Tag Archives: yoga classes

Jan7

Transference — Tend Your Own Garden

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

I don’t know what it is about the winter, but it seems to bring out the bear in me. At a time, when I should be going inward, slowing down and reflecting in order to prepare for a better or new / improved renewal in the spring, I have found myself lately drawn in to the drama of other people and getting really tired of it.

Usually I can float on the surface of such things; usually I can smile and nod, like a game show host at the unraveling contestant on my set. I could gesture to the camera tech or producer to cut to another shot.

But lately, the allure has been too much. I have found myself zooming in, in super-HD to examine the pores and nose hairs of the people in my life, looking for flaws and looking for ways to fix them. For me, this is wrong, and it’s classic transference:

Transference is a phenomenon characterized by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. One definition of transference is “the inappropriate repetition in the present of a relationship that was important in a person’s childhood.”

Basically, I am recreating the dynamics of the same crap / relationships I had as a child. (Transference is hard to depict, and it’s very subtle. If someone wants to help me out here, correct me: please do!)

This is my own layperson’s understanding of transference: that when a person named Percival does something that reminds you of a person named Mortimer and you end up unconsciously treating Percival like you would have treated Mortimer, even though conditions, situations, context, relationship, everything is different.

And so Percival is all like, “Gladys! I had no idea you felt this way!!” And you’re all like, “Gladys?! My name is Hilda!”

WAKE UP! This isn’t about your grandparents.

Hahahaaaa… Anyway…

That is transference as far as I can understand. And it’s unconscious; it is something we are not aware of, but when we become aware of it, and our tendency to exhibit transference in our relationships with other people, our lives can change.

I miss you, Charles Schulz.

It didn’t used to be like this. I have had significant “training” (therapy) to help me understand when this is happening. In fact, I quit my first therapist because I believe he started exhibiting transference to me and I felt the neutrality was jeopardized. But lately? It’s not like it’s been happening without my knowledge. I know better.

It was like sipping from the bottle of chaos for me. Look at another person’s so-called problems, and treat them as I would the person that I’m reminded of so I don’t have to focus on myself.

I chalk it up to boredom. I also chalk it up to a basic fatigue of navel gazing, of looking back at the misfires in order to create a more content and pleasant future or present.

It’s addictive, the navel gazing, and it’s really narcissistic too, because after a while, if we don’t make any healthy changes based on our navel gazing, if we don’t become aware of our tendencies redirect, or deflect, or point the finger at someone else, we end up deciding that our way of living is A-OK, Billy Bob. (I don’t know where Billy Bob came from…) And nothing changes. We drink/gamble/eat/smoke/shop/dream/navel gaze too much, we shout too much, we hold on too tightly. We don’t improve.

What bugs me most about result-less navel gazing is that lots of people are into it. As a yoga instructor, I try very hard to live the code of mindfulness, of “live unto others” and be cool with whatever happens because that’s meant to happen.

I had a student who reached out to me. She has since quit my classes (yes, they do leave me). It was not under the best of circumstances that she left (she transferred her past / mother on to me and wanted more of me than I felt was professionally appropriate). But I don’t “cut” people off unless I get a directive from them or the situation goes from awkward to untenable. So as is customary, when I was sending out the announcement for the upcoming session, she asked me to remove her from my email list. I did. I get it: clean slate, start over. I dig that. It showed me growth from her. I was actually happy for her.

Namaste and all that stuff.

Moving on.

Oddly, a few months later, she sent me a link to a blog about yoga instructors and how we need to check our egos at the door and not make the classes all about ourselves and trying to attain the perfect pose and just letting our students meet THEMSELVES where they are, so-called “limitations” and all.

Well, if you’re a friend of mine, or you’ve read anything I’ve written or taken a class of mine, you would know right off the bat, that I strive each day to be a growth-oriented and “it’s ok where you are” type person. That paradigm shift for me was massive, 10 years ago. I can hear me now: I didn’t just accept things the way they were! I fought them! That solid, cold, black iron rod must be bent and turned into a platter to suit my needs! Without fire! Without heat! Without cajoling or kindness or flattery, sincere or otherwise… Man, I was a fighter, but without cause.

