Context
In response to an email from a reader who felt the need to give me critical feedback about my use of personal funds to come to India for healing when I could be offering those personal funds to the programs for which I act as the fundraising coordinator and fiscal sponsor (Breitenbush Hot Springs and DAYA Foundation):

Privilege
It’s a privilege to be here at Vaidyagrama Healing Village. Given the numbers of people on the planet and the comparatively far fewer people who get to come to places likes this, and the numbers of people who are fortunate to meet Vaidyas, doctors, who hold such ancient, indigenous medicines in such high regard and who make those medicines available to the people who seek them out, I am both very privileged and very fortunate to be here.  ​​

We can also count, among my privileges, that I am able bodied enough to travel right now. I have been strategic with my airline miles and had a surplus for this trip. I’ve never been frivolous with things related to my stability - money, my home, my garden, the things that keep me grounded. I have a stable enough home and living situation that I could leave for a month. I’ve wisely juggled some financial resources to dedicate to this trip while waiting for car insurance reimbursements for the medical care I am receiving. I’ve had the wherewithal to set up my car insurance policy, at its inception 10 years ago, to provide enough PIP, personal injury protection, that I have had a medical recovery budget to work with.

Even so, there are plenty of financial hurdles and challenges with traumatic brain injuries. There are the medical expenses that are not covered. The loss of wages. The cost of transportation to and from medical appointments. Fines for late payments or missed government filings. Lost opportunities due to not comprehending a potential transaction that could have added to my life stability. Loss of revenue in my training school and in the yoga non-profit that I founded and continue to chaperone. My concussions impacted both organizations in destabilizing ways. While they have not been so destabilized that they’re at risk, each has experienced the increased costs of systems backsliding due to my absences, mistakes or limitations. 

And still, I have had the privilege to come here. Personal privilege and privilege in the sense of my place in society.

Luxury
To outsiders, all of this might appear to be a luxury. People may think to themselves, “How nice it would be to have the luxury of time to go to India for treatment!”  

I bristle against this statement partly due to my relationship to the word luxury - defined as a state of great comfort or elegance, especially when involving great expense.  On the one hand if I weigh the expense to my vitality, my life and my relationships caused by brain fog, challenges with word finding, headaches, vertigo, gut-brain axis issues, gaze stabilization issues, clinical depression, fatigue, and social apprehension, the great expense isn’t in this trip nor these treatments.

The greater expense is if I don’t do all that I can to get well.

On the other hand, the design of modern life leaves such little room for the freedom to truly value oneself and one’s vitality.  From the world view from which I live, this treatment time in India is not a luxury but rather a necessity. If we place our well-being, physical, mental and spiritual, above all else, we have the best chances at meeting the events of our lives with wisdom, skill, openness, ingenuity, and the love and energy needed to navigate those events. The depleted versions of ourselves just can not do that in the same way.

Service
These treatments are necessities for my contract with myself about how I want to serve in this life. I recognize that even the opportunities that I have had to serve come from a certain amount of privilege. In 1998, I had the training, gumption, spunk, and well-being to start a prison yoga program from nothing. I had no financial resources, but I had the inner resources that yoga catalyzed in me. That passion and perseverance sustained me in that service until April of 2022.

The day before we certified a group of students at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility to be 200hr Yoga Alliance Certified Yoga Teachers, April 14, 2022, was the day of my second and more serious concussion. I have not been able to serve in my usual capacity in Oregon’s prisons since that time.  To be fair, the prisons have not yet opened up for volunteer services to begin again. Just a couple of weeks prior to this trip, I received word that we would soon be able to get underway again with our programs. I also got the news that Oregon State Penitentiary wants to host one of the 200hr Yoga Teacher Training programs so that they can have certified resident teachers in their facility too!  That would make three Oregon prisons with teacher trainings and five prisons with yoga programs.

One reason I want to get well is to go back to these facilities and bring hope and meaning to lives that are otherwise susceptible to stagnation, depression, and hopelessness. 

I also feel committed to the communities in which I am blessed to be talking about the climate situation, issues of racial and social injustice, and collaborative solutions for our civilization. I am eager to be used in whatever way I might serve these communities and conversations. For example, Breitenbush Hot Springs has allowed me to support them with the fundraising of rebuilding after the 2020 fires. They’ve also invited me to support their commitment to BIPOC led events that bring more indigenous healing practices and social justice to their offerings.

