torso, Arms, Legs. Your whole body. 15:43                                     Now let's move to the breath. Long, slow inhalations with a pause long. slow exhalations and pause long slow inhalation, pause and long. slow exhalation pause. Just continue that rhythm or two or three more breaths.                                                 Just be aware of how your body feels and consider this to be a baseline. So when I give you these prompts about authenticity, you will probably have an intellectual reaction, but you also might have a physical reaction and just be aware that that's a possibility. 17:55                                     The first prompt is: I was attracted to yoga because, 18:25                                     the second prompt is: I've continued with yoga because. 18:57                                     the third prompt, is there anything connected with yoga in my life that seems out of alignment? 19:37                                     And the final prompt, is there anything I can do say that will allow yoga to reflect my inner truth?                                                 NOTE: the last two prompts come from the Authenticity Meditation by Kat Kansansis-Semel, NYU's mindfulness Chaplin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0yFTleM7Mo. Thank you Kat. 20:23                                     Now release all the reactions, whether mental or physical, to these prompts and relax and release again so that your body and your breath are without strain or tension. Start the breathing again and just take some time to fully appreciate this relaxed state. 25:45                                     Slowly become aware of your surroundings and the sound of my voice. If you are lying down, when you're ready, roll over to your right side. Everyone slowly open your eyes, try to maintain your sense of ease and relaxation. Those that are lying down come to a seated position. 27:09                                     Thank you all for being a part of changing the face of yoga. 27:25                                     Thank you for that wonderful interview. If you would like to be a guest on changing the face of yoga, please go to my website, www.yoga lightness.com. au under the Changing the Face of Yoga tab. You can complete Be our guest form and after reviewing the form and finding it applicable to this podcast, we will send you a link to schedule an interview.                                                 Please download, review, and tell your friends of any podcasts that are of interest to you and to them. If you would like to contact me, email to info@yogalightness.com.au and thank you for listening to Changing the Face of Yoga.

Changing the Face of Yoga; episode 128. Aqua Yoga with Christa Fairbrother Major points: Balance between offloading weight by being in the water and the hydrostatic pressure ("maple syrup" effect) that has the water pressing on the body from all directions. Offloading weight by being in the water is very helpful for people with joint problems. Aqua yoga is a form of accessible yoga that is very helpful for older students, students with arthritis and chronic pain. 00:45                                     This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is the 128th episode. My guest today is Christa Fairbrother and we're going to talk about something that we've never had on the podcast before. And that's about aqua yoga. And I find this very fascinating. I tried it once, teaching it. I was really much pretty, pretty awful at it. So I am really looking forward to talking to Christa about things that you should do for your students when you're participant or guiding that kind of yoga class. So welcome Christa. Christa has been living with arthritis and teaching yoga. She believes they are integrated. She had arthritis for more than 20 years before she knew about it and had a hard time reconciling everything she had achieved and her relative lack of pain and extensive joint damage. She gave her lifelong yoga practice the credit and now helps other people get more comfort in their joints and use the tools of yoga to manage their health. Aqua Yoga is their focus because it is kind to people's joints and is so accessible. It's an easy way to start a yoga practice. It allows people who've lost a land practice to continue and challenges people with an active land practice to explore their bodies in new ways. Welcome Christa. And I think there's going to be a fascinating podcast that this is a very interesting topic, I think. 02:26                                     Well thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. 02:31                                     Great, like I said, I had my students ask me if I would give them an aqua yoga class and I found it amazingly difficult. It was very hard to keep them moving enough to keep them warm. 02:48                                     Yes. 02:48                                     That's good. I wasn't just me. All right. 02:52                                     No, it is a different medium. You're in the water and there are some considerations. The facility you're working at, the water temperature might be a challenge and so you have to teach to your environment the same as you would in a land class. As yoga teachers who teach on land, we wouldn't think about that. Right?                                                 It's like we put somebody in a posture and talk about yoga philosophy, intention and breath, not in the pool. People are starting to shiver and looking at you like, I've been standing here and I'm dying. It is not aerobics. And that's a concern I get from yoga professionals is, well, how is this really yoga? You're getting in the pool and you're maybe moving around and that's maybe not mindful. It's not grounding. There's no yoga philosophy. How do you incorporate breathwork? I hear different concerns from people and these are all valid concerns that we do manage as teachers and we do, at least the way I teach them, the other professionals I know really do try to stay true to the lineage and practice of yoga. It's just that we're doing it in a different medium of water, which means you might have to approach it a little differently to keep the warmth. 04:15                                     Yeah, I realized that. When I got in the middle of the class, I should have prepared a bit better because I really wasn't expecting that and I was up on the side so I wasn't getting cold. 04:29                                     But you're getting warm. 04:31                                     Yes, so what does an aqua yoga class look like? 04:43                                     Yes. So great question. I'll just round out the temperature thing by saying if you're in 80 (degrees) would be the end range of like really what's too cool. And then all the way up to 90 is, especially you mentioned in the intro how I have arthritis and I work with people who have arthritis. If you have the choice to work in a therapy pool, which is like that 90 degree temperature, that's really great. So on average for most people there are considerations where that can be, you know, have to change a little bit. That's a great temperature. So I don't know what you were working at if you were at 76 degrees. That's why everybody was shivering. 05:22                                     I don't think it was heated at all. 05:24                                     So there you go. Yeah. So you were struggling. So the typical aqua yoga class that you know that temperature can be a consideration in terms of the pacing. But how I like to format a class is we do like some big body moving to warm up. What is big body moving? That could be like walking forwards and then backwards and then taking it in strides and then to the side and let's start to integrate some arm movements with that. And I like asymmetrical movements because of what it does for neural networks and stuff. So you're maybe stepping with your right foot while you're moving your left arm in a different direction. So that's just, it gets us mindful, it gets us moving. Right.                                                 Also keeping in mind people who come to aquatics classes, and I think this is a little more true than some of the traditional yoga classes, people like that social element. So if you give people a few minutes to kind of get their chatting out it helps with that. And then we always come into mountain pose and talk about, well what is mountain pose? My students are mostly new to yoga. They might be new to aquatics. They're really beginners. You have to start, okay, well I'd like to say it's Yogi homebase, right? Cause we come into it and we come out of it. And so we talked about, well what is mountain pose?                                                 And then we warm up our spine. So we take our spine through the six ranges of motion, I twist in each direction and then a side stretch to each direction and incorporating some sort of gentle back arch and then the forward fold that would be that sixth range. We do so much of it in our lives and it is a little hard to incorporate into the pool. Nobody wants to get their head wet. We're doing versions right. So forward fold is not like what we would do in a land class, but there's an element in there so and so that would be kind of like the base that gets us into about 15 minutes of practice. And then from there it would be predominantly standing postures perhaps in flows, meaning like you know a sun salutations can be done in the water and then we would finish off with just all right kind of like relaxing transition pose that works with the theme of the day and then going into a floating meditation. 07:53                                     I like floating meditation. 07:54                                     Floating meditation, it's awesome. Tons of noodles. It's like, you know, it's not a bath party cause you don't have a pool floaty but you can give yourself, you know like six, eight noodles if you wanted that. It feels like it. So that's kind of like the structure of the class. Most aquatics classes are about 45 minutes because another feature of working in the water that we don't deal with on land is you've got the hydrostatic pressure. So that's that feeling when you get in the water and you feel almost like you're in a sock and everything's pressing in on you a little bit, it makes your kidneys more efficient. So that's why everybody has to go to the bathroom. 08:30                                     Is that why ? 08:32                                     Yes. Everyone always does. It's like, oh I thought it was just me. Perhaps like with the younger real fit audience who's used to being in the pool, they can take about an hour. But frankly that's why most aquatics classes are 45 minutes in. That's considered best practice for that. So it is a slightly shorter class. Then you know, you're a teacher and you're used to working in an hour and 20 minute format, it is considerably shorter. But as you addressed you have got the issues of keeping people warm and you've got this hydrostatic pressure, people you know, need to get out and use the bathroom as well as you don't realize that working in the pool is actually kind of dehydrating because of that hydrostatic pressure. And if you're working hard enough, I wouldn't say Aqua Yoga does this to us, but some of the other aquatics disciplines, you're actually sweating in the water. You just don't feel it. So if you're working in the water for an hour and 20 minutes, you're starting to get dehydrated. That's why we keep the classes a little shorter because that's kind of the structure. We'll probably talk about props that, depending on what props we're using, obviously impacts the postures and the pacing and things like that. But that's just gives you sort of the general ba

Episode 127: Social Media: yes, no or sometimes? with Jamie Elmer Major Points: It is a given that we use social media to market our business. Is this a good decision for everyone? Does is feel right? Does it bring in clients, students, etc. ? Is it an effective use of your time? Does cutting back on social media have a deleterious effect? Or does curating your posts give you produce more engagement? Jamie’s found that a human connection through meeting people and having them on her email list feels more authentic to her. If someone doesn’t have an email list, social media can be a good place to start. But it must feel like a natural, authentic thing for someone to do. Is it fun? Is it something you dread? You have to find the path that feels good for you because you won’t continue if you don’t.   00:00                                     This is changing the face of yoga and this is episode 127 and this is part of the yoga teacher support theme. I'm speaking to Jamie Elmer and Jamie is an experienced RYT 500 teacher. She also provides continuing education through her streaming site. We'll get into that a little bit more. She has been teaching yoga and movement therapy full time, which is impressive for over 18 years. She specializes in alignment, applied anatomy and healing injuries. Jamie travels to teach teacher training, continuing education immersions, retreats, sees students online and has an online streaming video membership site for teachers or for students and as a continuing education resource for teachers. Jamie, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate, your sharing with us on this podcast. Is there anything else you want to add to that particular introduction? 01:18                                     No, thank you. Thanks for having me. I think that about covers it. 01:26                                     The reason I asked Jamie to be on the podcast, especially on this theme of yoga teacher support as you can tell, she's very busy. She's doing lots of different things, which probably requires marketing. Either to other yoga teacher trainings, people or to students or for her video streaming site. But she had posted about she was really looking at social media and how that was supposed to support her efforts. And so I know I've had several business coaches and they always tell you have to be on all these social media sites It's really, really important. But I think we should think about it. And since Jamie has thought about it, I asked her to come on and to talk a little bit about it. So, I assume Jamie and I could be wrong, that you have used social media to, in part, market your offerings and are now thinking about, I suppose the efficacy of it, if that's true. So I just like you to kind of set the stage for where you were and why you decided it needed more thought. 02:52                                     Well thanks. yes, for seeing that on social media and I did think it would be a good topic to bring up because, I too have worked with some coaches that have been great and I've been encouraged to use social media. I also feel like I've come up as a teacher as social media was coming into our life and it was just a given that of course we were going to  use social media and of course we needed to be on Facebook and of course we needed to be on Instagram. And it's just a given that that's what you do, without really even thinking about is this natural for me? Does it feel right? Is this really where I'm getting my clients? is this really where I'm putting my students and is it an effective use of my time?                                                  I don't, I in no way hate social media. I enjoy it, but I've learned that I need to enjoy it and want to enjoy it in moderation, both just personally and professionally. Because I am the first to admit that I started going down this rabbit hole probably about a year and a half ago where I was really trying to build my business.                                                 As I was launching the streaming site and traveling more than ever and really were quote unquote working more than ever. But most of my work was all behind a computer screen at my desk, not teaching. I went down that rabbit hole of I kind of took the bait thinking I need to be on social media as much as possible. And I started out with posting four times a week and had a whole grid and the theme and the blah, blah, blah of all right, this is what I do at 8:00 AM on Tuesdays and this is when I do it, noon on Tuesdays and  I started spending so much time on this thing that really I don't enjoy spending that much time on. It's not natural for me.                                                 And a year and a half into it, I realized that the people that are still connecting with me, the people that still respond to my newsletter, the people that still come on a retreat, the people I'm seeing for privates, these people, most of them I'd say 99% of them are all people that I've worked with in person and are on my mailing list. 05:33                                     I'm not like the next YouTube, 20 something year old model on Instagram that people are just going to start to follow, that’s just not me, never me. And I'm not the type of person that idolizes people like that either. And so for me trying to put on this presence, it was suggested to me that I actually get an acting coach to help me for my social media posts. And when I got, when I heard that on the other end of the phone, literally in my mind, something just clicked and I was like, I'm out. I'm done. It's not me. Just not me. And there's only so much time on the day, you know? It's a medium that I do enjoy. 06:41                                     I think it's useful to remind people, Hey, I'm still here, out there doing this if you're interested. And I've cut back to about once a week that I post on Instagram and Facebook and that feels good. I like sharing an event. I like sharing some helpful tips. and I think people like it for me at least, they like hearing from me in moderation. instead of, Oh Jamie is going to like post 5 or 8 times today. I'll catch her next time. You know? And it just, it was so unnatural. I can't even describe it, let alone just a total energy and time suck from actually what's most important in my life, which is not to become an Instagram star. Like that's not even a possibility anyway. So why try, 07:41                                     You say that you're really getting your clients and your students from your mailing list and, and how do you build that mailing list if you don't use social media? 07:52                                     Well, I would say that the majority of people that are on my mailing list are people that I have worked with in person. And I think that people connect in different ways. I think that we gravitate towards different people in different ways. I'm not someone, even though I have a streaming site, as I mentioned, I'm not someone that people are going to see on screen or see in a photo shoot and be like, wow, I want to be her. I mean, I connect more with people in person.                                                  I mean I think the reality is that most of us do, I mean we see someone like in a movie or in a photo shoot and it's different. And so I've built my mailing list through working with people in person and then once in a while I'll put out a post on social media about, if you want to be part of my mailing list, click here. And a few people will sign on. It usually is that human connection that's been made and not a stranger browsing the internet or browsing social media and connecting with me that way. That happens once in a while, but not very often. 09:13                                     Okay, you've actually done some analysis of where your new clients, students, opportunities are coming from and social media is not contributing a whole lot to that. Is that a fair statement? 09:33                                     Yeah, and I would say the people that stay in touch with me via social media, the people that comment, the people that like, the people that repost a post of mine, usually those people also are people that I've worked with at some point in the last 20 years in person. So the social media crowd, that interaction is still most of the people that are on my mail, my email list. 10:04                                     Okay. 10:06                                     And, and I'd say the same goes with YouTube. I had a YouTube channel and really worked that for awhile and I have paused it right now basically. because I also find that people that are going to get content from YouTube, they're going to  stay YouTube users, they're going to stay the users that want something for free. And it doesn't actually drive people to anything that, requires more of a financial commitment.                                                 10:36                                     No, that's, that's a good thing. Good thing to know because, I agree with you, it can be a real time suck that you just spend so much time getting posts ready and stuff. I just put out one post a week on whatever my newest podcast i