Back to reality: the irony, of course, is that this former student (and I can say this with a ton of confidence) was still projecting her stuff on to me. My days of “perfectionism” are toast. Twenty years of combined marriage, parenting, yoga, crazy mother, and classic psychotherapy, CBT and EMDR have exorcised that demon. She spoke endlessly to me about her need to make the Yoga Journal -cover perfect pose when reality simply didn’t allow for it.

I recall clearly that I would speak with her after many classes. Calmly, nodding, listening and hearing her, feeling her desperation for acceptable levels of perfection….

I drew her attention to a tree outside and said, “Would you ever consider that tree imperfect? Would you say that it’s not a ‘tree’ as defined by what our understanding of what a tree is? It’s got a missing limb or two, some knots and a hole in its trunk…” She shook her head ‘no.’

“Those things give it character. A place for animals to live.” I added, like freakin’ Snow White Freud.

She nodded and agreed, her eyes welling up a little in the sun. Her nose grew pink and she started to chew on her inner cheek, leaning on one leg more than the other.

“Then why do you beat yourself up? Do you think that tree would consider you somehow imperfect? Why must you insist that you are? And why must you fight your story, your reality, to prove –for whom I don’t know– your perfection?”

I was all “This is our reality… It is what it is, man… y’dig?” In my Nehru shirt and dandelion chain ~~tiara~~ crown.

She said she understood, that she appreciated my help and time. That I was a true teacher and friend to her for doing so and she thanked me.

Then the phone calls increased, the emails increased and the text messages increased. She wanted more of my time; I began to feel uneasy. This is my issue: I didn’t like being someone’s salvation. I couldn’t save my own mother, there was no way I could to do it for a yoga student.

She wanted more of the class’s time and attention. It became a cyclone of need. I had to draw a line; I had my own personality limitations as well as a real interest in protecting the integrity of the class, the time of other students, as well as my reputation as an instructor to manage disruption. I had to ask her after class to stop the chatter, the distractions in class, the bringing of the “outer world” into the room. “…We take our shoes off as a gesture of the solemnity and respect for the practice of yoga, likewise, we need to do with our day, our woes, our ego and our mirth. I ring the bell at the beginning to announce the tenor of practice, to introduce a new moment. Not everyone had a bad day like you did… not everyone just aced a final like you did… everyone is working on something personal and unique in here, so please respect that.”

She didn’t say so. She didn’t say anything in fact. She packed up her stuff and thanked me for a nice class. Only later, I surmise, did she decide to tell me (indirectly through that email) that my interests in protecting my yoga classes felt unkind and ego-identfied to her. That I was asserting my “authority” in a non-produtive and territorial way. I was the enemy. She resorted to her native coping skills and never communicated with me again.

Until that link to the blog.

So I sit and I sigh. Distracted by this not-very-subtle jab at my person and teaching style I start to wonder, actively, about that person. About what makes her so high and mighty, what makes her the high priestess of ego and yoga teaching? She’s not such hot stuff, why if she were then … And what’s with the contacting ME when she told me to take her off my list?? Talk about BOUNDARY ISSUES!!! Why she …. …. …. ….

And down the rabbit hole we go. Watch out for that root on the right as you go down, it’s like a whip.

The good news is that that rabbit hole is brighter now; it has landing strips by it and it’s not as bumpy, deep or as curvy as it used to be. My descents into it are less intense and more fleeting. It’s more of a gopher hole. But the gopher holes are everywhere and they’re in my garden.

Instead of tending to my gopher holes, instead of sealing them up or planting a flower in them, I look over the fence, into someone else’s garden and I start to think about where an azalea would look good to cover up that ugly corner; or that a shade tree would do well to keep from burning up the astilbe… My, she doesn’t know how to tend to her garden; she’s got shade plants in full sun… her kids are likely on drugs too… that son is a mess… I thought my mom was weird … her mother is a trip…

… and there we go again. Me thinking about someone else’s crap instead of my own. Me transferring my energy and my thoughts and my precious little time left on this planet to someone else, someone who’s into the drama, who’s into the distraction and who’s not able to understand my “brand” of help; or my timing.