For me this is like two rivers coming together - my decades of dedication in social justice in the prison system and my decades of involvement as a community member and presenter at Breitenbush. I shudder to think that my concussion situation could make all of that too challenging to participate in. 

I started this blog in response to a comment that I must be so privileged to come here. I was criticized by a reader for the cost of this trip while I am also fundraising for Breitenbush. Specifically, the reader suggested that the cost of my trip would have been better offered as a donation to Breitenbush and that I ought not “brag” about being here. Even though I take this to be a rare perspective that a reader may have, to the extent that there may be other lesser misperceptions, I wanted to take the time to reply to this comment.

Duty
I also wanted to offer this reflection because it is also true for all of you. Your vitality and well-being is a duty. I would go so far as to say it is a moral duty to neither damage nor disregard your vitality. Whether you have an ounce of privilege in our society or not, if you have an ounce of passion for making a difference, I want to support your well-being so that you can be of the highest service possible. Tending to your well-being, prioritizing your physical, mental and spiritual health, is not a luxury. It is a necessity. Your contributions would otherwise be compromised or, sadly, half-hearted and at risk of being unsustainable. We don't need people with passion and vision who are unable to sustain such service. 

I see this healing time in India as a personal, moral duty. My duty to the vitality offered to me (and everyone) as a part of being born. My duty to live in integrity as I have leadership roles in my life. Yes, there is privilege involved. I hope to always make the wisest use of the privileges that I have. In this case, my greater sense of duty to serve both the communities in Oregon’s prisons and society at large (in my own geographical way), make this healing journey a duty. It is my duty to get well and to be well enough to continue the work that I started and to see to it that I create the systems of sustainability and collaboration that will allow any of these programs to go on beyond my lifespan.​

People often go to a retreat or a healing center  with a set of symptoms that they identify as “their symptoms”. The things they wish would go away (perhaps so that life could “go back to normal”.)

Yet, those symptoms have underlying causes.
Often much deeper than we imagine.

A retreat or a healing center that is dedicated to the transformation that our lives are capable of (and dedicated to that transformation creating better citizens, a better society, a more connected world), won’t likely allow us to believe that these are just the pesky symptoms of our life which, if we just solved them, we could go back out to the world to be “productive members of society again”. ​

In our country, those who were fighting for our independence from Britain were also colonizing the native people who already inhabited this land, since time immemorial.

I sat with this recurring painful societal quandary (recurring because it happens in me every year) in my meditation this morning. Whereas, normally, my meditation is quiet, reflective and still, this morning this poignancy and pain wafted in. I welcomed it. I felt it in my body. I allowed it to move in whatever way it needed to.

After meditation, I did a google search with the words that could best describe my painful inner conflict. I thought it might be hard to find something in the Google sea of options for my search. I must have articulated it well enough for Google because the top item on the list met me where I was wanting to be met.

This is what came at the top of the search engine:
Why the US can't claim to have been India's colonial cousin in its struggle against the British | By Mitra Sharafi

I am also reminded that Juneteenth was recently celebrated. Some call it our Second Independence Day as it marks the effective end of slavery in the US. This is a day that I celebrate.

Our 4th of July:
I realize it’s a complicated world. I can understand the desire to celebrate one’s freedom. Yet, I also see that many of us in the dominant culture celebrate “freedoms” that have harmed and continue to harm others. We may not even realize we are doing it since our seemingly mundane or commonplace actions are so woven into daily life that something such as filling our gas tank is overlooked for the damage it is causing. 

Many people’s freedoms are being taken away as I write this blog. Affirmative action is under threat at the university level. One person’s freedom to bear arms is another person’s fear of attending public school. Countless people have had the same freedoms available to me as a middle class Caucasian woman denied to them by racism’s continued influence in resource allocation, barriers to access for essential services, social justice issues, and systems of oppression.  