Episode 126 of Changing the Face of Yoga: Working in the Medical System   with Lisa Holland. Major Points:                     1) A lot of therapy is treating them, doing things passively to them or setting things up. A lot of coaching is holding up a mirror. And asking them to see the truth in the matter and then creating a safe environment for them to do that to self-reflect and to get their own answers.                                                 2) What is helpful for me in terms of a business standpoint is now I have more to share at different places to move them through an experience, the whole picture experience.                                                                                                 This is Changing the Face of Yoga. And this is episode 126 and my guest today is Lisa Holland. This is part of the theme of support for Yoga Teachers and Yoga therapists. Lisa is very experienced having worked within the medical field as a physical therapist and she has some ideas about working in that field. It's just how you position yourself in this area. So welcome. Lisa. I'm really excited about this particular interview because I think it's quite unique. Could you just give us a short bio that will introduce you to the listener?                                                 Sure. Thank you Stephanie so much for having this theme. I think it's important that we start thinking about wanting to have a sustainable business. If you want to help people, you got to make sure you stay in business. I'm a doctor of physical therapy. I've been practicing physical therapy. I don't do as much clinically now because I really moved into some mentorship and some of these business conversations for my peers that are in medicine and Rehab Medicine and also for Yoga physios. Yogis that are kind of the bridge builders. I tend to work with people who kind of walk both lines, walk that fine line with one foot on each side because that's where I came from.                                                 I've been a physio Yogi. I really had my first class really dipping my feet into it about 2000-2001. And then I created my company Belly Guru LLC in 2005. And I did that as a model. It was one of the first medpreneur type of health entrepreneur, boutiquy, clinical/ wellness center, well positioned, direct to market. I did not take any insurances. I did not step into that. I was leaving that for very important reasons. Number one, they weren't accepting of yoga back then. That was 2005. And I really had seen that as a very helpful therapeutic modality and it aligned with what I had done in orthopedics and sports medicine prior to my move to women's health, which was, in that realm, you were really working on mind body things. You knew that they needed to keep their head in the game and you saw the detriments of that in their physio, no matter how physically able they were put together, fixed up, patched up, if their head was out of the game, if they were feeling injured mentally, you saw that performance.                                                  And then I went over into main stream, rehabilitation medicine and that was like, oh, forget about it. It was every body part for themselves and every person's discipline for themselves. And it did not overlap. So my main migration of over into yoga as my main modality for restoration started out physical in as much as I think every physical therapist that you know goes into that much more than let's say the psychologists that go into that, they go a lot more mind approach.                                                 But my approach was always very holistic, was always mind and body and it really gave me a vehicle. And so I evolved into that. I naturally became a mentor for other people doing that. They were asking me questions, so I decided, hey, if they're going to ask me some questions and I'm not going to be seeing people and I'm talking on all these Facebook pages and giving advice, I need to start getting supported for that. Because I actually really liked it and I knew a lot of stuff and I could save them years. I mean, pretty much right now I've a five day accelerator that took me 16 years to learn. You could do it in five days.                                                  So I'm trying my best to broaden the physical therapist minds. But they have a lot of legalities and things and then there's a lot of fear in that mentality. I think the yoga teachers and yoga therapists could really learn from their mistakes. And one of the big things I see right now in having been one of these bridge builders in the international association of Yoga therapists trying to bring a conversation for that line of health providers that don't necessarily want to hang up their clinical to become, a yoga therapist or a full time yoga therapist or a yoga teacher. They actually want to combine it.                                                 But what I saw is that we're kind of walking down the line here in yoga therapy, number one, calling ourselves yoga therapists when we can actually can really fit into the market, positioning ourselves in a little different way. And so I've been out there having that conversation. I am actually even more than a health coach as what I was trying to bring in when I went into health coaching, I really saw that was actually still a very clinical conversation and more of what I do is what I was taught in Yoga. Very traditional Raja, Hatha - the holy science of yoga is I help people change their lives.                                                 I'm a life coach. I do that in various ways, it leans towards more rehabilitation versus personal development depending on the person. But when you're dealing with chronic pain and you're dealing with women's health, which are two areas where I tend to work in nowadays or since I moved into women's health in general, those two conversations, long-term, hormonal imbalance, stress induced things. That realm that yoga is in right now to be a very big help in their community is actually needing to make sure they have behavioral change and not just doing these modalities. It actually is about behavioral change.                                                 So I'm having that conversation and I assume that's what, some of the conversation we had from in the last podcast that you so nicely had me on. so that's really where I'm at. My mind-body brand academy is helping people such as yourself and anyone else to literally have a personal brand that they can transport as they evolve into their professional way they want to evolve. And then like I said, I'm actually starting to certify people in these abilities to read other people with some psycho-social assessments. We all start talking about the bio-psycho-social and how yoga is so great on the bio-psycho-social. But you cannot come into mainstream and start talking chakras. You're not going to be able to talk to a physician. You can't go into health care and yoga therapy wants to so much be in healthcare, they have some schools that are putting them in white coats and in hospitals.                                                 But the problem is that you can't go into that. Our psychosocial and yoga-Ayurvedic method and whatnot is such that it is something that they don't have in the Western model. They don't necessarily have that conversation. So we need to enter in their conversation. And that's behavioral change and that's life coaching and health coaching to some extent, well being and all of that conversation. But it's not necessarily we're all, health coaching right now is about learning. You have to become a ninja about the gut microbiome. We're not going to have a bunch of, Yogis doing that. You can.                                                 But I think really what's natural within the practice itself is that aspect of on helping people see themselves of today as they truly are. Not focus so much like therapy does in the past and focusing on the problem and how you got hurt and what's going to change from yesterday and going back to that trauma over and over and over to work it out. We need to focus on the today and let them see the person of tomorrow. Because a lot of times we know when they come to the mat they don't see that yet. It's too big of a gap. And that bridge building right there honestly is a lot more that I do of life coaching. Then just health and wellness. So a lot of yoga off the mat and I think we can position ourselves there.                                                 Let's just talk real basics. You've kind of evolved since the last time we talked, because you were talking about health coaching, but now you kind of evolved into more life coaching. So what would you say are the major differences between being in a clinical position, whether it's physiotherapy or it's yoga therapy or whatever therapeutic versus a life coach?                                                 Okay. Well I think probably what you heard is I feel I am a health coach. I just feel like they're not really two different things. It's just my definition of health and wellbeing involves your life and you real

Episode 125: How to make a change in your business with Laura Kupperman Major Points:                     1) Making a change in your business is needed if the business is not providing the level of satisfaction that you want.                                                 2) It can be scary to change because it is hard to learn new things, fear of scarcity is common, and/or giving up something that you have invested a lot of time, money, etc. can feel like failing.                                                 3) Following others can be satisfactory or not; it is important to explore what is important for you, what are looking to achieve, and what are your goals. 00:00                                     Hello and welcome to Changing the Face of Yoga - teaching toddlers through golden oldies and very excited to be talking to lots of yoga teachers who will explain their passion for teaching yoga to students with different ages, physical fitness levels, wellness levels, and different goals. They will explain the benefits of yoga for these students and we'll be including teacher tips and pose modifications. I am Stephanie Cunningham of Yoga lightness and I've been teaching over 50s for 10 years. So this area is my passion and the passion of many other yoga teachers that you will be listening to in this series. Thank you so much for listening and let's get started. 00:45                                     This is episode 125 of Changing the Face of Yoga and my guest today is Laura Kupperman. Laura is a long-time career and business coach as well as a certified yoga therapist and she is on the Faculty of Inner Peace Yoga Therapy. Through her coaching, she helps yoga, health and wellness professionals make a bigger impact and grow their income. Laura also runs the popular yoga therapy Facebook group and lives in Boulder, Colorado, where I grew up, where she enjoys just about any outdoor activity. Welcome, Laura. I'm really glad that you were able to come on. To make everything very transparent, Laura was my business coach for a long time. She's really spectacularly good at it. 01:39                                     Oh, thank you. Stephanie. Thank you for having me on your show. I'm really, really happy to be here in talking with you today.                                                 Oh, great. Thanks. Is there anything you want to add to that particular introduction? 01:54                                     Oh, that was just fine. Yeah, thanks. 01:59                                     Laura has agreed to be part of the Yogi support month theme and it is kind of in the businessy arena. But basically it's also just about how you are supporting yourself in life. And the thing I want to talk to Laura about today is, as I said, Laura was my business coach and then she started the Impact group, which was a kind of a mastermind on Facebook and it was for a Yogis, and others who, wanted more in depth discussion and community around making our businesses, financially and personally rewarding. However, Laura decided not to go forward with that, after about a year or so. Laura and I just want to talk about that because I have done that too, where I took a total different view of things. And how do you come to that point where you think, hmm, I think this is not what I should be doing. So if you could start off Laura with your own experience about the Impact Circle or anything else really. I just happened to know about that one just to talk people through how you make a change. 03:27                                     Sure., I'm really glad that this is something you wanted to talk about today because I don't think we talk about it enough. How we course correct or how we change course completely or even leap onto another path when we've invested a certain amount of our energy and resources, you know, our time or blood or sweat or tears or money. so let's see. So the impact circle, right? I had it for about a year and it was a membership community, which I really was excited about and I put a lot of effort into it.                                                 It's still kind of trickling out, so there's still some people in there, but basically there were a few different components. There was a really super supportive small Facebook community. There was a bunch of online resources that people had access to. And then people could reach out to me by email if they had a business question and I would respond to them. And I put a lot of energy into thinking this through on the front end, making sure that you know, the interface looked great and everything was really user friendly on my website and I even experimented with not having the community group in Facebook with using a different platform. I played around with it and I got some Beta testers in there. You may have been one of those early Beta testers, I think too Steph. I put a lot of energy into this and it was really interesting because I was super excited about it.                                                 By the time I launched I almost felt like I had some fatigue because that pre- launch phase was significant. And so you know that that's one thing for people who are listening to kind of think about. So many of us when we put something out into the world wanting it to be perfect, we want it to be of the highest quality and sometimes that's merited and it's justified and you really want everything to reflect really highly. You want it to be at a certain quality and so you wait, you wait until you feel like it's perfected. But more often it makes more sense to put it out there before you're comfortable, before you feel like it's perfected so that you can start to get feedback.                                                  And I did go ahead and get some Beta testers in there to get feedback on it. However I should have put it out even sooner. Yeah. If you're putting out an online course program, you need to imagine like you're a software company where you know you're going to be putting it out there with some bugs and you just know that, you know, on the fly you will adapt and you'll upgrade and you'll refine. So that was, that was the first part. Like by the time I got to the starting line, it felt like it had been a year. It wasn't quite that long, but it was a long time sort of germinating in my head. It was a long time trying to figure out the best way to do it.                                                 And I had been putting out so much energy without getting anything in return. And I don't even just mean financially, but the reward of seeing the people in the group, I'm benefiting from it. It was kind of working in isolation. That was one piece of it. and the other piece that goes along with that is that this whole perfection thing is like what is the price point. If someone is spending $10,000 on something, you do want the quality to be insanely high, right? Like if someone is buying something that's a really big investment, you want it to be an amazing experience for them. The Impact Circle lesson, that thing in terms of the price point, the price point, depending on whether or not you're doing a six month membership or a year membership, like the most someone would have paid was between 450 and $500. 08:17                                     That would have been for a full year. 08:19                                     For a full year. Yep. And so, you know, in order for me to, to justify the amount of energy and work I was putting into it, I probably should have charged more. That was all the front loading that I did and then the group started. And the group was really lovely. I mean, there were super supportive people in the Facebook group. There were people reaching out to me with business questions by email, which is what I had envisioned.                                                 At a certain point. I came to this huge realization, which was people were not getting the type of results and benefits that I wanted and they may have gotten the type of results and benefits that they wanted. A really interesting conundrum because it's like, you know what, if you're doing some good in the world but you have a bigger vision for yourself or a different scope or level of impact that you want to be making . While there were people who were engaged and who were benefiting. I think especially from the one-on-one email coaching conversations, I wanted to see people making huge leaps in their business. I know because I do work with people one on one, I know that when I work with someone one on one, that's the kind of experience someone typically gets and people just weren't getting it in this structure hardly. I think it's because they weren't as invested. You know, my one on one coaching is definitely a higher price point and if you're paying a couple hundred dollars for something, your level of commitment is not the same as if you're paying thousands of dollars for something. 10:31                                     Correct. 10:33                                     And that's related to everyone who's listening. I hope people remember that as they evaluate how much they're

Major Points:                                 5:15       Things that usually bring you joy no longer do so is a sign of burnout. Ask yourself why this no longer gives you pleasure.                                                 7:12        There is a mindset associated with burnout that may present as mental, physical, or emotional issues or a combination. Changing this mindset is key to addressing the burnout but professional help may be needed if the mindset is difficult to change.                                                 14:19 Finding purpose: What are the three words that you would want others to use to describe you and what is you intention to elicit that description?                                                 00:01                                     This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is the 124th episode of this podcast. And my guest today is Susie Bischovsky and Suzie is an expert on protection from and prevention of burnout. I think that that is and can be an issue with yoga teachers and yoga therapists since we give so much of ourselves. I wanted to talk to Susie about this. Suzie is also a yoga teacher and she has her own podcast called Keep Your Candle Lit and she also works in public school education. She embeds what she learned in yoga into her classroom and she teaches gentle yoga at a yoga studio. You could call it extra, extra gentle yoga. We might look into what that means. She's also taught her school colleagues and students at her middle school and she incorporates mindfulness and burnout prevention in the practice. Her ideal client is someone who doesn't think yoga is for them and leaves the class realizing that it is. Welcome, Suzi. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that introduction? 01:30                                     Wow that after listening to that introduction, I'm exhausted, I'm tired. No. 01:38                                     It is an extensive list. I listened to some of your podcasts and one of them really threw me because I thought I knew what burnout is, but given what you said, I don't. I saw burnout was just being so stressed and having so much to do and that you just can't keep going. But what you said, and I'd really like to talk about this, is that if you don't have purpose in your life, passion for what you're doing and vision, that's the cause of burnout many times. So could we just kind of start there and talk about what the causes might be and why you believe this is the cause of burnout? 02:29                                     Yeah. So thank you for that question. as far as that being the cause, maybe it's more like causality or more along the lines of if we sit down and we look at ourselves and we're asking ourselves these questions, what is our purpose? What is our passion? What is our vision? If we can't answer those questions, that could point us in the direction of possible burnout. 02:55                                     Okay, so what we're looking at is not so much a physical overwhelm as kind of being lost. Is that a fair thing to say? 03:08                                     Yeah, I think so. I mean, I feel like the interesting thing for me about burnout is when I was going through my coach training, I didn't recognize that I myself had gone through burnout because it was never framed that way to me. We talk about depression, we talk about anxiety, but at that time, burnout wasn't that thing. Other than like people would say, I'm feeling really burntout or I'm feeling tired. My key was I would say, I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired. Or if people wanted to do something, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. It was like that idea of a hamster wheel, but now it's 2019 and the world health organization itself actually cites burnout as a condition to be mindful of and aware of. They do pretty much pigeonhole it towards the workplace, but we see people talking about caregiver burnout and all other things. So I feel it's something that we're still on the cusp of understanding. 04:08                                     So you said that you didn't realize that you had burnout. What would be something to be looking out for if you feel that you may be either on the cusp of burnout or actually burned out? 04:26                                     So if I can add to that question, just the idea of like how is it different or similar to depression or anxiety, specifically depression, because I think someone could very easily say, Oh, I'm burned out and maybe not even recognize the signs of depression. So I also just want to advocate for the importance of having our own wellness team, like your audience, they're familiar with yoga, right? So a lot of us embody yoga as a physical, mental, spiritual practice. For some people it is physical. So what do other people have in their life that guides them to recognizing when something within is calling out to them. So to go back to that original question of how do we know when we're being burned out? Wait, was that the original question? I'm sorry, 05:13                                     That was it. Yes. 05:15                                     Okay, thank you. My brain just went loo la loo. Oh, so to go back to that original question of like how do we know when we're burned out? I think that sometimes people can see it within us before we can see it within ourselves. And one of the things I think to be mindful of is: if the things that normally bring you joy no longer bring you joy, what's underneath that? Or here's an example that seems very like benign, right? So I'm an avid reader, whether it's paper copy or an e-copy, I can sit and I can read and I can read and I can read. And you know what's wrong with that? Reading is a good thing, but if I sit and I don't do anything else for hours and for days for me that pleasurable activity has become either a substitute or a coping mechanism for something else. And sometimes I need someone to kind of say to me like, Hey, so you've been on the couch coma for like a week, what's going on to point that out to me? Or even for yoga practitioners, if yoga is the thing that brings you joy and release and you're avoiding your mat, or you're avoiding yoga on your chair or yoga on your couch or yoga in your car, you're like, we all do yoga all over the place, right? So when you start to run away from that thing that brings you joy or brings you release, I think that's another indication that we need to look at something. 06:41                                     Okay. So that's, that's really very different from what my interpretation of burnout used to be. It's not really so much, if I'm understanding this, a physical tiredness as much as a mental, not an issue, but a mental problem that you may or may not be able to recognize. 07:12                                     I think that's a really good question. When we think about burnout, it could be physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion, right? Or someone might even have a change in attitude or become negative or unconcerned or disconnected. However, from talking to my clients and supporting them through their own burnout prevention, or even recovery at the heart of it, generally speaking, there's like a mindset. And if we can shift the mindset, we can then go after the physical, the emotional, the mental exhaustion. However, if the mindset can't be shifted or can't be unpacked or can't be uncovered, then I think that's when it's time to talk to a traditionally trained professional, like a therapist or a doctor. And talk a little bit more about, is this burnout? Is it something deeper and what are some things that I can do? As an example? one of the things that came up for me years ago was that I was vitamin D deficient and I was like, all right, whatever. 08:11                                     And then as soon as they started to give me the prescription vitamin D, at that time, it was like someone shot sunshine into me. And I was like, wow, is this what it feels like to not be exhausted all the time? So that wasn't necessarily a burnout piece, but that adjustment to what was coming into my body certainly changed how I showed up and presented myself. When I was burnt out, I didn't know that I was burnt out until I wasn't burnt out anymore. And then with the learning and the knowledge that I did, hindsight's everything right? I look back and I went, Oh, that's what was happening. Oh, that's why I took a piece of chart paper and wrote on it all the things that I had to do and wore it like a badge of honor. And that's why before I understood what values were, when I made a list of all the things that I had to do and that were important, my friendships weren't on there, my family wasn't on there, my husband wasn't on there. It was just all very task-oriented. I think that now a days there is still a stigma with mental health. I like to call it mental wellness for some reason. When you say mental wellness, people listen to a conversation differently. I feel that as the conversation has shifted and evolved and has grown, we do talk about this a lot more. Back then I was just, your average really busy really to hired person who thought everything that she was doing was so important and it was not. 09:38                       

