Living Through Suffering is Why I Teach Yoga — It’s Universal
By definition, a teacher is one who educates and facilitates a learning process for students. Yoga teachers vary from style, lineage, specialty, and niche — the yogic path is vast and dynamic. As with any subject, there’s flexibility in learning and teaching styles, and different students gravitate towards different teachers.
Yoga warrants years, even lifetimes, of study — it’s a deeply personal self-study process of breathing patterns, being bound in shapes, opening up physical channels (srotas) or energetic channels (nadis) in the body, and observing one’s ethical behavior and mental tendencies. As one of my teachers Cheri Rae says, “Yoga is magic.”
So, let me introduce myself — I’m a yoga teacher and I’m on a mission to inspire folks to be nourished by their own breath and empowered through the guidance of listening to the innate intelligence of their body. We are all unique and universal principles along the yogic path are as a process to be liberated from suffering. I’m dedicating my life to studying, honoring, evolving and propagating this discipline because healing.
The yogic path teaches non-violence, non-stealing, truthfulness, contentment, cleanliness, surrender to God and other nice virtues that support being a decent human being in the world. For me and many others, yoga is a deeply philosophical pursuit.
What is the fabric of our existence? How does our inner landscape feel? Why do I feel this way in this part of my body specifically? What data is stored in my mind-body interface?
Back to suffering — Most of us experience a deck traumas of in life, some significantly more than others, and perhaps some of these traumas are yet to be experienced.
All of us have experienced either complex familial dynamics, tragic events or relationships that led us astray from a deep seated sense of well-being, confidence and trust in the world or lack of trust in ourselves. We’ve all dealt with painful shit in our lives, relatively. It’s part of the human narrative.
Why does this matter? Why is pain such a valuable part of our life experience? Pain is worth mentioning because there is a saying that, “Everyone comes to yoga through suffering”. Read that again and think of your life.
“Everyone comes to yoga through suffering”.
If it wasn’t yoga, maybe it was meditation, music, surfing, programming, gaming, travel, volunteering, biking, baking, gardening, horses, a pet, something that was your outlet and lifeline for some period of time. Today, there are over 2 billion people in the world who practice yoga — because it works.
Back in 2013, I walked into my first yoga class less than six months out of intensive eating disorder therapy for bulimia. That first class was hard, really hard — it was taught by discipline-oriented Hatha teacher, Richard Manaputy. He taught me that when we’re challenged, we learn to move through the parts of our mind that tell us “You can’t do that”, “That’s too hard”, “You’re not capable”, etc. He was incredibly supportive and taught us that the energy of one person in the room (mental weakness, for example) impacts everyone else in the room. Being a former competitive athlete, I resonated with the team dynamic and invitation to train for myself and the benefit of others.
I kept returning to 1 or 2 classes each week and practicing yoga has been a fabric of my existence ever since. Of course, I’ve found gentler styles of yoga and continue expanding the scope of what I practice and teach. It’s natural that different folks like different strokes.
Overall and styles of yoga combined, I have a whole set of tools for physical-emotional-mental-spiritual well-being and my recovery with food has been progressive. These are tools I want to pass along, the same way they’ve been passed to me.
Healing is a process in it of itself — I’m still healing in my relationship with my body, food, my past and it’s been 8 years on this yogic journey. I see a therapist and am committed to the various stages of recovery. However, my aptitude to respond to stress and a world that is literally eco-systemically under immense threat, feels more solid than it was 8 years ago.
Suffering can be the big, horrific stuff in our life from eating disorder hospitalization, job losses during pandemic, increasingly raging wildfire seasons, systemic racism, rape or failed pregnancies.
Suffering is also the little stuff — attachments to the way food is prepared, being emotionally tied to the way your partner communicates with you, being annoyed at the mindless dude who is texting while driving, the sound of political debates coming from the television or reacting to dirty dishes in the sink.
Suffering is still a part of my life, and I’m not foolish enough to think that my suffering will be eradicated, let alone suffering across our universe— suffering and pain are teachers and doses of reality that serve a purpose.
Yoga is a vast healing journey guiding you somatically and psychically back to yourself and the things greater than ourselves. There is no shame in healing either, it’s a liberating, nourishing and empowering process.
Beyond the work of the individual, cultivation of mind-body awareness is part of our societies healing — to learn what is the mind, what is the body. This should be included in standard public education, and is certainly what I’ll be teaching to children in the future. All of our children will face parallel challenges, and learning how they operate, and techniques to clear rubble from a path of seeing clearly, is imperative for their ability to navigate the world we pass down.
I was academically trained with a degree in Anthropology and Geography — I love people, culture, environments, and the ways we move. I love learning about the nitty gritty details of our stories and the differences in how we live.
Yoga is a study anatomy and physiology, Hindu culture, Sanskrit, philosophy, Hindu mythology and mechanics of the modern world. For me, teaching yoga is a dream come true. Having stumbled into that first yoga class in 2013 was an open door that changed the rest of my life.
What I wish for you, whether you’re a teacher or searching for a path through human suffering— is to remember that you deserve to feel healthy in mind-body-soul. The time you take to heal as an individual ripples out into the world as our willingness to sit with the uncomfortable and look at the roots of our suffering increases. Your healing and your health is an important part of the universal ecosystem.
May we set intentions as we begin, adapt and evolve into the rest of this monumental year. May we all have the courage to study our own suffering and train our mind-body to be adept in responding to the thick, chapters of change coming our way.