Sometimes people equate freedom with the privilege to do what they want. Does money then equal freedom? Of course, having money makes it easier to move about in this world with some assurance or ease. Yet, those of us looking deeply know that money doesn’t bring the deepest freedom. And that how it is acquired can actually cause the opposite of freedom, even if one is wealthy.​

Sometimes people feel they’ve earned the freedom to do certain things, perhaps outside of their usual behavior or their stated value system, because they’ve been through a period of strain or they’ve paid some invisible dues by doing backbreaking work, either mentally or physically, on behalf of a pressure outside of themselves, such as a job, or on a bigger scale, the “machine”. Corporate culture feeds the merchant culture of consumerism, seducing us until we’ve earned “this or that” freedom.  The freedom to purchase things that we want, even though they may have been grown, raised, made or shipped using the exploitative labor of people living in dependent poverty. We make these purchases and, even though they may end up in the landfill later, we have some fleeting, justified happiness that we might mistake as freedom, contentment, momentary satisfaction. Only to need something more. Again. And, again.

Before I am just dowsing any remaining fondness you have for the upcoming holiday, let me say that I do want us to celebrate freedom. I just want us to truly know what it is and to make a commitment to raising up freedom, human rights, and the welfare of all species as zestfully as we might pursue our own freedom. Since most people in the dominant culture are pursuing pleasure more than freedom, we have society-wide dilemma. This, along with the way this holiday is represented and what its narrative leaves out, is what troubles me. 

What, then, am I doing about my inner quandary?

I’m deepening my commitment to the ethical precepts outlined in the 5 Imperatives. (These imperatives have been my focus for the last few months and will be our focus for the August retreat at Breitenbush as well. Check the link for more info on that.)

Really specifically, I’m taking a closer look at each of the teachings and asking how I can deepen those in my own life.

The First Imperative:
How do I truly express my care for the welfare of all others beyond my daily prayer for this? And my efforts to revive our programs in Oregon’s prisons, or any other offering or program I might make?  For me, there has to be an equal amount of raising up the welfare of the greater good along with the reduction of exploitation, oppression, colonization, and injustices.  My life so far has placed me in situations where I have had the privilege to create programs and opportunities, for which I feel deeply grateful and honored. But, if I pan back the camera and look at where I have given explicit energy to the reduction of exploitation, it’s far less. Therein lies one of my commitments upon returning to the US. How can I get involved, in an active way, not just with my voice within my small circle of influence, but a truly active way to be involved?

Stay Tuned for the remaining imperatives and check out the posts on our FB page as well.

Creating Connection in the Online Yoga Classroom
Part of a teacher’s job in any classroom is to create a community of learning. When I did my yoga teacher training, I was very aware that a large part of my learning happened in the daily milieu of being with my training cohort. It wasn’t just about content.  I learned from the content, for sure, but I also learned about yoga through the sense of community we created and from our connections.  I learned from seeing how my teacher’s responded to other students, how they addressed issues or explored, in real-time, the physical learnings and the questions that arose for other trainees. 

So how do we create a felt sense of what it means to learn yoga together when we are teaching online? How do we foster community among our yoga students if they are not in a shared physical space?
The goal with online yoga teaching is still to create a field of learning, where we, as the teacher, can sense each student, and our students can experience safety and co-learning. We want to share students’ transformational moments so they can be a catalyst for other transformational moments. 

In this video, I discuss specific tactics I use in my teaching to create this sense of community and connection in my yoga classes and yoga teacher trainings. 


Practicing Mindfulness in Our Own Teaching
Even yoga teachers can get caught up in the stress of expectation that has become a part of our culture. We have high expectations of ourselves, and we feel stress around what we perceive our students expect from us. The shift to teaching online has made many yoga teachers feel even more pressure to "perform" or "stand out from the crowd." But when we focus on performance or meeting others' expectations, we do our students a disservice.

That is why I developed Getting in the GAP, a 3-step mindfulness practice to use before teaching yoga. Click the button to learn more and download your free copy: ​

The next time you practice savasana I encourage you to try on this mantra:
Earth returns to earth.
Water returns to water.
Fire returns to fire.
Air returns to air.
Ether returns to ether.

I am only being loaned these elements as a grace through which I might live,
and love, and serve,
and express gratitude.

Since this holiday is intended as a celebration, I’ll reserve my further reflections on our ecological dependence (and our dilemma) for now. I know people are accustomed to shorter attention spans and we sometimes wince when a newsletter or an email asks more of us than we can digest in one sitting.