Major Points: Carla started yoga after refusing for many years to go to classes and found that the stillness and meditation were immensely beneficial to her and she started taking classes regularly. Through classes and studying, she found many tools to increase her happiness. She took teacher training, opened her own studio with a mission to help people find their why and their happiness using the tools to yoga.                                                 This is episode 123 of changing the face of Yoga and my guest today is Carla Simpson and Carla is known for being full of energy, love, and inspiration. She's very enthusiastic about life and love and wants to experience as much of what life has to offer. She has discovered her why. My mission in life to help others live a happier and more fulfilled life. And she's going to share with us how she uses this inspiration in her yoga teaching. . And to hssist for students. She opened her own yoga school four years ago, Happy Hot Yoga, and they have a range of classes to suit everyone. And they also are a yoga community, a real family. We have social dinners once a month, workshops and yoga retreats. So welcome Carla. And would you like to add anything to that introduction? 01:47                                     No, I think you got it all. Thank you very much for having me on the show. And you're right. I do. I'm a big lover of life. That's cool. 01:56                                     Great. Okay, let's start there. You said you were on a journey of self-discovery and that's when you discovered your why. Can you talk a little bit about that. 02:02                                     Growing up, I hated yoga. You couldn't have got me into a yoga class at all. My mom was always doing yoga and I just remember, getting up in the morning and her out in the lounge room on her yoga mat doing in class. It wasn't me and she always trying to encourage me, but I've always been a bit of an adrenaline junkie. Growing up I got very into fitness and running marathons, things like that. It was only that my knee was really starting to ache a lot in the long runs. My physio kept saying, you should go to yoga, it will really help you. And I was like, no, I don't do yoga, I don't do yoga. Anyway one day, I cried my way to the finish of one of the races, and I was in my head, I'm not going to do this anymore. 03:04                                     So I'd dragged myself to a yoga class and yeah, it wasn't the first class that definitely changed my life. But in that sort of journey into the first few classes, I, I first started with Bikram Yoga, more because it was the adrenaline as well of the hotness, the hard. I found it very difficult and I couldn't believe that I couldn't do some of it. So that was what dragged me back. And then I had gone to visit my friend who lived a little bit out of the town that I live in and I thought I was going to do a Bikram yoga class. But when I got there, the teacher had said, oh, sorry, we had to change your schedule is not bikram Yoga. And at that point I would have walked away. but I'd already paid. 03:55                                     I was a student then, so I was like okay, fine. So I dragged myself into these class and it was like a slow class and it was strong. It was something teacher said to at the end in savasana and it honestly changed my life. I still remember it. I was just lying there and she says, so it's now time to turn off the voices in your head. If you think you have no voices in your head that was a voice that just told you that you have no voice in your head. aI was like, oh my God, I have a voice in my head and I'm not the only one. Then that was the start for me was I wanted to find out more about how to find that stillness in that space. 04:43                                     And I started to get really into yoga then and more into mindfulness and meditation. And I really discovered what true happiness is without our voice telling us different things or what we should be doing or could be doing. But how I could just feel happy and joyful in any moment and that it was my choice. So that was the start of my whole journey. And then I just really loved what yoga had done for me. And the closest yoga school to where I live was about 20 minutes and I just one day, sort of having a conversation with my ex-boyfriend at the time, so said, why isn't there a yoga school around our area? And then anyway, that put the plan in my head and the plan started to grow and so I opened up my own yoga school. 05:34                                     Oh, excellent. you say that you are helping people find their purpose and you have a multitude of ways to do it. You've been an entrepreneur or business owner, global backpacker and a podcast host. And so I like all these different ways you're looking at it, but you are a yoga teacher and so how are you trying to meet that purpose, that mission, that why through your yoga studio or your yoga teaching. 06:06                                     Well really, for me it's just about sharing my experiences and my knowledge throughout my class and then throughout the studio. So if you come to a class with me, you probably get one of my stories. I just spent a month working in an orphanage in India over December. And so the first part of me coming back, I was sharing stories of that and I'm really just trying to educate people that we can be happy no matter what's going on in our lives at any one point. And life is a journey. We're always going to have ups and downs. Kind of like yoga class, we're falling in, we're falling out of poses. 06:48                                     But that stillness in there is  being okay with whatever is going on around us. So that's really what, for me it is about and just really helping people to be happy with themselves. We spend so much time growing up trying to change ourselves. Every advert on television wear this makeup, whiten our teeth or whatever it is. But I think we all can just learn that we're perfect the way we are. And it's a hard journey sometimes, but that's why I want to help people realize. 07:30                                     Your school is Happy Hot Yoga, so I assume that you're doing hot yoga. You said that you like the adrenaline at one point and so isome of them would probably be very physical, but it sounds to me like you are saying that and please tell me I'm wrong, the meditation, the stillness, how you think about yourself, the self-talk, all of that is more of the journey to being happy then actually the physical. Is that a fair statement? 08:09                                     Yeah, for sure. Yeah. The physical just helps us sometimes find that space and I think a lot of us feel good when we are being physically active as well. So we have a range of classes at a studio. We not all just power, strong classes. We have the slow, the meditation, the yin classes as well but I think that often in that flow or it's in that everyday life, where it can get chaotic that we sometimes need to learn to just be okay with the stillness and be able to find the stillness even when things are strong around us or we are caught up in an argument or whatever it is or your yoga class. I think that you find the true happiness when you can allow this, not necessarily the stillness, but you can allow yourself to have the, maybe the chitter chatter or the boys talking on the sidelines and you didn't have to be so involved in that by choosing to react or choosing to just let it pass by. 09:16                                     You now have a yoga studio that's in an area that didn't have one before. And how are you introducing the community to Yoga? 09:31                                     Well, we've been here for four years now. So a word of mouth is definitely a great tool. But I do lots of different things. Like we have obviously our Facebook and social media, but we have these signs up and I put our flyers and offer free classes to mostly people in cafes around the area. We might go out, I've spoken at events. Earlier this year I spoke at a big event in Gosford, which is a health event. So I spoke and hosted the meditation in the morning there. It's just brand awareness really, but I think what assisted me was word of mouth and it has taken four years to build the studio up. I've got other teachers now we're running workshops, teacher trainings, things like that. It has been a climb. I'm not going to lie. That's what I love about it too; is it has been journey. And I remember those days of first opening the studio and having no one show up to some classes. And it broke my heart. But as you chug on and the next class someone will show up. And that's what happened. And over time it has grown. 10:52                                     When you talked about your first experiences with Yoga, I think it's important sometimes that we take into consideration what the student is going through, because our own ego, like it is upsetting when you have a class and nobody shows up. I've been there. But when you're talking about, the first class wasn't all that great, but you went back and then you finally found what made sense for you. How do we make that transition for the students, especially a new student to understand that there's so much that yoga offers and maybe this particular class or

00:01                                     Hello and welcome to change the face of yoga teaching toddlers through golden oldies. I'm very excited to be talking to lots of yoga teachers who will explain their passion for teaching yoga to students with different ages, physical fitness levels, wellness levels, and different goals. They will explain the benefits of yoga for these students and we'll be including teacher tips and pose modifications. I am Stephanie Cunningham of yoga lightness and I've been teaching over 50s for 10 years. So this area is my passion and the passion of many other yoga teachers that you will be listening to in this series. Thank you so much for listening and let's get started. 00:48                                     This is episode 122 of changing the face of yoga and today we're going to do a very short, fun podcast. When I produce my podcast for release, one of the first things I do is a transcript and it is usually quite good. But I've had several guests this year that have been talking about some of the more subtle aspects of yoga and so it doesn't quite know how to translate Sanskrit and some of the things that comes up with are quite funny. I'm going to give you just a short look at this. If you are interested in looking at some more, just go to the show notes of this particular podcast and I'll add some more in, but just to give you a taste of how very, very confused the artificial intelligence transscription service gets by Sanskrit.                                                 Let's start at the very basic, which is what does it think Sanskrit is?Well, it came up with sunscreen, which I rather liked. Hatha is hot tea and yoga is yells. I don't know where that came from, but anyway, Asana is assets, which I think we'd all agree with, don't you? Ujaii breath is with GI breath. One of my favorites was when we were talking about chanting and my guest said that her students would come up to her and say, I really liked that happy, puffy breath and this is in pure English, so I don't know just why it happened, but then it came back with happy puffy breast, which kind of reminded me of a self-inflating breast implant. I just thought it was kind of cute. I really liked that when we get into some of the terms of yoga in the yoga philosophy, it really did confuse it greatly. 03:17                                     Vritti: apparently it thinks of people when you say vritti so we have Christine, Ruthie, I don't know where that came from and for Richie. It took me quite a while to figure out what we were talking about when I was editing the transcript. Namaste is numbers stay and  Upanishads, which I really do love is called funny shots (or open. A shoddy). Don't ask me, I don't know. Shakti is champion, which actually isn't far off. Shiva is Shavon and Jalandhara is jolly turban. I think I might always, always remember it as jolly turban from now on. Moolahdhara is Moodles. Moodles sounds nice, doesn't it? Kind of, I don't know. Something to do with poodles. 04:19                                     I had several guests this year about, like I said, the subtle aspects of yoga and so we talked about chakras and we talked about mudras and we talked about yoga Ninja, sorry, now it's got me saying it. We talked about yoga Nidra and they came up with some really, really funny kinds of translations. As you might've guessed, yoga Nidra is often written in the transcription as Yoga Ninja. Chakras are several things and it was interesting because Kristine Kaoverii Weber taught me how to say chakras and it is that hard cha instead of Shah. And so if I was saying it correctly, and she of course was always saying it correctly, was chockers or chuckers or choppers or chocolate and if I wasn't saying it correctly, it was called shockers. Chakras are definitely confusing to transcription. Mudras are the same. I have quite a few on Mudras. I'll just give you a few. A mood Rose. That's kind of a lovely thought, isn't it? Metrology. I'm not sure where that came from. Motors and my favorite - Madeira. Tantric was contract and I think my absolute favorite is Gomaghasana and it came out as cammo cousins. 06:10                                     It's always good just to laugh. There's also laughter yoga. Haven't ever taken that but I'm sure it was a really good, experience. All this is, it's just a little bit of a laughter to have us remember that laughing is also important in life. This is just a little bit of self care just to get you laughing and thinking about some of the ridiculous things that this transcription service came up with. So thank you so much. Like I said, very short, very sweet and to the point. Hope you enjoyed these bloopers. It was fun for me to gather them together and get some lists going. And just actually be kind of in awe of the creativity of the transcription service of all the different things they came up with for words that were obviously very normal to us and not at all familiar to it. Thank you so much for listening and this is Stephanie Cunningham.   07:37                                     If you would like to be a guest on changing the face of yoga, please go to my website, www.yoga lightness.com.au under the changing the face of yoga tab. You can complete the be our guest form after reviewing the form and finding it applicable to this podcast, and we will send you a link to schedule an interview.                                                 Please download, review, and tell your friends of any podcasts that are of interest to you and to them. If you would like to contact me, email to info@yogalightness.com guiding you and thank you for listening to changing the face of yoga. Additional Transcriptions: Chakras: child, chapter, charter, truckers, tracker, chuck rose, shoppers, shock grows, shocker is Mudras: Mujeres, blue dresses, blue dress, motors, motorised, motive, Missouri, Woodrow(?), withdraws Kriya: Korea Gamoghasana: goa goose center, gomo us. Agni: agony Ayurveda: are yours I

