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Yoga Teacher Talk (YTT) is authenic yoga conversation with your favorite yoga mentors, trend-setting yoga teachers, and wellness experts who are changing the paradym on traditional instruction. YTT invites you add to your 200 or 500-level yoga teacher training and elevate your presence as an instructor. Host Becca Schmidt, E-RYT5000/YACEP, has more than 20 years experience on the lead mat, having taught more than 10,000 classes, workshops and wellness retreats. This show, formerly, The Language of Yoga, offers a fun, engaging platform for yoga teachers of all branches of yoga to gain confidence and continue their YTT for years to come.
Go With the Flow and Get Unstuck
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Becca: [00:00:00] Welcome to Yoga Teacher Talk, a podcast for yoga teachers to help you with themes, stories, and ideas to elevate your classes to their highest level. I'm your host, Becca Schmidt. So today I am flying solo. I have no guests with me today, but I do wanna share a really great book that I read and I kept thinking it really has a lot to do with yoga.
So the book is called, it's a memoir actually, and it's called The Well Lived Life by Dr. Gladys McCarry. And the, probably the most fascinating thing about this whole book is that the woman wrote the book when she was 103 years old. So she spent her whole life kind of breaking all the traditional boundaries of all kinds of things with medicine and just the way she thinks.
She was born in India in 1920, and when [00:01:00] she was a child, she traveled with her parents, both whom were doctors on medical safaris, visiting patients throughout the country of India. In 1935, she came back to the United States for medical school. And then while she was in medical school, she was very observant about the way medicine worked.
And she kept challenging traditional Western practices. She kept seeing that medicine practiced here in the West was very focused on just the part of the body that was in disease and not the whole person. For her, holistic medicine meant the art and science of healing the whole body and that the body would begin to heal itself.
So she was one of the trailblazers really recognizing the interconnection of all the aspects of the body, including the mind, [00:02:00] the emotions, the spirit, and even the compassionate care that the patient received. So needless to say, Dr. Gladys was not very popular with the other doctors as she was pointing her fingers at all the things that they were doing wrong.
But Dr. Gladys practiced medicine for 60 years and over time became known as the mother of holistic medicine. So in her memoir, Dr. Gladys shares her six secrets to health and happiness. And I wanted to share the secret that resonated with me most as a yoga teacher, and I hope it'll resonate with you as well.
So flow, as we see it as a yoga teacher, we often just think about, you know, vigneasa flow or soft movement, you know, flow on and off your mat, the way we dance on the mat. But with Dr. Gladys, flow is, [00:03:00] uh, an innate energy that all humans have, and not only humans, but all animals, everything in nature, everything around us contains flow.
We in our world call that prana or chi. It's also called life force, of course, ka or Atman. It is the vital essence. It is the life blood, it's water, it's ocean breeze, it's flames of the fire, it's even the slow current of the earth, okay? So she was trying to get people to recognize that we are not separate from the life essence of the earth.
So I think in yoga, uh, as we teach classes, I think we can sort of slow down and really take a look at how we are [00:04:00] aligned with the world around us. So I had a couple ideas, um ... So when we teach a class, we can actively seek or create flow. And when we do that, we are aligning with not only our life force, but the life force around us.
And one of the things that struck me is something she said about stillness. She says," Too much stillness promotes tension in all parts of the body, including our circulation, digestion, and our muscular health. "If we don't release emotions by movement and we allow stuck energy, we're compromising the systems of the body whose job it is to rid the body of toxins and the systems that move hormones [00:05:00] to tissues and organs throughout the body.
So her idea of movement is far beyond just, you know, stretching and, uh, what we might just normally think of as flow in yoga. When we try to block flow, and that might be energetic flow, when we are stubborn, we experience great suffering in the body. If we feel stuck mentally, energetically, or in the body, we need to look for that little piece that is still flowing, and we need to nurture that piece that's still flowing and allow it to affect the body more and more and more until we begin to feel this, uh, alignment with the nature around us.
All right, so how do we do that on the yoga mat? So I actually, [00:06:00] uh ... So we can support this energetic flow in the yoga mat, but let's start off the mat. So take a moment if you're, if you like this idea of teaching this energetic flow and how we align with nature, take some time to spend some, uh, moments in nature, observe, watch literally how the wind blows, the branches of a tree, observe water flowing, even if it's just from a faucet.
Watch a child run around and scream and play on a playground. And if you have access to an aquarium or a, uh, pet store, take a look at the fish and watch the gills of the fish pumping the water. It kind of gives you a different perspective that everything in its natural state and its most happy [00:07:00] state is flowing.
All right, so now let's move into the yoga studio here. We'll move from the outside world into the yoga space, and we'll introduce this concept of flow, again, from a beginner's mind. So I like to introduce the theme of flow during seated meditation, and then maybe what you do, you could even have them lie down on their mat, maybe supported by a bolster or a blanket, and maybe you dim the lights.
Play music that might be deep ocean sounds or whales, and ask them to just visualize being underwater.
So after visualizing being underwater and just having that calm sense, then begin to flow with a nice, easy practice with [00:08:00] your students, flowing through cat and cow, flow to down dog, and then to updog. Just continue maybe a front to back flow, a low lunge, bring your arms in the sky, bring your arms back, front leg long, and just find that beautiful flow, front to back, front to back, and then allow your students to just kind of do a yogi's choice here, do what feels good for them, and then encourage them one more layer.
This is what I do a lot. When, when I do that low lunge flow, then I say," Make your way to wide leg forward fold. "And typically, if you give students opportunity to flow in wide leg forward full, they're going to come into scandasana or just bend one knee and really lengthen, um, that long leg, that inner thigh, they just [00:09:00] lengthen there, so they just will flow there.
And then bring your students to downward dog.
So downward dog can be a pose where we offer stillness, but even in stillness, in this little piece that feels like stagnation, we're still flowing.
But if we focus on what is stuck, in other words, if we have this thought that maybe rolls around in our brain over and over and over and over, that is stopping the flow of everything that is not that thought. So you wanna encourage your students to be in a state of observation, and then tap into what we just mentioned a moment ago, that leak in the [00:10:00] dam, right?
So if you have these repetitive thoughts, that becomes the dam and you are stuck there and stuckness restricts and, and it holds back light. So when you create the dam, you're blocking ... You're actually, what I thought was kind of interesting what she said is you're actually blocking the natural order of nature.
I thought that was a really powerful thing to say. So if you're consciously moving through this block and you're thinking of it in terms of, um, physical movement, then it, it sort of all gels together. You could do one leg in the sky and then come up into a warrior one and just continue some flow where that stuckness starts, uh, releasing.
It starts moving.
Life is full of [00:11:00] these blocks. It might be, uh, something that's just going on in your head, something that you're worried about. It might be a, an injury or an illness.
So we can find the trickle in the dam, in the breath, in the movement, in the flow of the practice, the physical flow of the practice. We think about lengthening and contracting the muscles. Even just a little contraction is like giving the, um, that stuckness an opportunity to hydrate if you pull the muscles in in contraction and then on the release you feel the blood moving in that area.
You can teach this go with the flow with [00:12:00] practices that are around the meridians or the chakras or alternate nostril breathing. All of that is about opening up the channels in the body.
I hope that will give you some food for thought, and I hope you'll pick up Dr. Gladys' book and let her inspire you to understand that bigger theory of flow being the life force, and that when we try to block it, we are literally blocking the way nature works.
Keep listening to our podcast and do share it. Share it with some of your fellow yoga teacher friends, and I think they'll really enjoy some of the episodes as much as you have. Keep listening, and I'll, uh, catch you next [00:13:00] time.