People need to work at their own pace and just because I can see all the traps and falls awaiting that person, it doesn’t mean 1) she can or 2) he cares. Sometimes the elixir of someone else’s problems or issues are SO ~~important~~ strong that they keep us from working on ourselves. As I said to a friend this morning, fully aware of all the trappings of the drama I’m hovering over, “I love decorating someone else’s house…”

What else this means is that I stop the narrative I’ve been telling about my life. I’m 47. It’s time I put things in their boxes and ship them off for the garbage dump (or the book). My story of who I am and how I got here is precious to me, yes, but it doesn’t define me and it needn’t hold me hostage anymore. I’m not just the result of my parents’ union; I have transcended that — years ago — and I am a fully functional adult female human who has co-created three more humans. I am more than 1967 – 1990; so much more. I am 1991 – 2003; and 2003 to now, and counting. I look back at the time I feel I have squandered worrying about my mother and father, about “reputation” and about fear.

The only way I can, and you can, and your neighbor and your former friend or ex-spouse, or ex-lover, or former yoga student can fully achieve our own fantastic full-blown personhood is to learn from the past, not let it hold us back or down anymore, see it for what it has provided (a backdrop, that is all — and that backdrop changes with the set of our stories!), and move on, with gratitude for all it has provided. We can leave that garden where it is without regret — and that is hard!

Leave that garden in the sun or in the shadows, in a state of flourish or disrepair, but walk away from it nevertheless. It’s not our garden anymore, and the garden that IS ours, needs us. We can walk into our own garden, as modest as it is, and tend to it. Talk to it, let the sun in and the rain fall. We can see it in the greater landscape with all the other gardens, in their own individual growths, and we can admire it all, while keeping the errant vines and the weeds out of ours. And we can step back. And we can see it grow.

Thank you.

Apr24

Missives from the Mat #11: Why Yoga?

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

Standard

I fell in love with my first svasana*, corpse pose, back in 1998. My first child was about six months old and I wanted to try something new to get my bearings on my re-formed body.

I had illusions that my body would return to its pre-child state, that with yoga, I could ease myself back into a world of fitness and of edgy, corporate communications and public relations agility and the pre-baby woman I was. That I’d get my groove back.

I had no clue what I was in for. The person that yoga restored me to is so different from the person I thought I was.

When I was younger, much younger, I remember my mother coming home from her yoga “classes.” I use quotations because I’m not sure what the classes were like back then, in the 70s, and what she actually did. I recall vividly of her *lying on her back, just lying there! and saying, “this is yoga.”

As I’ve aged, but before I allowed yoga to know me (not me to know yoga) I remember thinking, “Bullshit. That’s called ‘lying on your back.’ ”

Another time she came back from her classes, her hair in a scarf and she in a buttoned-down shirt of my dad’s knotted at the waist and wearing beige velour pants. I encountered her again laid on her back as she lifted one leg up in the air. The raised leg was straight and the foot was parallel with the ceiling; the lower leg was flat on the floor. Her hands were by her sides. “This is another yoga move,” she said, as the sunlight through the window set the room softly aglow. She did seem calmer. I was about five or six.

As a child, I’m sure I was eager to learn more, to connect with her in a way that she clearly felt she could have both the advantage and teach me without it seeming like a “lesson” and also to also connect with me in a nonthreatening way in which we were both learning new things.

Mom could extrapolate information and then diffuse it in a completely unique way that, given the right circumstances and a goodly amount of general ignorance in her audience, she would reign omniscient. Yoga in the US was esoteric and weird back then, nothing like the mainstream, studio-on-every-corner, $6.9 billion industry (hey! where’s my share?! oh wait, that’s not yogic) world it inhabits now.

Little did I know, that some 25 years later, I’d begin my own journey on my mat, with my children equally entranced by this mysterious relationship between movement and silence. And I’d also learn that what she was doing, was yoga.