00:45                                     This is the 121st episode of changing the face of Yoga and my guest today is Ayanna Parrent. She is a the owner and founder of Befree coaching and wellness, a wellness center whose mission is to change people's lives through Movement, mindfulness and fun. She is a licensed independent clinical social worker, registered Yoga teacher and certified fitness instructor in multiple areas. Her goal is to help people heal from issues such as trauma, addiction, depression, and other issues that get in the way of people living their best lives. Welcome. And is there anything you'd like to add to that introduction? 01:35                                     No. Hi, that was wonderful. 01:41                                     Now you say that BeFreeWellness is a wellness community and offers yoga classes there. Is that correct? 01:53                                     Yes. That's great. 01:54                                     I want to start the podcast with this great idea that you gave me, which is that you're committed to making movement, fitness classes and yoga classes accessible to all. You've designed your studio to include people of color, men and larger bodies. So can we just go into that a little bit. First of all, why do you think that's important? 02:24                                     Oh my gosh. Well I think that's actually most important just coming from a personal standpoint that Yoga really helped me to heal personally and change my life. I'm a person of color and I just think that what I was seeing in studios, particularly my own personal journey and just talking with friends. It became particularly hard when you would go to studios and there was prominently, mainly white women, thin, white women, and not a ton of larger bodies, not a ton of diversity. There was men, but there was, without trying to stereotype, there was like really hardcore men.                                                 I just started just on a personal journey of yoga myself. I'm a person in recovery and it's really helped me with addiction and just to really help me with my thoughts and sort of controlling negative images of myself or anything negative. It really was the catalyst of releasing some of that. The movement piece is really important. However, I feel like the mindfulness is the key to yoga. And I feel like a lot of it's become certainly commercialized and all these clothes and stuff. Who really cares? And mats are just so expensive. Yoga teacher trainings are a gazillion dollars which would certainly block out any person of color or a person that doesn't have a lot of money. It's just finding that in order to really heal some groups of people that really need it, we have to look at it in a different way and sort of offer it in a different way and talk about it in a different way. To speak to certain communities that otherwise might not access this. I just sort of found that as my mission as I opened my studio. 04:29                                     What are the specific things that you're doing that is making it more accessible? 04:36                                     I do a lot of marketing to communities of color. I live on Cape Cod right now. It's not a huge, diverse community, but there are places where people are. I just make myself available. I really work hard to market to those areas, offer different discounts , or keeping prices low that you can access that or giving discounts to certain communities that would allow them to access it. And again, I also put in my marketing and everything that you'll see publicly that I write in there that it's for all bodies, it's for diversity. It's for people of color so that when you actually go to the website or look at any market materials, you can see that this is going to be like an inclusive place. I've had people call: I saw this, is this true? Yeah. I've had people that are larger bodies. It's hard to walk into a place. Not only am I saying that, but is that true? Like how are you doing that? So we've had people call, which I totally love and appreciate and their experience has been great. I've just asked for feedback as well.                                                 You can still offer yoga, you can still offer Vinyasa, but you can offer it in such in a way where all bodies can access different poses so you don't have to be so rigorous. It doesn't have to be, you can show modifications. You can adapt it so that anyone one can do them. You can certainly design sequences if you have enough knowledge and background that pretty much anybody can do, but you have to have that in mind. You can't teach a Vinyasa class and expect all bodies to do it. So if I say that, I really have to hold myself accountable and the community accountable for that. That's in my teachers too, when I hire people, I'm very clear. I talk about the mission of the studio first. This is who we are. This is who we're accessible to. We treat everybody with respect and we're looking for people that might not necessarily come to yoga. We're looking to heal those communities particularly. 06:49                                     These teachers that you're interviewing, do they feel comfortable that they have the knowledge to teach people who don't look like other yoga teachers? 07:05                                     I've sought out ones that I've either taken their class or I have familiarity with. 07:13                                     You really have a commitment there. I see that you don't sell high end yoga clothes, but that you do offer larger sizes. Is that another way to make people feel comfortable and welcome? 07:31                                     I think that's really important. I think a lot of yoga studios, they'll say, yeah, I work for everybody. And then you go into their boutique and you can't get larger than a size large. Some people can't fit into that and that's okay. But to not carry it is sending a message that that's not who we want here. And I know that's not for everybody. And that's not maybe people's intentions. Because I certainly have wonderful friends that have amazing boutiques that are yoga teachers and yoga studio owners. But I do think we really have to be careful of that and calling it.                                                 So here's my other thing that I wonder what people think about this is like in terms of accessibility. Yoga studios have like a class that's called the community class. That what's where they have would maybe offer it for $10 saying that's the community class for everybody. I struggle with that because why would you want that sort of communication that you're separating people out in some way. Is that the class for people that can afford it, the $10 or is it dumb? Dumb down sounds bad. But is it a different type of yoga? Like what is the community class that we're offering and how is that different? Is it just the price? And if it's just the price, why are we calling it a community class. Isn't every class with the community. I just wrestle with some of this stuff. I don't offer a quote community class.                                                  I make  it accessible to everyone. Then I do get push back from people a lot about like when you're running a business, you can't offer every class for people that can't afford it and Dah, Dah, Dah, which I totally get. However, if that's your mission, then you need to stand by it. I do lots of other things on the side to support the business so that I can offer affordable packages to people and I also say nobody's turned away. So there are scholarships available. I do partner with a non-profit in Boston - Namaste Sober - and so they help with some of the things as well. So I feel like you can run a business and still be accessible, but you have to really work with the money in terms of holding your own self accountable as a studio owner to make sure that you really keep your doors open to everybody. It's hard. I totally understand. I get it. It's hard. Yeah. 09:53                                     I talked to someone else about that and he said that the big studios and the big franchisees and the worldwide ones all across the US, they really aren't very interested in being accessible because it's not financially rewarding. 10:14                                     Right, right. Yeah. 10:16                                     So are we saying that it's really the small business owner that's going to be the one that may most likely be offering these kinds of classes? 10:28                                     I don't know. I'd love to not think that because I mean, it's hard. People say different things to me all the time, but you can make a lot of money and still be accessible and be community based at the same time. There is a way, but you have to be really strategic about what that looks like. You have to have it on paper and you have to market it and you have to hold yourself accountable as the leader. So I'd like to think not. But right now I think that's probably what's happening. Money is a tricky thing. They start small and they're like, yes, this

Major Points: With yoga and proper nutrition, the aging body and mind can feel better, younger, and live a vibrant life. Menopausal women can also accrue benefits from yoga and proper diet  through a variety of mechanisms but decreasing inflammation is one of the major benefits. Baby boomers do not accept the aging model of their parents     00:45                                     This is the 120th episode of Changing the Face of Yoga and my guest today is Anne Noonan.  She is a Silver Yogi and a food coach and she specializes in showing women how to age backwards with Yoga and mindfulness. She has a passion for showing the woman facing her second half of life that these years can be full of vitality rather than ill health or frailty. After going through her own health journey of insulin resistance, adrenal fatigue and varied menopausal symptoms in her forties and found a way to holistically turn back her inner odometer and is now thriving in her 60th year and looking and feeling younger than she did 15 years ago. She not only turned those health issues around but has transformed in the process. She now teaches women facing similar health and aging issues that through mindful, functional yoga-based movement, breath. and eating for health, you can most certainly find your strength, flexibility, and youthfulness. Welcome Anne 02:01                                     Thank you, Stephanie. Fantastic to be here. Look, everything you just said is pretty much a perfect summary of where I've come from. I did experience pretty serious health issues and I had to find my way, so to speak, through the quagmire. I had to find a direction that wasn't completely medical and it was stumbling across yoga. It was learning to eat for an aging body. And then combine it with the right movement for an aging body. And once I could see the results happening for me, it was like a calling. I absolutely have to teach this to other men and women who are facing those later years. So you're pretty right. You summarized that really well. 02:56                                     Okay. I think we should start off what you made a statement which I thought was interesting, which was we're aging very differently to the way our parents aged. Can you kind of explain that and what new things we might be dealing with that perhaps our parents didn't or vice versa? 03:22                                     We women, let's say we are, I'm 60 so I'm a typical baby boomer and I would hope maybe don't you know them, maybe people who are listening to this might also be in those baby boomer years. So we're the people who were born between 1946 up to 1964 and we have all had parents who may have come from the war years. Our parents are now, if they're still with us, they're now pretty much in their early eighties through to about 90 and just over 90. And in that era they aged very differently. They had different things occur in their life. They had different stresses. They had a different mindset towards aging. So by the time our mothers, us Boomer women, by the time our mothers were say 50 or 55, they were planning retirement or they were considered over the hill, sliding down the other side and starting to think and move their way into old age. 04:30                                     I'm not going to say that absolutely every single, elderly mother back in those days, there's some who aren't, who are an exception to the rule. But generally they did have a different attitude to aging. Now we are the daughters and we are the children of those elders, the silent generation.  And we have so much more technology at our fingertips. There's so much now about nutrition. There's so much extra knowledge and things that are right there on a silver platter for us to choose from. And as far as media is concerned that the way the world has changed, there was an expectation, there's a big expectation on us to keep working, to remain employable, to continue giving and contributing to the community around us. So we cannot afford at the age of 50 or 55 to slide downhill into age. It's just can't be.  As baby boomers age, we don't want to age like our mothers. We don't want to have the mindset - some might be a little bit thinking a little differently - but generally we want to stay healthy. We want to stay vibrant and God help us, we're pretty vain. We want to look darn good too. So there is a different attitude. So there must definitely be a lot of new things available for us. 06:07                                     So really we have many more opportunities or we're making many more. I sometimes think we're making more opportunities because we do not accept that previous model of aging. At least most of us don't. I don't think. 06:23                                     You're pretty right, Stephanie. We are refusing to accept it. And I'm noticing it, in like general media, if we look at the celebrities, for instance, some celebrity may not make the remotest difference to us, but even in Hollywood, Judy Dench and Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep's roles, these older women, Glenn Close, these older women starting to really lift their profiles. I guess if there's any filtering out from what's happening in the world of celebrity, it's wonderful to see the older woman is starting to become lifted, starting to become a little bit more noticeable. And I'll tell you what, the older woman still has incredible knowledge, experience. She's got goals to kick still. She's got such contribution to the world that the rest of the world and the media would, at their own peril, ignore the older woman because I think she is stepping up. And someone said, I can't remember what some entrepreneur said a while ago, it's the older woman who is going to soon be the disruptor. She will be the business disruptor. She's the decision maker. She is the one with money and she is the one whose health needs to be careful. Seriously. 07:50                                     Yes. I think I agree. I think we have perhaps a position of power that is not recognized yet but is still there. And I think probably it is that we have a deep (okay, I'm talking about myself obviously) but a contentment that perhaps we haven't had before. I mean we went to school, we raised children, we had our careers, we did all of that stuff and now it seems to be a time of, as someone said, we're done with the biological and we're looking towards the existential. 08:27                                     Yeah, that's such a good way to put it, isn't it? That's so good. And we are looking to the future now we're ready. It's our time now. You're right. We raised our kids, but then again, we might've raised our kids, but we're possibly dealing with a spouse who might not have the same attitude as us. We may be dealing with a spouse whose health is changing. Some are divorced. Dealing with elderly parents still. So there's probably still a little bit of that stress on us. And of course a lot of us are dealing with the diagnoses that come with middle to older years. We've got barriers, maybe autoimmune, different things that might've popped up that we might not be too pleased with that we might have to deal with but doesn't matter. We've still got a lot of years that this body has to serve us in and we definitely want to know that those years are going to be vibrant. 09:26                                     There was a show on TV last night: Catalyst. It was good about aging, stopping the aging process or aging backwards. And one of the doctors said we don't want our later years to be a long, slow, degenerative downhill process. We want those later years to be so fruitful and vibrant so that when our last year's come they're quick and they're done. So we want them to go right up to those last years really being vibrant. I have found eating the right way was emphasised in the show. They really went down into diet and the way you moved and the variety of yoga combined with the way you eat is just that perfect combination to make that possible. 10:22                                     Let's talk a little bit about that. I think you said in what you gave me, that the aging body requires balance, agility, flexibility, hormonal balance, calm strength and cardio and all of these are possible with yoga. I taught seniors for 10 years, so I do have some experience in this area and yes, all of that is possible, but I think it has to be managed correctly because not everybody can do everything. 10:57                                     That's right.  In my classes, my classes might range from a 45 year olds all the way up to about anywhere between 75, 76 year olds. And I then do a special functional movement class for the 80 plus up to about 90 plus. So if we talk about that age group, 80 plus up to just over 90 year olds and admittedly they are very limited with what they can do. So we work from the chair, we make it gentle, we keep the stretch, we did the left and right brain cooperating with each other. We don't go into any strong agility or cardio. Sometimes getting up and out of the chair is enough for them. And I know I can kind of puff them out after about 30 minutes. So we're very mindful with that age group. 11:53                                     My general yoga class between 45 and 75, there is a dramatic range of ability amongst those girls. It all depends on what their younger years did deliver to them, what state their body is in. And it's such

Major Points:                                                 32:03 Grief is a developmental and learning process not a healing process. Grief is not pathological; it is a normal part of life.                                                 35:22 But you don't need closure on a relationship of a person you love who you don't want to be done with.                                                 48:50 You don't have to believe in yoga for it to work, because Yoga believes in you. 00:45                                     This is episode 119 of Changing the Face of Yoga and my guest today is Karla Hilbert and Karla is a licensed professional counselor, a certified yoga therapist, a compassionate Bereavement Care Provider, certified divine sleep Yoga Nidra guide, an award winning author, and a bereaved mother. Her life was forever changed after her firstborn son died of a brain tumor in 2006. Her therapy practice focuses on loss, grief and bereavement working in particular with those affected by trauma and traumatic death. She leads classes, workshops and retreats for the bereaved as well as training for professionals on how to work with those impacted by traumatic grief. Her book, Yoga for Grief and Loss describes each of the branches of Yoga and how they are ideally suited to support those in grief. Her newest book, the Chakras in Grief and Trauma is the first book of its kind to explore the energy body and how it is impacted by trauma and grief. Both books have creative ways to bring yoga and mindfulness into a regular practice to support your broken heart and remember your essential hope. Welcome Carla. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that introduction? 02:42                                     Oh no, that's really long and, but really beautiful. Thank you so much. I so appreciate being here, Stephanie. 02:49                                     Thank you. I wanted to start by asking you in, one of the things that you said, was that there is a societal and medical model of grief and then there's yoga's model of grief. And so can we define the medical and social model and then the yoga model and compare and contrast so we can see what the differences are. 03:26                                     I don't remember saying that but the Western model of medical model in general of what we call mental health. I don't particularly like that label because what I really do and what the people who are therapists and who do this profession really are dealing with our emotional health as well, which doesn't really get talked about.. Our thinking, our thoughts about things are not the same as our feelings and our emotions. And I think it's really interesting that we don't even talk about emotional health. It's always about quote unquote mental health. but anyway, the Western medical model deals with disease, right? And when something goes wrong, when something has caused pain or is a disease or a problem, the medical model goes in and says, let's fix this problem, cut it out, or put chemicals on it or do something to fix this and then bandage it up, send somebody home and hope it gets better. They don't really look at the whole being.                                                  I don't know about a social model of grief. I think so it's hard to kind of pull those things apart. Our society, again, Western society and there's so many different layers of how various cultures deal with grief and I don't really think any one culture is perfect. I think there's a whole lot of other cultures around the globe who do a better job than our culture does. And when I talk about our, I mean like the Western culture, America, Europe, Australia. So the Western model societally, and socially we are not very hospitable to grieving people. And it's interesting cause death itself is having a moment right now, which is not bad. That's good.                                                 I don't know if you've heard about the death cafes, which I believe started in England. Now they're all over the place and it's community-based things where people get together. There's a facilitator and it may or may not be supported by a community organization like a hospital or a hospice or it could just be a person. But you find the information about the death cafe and sort of the guidelines of how you run a conversation. And it can literally happen in a cafe or it might happen at somebody's house, but people sit around and drink coffee and eat some snacks and talk about death: planning our own deaths, what death must be like or how we deal with death. But that's not the same as grief.                                                 And grief is the experience that we have when something precious to us is gone. And that can be anything that we love. It tends to be a lot more impactful when it's a person who dies, but there's all sorts of losses that people deal with all the time.  But when people die, the grieving person, the bereaved person who's left behind has to deal with how to manage existence without this person in their lives like they were before as a living and breathing presence on the earth. It's different than death itself. It's a very difficult process and it varies individually. Grief is like a fingerprint really. We all have it at some point and it's completely, totally unique to us, but our society tends to be really unhelpful sometimes.                                                 I mean, we have groups of people who experienced what we call, marginalized grief, disenfranchised grief, where that grief isn't necessarily recognized by society. And there's lots of categories for that. But, that could be your ex-husband dies and you've separated and gone on with your lives . Maybe he's remarried. He has children with this other person and a whole life that doesn't include you, but yet you have this major grief response. It's not the same as his current wife might be experiencing. Miscarriages are one of these places. Stillborn babies often are this way that's not very recognized by society as intense grief.                                                 There's disenfranchised grief but when it's a socially sanctioned grief, everybody knows, of course she might be grieving. There's tends to be a lot of support. And then after the funeral, a few weeks, a few months, that support dwindles away and people expect the grieving person to go back to the person that they were before, which depending on, the grief itself, the relationship itself, whether or not there was trauma involved might be impossible to do. It usually is, and grief can go on for a long time and that, and it changes over and over. In fact, it really, truly never ends. It just changes and gets different. We learn, hopefully with good support, how to grow and develop through that process. But what happens is we tend to lose more people the longer that we live. So it's a thing that we're going to go through over and over and over. So we don't have a real good social model.                                                 And a lot of people really love to talk about the five stages of grief from Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who is an incredibly wonderful, beautiful pioneer in this field. But she herself even said that she wished that her five stages model hadn't been so broadly applied to grief. In fact, it was meant not for bereaved people in the first place, but for dying people. She revolutionized the hospice model, the hospice care field in general. She worked with terminally ill people and she noticed that they tended to go through these stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It makes more sense in the context of a terminally ill person than it does in terms of a bereaved person.                                                 So we don't have a very good social model for dealing with grief at all. And our medical model tends to want to pathologize grief in many ways, when in fact, grief is not pathological at all. It is a completely normal and natural response to a loss. Depending on whether trauma is overlaid, and the circumstances surrounding the death itself, and how intensely that person is grieving, how much they're functionally affected by their grief and their loss varies.                                                 The medical community might come and say, oh, hey, you need to medicate that. It's gonna lead to depression, which isn't true necessarily. Grief and depression are two totally different things, but I see a lot, as soon as there is a death, often people days after the event or maybe even the day of are given prescription medications, either antidepressants or antianxiety medication, usually Benzodiazepines, which is really dangerous often. We see often in society people supporting grieving people and avoiding the pain. I'll come over, bring a bottle of wine and we'll just drown those sorrows for a little while. So we don't have a real good supportive, nurturing kind of model at all in the Western model period. 11:37                                     So how would we contrast it with either your model or a more generic model of yoga helping with this issue? 11:48                            