Embracing Interdependence
While  I could elaborate on brain science and our survival impulses many of you have already heard discussions on this or have read other writings.
Today, may we consider these interdependences:

• The roads on which you will travel were paved by people you’ve likely never met and whose lives likely preceded yours. Perhaps they were preparing for your arrival.
• The electricity and the technology on which you depend (in order to charge the device on which you are reading this) were developed by people you’ve never met whose instincts included innovation, connection, or communication. While so much of our computerized time seems to be causing separation, perhaps today remembering those who are supporting you to have this opportunity at all will remind you of your dependence on them. May we read, type, swipe, shop, listen, and respond with gratitude for the support offered to us.
• If you’re attending a family gathering, consider its poignancy and that it is a potent window into our vulnerability and our grace. Explore the value of seeing this configuration of cells and that configuration of cells (family members) as coming along with its developed personalities, biases, curiosities, quirks, annoyances, and amiability. And, while you’re looking through this lens, imagine each person shaped by the biologically hard-wired needs for safety and connection throughout their life span.   Each shaped by relationships and events you weren’t at, as well as cultural, historical, and intergenerational forces.  If you can see your family members with yoga’s “x-ray vision”, you will see their indwelling “suchness” and the character that they have become. Perhaps you will also play a small role in the direction toward which they lean their curiosity and vitality!   Rather than seeing people as their problems or their annoyances, for this weekend, let’s view them as the combination of countless processes from which they have been shaped.

Freedom, Not Independence
Perhaps a pursuit worthy of more commitment than independence is Freedom:

• Freedom from suffering.
• Freedom from the limiting ideas we have about ourselves and each other.
• Freedom from the conditioning in us that perpetuates harm and separateness. Freedom from our guardedness and the inevitable distancing in us from the divine (a distance which causes inner restlessness - even when we aren’t aware that it is the divine for which we long - and which we may try to fill with busyness, possessions, distractions, substances, opinions, and so on).

Yoga teaches us that it is possible, through skillful means, dedicated effort, and non-attachment, to become free from that which binds us. The more of us dedicated to this freedom, the more loving, conscious, intimate, and wisely interdependent our communities, and our world can become.

As a mental health therapist, healer, educator, or yoga steward, it's our responsibility (and our honor) to provide the conditions of enough safety, stability, and structure for our client or student to come into a relationship with themselves and with us in which we are able to collaborate on their healing. To be this stable enough lighthouse (as we like to call it), it is profoundly important that our compassionate (sattvic) nature is alive in us.

However, it is important to remember that compassion doesn't mean that we fall into apathy or resignation.
That would deepen tamas. 

We are also in a role where we have the honor of helping a client to choose actions (rajas) in healthy directions for them. (Action without wisdom won't be helpful.  And, swinging back and forth between inertia and compulsive action that lacks wisdom may cause a deepening of the inertia when efforts aren't producing the desired outcome.)

With this in mind, we recommend the following considerations which we  teach to clinicians in our trainings :

• As the lighthouse, maintain your steadiness and non-judgment. Stay aware of your own compassionate nature and acknowledge where you get distracted, impatient, or urgent for the client. This information might hint at how parts of them are also feeling. Or it may also hint at how other people have been responding to them regarding their pattern. Being a stable, present, non-judging presence revives networks in their brain (and gut) for empathy and relationship. It also diminishes the sense of isolation they may live with, internally or in other relationships in their life. (Tamas is a quality of inertia, pessimism, hopelessness or helplessness, and tends to cause withdrawal and social isolation or the retraction of one's authentic self in social settings.)
  
  
• Encourage the client to come into contact with the body-based sensations of tamas (of the stuckness their pattern causes). What do these sensations feel like? Where are they located in the body? Are they a particular size, shape, or color?
  
  
• As you ask them to stay with these sensations in the physical body (even if it seems mysterious or dark in there). Remember that you are inviting a small amount of action (rajas) - to bring attention to a sensation, an experience. Also remember that you are asking them to do this in real time, while they have you in relationship with them and the value of your "lighthouseness". They will not need to inquire any more deeply nor any moment longer than they feel safe. And, they will have your presence (sattva) to help bring them to shore when needed.

 

• As they stay with this, even for a few moments, ask them to notice any way in which the sensations shift when they bring attention to them. How are the sensations themselves responding?
  
  
• This is a hint at the process of change. Attention (rajas) is an active (even when gentle) inquiry. Attention is also the beginning of relationship. As this opens an opportunity in them, in their body and most of all, in the relationship between them and their body, now is an ideal moment to recommend they extend compassionate attention toward that in them which has been held in, burdened, or confused by the tamasic pattern.
• Compassionate (sattva) attention here can take the form of an inner dialogue from them toward their body:
                 "I see you."
                 "It must have been hard to hold that on your own." 
                 *I'm here now." 
  