Recovery from trauma

So when I started, I was attuned to the fact that something had changed forever and that even though I knew it was impossible, I endeavored to regain some semblance of my physical being despite having given birth to an eight pound baby whose head measured 14cm. I won’t go into the discussion of childbirth as trauma / business in a hospital, but I will say this: it’s far from a nurturing environment. Pregnancy is one thing, being “prenatal” is something else entirely.

As I look back on it now, the fact is that I knew I was seeking healing. I knew what I’d experienced — all of it, from the invasive tests, to the low count on a premature CVS test, to the weight checks and belly measurements, to the peeing in a cup every two weeks for the last eight weeks, to the false labor, to the rejection at the hospital, to the being up all night, to the final moments, to the wholly disturbing unscheduled induction… to the birth to the recovery, to the incessant overnight interruptions for blood pressure and temperature taking, to being released home, to nursing, to insomnia, to returning to work — was a major disturbance to my qi.

On a level I’ve only recently allowed, it was all trauma. I was angry. I told Mom everything that had happened, but she didn’t seem to acknowledge in on a level that I needed; she brushed it off and said, “that’s the way it goes, kid,” about it all while also allowing some tenderness, but overall, little sympathy.

I remember her telling me I was angry. I didn’t think I was, but as I look back now, I see it. But I didn’t know that yoga would bring me peace and self-acceptance (and still does, despite my crazy ego-induced fallacy that I don’t need self-acceptance). I just went to yoga classes to get my body back, right?

Everyone seeks healing in one way or another

As I’ve continued my journey, now with its latest step as a yoga “teacher,” I’ve had to allow and ultimately embrace jubilantly, actually, that those of us who seek yoga do so because we allow, finally, that we need to be healed.

Some people have families, some people are alone. Some have tight hamstrings, some have loose hamstrings. Others have jet lag, some are mad at the world, some are mad at themselves, some have too much going on, others have too little going on. Some people are sick, some people are healthy. Some people have fears and anxieties, some people are in recovery. No, strike that. Everyone is recovery.

Everyone in that room, on their mat, has a story. Every morning for each person, no matter where they live, starts differently.

One person’s morning might start gently, with a bird’s call outside the window and the golden light streaming into the room between the cracks in the venetian blinds. The eye lids slowly open and flutter, blinking back and forth between near-darkness and sunlight. A stretch in the bed as an arm extends ushering a big inhale as a leg joins in the dance.

Another person’s morning might start from a gorgeous dream when she was young, seventeen even!, on a beach with her first love, walking toward a twilight bonfire on a sultry summer BUUUUUZZZZZZ! She shoots out of bed, knocking her glasses off her nightstand and sending her glass of water into the wall behind the nightstand. No stretching for her. She has to find her glasses and then look for the cup, but not until she finds a towel to clean up the mess.

Another person’s morning might begin with a phone call from a child at school asking for the delivery of a long-lost assignment that is required. This request comes on the heels of a pre-dawn argument with that child about her performance in school and how her future depends on her compliance in her classes and performances. He rushes back from the drop-off, pulls his car into the parking lot, grabs his mat and dashes up the steps to the studio.

Countless other mornings take shape all over the globe, many of them without the answer of a yoga routine through the day or the lifetime of the people experiencing them.

For all of these people, however, there is a practice which awaits them. A practice which meets them where they are in that moment, on their mats. A practice which, if allowed, will show them their strength and their grace, and their limitations. A practice which, when noticed, will show them how much they’ve grown and how much wonder there is yet to experience.

And for all these people, there is a teacher who has also been there, providing she has done her own Work. Becoming a yoga teacher is not easy; to be a sincere one, you have to do a lot of self-discovery and be OK with it. This teacher may not know her students’ personal woes and frustrations and triumphs, but her allowance and realization of every mutual up and down, every moment of ennui, every doubt of what to wear, what to say, how to act and what to think –within herself– is what brings her the courage to stand before them and share her love of yoga, a vital bridge for the work of self-healing.

I stand before people three times a week, sometimes four times a week, amazed and humbled by their confidence in me and my presupposed ability to take them away from themselves for just a few moments each time we meet. I stand before them willingly and without pretense because doing otherwise is inauthentic.