Major Points: IRest Yoga Nidra, supported by research studies, helps those with stress, anxiety, depression and is used to help returning veterans in the US with pain and PTSD. IRest Yoga Nidra is a structured relaxation practice based on the Pancha Maya Kosha model for students to find their wholeness through this practice. In the practice, students develop their own sankalpas based on a three part system. 00:47                                     This is episode 118 of Changing the Face of Yoga. And my guest today is Gina McCauley and Gina has graciously agreed to be part of my meditation theme and she has taken training and is an IRest meditation teacher. We're going to discuss Irest but let's hear a little bit about Gina. She began as a student in the late eighties, and she's been teaching since 2009. She feels there's no one practice, no one style for everyone. She offers different things for different people so that they can take what they need. She has an advanced diploma in Yoga teaching through the Academy of Yoga Learning, a graduate certificate in Yoga therapy through The Australian Institute of Yoga Therapy and is a certified Irest Yoga Nidra teacher. She's on the faculty of the Academy of Yoga Learning and Australia Institute of Yoga therapy. She runs her own teacher training and she is undertaken studies with Indian teachers, A.G. And Indra Mohan and Saraswathi Vasudevan. I hope I said that right. She's a senior registered teacher with Yoga Australia and has served on the Yoga Australia Victorian Committee. She is continually studying and practicing yoga and is currently inspired by Lee Blashki, Paul Wood and Richard Miller. Welcome. Gina. I'm so glad that you agreed to come on and talk about this and is there anything you would like to add to that? 02:32                                     Oh, well thanks Stephanie. Thanks for inviting me. When you string it all together like that, it sounds bigger than how it actually is. No I have nothing to add to that. 02:44                                     All right. It is still an impressive list. 02:50                                     Well, it makes me feel a little bit more important than what I actually am. Everybody doing their own thing to the best of their abilities. As I go through that, I do bits of training here and there that support where I'm at. So when you string it together it does sound impressive. 03:13                                     Good. I'm glad. We're going to talk about IRest and I think it will be good. I'm sure almost everyone has probably heard of it, but it probably be good to have just a little background about it and maybe what makes it a bit different from other types of meditation. 03:32                                     Yeah. Irest is Yoga Nidra, basically. It was developed by Dr. Richard Miller and Richard tells how he rocked up to a yoga class to meet people and Yoga Nidra was part of that class. He was trying to fit into a community. And it turns out that, this little class was silent. So he didn't actually get to meet any other people, but he got to meet himself with his little story that he tells through Yoga Nidra. And he knew that Yoga Nidra was the method.                                                 He just really had a deep connection to it in that first instance. And so over the years, he started practicing it and eventually started teaching it. And really that was really his thing and through, students and through other people, he was teaching Yoga Nidra to ex-serviceman. And they were going back to their peers and saying how much they were getting benefit from this practice of Yoga Nidra. And eventually the military approached him and said we have been hearing about this thing you're doing and the results you're getting. And we'd really love to, see how it works and do some studies and see if it would support other veterans. And so he started this research program in the military, but they said to him, you can't call it Yoga Nidra, you can't call it yoga because we're the military. 05:08                                     Right. 05:12                                     He spent some time with what can I call this thing, what is it? And when he came up with was essentially what they doing is, well, what he was doing was integrative restoration. So really, and that's what Yoga Nidra is - it's restoring and reintegrating ourselves to our fullness, our wholeness. He just started to call it IRest and the military loved it. They loved it, they thought it was great. They did this study and that was quite successful. And they said, oh, love this. We want to make this part of an option for returned servicemen when they come back to help support them with pain and PTSD etc. And they said, you can call it anything you like. We love it so much you can call it whenever you like that. Then Richard said, Irest Yoga Nidra is what we call it, or IRest Yoga Nidra meditation, but essentially Yoga Nidra is meditation and I love it too.                                                 It's I what I love about it is it is a beautifully gentle form of meditation. So it's not forcing the body into some position that isn't quite right. And you know, not everybody as you would know, with the people that you've been speaking to. Sometimes certain things aren't available for people. Sitting still with your legs crossed on the cushion is not available to a lot of people. So are we saying that you can't do meditation if you can't sit like that. One of the things I love about Yoga Nidra is that you can do it anywhere, anytime, any position, any way you like sitting, standing, lying, walking. And it is so beautiful and restorative. And I think personally meditation should be about that. Restoring, reintegrating, that kind of thing. The kind of practice of coming back to your wholeness. One of the things that Yoga Nidra does that helps in that journey is as people might know, it is within this framework of the Pancha Maya Koshas, the five layers or shields that veil our true nature essentially.                                                 So Yoga Nidra takes us through these five layers, which are the physical body, the energy body or the breath layer, the mind that processes that kind of information from our senses, where feelings and emotions kind of sit. The deeper wisdom mind that is that place where we have the wisdom and the Aha moments. It's also the part of the mind where we hold our habitual patterning and the joy or bliss layer that covers all of those five layers that cover out true nature. The process of Yoga Nidra, any Yoga Nidra takes us through these five layers to help us reconnect back into our wholeness.                                                 To be able to have this study though, Richard had to be very clear about a protocol. These sort of studies must have a protocol to prove your point, I guess. And so he developed some very clear processes, a 10 step process that includes the journey through the koshas to come to your wholeness. It's through this model that the IRest protocol has been developed. It's very specifically taught and trained. so shall I keep going on about that? 09:12                                     That's great. I didn't realize all this. It's the first time I've noticed IRest has Yoga Nidra after it? All right, go ahead. No, I would continue. I think it's very interesting. 09:32                                     That's a great point about not realizing that Yoga Nidra is IRest. One of the things with Yoga Nidra is it has those elements of it. And if you think about a traditional Yoga Nidra we, we do our sankalpa which is clarifying our intentions, our sankalpa, our mission or dharma if you like. It has, generally an instruction from the teacher that asks us to maybe set an intention to remain aware and awake. It's talks us through a body scan. Usually every yoga nidra has this lovely body scan associated with it. And then some kind of breathing practice like a breath counting practice and then feelings, it goes through feelings generally or something like heavy, light, hot or cold.                                                 And then in a traditional yoga nidra, you might go into something like a visualization, which is when we're working on those secret layers of the mind. But one of the things with visualization, it can be problematic with certain types of trauma A little bit of visualization; they might be walking through a forest or in a garden or in the ocean or about water. All these different kinds of associations can actually be a little bit triggering for some people. The IRest protocol has a very specific process through that area where we don't, so much do the visualisations. There are definitely some that we can but generally we're looking at the functioning of the mind in terms of emotions and thoughts and long held beliefs and we work with opposites as you do when doing Yoga Nidra. And then we come out through the process, same as you would in a normal Yoga Nidra through the intention and I guess your sankalpa and re-integration.                                                 But to make it have a specific way to train and, and to have it have a specific protocol, we kind of take out that potential trauma issue

Main Points: Meditation is for everyone; but it may need to be modified for Western meditators. Making meditation accessible can be done by looking at the physical positions associated with meditating, offering different types of meditation, tailoring meditation to your audience. Meditating can lower stress based on recent research.   00:47                                     This is the hundred and 17th episode of changing the face of yoga. And my guest today is Gin Carter. Gin is part of my meditation theme and she's also has a podcast about meditation. And it's called Meditation Monday's with Gin. And we're going just talk about her take on meditation, how she teaches it.                                                 She is used to be a conservation scientist. And she's changed to teaching yoga because she realized that all the science in the world won't save the planet unless people are willing to make the choices to implement that science. And she feels that by teaching yoga, she decreases people's stress, which allows them to make better choices for themselves and for the world. She teaches very alignment based asana, but also lots of practical yoga philosophy and meditation. And she has an incredible diversity of clients: young athletes to 911 dispatchers to 90 year olds doing chair yoga, which I think would be interesting to talk about how meditation fits in with each of those different groups. 02:11                                     Welcome. Gin. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about? 02:17                                     No, that was a great introduction. I will say I have not updated my podcast in a while, but there's a lot there already. I think about updating it sometime, but I've got a lot going on these days and I haven't done it, so I'm glad that you guys listened to it though. 02:34                                     I thought it was very interesting, one of the things I would like to talk about is you really do have a very diverse group of students. Young people, very stressed people, 911 dispatchers I would assume would be very stressed and 90 year olds. Do you have any way that you approach this? So that might be different for each group or do you think that meditation... 03:02                                     Oh, definitely. So I teach almost exclusively privately. So even when I'm with a group, it's a private group. They're not usually public classes. So I've been brought in specifically to work with that group or that individual. And so every time I teach its customized to whatever's going on with that individual or that group. So it's very different from class to class. Certainly the 15 to 25 year old athletes are doing very different things than the 90 year olds in the chair. 03:40                                     Is the meditation also different or is that a bit more universal? 03:45                                     So the meditation varies between groups between days and and between whatever we're focused on that day. Sometimes they're the same meditations, but depending on who is the audience, I often explain them slightly differently to make it a little more relatable to their life and what's ever going on with them at that time, if that makes sense. 04:09                                     No, that does. I listened to your first meditation podcasts and I thought you had very interesting way of going about it because you gave them some tips for meditation success. And I was wondering if you could kind of talk a little bit about that. 04:29                                     Sure. I think a lot of times we think that meditation has to be a certain way and I'm a big proponent that it doesn't, and so setting yourself up so that you're comfortable. Like you don't have to sit cross legged on the floor. Like it's not a requirement, I promise.. I think the most important thing as far as your position is that you're able to keep your spine long and you're able to breathe. So , if that means sitting in a chair with your feet planted on the ground, I usually, if people are sitting in chair encouraging not to rest against the back of the chair, but told yourself up and sit on the front. If you're sitting on the ground and it doesn't feel that great, you can elevate your hips so that your hips are in line with or higher than your knees. And that usually will take some of this stress out of your hips and your back and help you to sit up tall.                                                  Sometimes I have clients that both of those things just don't feel good and they're not accessible. And I love having people meditate in Savasana, laying down, because if it's straining you be in the position, you're definitely not going to get where you want to go in meditation. And so it's beautiful to sit in Lotus. I don't ever teach Lotus. I just don't. It's beautiful, but like you can get so many benefits of meditation without trying to get into some crazy pretzel pose. When you're in that pose and you're hurting, you're not going to be focused on the meditation. You're going to be focused on the pain in your body. I think there's some schools of meditation where that's kind of a part of it. Like you're meant to work through it and whatever.                                                 But I think for regular people, they can use meditation so much and making it easy for people to do is really important. I also think there's a lot of ideas about what it's supposed to be like if you can just sit in your mind quiet and it's going to be magic and that doesn't happen. And so meditation can work so many different ways , I think that's one of the things that people can realize is set themselves up for success. So there are so many different ways to go about it and you try something, it doesn't work for you. There's always different things to try. 07:17                                     so if I were really uncomfortable, If I were really uncomfortable sitting in Lotus, which I don't do lotus anymore, what would you suggest? Because I agree with you, if you're in pain, that's what you're thinking about. You're not thinking about the meditation or whatever it is that you want to think about. 07:36                                     I would tell you don't do Lotus. 07:39                                     Just stop that. 07:41                                     Yeah. I'm a firm believer, actually I, we could go on a lotus rant like I feel like in the Western world, we don't sit on the floor and we don't sit cross legged that much in our life up until the point where we think, oh, it might be good to do this meditation thing. Maybe I should try to sit like that or we started yoga and we tried to sit like that and so for a lot of us, our bodies aren't made to go that way. It's hard on our knees and our ankles to be in Lotus. It's also hard on our back to keep your spine long and its hard on our hips. For Western bodies. I'm not a fan. For bodies that started out sitting on the floor, that makes a lot of sense. But for most of us it just doesn't. And so I would advise you to come out of it.                                                 There's a few different ways you can sit on the floor, you can sit obviously in easy pose just cross-legged. You can kind of sit with one leg sort of folded in front of the other, which is I think what I do most of the time. But there's a few different variations. You have to see where that person's at as far as their seat goes, but there's a lot of different options other than trying to pretzel yourself into Lotus. 08:55                                     Okay. no, I think that's smart. I think you're right. We haven't really grown up sitting on the floor or squatting either one. That one I can't do very well either. You said there was lots of different kinds of meditations and there are. How do you match the meditation with the person or the group that you're going to be trying to teach this too? 09:28                                     I think it just depends on that group's needs. There's a bit of reading the room and reading the person or the people. I also sometimes I like to just cycle through different meditations to let my students experience them. And then I have some students that will really hone in and say when we did, heart-centered meditation or that breath-centered meditation, it really worked for me. And then we know that we'll do more of those kind of things for that person.                                                 But with my students, I do like to try a variety and kind of show them how there are all these different things that you can do so that they're aware. Then once they feel like they want to really start getting into it themselves and then you can kind of hone in on something. I think it benefits a lot of people to do different ones at different times. I change my meditation practice constantly. Sometimes I'll get going with one and focus on it for a few weeks or a few months. But I like to change it up because I think there are all these different techniques and each technique can kind of be a window into where you'