  
• Regarding the need to apply some action to their life, even a small action that represents their commitment to change, if we request this from their body, not from their habitual mind, we will also be mentoring them in the development of a relationship with their body. We can start by asking them to ask their body:

                          "What's needed now?" (this means in this very moment) 
                          "How can I help?" (them asking this of their body)

• ​As they inquire and you sense the completion of a portion of this inner dialogue, notice your own compassionate nature again. How has it grown, been moved, stayed present, become distracted, fallen into attachment on behalf of the client (wanting this to go a certain way)? Remind yourself that you are their lighthouse - and that you can seek out your personal lighthouse later, too. (such as a friend, supervisor, or colleague)

 

• ​Now you can invite them to come back into relationship with you. You might ask them how was their experience? (Even if they were reporting along the way, when you ask them now, you are also transitioning them into the present moment relational field with you.) As they share their experience,  offer your respect, appreciation, admiration, for real things (not for what you make up in your head about their experience). It is helpful to reflect back to them as closely as you're able (without being a robot).
  
  
• And then we recommend the relational questions: 
                "How is it for you to share this with me?"
                "How has it been to have my presence here with you?"
                "Is there anything you would like me to know about having me here to witness or support you?"
  
  
• These last questions further build the network of your relationship with each other. You may now become the trusted "other" who can ask them about applying wise action in their life. You can ask them (without them feeling pressured or having a sense that they might fail): "As you leave this session, based on what you experienced here today:
               "What wisdom might you apply to the pattern that has been troubling you?
                "How will you apply this wisdom to your pattern?"
                "And, very important, how will you do this in relationship with your body?"
  
  To learn more about our Yoga Psychology Training program, click here.

How Does Yoga Create Secure Attachment (if it also teaches non-attachment)?

Somatic Secure Attachment
In the process of yoga, secure attachment networks are neurologically stimulated, and interpersonally nourished. As we teach students how to have more consistent, more nourishing, more relational attitudes and considerations of their physical body as a resource, their sense of being in relationship with their body changes. How they relate to their musculo-skeletal, physiological, and neurological expressions is a reflection of one layer of their attachment networks. As historical trauma lives in the body and brain, the somatic practices of yoga - including breathing, sensing, moving, respecting, reflecting, and inviting their body to be integrated into their life in healthier ways - stimulates new ways of being in relationship with their personal ecology.

This creates a ripple effect into relationship with the larger ecology - nature itself - and all of the resources being provided each moment. Life is taking care to breathe us, to provide us with eyes that blink in the too bright sun, and with ears that hear the symphony around us, whether beautiful, neutral, or non-neutral (aka irritating). 

Innate Belonging: Interpersonal Timeless Community
In the process of practicing yoga, especially with a knowledgeable and responsible teacher, (and practicing the whole of yoga, not just asana), students are also connecting to an ages old tradition. Secure attachment networks awaken neurologically when invited to belong to a community both within the physical structure of an in person class or one-to-one session and in the more vast community of people practicing - all over and throughout time - to awaken from suffering and return to wholeness and grace. 

We become part of the yoga tradition. A skilled, responsible, well-trained yoga teacher or yoga therapist understands the importance of this internal development. In yoga we call it Sangha, community of practitioners, seekers, students, and Lineage, a sense of our teachers and their teachers before them.

In laypersons terms we can understand this as one of the accessible doorways to re-awaken a client's inner sense of innate belonging. Unconditionally. Consistently. Lovingly. Students and clients can discover that Yoga, as a path belonging to no one individually (and not to any corporation) is a wide, warm welcome to our human condition, in all of its variations and turbulences, as well as its potentials and longings.
​
​Relational Secure Attachment:
And, we must include here the relationship the student has with their yoga teacher or yoga therapist (or their mental health therapist, or spiritual friend, Anam Cara).

In our training school at yogajoy, we help teachers, therapists, and providers to become interpersonal, non-judging, non-anxious resources for their students and clients, without risking burnout or overwhelm. This is a very intentional process. We must respect the relational attachment networks of the provider as well as the client and student.

Ironically, it's not about having stronger boundaries in the sense that our Western view continues to tell us to "take care of ourselves first", or not to let in the toxicity of others.

I'll follow up on this in my next blog. Stay tuned!