Find your breath, find yourSelf

Every movement has its release: running, skating, rowing, swimming, cycling, dancing, gymnastics … they all offer an opportunity for the practitioner to express him or herself physically in a way that no other activity provides. We create teams of these exercises because others want to engage at the same time and also connect. Then we have people come and watch these teams engage.

In yoga, it’s you and your mat. Partner work exists, but a few of us shy away from all that. We indulge our teachers and form our little groups which help our classmates stretch psychically as well as physically, but we prefer the solo work.

It’s the whole of the solo work, the inhales on a lift and the exhales on a fold; or the inhales on a lift and the exhales on a twist, that creates for a room of people, a symphony of breath and movement. Even though each person is doing it by herself or for himself, the sound of your fellow yogis inhaling and exhaling on their forms at their paces and in their ways affirms the notion that while we are social creatures, we are also solitary ones.

For a yoga teacher, as new as I am, I can say that right now at this stage, I feel it’s the best time: to experience the concert of motion and breath where everyone finds themselves and ultimately loses themselves in the same room. When you lose yourself in yoga, you don’t necessarily have to go looking for yourself … yourself finds you where you are.

“Mom, my quads are really tight.”

All three of my kids have taken yoga classes with me as teacher at one point or another.

I remember when I first started teaching, kids!, I was petrified.

“They’re going to know I’m not certified,” I would insist to myself as a reason not to do it.

“They’re going to know I should have said ‘left foot forward instead of right foot forward,’ ” I would think to myself once I got started.

I look back on that now, six years ago, and I think to myself, “The crap we do to ourselves in the name of advancement is just awful.”

The kids had no idea; they just liked that it wasn’t math or science. As each week went by, it became easier and easier to do. I wasn’t in a limbo state where I felt I had to convince them to do any of it. They just did what I proposed to do because they knew yoga was good for them and they knew they should try it and also because I was “the teacher.”

So as I worked through that, I gathered the nerve to teach adults. And the conversations I have with myself still (and for likely a few sessions which will dot more months, if not years, to go) are still rife with self-doubt, nausea-inducing nervousness and at-times crippling inadequacy fears.

“Oh! I’ve done that! It gets better, I promise,” one yoga teacher friend said to me when she asked me if I’d worked myself sick with worry before a class.

“Have you thrown up yet?” asked another one.

“Almost,” I answered, relieved? that this teacher could relate to where I was coming from.

“I still have moments when I leave the studio and think to myself, ‘well, that was a career low,‘ but the people come back and somehow in the morning, it all seems better,” another one said to me.

“If you do this and it brings you nothing but anxiety, isn’t that defeating the purpose of teaching yoga?” my son asked, his brothers, and my husband nodding in accord and looking at me expectantly.

I have no answer for them other than the slowly revealing one: that each time I teach, it gets a little better. I’m perfectly happy to admit that I’m at the stage where I need I need I need positive feedback.

After dinner, the conversation continues in our bedroom.

“They keep coming back, right? No one has asked for a refund, right?” my husband asks when I pace from plank to downward facing dog to plank to upward facing dog like a Newton’s Cradle toy, just to flush out my anxiety.

“No.” I answer on my presses back to plank. Rats, shoulda answered that on the exhale press back to dog… when will I ever learn?!

“Then just keep showing up. They will too. You’re good at this, Mol,” he sighs, exasperation and humor in his voice over the irony of it all.

Our bedroom door creaks open.

A little shape is in the crack; his silhouette formed by the light in the background.

“Mom? My quads are really tight. Those are my muscles in the front legs, yeah?” Thing 3 asks.

“Yeah, buddy. That’s where they are. Can’t you sleep?” I ask, silently hoping inside that he’ll say no and that he’ll need a cuddle and a moment here. With me.

“I can’t sleep because you won’t stop talking, but also because, yeah, my quads are tight. I think it’s from growing pains,” he says. “Can we do some yoga? To help stretch them out?”

“Sure buddy. Go get your mat.” And he turns around because it’s right outside the door and he drags it in and we do some yoga together.

He asked me to buy an app for him where we can design a bedtime routine for him. He does it, but he prefers me to teach him. I watch the routine, and give him pointers.