Main Points:                       1) Modern Western yoga pays less attention to the inward based practices in favour of asana.                                                 2) Mindfulness can lead to meditation or vice versa                                                 3) Mindfulness and meditation are different but complementary. 00:42                                     This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is episode 116, My guest today is Hannah Perkins and she is part of my meditation theme for the month of September and Hannah has been leading mindfulness groups, courses, retreats since 2013 and teaching Yoga since 2016. She is passionate about helping those on the frontline of our community, particularly health care professionals, school teachers, parents and the populations they served. She is a qualified mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR), mindfulness-based cancer recovery and mindfulness school facilitator and offers in-school programs for teachers as well as primary and adolescent school students. In addition to her weekly trauma aware yoga classes offered through her business. Love This Moment. She also teaches from Mindfulness Works, the Yoga Place, Blacksmith and Twine yoga studio here in Newcastle in Australia. So welcome Hannah. I'm so glad that you came on. Our topic today, that Hannah has agreed to talk on and has a great deal of interest and experience in is mindfulness and meditation. 02:12                                     Are they the same? Are they different? What's going on there? I guess I see them being used kind of interchangeably many times. So we're going to explore that idea. And Hannah, is there anything else you'd like to add to that particularly introduction. 02:30                                     No that was a lovely introduction, Thank you. 02:31                                     Thank you. As you can tell, she's extremely qualified in the mindfulness area., How did you come to that and how did that become something that was important to you? 02:47                                     Well, actually it started in my twenties. I was living in Thailand and I was working for a handful of NGOs over there, including Greenpeace for a  period of time. And I found myself on my weekends when I was usually trying to get some relief from the stress I felt at work. Just ending up at the temples in my local area in Bangkok. And I'd sit there and I also understand and can speak a bit of Thai. So I'd sit there listening to the monks, talking about Buddhism and suffering and the Dharma and all of these things I didn't quite understand at the time. But I just felt into their energy and the energy of the people who were going to temple. And I just found myself doing the things that they were suggesting. So I found myself, circling the temples 27 times and bowing to the Buddha and lighting incense and doing these things to try and relate. What I didn't know back then was what I was experiencing as suffering. But I just thought I was under a lot of work related stress.                                                 But, it was not long after that that a friend of mine was riding a bicycle around the world and he was starting in Newcastle and leaving, to go through the northern territory and then get a boat over to Indonesia and Singapore. And by the time he got to Thailand, he needed a translator. So he invited me to ride the legs of Thailand with him. And I at that time was consulting for these NGOs as a fundraising executive and really just was so burnt out in my life and very, very unhappy, probably borderline depression. And I just decided to go with him. So I bought myself a bicycle and I rocked up in Penang on the train and met him. And I've never done anything like this before. And we rode for 2,500 kilometers from Penang in Malaysia up to the top of Thailand.                                                 And during that time I really got to know the chaos that was going on in my mind. I really got to see how crazy I was. And I don't say that lightly because it was quite an endeavor to get on this bike and ride and spend so much time in my own head. And in order to stay places cheaply, we actually would rock up to the Buddhist temples and ask could we stay in their Sala, which is the temple area. And most of them would allow us to do that for free. And they'd give us food and they'd also give us Dharma talks, which I would then translate to my friend. And I started to just really pick up this language around Buddhism, the relief of suffering and started to think, oh my goodness, this is something that could really help me. And so, yeah, it was during my sort of mid-life, mid-twenties life crisis started to explore, these themes of Buddhism and later led me to all the styles of meditation. But it all started with mindfulness and meditation in that sense. 05:51                                     Obviously since you're now in Newcastle, you've come back to Australia and you're teaching a lot about it. How did we get from Thailand to here? 06:08                                     Well, it's also a long story. Later in my twenties, I was actually living in the UK at the time. I was attending a Buddhist Sangha weekly and practicing meditation every day. I had a very healthy lifestyle. And again, I found myself in the depths of depression and feeling very hopeless and uncertain about my life. I was very unwell, had had chronic fatigue for two years and didn't know what was going on with my body.                                                 And I took off to Plum Village, which is where Thich Nhat Hanh the Zen master used to reside. And I checked myself in for the winter retreat for three months. However, after two days of being there, I fell very ill. I started to bleed from my intestine and I later found out that I had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, so a type of cancer and I had to make the decision what was I really going to do in order to wake up in my life. So I decided to come back to Australia and heal here and I also recognized that I needed to do a lot of healing in my family, towards my place of birth and where I grew up and that sort of thing as well. So I've been back ever since. I've had some trips away for retreats.                                                 But yeah, I've really established myself here and it was not long after I recovered after surgery and chemotherapy and I started to heal that. I started a Buddhist Sangha in that tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh here in Newcastle and that was in 2013 and that went on for about two and a half years. I just held a space that was by donation. People can come and I would just teach them what I was learning about meditation through using it to heal my body and my mind. And whilst I was doing that, someone came along to those sessions and she saw what I was doing and she invited to support me, mentor me to become a meditation teacher. And she very kindly sponsored me to go and do my MBSR teacher training.                                                 MBSR is a global globally recognized, scientifically proven course of secular mindfulness training. So it's an eight week program, which is often offered in clinical settings in hospitals and mental health outpatient units and also in schools. And so I trained in that in 2014 and as these things happen, one thing led to another where just opportunities would arise for me to teach this. And I was learning more through doing my own practice and through applying it to my life. And that's where the movement component came in as well because I was suffering from chronic pain post surgery that I had in 2012. And so I've recognized that I actually needed to apply this in lots of different ways in my life, not just sitting on a cushion.                                                 So I've been trained as a yoga teacher and started to merge these two worlds of mindfulness and movement together, which actually they are married, they already were synonymous with each other. It's just that I think modern yoga has taken a lot of the awareness based inward practice away from the actual physical form of the movement. And my teaching is not just asana-specific, it's very much about the hatha yoga principles of asana leading to Pranayama leading to chanting a mantra and leading to meditation and these different stages of meditation. So we have the Pratyahara of withdrawing the senses and Dharana which is more the mindfulness component of concentration, focusing our attention leading to Dhyana, which is where we can connect with an object of our attention and that might be a higher power or it might be an image or light or a being and then eventually to Samadhi. So yeah, my movement practice and movement I'm teaching is not specifically asana focused. It's very much about how can we be in a state of meditation while moving sitting, walking, daily life, that sort of thing. 10:19                                     Why don't you give your definition of what mindfulness is and then we'll do meditation. 10:30                                     Well this isn't actually my definition, it's comes from Kevin Zinn who started the MBSR program. But I like it

Major Points: Meditation is for everyone; but the introduction of meditation should be tailored to the audience. One of the major benefits of meditation is postponing an immediate response to a stimulus. Jay started meditating as a child and has continued meditating to the present (with certain breaks). Stephanie: This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is meditation month. I am going to be talking to people who have different takes on meditation. And I have a very interesting guest today. His name is Jay Cole. Jay has written a book called Calm the Fuck Down meditation for Blue Collars. I have to admit that's a little bit different than we usually think about it. Jay and I are going to talk about his experience with meditation and why he wrote this. Jay's a RYT 200 level yoga teacher. He started with Yoga with Adriene and then went to some classes. He's since decided that he really enjoys yoga and became a teacher. He's also been meditating for 20 years and we're going to ask him why he chose to make this book and why he chose to target blue collars. So welcome Jay. Glad to have you on the podcast. I think you're going to add some stuff that most people wouldn't and I'm looking forward to it. So do you have anything else to add to your introduction? Jay Cole: Well, first of all, thank you Stephanie for having me here. This is a great honor to be on your podcast and a part of anything in the Yoga community. Definitely a fan of this kind of stuff. The intro was great. You've done your research. I don't know. Geez, So, yeah, yoga is like one of like the newest things, I guess to come into my life. So before that, if it helps anybody, I started out as an artist and doing graphic design and I still do that on the side. And I probably did graphic design for like 20 years, the last before getting into yoga even. But then alongside of that I was a musician in a hip hop band. I think I've had three different like rap crews. Yeah. And then I've had my own solo music that I make too. And I dunno, I just, you know, I lived such a hard life and then it was just so interesting to like kind of go from the sex, drugs, rock and roll kind of lifestyle, like live fast and free and hard and, and then, flip flopping completely into a more of a soft kind of existence, you know, in the whole world of yoga. Anyways, the reason I got into that was, oh, I think it was like 2007 I had been talking to my grandfather when he was still alive and I was trying to find out what the illnesses were in my family so I can be proactive about that stuff and kind of get a handle on it early, in my youth, my twenties. So he was saying how the worst thing in our family is arthritis. And so I definitely did not want to get into arthritis cause my dad has it pretty bad. And his arthritis went all the way to rheumatoid, so it's pretty bad for him. It's nasty stuff. So rheumatoid, for anybody who thinks that rheumatoid arthritis is arthritis. It's not, it's literally your immune system. It's like eating itself from the inside out so it your immune system goes, oh, what are these bones doing here, let's get these out of here and it will start to eat away at your bone. They are so brittle, they will break, shatter, release. My Dad's had so many operations. He shattered his ankle and he had like 52 pins put in his leg all the way up to shinbone. It's been reconstructed; he's part robot. Now I call him the cyborg father. Yeah. So yeah, I was like, how am I, what am I going to do about this arthritis thing? And any research that was available online back in 2007 was yoga. That's what everybody said. You know what? It won't make it better, but it'll stop it from getting any worse. And I said, okay, sign me up. But you know what, I don't feel the pain, so not right now. It was probably 10 or so years later, 2015 when I was living in Los Angeles, which was great because the humid, the climate and everything was great. But then something miraculous happened. It actually rained in LA. Well it hadn't rained in probably six months. When that rain hit, the contrast, just the humidity in the air, it just hit my bones like a bag of bricks. I couldn't get up out of bed. I was just in so much pain and I knew what it was. I was like, well this is it. This is the day I have to start doing yoga. And that's when I just started following yoga videos on Youtube and I was falling over all the time and hurting myself. It wasn't working out. I must've watched a hundred different videos and a friend of mine said, Oh, you need yoga with Adriene. That'll fix everything. So I started watching Adriene and, it's still a part of my daily routine. Even though I teach my own stuff and I write my own classes, I still follow yoga with Adriene. It is just amazing and it's good. I mean in between I went to real classes, you know, to learn, okay, am I actually doing downward dog properly? I don't know. In my room by myself, I didn't come in here to look at a mirror on the wall. Okay. So, yeah, taking a few classes, you know, getting some alignment and whenever you're going to a yoga class, whenever you tell the teachers like, Hey, I'm new at this, they're just like, oh yes. I love that. And I love it too because that's your person. This is your demonstration person you're going to use for the whole class, I think it's just  a good bonus to have somebody who's there to be taught to learn. So you're like, no micromanaging every little move that they make. They're like, oh, you could, this could go over here and that could go over. You really, really help someone deepen their practice. I love it when students say that, and they definitely loved it when I came in there saying that I didn't know what I was doing either, and that was it. So 2016 on the end of 2016 I decided I love this. I love doing it every day. I would love that. If this was my life, that's all I had to do. And I went and took the training on Vancouver Island. Stephanie: On your blog, you tagged your book as meditation and mindfulness. Do you equate those two things? Jay: I feel like people who meditate become more mindful after. I wouldn't say that it just happens right away and I wouldn't call meditation mindfulness. It's like a by-product or an after effect that happens.  I find all the benefits of meditation are that way. Whereas you start doing it and over a period of time you start to notice it expanding. It's not just in that hour that you're meditating or 20 minutes or 10 minutes when you're meditating before it starts to creep out into the rest of your life, seeps into everything. So then you get cut off in traffic. You're not freaking out about that person. You're not being reactionary. As a very reactionary person. Back in the day before I meditated. And even when I did meditate, it wasn't full time for the last like 22 years. It was an off and on kind of thing. I would go like little bursts of months, days, but it's been the last two years, two, three years, I've really just gone hard at it. And by doing that now I'm really noticing the benefits of it. I don't know if it's because I'm older, I'm more mature, I have a better head for these kind of things and I can recognize them. But I wasn't seeing it before for what it really was in my youth. Now, today I can definitely feel the benefits of it. Stephanie: So how did you get interested in the beginning? Jay: So an interesting story. When I was about nine or 10 years old, we would vacation at my grandparents cottage on a lake. So it was me and my brother and my sister and then two grandparents would be there. Usually they would have us and my parents wouldn't be there. So sibling rivalry starts happening, little bickering, a little bit of fighting. Next thing you know, it's all out war. All Day, every day. Fighting with my brother and sister and I wasn't having fun. I didn't like it. My grandparents didn't like it. You know, back then they still had jobs. They weren't retired. This was their vacation too. One day I was like, I'm just going to stop fighting. I'm just going to just get away from this and I'm going to go sit on this rock. There are these, that's the other cool thing. There are these giant stones coming up out of the earth. They had pulled as many as they could out with bulldozers and tractors, but a lot of giant rocks are like an iceberg, a piece sticking out on top. But the piece below is far bigger. And I climbed up on this rock. I folded my legs into a full lotus. My Dad taught us how to do full lotus when we were really young. So all of us kids could easily do that at least. I crisscrossed my legs in a little pretzel, close my eyes, I was in it. Fighting went away. Everyone stopped bickering. My grandparents were happier. I was happier. Brother and sister are happier. Neighbors weren't listening to us all yelling and running and there's this calm washed across the land. And that was the beginning of meditation, I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what I was doing. I had seen Ninja movies. You would see like a monk in a monastery meditating before the Ninjas attack and just little glimpses. The Ninja Turtles, a popular cartoon in Canada, they have Master Splinter, he was always meditating. He would tell the Ninja Turtles, oh, I have to go meditate on this problem that we're having. So I okay, all I need. So I sat down on that rock, close my eyes. That was it. People laughed at me and my brother and sister would run over at first and try and get me out of it. And then after a while they realized, oh, leave him alone. And then, my grandmother would step in like, leave Jay alone. He's meditating. Right. They didn't know what it was. Nobody knew what it was, but everyone knew that something peaceful and quiet was happening. That's all that really mattered. And from there I had read, we used to have these like Buddhist magazines, can't remember the name of it, but I would read these magazines. I didn't know any of the Sanskrit terms, wo

    Major Points: a) yoga as a complement to western medical knowledge has benefits for burn out b) People may not know they have burn out as burn out just becomes part of your life c) Secondary traumatization occurs when you work with trauma victims. Yoga helps you maintain your compassion but decrease your empathy so that you do not become traumatized.   This is episode 114 of Changing the Face of Yoga and I have a very interesting guest today. This is Dr Shailla Vaidya. She is a physician, a yoga therapist, and a compassionate change agent, practicing mind body medicine in Toronto, Ontario in Canada. She completed her MD at Dalhousie medical school, a residency in family and emergency medicine at the University of Ottawa and a master's of public health in health management and policy at Harvard. She has had her own experience with physician burnout and she created the yoga of burnout, recovery stress resilience program, which combines yoga practice and philosophy with the science of human functions, self-compassion and stress resilience.                                                 Her current medical practice is focused on helping her fellow professionals and others with stress-related illnesses to regain their health and well-being. She's also certificant of the International Association of Yoga Therapists and teaches medically informed therapeutic yoga to yoga therapists internationally. Welcome. Shailla . I think this is an important topic. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that introduction? 02:16                                     No. I did change the name of the program to the yoga of stress resilience burnout recovery program only because burnout has so many things to prove that it's actually burnout you're fixing as opposed to stress. So it's actually the yoga stress resilience burn-out recovery program. 02:36                                     What exactly is burnout and let's as opposed to being stressed? 02:48                                     Burnout was first described by Dr Christina Matlock at the University of California Berkeley. And she described it as having three components. I think we all use burnout in a very colloquial way. But the three components are emotional exhaustion. So many of us had the experience of not being able to mentally handle yet another thing that we may not always recognize or acknowledge that state. So just being emotionally tired is one part of it.                                                  The other part of it involves depersonalization and that's a fancy word to say that we go numb. We're, we're not really human anymore. We're not feeling as we used to feel. And that usually occurs when we're overwhelmed with a lot of the feelings that we face, a lot of the people that we come in contact with who are suffering with pain and grief and so many other things. As we get exposed to that over time, we may lose our ability to feel empathy for people who had that because we've been exposed to it so much.                                                 And then the third thing is reduced personal accomplishment. And this is , the feeling that we're no longer active at our jobs. We start to view ourselves negatively in regards to our work and with the people we're working with. So we feel negative and we don't feel like we're accomplishing anything in our day. The World Health Organization also just recognize burnout as an actual thing. I don't know if it's a medical diagnosis, but they did give it an ICD 10 code. So a diagnosis and such, but mostly related to one's work. So that burnout is related to the jobs that we do. . And there are many, especially women, caregivers and other people who are caring for people in our community. 04:45                                     It's actually a very specific thing. I agree with you, that term gets bandied about a lot. But there are some ways that a person could say I'm having those kinds of issues. And if they do feel that maybe they are, what should they do? 05:07                                     Well, that's the big thing. We all say you need to take a break. You need self-care. That's a hard thing because we make that the job of the person who is experiencing the burnout and not everyone is really able to understand that or understand what they need to do to get out of this cycle of burnout. And essentially it happens when we've had chronic stress.                                                 The big thing would they really have to do is start to release stress. And as yoga therapists and yoga teachers, we know that stress builds up in our body. And completing that stress response and then releasing stress from the body is a real big component in helping recover from burnout. Because there's some neurologic things that are happening when we hold stress in our body, we're sending signals up through our brainstem through our limbic system particular around the Thalamus. And of course this is far more complicated than the breakdown I'm giving right now. But our brain stem or thalamus and our limbic system can actually shut down those signals. So we don't actually know we're experiencing the beginnings of burnout until we're exhausted and we can't do anything. So yes, take a break but also do the things that help reduce or release stress from our body as we give ourselves that care. And there's so many components within that but yoga happens to be a fantastic technique to help people with burnout. 06:41                                     Let's explore that a bit more. Why don't you explain your program? I think that might be the easiest way to do it because it will give us specific information. 06:55                                     I get referred a lot of people with stress related illnesses from their family doctors and so they've had chronic stress their whole life. And actually when I do their histories and do their assessments, I also do adverse childhood experience scores. So the majority of the people I see also had stressing as a child. And so their nervous systems developed under stress and that may make them more stress responsive as they leave that environment and go on to the rest of the world. And what's so interesting is a lot of people who had stress as kids who survived that tend to be professions where they want to help other people. I always joke with them that no, you want to help other people the way you weren't helped as a kid or give back in that way.                                                  It's very interesting. I can't generalize that to the whole population of burnout. I'm really only looking at the people that I see come through my door and so adverse childhood experiences is huge. The way I use yoga is yoga really helps us re-integrate the body. So we know that yoga is more than just the asanas that we practice. The Yoga Sutra says it's a process of slowing down, change the perceptions of our mind through this process. How do people come in who are just exhausted, their bodies can't take anymore. And then using a restorative approach and a bottom up approach to help release tension through the body and then work with breathing and meditation techniques so that they can, you know, exhale and start focusing their mind on other things.                                                  It's very effective when we bring them to those places of concentration, meditation and maybe, hopefully bliss. But learning how, first of all to have compassion for the self and take care of the self because so many of us put others before we put ourselves. So my program really helps people come back to that self-care component, taken care of themselves. Actually stopping and moving and releasing the stress and breathing and then learning how to have compassion for the self. Much like they have compassion for the other people in their lives. 09:21                                     I noticed on your website that you have several supportive resources. I think you have a drop in where people can just come and meditate once a week or so. Is that correct? 09:37                                     I usually run that in the summertime for people to help them keep up with their practice. During the spring, winter and fall I'm usually busy with working at the medical aspects of Yoga. But I had that drop in because a lot of people after they'd gone through my program can't find a yoga class that is like what I teach. There's tons of people out there teaching yoga. To find a good restorative class, that's just what they need, but might not always be available to people or they might not feel comfortable going to their local yoga studio for whatever reason. 10:22                                     That happens a lot, unfortunately. When you've got someone who you have diagnosed as having burnout, are they open to coming to your program or does it take them a little while to really accept that that's what they have? 10:43                                     That's a great question. I work with a lot of family doctors who have assessed their patients over time and some of my patients have had you know, back pain or migraines or other stress related illnesses and they've seen specialists and a lot of other

                                                Major Points: Integrating the eight limbs into teaching asana to bring the fullness of yoga to everyone. (12:58) Media images of yoga will affect people’s decisions on whether to attend yoga classes. (4:22) How do we become more inclusive in yoga (32:23) Practicing yoga helps you become more discerning by making us pause and reflect between the stimulus and response of day to day life (7:56) 00:47                                     This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is episode 113. I have an incredible guest today. Her name is Doctor Christiane Brems who is a certified psychologist from the American board of Professional Psychology. She is an RYT 500 yoga teacher, a certified yoga therapist and she received her Phd in clinical psychology from Oklahoma State University in 1987. She currently directs YogaX an innovative Yoga School Initiative in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. It provides yoga training, continuing education and services. Dr. Brem has been extremely interested in yoga all of her life and she's integrated it into her research for clinical work and also, has developed this program called YogaX. YogaX sounds like a really different kind of yoga teacher training. We're definitely going to go into that. It is the integration of science and spirituality in service of individual and communal health. It's work is grounded in modern neuroscience and psychology research as well as the ancient philosophy and psychology of Yoga. It is based on the fact that yoga is a lifestyle practice and has many health and mental health benefits. So thank you Christiane for coming on the podcast. It's amazing what you are doing there and I think it fits so well with what Changing the Face of Yoga is all about. So welcome. 02:42                                     Thank you. It's absolutely a pleasure to be here. I'm very excited. Thank you. 02:50                                     Is there anything you'd like to add to that introduction? I kind of zoomed through it because it's just incredible what you've done. I wanted to hit the highlights, but is there something that you would like to emphasize? 03:03                                     Well, maybe I'll just emphasize that YogaX really is a team effort. I happen to be the director of it at the moment, but our team includes 10 people and YogaX is really our collective brain child. And so I just want to acknowledge that I'm speaking for the group, not just for myself. We have been together for quite a while now. I think coming on seven years. So even though the Stanford initiative is very young, our team is pretty seasoned. 03:32                                     There are a couple of things I've picked up that I thought was really interesting. You said that you had done a study or seen a study, I'm not sure exactly. There really is a media bias against inclusiveness, shall we say in Yoga where you have to be young and white, probably economically safe. It isn't, in the west, very welcoming to other people. Did you do that media study or did you see it or what's the background of that? 04:22                                     Yeah, that's actually our own work. We did a review, a fairly thorough review of about 10 years worth of yoga journals, looking at all their images and articles, the graphics that go with advertisements in Yoga Journal. Obviously we were pretty successful in showing that there's a strong bias towards white, skinny, wealthy women in the images, not just in the advertisements, which was originally our hope. Also in the graphics that accompany the articles in Yoga Journal. So there's clear sexism, there's racism in the sense that there are not a lot of people of color. There are lots of images of white people. They're more images of women than men. And the interesting thing is when men are depicted, they are typically in teaching roles, whereas the women generally are more likely to be in the student role.                                                  There just a lot of really interesting things. We've published a couple of papers about this, but we also did a really interesting study where we took Yoga Journal images and we took some information about yoga. We created a control group and a treatment group and we invited people in to learn more about yoga and then at the end of this study asked them whether they might be inclined to try yoga. The treatment group was exposed to the yoga images whereas the control group was just exposed to information about yoga. Then both groups just got a little power point presentation about yoga and we ask them our questions. Being exposed to the images of Yoga Journal as opposed to just learning about yoga made men feel much less likely that they'd want to try yoga then if they just read something about yoga. And we thought that was really fascinating because it's sort of undergirds this premise, right? That if we show the wrong images then we disinvite or uninvite certain parts of our population from the practice. 06:36                                     Yes. I used to teach seniors and a lot of ads for senior yoga and stuff would have this very young girl, the typical yoga person. And I kept saying that's not a good idea; people need to see themselves to think I can try that. 06:57                                     Yeah. We need models. 07:40                                     Yeah. So I just thought that was interesting because it is a bit of a thing with me that I was really glad to hear that there was actual research to support what I've seen. So, I loved this. This came from your blog and it just totally got me, because I didn't ever think of it this way, but you said, that yoga is when we find the gap between stimulus and response. Yeah. I thought good grief. That is what we do. But it just seems like stimulus and response is so close. For Yoga to define that gap is kind of amazing. Can you kind of expand on that idea a bit? 07:56                                     Yeah. That to us is sort of the central practice, right? And even going all the way back to the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali's yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. That's the second line in the yoga sutras - right now is the time for Yoga, which is sort of a call to mindfulness. And so even Patanjali argues if we can still the mind, then we can transform ourselves. And it's the same idea when you start looking at that gap between stimulus and response, you need to have a moment of quiet in the mind, right? You need to be able to take the stimulus and then have some discernment and some deliberate choice about how you will respond to that stimulus. And in our day to day life, that doesn't tend to be our habit, right? Our habit is more stimulus  and reaction,; there's no gap at all. And so in Yoga, we tried to cultivate is this pause, whether it's through breathing practices where we have a pause at the top and the bottom of the breath or whether it's through a physical practice where we pause to take a moment to tune in to the sensation in the body before we just sort of blow out our physical boundaries and limitations. It's all preparation for having that capacity when a stimulus reaches our nervous system to take a moment and make a deliberate choice about how we respond. So to me that has always been the very central part of the practice is this instilling of the capacity to pause. 09:41                                     I like that. Now I'd like to talk about, your teacher training because it sounds to me having been through two different sets of teacher training, that it's very, very different because it seems to have a real emphasis on community. . As well as, , learning all this stuff you got to learn. Sure. All that's in there too, but it's really, I wrote it down. It's fostering of community, encouragement of service and engagement, creation of accessibility and inclusion and I liked promotion of inspiration. The teacher training contributes to the student's personal and relational health. Relational health I don't , recall anything like that in any of my trainings or anyone else talking about that. And so could you kind of expand on that? What, what do you mean by relational health and how does the Yoga teacher training contribute to that? 11:10                                     It brings us right back to that gap between stimulus and response, right? So our relationships are often a reflection of our own capacity to self-monitor, to be compassionate, to be empathic and to understand what's happening in the other person before we react to whatever is happening in our relationship. In YogaX, in our group we have used yoga a lot in mental health care settings. And we have learned there that what happens with our clients as they do yoga because they increase the gap between stimulus and response. They become better partners in relationships. They bring us back anecdotes where their partners or spouses say, oh my gosh, you're so much more patient. Oh, you're less likely to fly off the handle. You haven't been as angry. You're easier to talk to. Bosses make comments to their employees about what changed for you? You're more patient, you're more thorough, your attention is better. There are really these reverberations into day to day life that enhance relationship

Confino: Major points: Small Yoga pauses during the working day can refresh and relieve discomfort. Carol has developed a series of minute movements, breathing and meditation to bring the body, mind and emotions into a healthier state during the workday. Carol is helping people develop sustainable habits that are beneficial and easy to do.       00:41                                     This is episode one hundred twelve of changing face of yoga. And my guest today is Carol Confino. Carol has been a nurse for over 20 years and she's now shifted to preventing illness and disease becoming a yoga teacher, a yoga health coach and a certified yoga therapist. She's found ways of dealing with depression, self doubt and anxiety. The simple prompts process of noticing when these issues come up begins the process of overcoming. Welcome. Carol. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that particular introduction? 01:38                                     Just to clarify, I was an RN way back. I was an RN 14 years, but it's been 20 years since I've actually been a practicing nurse. But, I've been teaching yoga since 2006. Transition. 01:55                                     We all are doing that, aren't we?. I was very interested in what you were talking about doing desk yoga classes at a health fair. And you said it's a really different format from just doing office yoga or corporate yoga or whatever you want to call it. 02:23                                     It was interesting because I hadn't really thought about doing much corporate, but I was offered this job to do a health fair. Not so much in handing out flyers about my business or anything, but to teach office yoga. first time I had done hour long workshops at offices in the past, but I wasn't sure how this is going to work in a health fair. And I hit on what I call pause practices. I had done a workshop at my studio, Sun and Moon Yoga Studio here in Fairfax, Virginia. I did practices to pause during the day where you just take a minute or less and do some kind of practice that's going to either change your mind or your body in some way. So I used some of that and some of the things that I did with the desk yoga and there were a few practices that when I did them really resonated with people who didn't usually do yoga. So that's when it hit me that there's a whole population cause I've gone in offices and I've done a yoga class before or after work. But actually having it as part of their work day. Because yoga is more about mindfulness, being aware and when you start to become aware of when your posture is getting out of whack, what can you do? 04:04                                     And you know, you can go through all the alignment cues and things and sit up and you can bring your shoulders back. But I found that just bringing your arms out to a tee position brings in all the alignment cues and then you can add some practices that bring some strength up into your shoulders so you don't round forward so much. And if you incorporate that during your day, like as you're typing away on the computer, you notice you're rounding and you're in the middle of a thought, bring your arms out to a t, you've just broken up the muscles that were tight rounding you forward. And then you go back to typing and you roll down again. When you get to a breaking point where you've come to the end of the thought or the paragraph, you can do some stretches that will keep your shoulders up and keep you in better alignment because it's not so much the rounding forward that's bad. It's staying there. So if you can a couple of times an hour come in and out of it and to get them to sit and listen cause everybody's in a hurry.                                                 All these practices take a minute or less and I have about 20 different ones: minute meditations, eye exercises, shoulders and the arms. And they all fit into a nice little format and I give them a little handout they can take back to their desks that goes through all the practices, some breathing practices, some energy medicine practices and I go over the ones that are more unusual and then I say you can look everybody can round and arch their back and roll the shoulders. But explaining some of the things that I do that can keep you in better alignment and gets you through your day a little more comfortably. 06:13                                     Oh, how clever. That's really interesting. I'm sitting here doing the T thing. 06:22                                     If you do that t and then bring your arms in a cactus position. So you bend your elbows. 06:27                                     I am. 06:30                                     So if you turn your palms towards your head, okay, your upper back muscles are getting a little stretch and so your shoulders and the chest is contracting but they're not moving any bone. Really turn your palms away. And now the upper back muscles contract and the chest muscles stretch. So you go back and forth between those two. And then bring your arms down without moving your shoulders. I found this out from doing it over and over again. By at the end of the day, when I go to round my shoulders, I would feel a little more resistance than I did before I did cactus arms, which is different than if you bring your arms behind your back and squeeze your shoulders together. Your shoulders can come immediately come forward because you haven't gotten the stabilizing muscles to stay there. So that's like a revelation for a lot of very tight men particularly. But even women, they come and they do this and they notice it right away. And there's other ones, a couple of other ones that I do, and I talk about how to fit that practically into your day. Just like I said you're middle of something and then when you get to a stopping point, you do the stabilizing things and before you go on break, you can do some eye exercises. There are lots of different ones, there's even more than that. I didn't even go into the wrist with the ones that I do with the office. The wrist is much more subtle to work with. 08:06                                     I saw you had a a youtube video on it. 08:09                                     I had some on there and I'm going to have a little course. I'm doing the health fairs. Then I started making up the whole little handout that I have is going to come out as a course where all 20 practices are done. And the minute meditations I have recorded about a minute and a little longer because I just startto welcome them and then do about a minute. I've had people ask me when I've done this in offices, do you have any videos with this? And I said I have a few on youtube but this is going to be an actual little course package. 08:58                                     It's interesting.I think it's hard for people when they're working, but to take that time to take an hour or so for a yoga class, but just to get that habit in of really noticing where your shoulders are or whatever is, it's quite clever really. Because they can do that without really taking away from there their time at work. 09:21                                     And it makes them aware because actually if you do it over and over again, it actually becomes more comfortable to sit upright. You're really working your body very hard rounding your shoulders forward. It's not a bad position but the strongest position for your spine is when your head is balanced on top of the spine. Once you get your muscles used to that again, because that's how you were when you were a little kid. Your head couldn't go forward cause it was so heavy. Babies when they sit up, sit upright. Because that's where your spine is the strongest. You don't usually see little kids with rounded shoulders cause their heads are so heavy. Then when they bring them forward, it throws their balance off.                                                 But if you can kind of get aware that this is really more comfortable and also it gets them moving, even if like it's not get up and walk around the office. But even when you're in your chair you can change your position a lot. You've seen a belly dancer move, they have their arms in a tee position, they can bring a lot of movement to their body. But their shoulders stay where they are. It's actually not a very tight position, rounded shoulders. You can't move as well. You're restricted cause you're crushing your chest.                                                 You know, if the belly dancer had rounded shoulders, she couldn't get that movement down through the rib cage because she's crushing it. But if you bring your arms up, you actually can get a lot more movement. Your body is free or to twist. Not that you're going to stay still. Your body likes to move, your eyes like to move. Those things that you do every day is going to have more of an impact then what you do once a week in a yoga class or at least as much impact. Developing habits that are sustainable that aren't hard.                                                 We've had master teachers, like Leslie Kaminoff. He talks about even how you walk you can really, if you really are mindful of how you walk, it can help prevent some bunion's and things like

                                                SunnyBee Yoga with Jacquie Barbie - Changing the Face of Yoga podcast #110                                                 Major points: a) Everyone in yoga classes should be doing the pose modification that is best for their body (5:49) b) Representation counts, and the public should be able to see all different kinds of yogi bodies (10:10) c) Thank your body at the beginning of class and accept that today may look and feel very different from yesterday (18:04 00:47                                     This is the hundred and 11th episode of Changing the Face of Yoga. And my guest today is Jackie Barbie and she's from Sunny B yoga in Florida in the US. She's a 200 hour experienced RYT and she specializes in accessible yoga for all. She's trained with Diane Bondi and Amber Karns and yoga for all. And Jivana Heyman of Accessible yoga. It is her passion and she believes her Dharma to help bring yoga to those that can benefit from the practice, but don't fit the stereotypical image of a yoga practitioner. I love this. I tell clients that call on the phone who have never seen me and are afraid of trying yoga, that I'm a fat gray haired lady with Fibromyalgia teaching the yoga class, you will be fine. It's great. She teaches a variety of classes, really impressive variety. A wheelchair yoga, Chair Yoga classes, beginner, gentle classes. She works privately with people in their homes. So she's really got the full spectrum of students who may need a little different kind of yoga. And we're going to talk about some of those different kinds right now. So welcome Jackie. I'm so glad that you're here. Is there anything that you'd like to add to that introduction? 02:24                                     Oh, that was great. Thank you. It's always kind of interesting to hear that back when I get a lot of people who call me on the phone and say, I'm too old, or I'm too fat, or I can't do yoga. I just tell them, trust me, when you see me, you will feel 0kay, you'll think, oh well she can do this, I can do this. So I think I bring a lot of people to ease just visually and then we have fun. 02:56                                     I taught seniors and they were very nervous that they would get someone very young and I'm not. So I think that helped because I knew what they were going through. I understand what you're saying. I'll give you all these contact details later to my listener, but I really want to tell them about your Instagram account because you have all these wonderful pictures of modifications of really common yoga poses. And I especially liked boat pose. I thought that was quite clever. I like to talk a little bit about how your yoga teaching, your guiding of your students includes all those modifications. When I do modifications, everybody wants to do the most intense one or the most difficult one. And sometimes it's really hard to get them to say, yeah, that's great, you can do that. We can work towards that, but why don't we think about it like this way too. Sometimes that works and a lot of times it doesn't. How do you introduce and guide people to modifications that might be a little better for their body. 04:25                                     So we start with that first and we start with the simplest and maybe even they might not even feel like they're in the yoga pose to begin with. Maybe like you said, boat pose. So maybe we'll start with the bolster popped up behind her back and just do that and then ease into something a little bit more. Or if we're in the chair, maybe we're just lifting the feet one at a time and we just ease into it slowly so that we just say, hey, if this feels good, stay here. But if you want to be a little curious,  let's try this. And if you go there and that doesn't feel good, come back to this where it did feel good and safe. Safe is always a big word for me. We throughout the practice introduce a little bit more and a little bit more and then remind them, don't forget, we have these options too. So we usually have maybe four different options of a pose that we work on in a class. And like I said, a lot of times it's very subtle. They don't realize that they're doing this, what they might look at if they were to open up an average Instagram page and say, I could never do that. But they're doing their version of the pose that fits their body, which is the most important thing to me. 05:40                                     So in a subtle way, you're really asking them to really pay attention to their body and how it feels. 05:49                                     Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't want everybody to look alike. I tell everybody in the classroom if everybody's in a different version of the pose, that makes me extremely happy. Because that means my job of making them comfortable in their own body, I was successful because that's when I'm trying to get everybody to listen to their body. I'm not trying to do what the person next to them is doing. 06:18                                     I think that's excellent. I notice that you said, I think on your Facebook page, that you're starting to create video content. 06:32                                     Yes. So I have a 15 year old daughter who was an aspiring videographer. She's taking all kinds of classes, is already accumulating certifications. in video editing, photo editing, things like that. So she is very interested in creating videos. We actually did one yesterday. She impresses me in how she can whip these together, edit them very quickly and make it look like it was the easiest thing in the world. And so we're working on that. We're trying to do that because I have people in different states, different areas who are saying, if I had you as a yoga teacher, I would go to yoga .I know that there's like hundreds of other me's out there. They're just afraid to try. So I figured I can at least get them started by practicing online with me. Maybe they can do some of the videos and, and they just need to do one video and they're officially a Yogi. Hopefully that will make them feel better. My sisters are in Pennsylvania. I really would like for them to practice chair yoga. I'm the baby of the family and I have lived over a thousand miles away from them for 30 years now. So this is a way for me to bring a practice to them and just to anybody who's just interested in trying some modified yoga, some adaptive yoga, whatever works in their body. 08:03                                     How do you do that? Because I've always been concerned that if people are just watching me, I can't really tell what's going on with them. Or is it kind of a two way thing, like on zoom or something like that? 08:17                                     That would be a great long term. That is something I hope to work towards in the future. I've seen that there are platforms where you can practice, where you can see people and do that. Right now we're just doing very basic, simple, beginner chair yoga type things. I really feel like anybody can really easily follow along. We're not doing anything complicated that they need someone quite there. It's not much different from anybody getting a yoga DVD or going on Youtube, we posted our first Youtube video today. And it's on SunnyBee Yoga on Youtube. You can look that up and we'll plan on adding more as we go along. 09:05                                     I did see some videos, I don't know if your daughter had anything to do with them, but I was so tickled at them because they were at a very fast pace. People are going up and down and round and it was kind of fun. It really was and I thought, you know that that's very clever to say Yoga can be fun. It's not always terribly, terribly serious. 09:31                                     A lot of times we do our family yoga videos where I actually get a lot of people requesting, I haven't seen a Barbie family high speed yoga video lately. We like to go hiking a lot or camping and we'll put up the iPhone and put it on high speed, videotaping it at high speed and just so that they can just see like this is our real life. This is actually what we do this is just for Instagram and we don't always videotape it obviously, but people will say, oh, I need a Barbie family video. So up sometimes just for fun, if anybody really ever wants to practice the yoga that we're doing in the high speed, I'll be happy to write down the poses for them.                                                 But I did start them at high-speed because I was always so nervous about posting pictures and posting videos of myself doing yoga. Just very self- conscious of the way I looked. But representation matters. And if people don't see me in a bigger body, in an older body, in a body with chronic illness doing yoga, then they're never going to think that they can do yoga. So representation matters. We have to all be posting these pictures and posting these videos so that they don't only see white 24 year old women standing on a rock off a cliff doing yoga, you know, like that's not all that it is. It's being silly. So someone had told me do your first videos at high speed because nobody will see the mistakes or nobody will see the things like that and you won't be as self-conscious and it will just be creating the practice for yourself. So now I can

This is changing the face of yoga. And this is episode one 10. My guest is Linda Lang and Linda was on, , earlier in the year, but she said something that really intrigued me. I have taught seniors, mature adults, , for over 10 years now. And the way she talked about it was very, very different from the way I taught. And I wanted to explore that a bit more. , I'm going to let Linda introduce herself and then we're going to start. So thank you Linda for coming on again. I appreciate that. And tell the listeners a little bit about yourself. 01:28                                     Thank you, Stephanie. I started practicing yoga in my late teens. I was part of a generation introduced to yoga when the Beatles brought their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the United States. So my foray into eastern philosophy and yogic practices began in my late teens and early twenties. I will be 66 years old this s mer. I always wanted to be a yoga teacher, but did not become one until the late 1990's so now I am full 20 years into a teaching career. During that period of time for about 15 years, I taught as full time as I possibly could in studios, community centers, memory units in assisted living centers. I worked for eight years at the Center for Integrative Medicine at George Washington University where I worked with patients in a clinical setting and taught medical students electives on yoga therapy so that they could learn how to embody the benefits of practice. And then take it into their medical practices, knowing that they would affect far more people in the course of their lives than I, than I ever might. So that's my work in a nutshell. I do my best to educate in the greater community in the Washington DC areas through the Smithsonian institution there, the Smithsonian associates educational programs, and I mentor other yoga therapists and train yoga teachers when I can. 03:18                                     You have the whole spectrum there. I appreciate the communication issue. I  think we were talking earlier and we decided the first thing we're going to start with is what does it mean or when do you become old? What criteria would you be looking at, Linda, if, if you had to define it. 03:46                                     Yes. Well, if I had to define it, I would emphasize the, the experience of working with individuals in their late forties and fifties who, because of illness or debilitating conditions or the impact of medicines, chemotherapy or radiation, accidents, trauma might consider themselves old because they are no longer feeling vital and already feeling quite limited on many different levels. So I can tell you, I've met people in their forties and fifties who have the characteristics of people who reach into old age and began to experience frailty on many different levels.                                                 I think of older students, quite frankly, as anyone over 60 years old is an older student, which doesn't mean that I have not taught headstands to people in their sixties. I have so you can approach older students and people with potentially severe limitations in some ways, but continue to teach them asana practice in ways that raises the bar in terms of what they believe they can do themselves. So, age is a huge factor, obviously and what makes a student old. But I just wanted to be clear that some people really do feel quite limited when they're younger than that. 05:38                                     And I think you brought up a really good point, which was self-limiting thoughts. That's it sometimes isn't so much what's actual as what you think it is. And I think that's an important topic that we might want to explore a little bit. 06:05                                     It is one of the greatest obstacles and because yogic philosophy focuses a great deal on obstacles and the deity of Ganesha is the remover of obstacles. It's nice to be able to literally bring these very profound images into the classroom, working with students, particularly older students and remind them that the stories that they tell you about themselves physically are meaningful to them. But when I hear people talk about what they cannot do or things they no longer do, I asked them to think about things in terms of realistically, is it because you're choosing not to do it anymore because you physically cannot do it anymore. Really important to differentiate on because you know, Stephanie as well as I do that you start to do something in a class and somebody will say, oh, I can't do that. And then you give them some modifications and 30 seconds later they're doing it. So, my suggestion to anyone who wants to know more about self-limiting thinking is to think of the things that you feel you cannot do or in the past did not think that you could do that you have already overcome. That's our job as teachers working with people who are feeling very limited because of age. Our responsibility is to eliminate possibilities for them to modify practices so that they can feel successful but still hold out hope that they actually will be able to achieve something beyond what they might expect for themselves. 07:58                                     You said in our earlier podcasts that you actually help them set goals. 08:04                                     I do. 08:06                                     And, and could you kind of explain that and give us an example of what you mean by that? 08:14                                     Yes, I'd like to differentiate intentionality from goal setting. If I come to the mat with an intention of quieting and calming my mind while stretching and relaxing my body. That's a very nice intention. But if my goal is to create strength, then I approached my practice with a different intention. I'm being very specific that there's an outcome. Goals have outcomes. So let's imagine well this just happened to me this morning. One of my students is 82 years old and she works with a physical trainer. She's got a lot of individual strengths in her body, but she has some inherent weaknesses in her feet and her hands. So if we don't pay attention to building strength from the tips of her fingers up into her knuckles, her palms, her wrists, all the way up to her elbows and shoulders, whatever strengths she has and her biceps and triceps and her trapezius muscles and whatever's going on in her neck and back. If she loses strength in her hands, she will become diminished with her strength in the rest of her body. Same thing is true with her feet. So we set a goal this morning of being able to literally to bear weight longer in her hands, doing a variety of different postures that we're not totally weight bearing, where she had a lot of control over her movement and she was ecstatic because she started off saying, oh, my arms are tired, my shoulders hurt already. We just went immediately to the modifications and she said, oh, this is great. Oh, Oh, if I just do it, isometrically, oh, I really can feel my strengths there. Oh, I really feel the weakness there, or I really feel the vulnerability in my neck. So by being clear about the goal, she started sensing things in her body and asking me questions and giving me feedback that I could use to illuminate her challenge and help her feel successful by building on existing strengths rather than saying, oh gosh, well, I guess that's just going to be a weak spot and going on to something else. Another goal, for instance, it's really important with older students is being able to walk longer distances to build endurance and resilience, able to hold certain poses longer. So let's say my goal with you, let's say that when we practice tree pose, you always hold onto the wall or the chair. My goal with you might to be, you're going to practice tree pose using my index fingertip. And then the ultimate goal is for you to be able to practice tree pose without using a support, having it close enough by, but to begin to play with the possibility of becoming stronger, more balanced, more grounded. Another goal might be to say, you know, normally we practice 15 minutes doing these specific asanas. Let's expand to half an hour. What is my expectation of you in your home? Practice your homework. I don't want you to just practice this for 10 minutes once a day. I'd like you to practice it for 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night. That kind of thing. Finite goals. 12:14                                     These are all more or less physical goals - balance and endurance and resilience. Do you also work with them on emotional or mental goals? 12:26                                     Yes. This same woman this morning has a lot of aches and pains and she said to me, Oh, you must be so tired of me complaining. And, I said, you know, for me to grow tired of your complaining isn't really part of the nature of my experience with you. You're complaining is your way of communicating to me your frustration. And my question to you is, is what are you really frustrated with? So the goal setting that she and I have has to do with acceptance. She's 82 years old. She's going to have aches and pains. What I did tell her was that given the nature of what she complains to me about, I would take every one of her complaints in the grand scheme of things, it's what she's complaining about is not so bad as I see it. And she wanted to know more about that. So I'm not afraid to open the door to inquiry through yogic lens,