Tag: real life yoga teaching

just when you think you’ve had enough….

by L. Valdez Karl


…someone says something nice.

The longer I teach, the more I read about the corporatization of American yoga, the more I was thinking that I should quit teaching group classes and just concentrate on my own practice (which is very free-form but that’s another post), find my own yoga tribe and disappear somewhere…

then someone tells me how I changed their life.

I was going to drive into Chicago this morning to take a class at the studio where I trained. I live 45 miles straight west of Chicago and on a good day it might take me 75 minutes in the morning — a bad day would be 2 hours. It was 7:30 am and I was leaving for a 10 AM class. So I get into my car, leave the garage, turn on the radio, and heard about how bad traffic was all over Chicagoland this morning. The traffic announcer said that three lanes were down on the expressway I take and it was a parking lot. I pulled back into my garage.

Since I was dressed for yoga I decided to go to another studio to a friend’s class, she teaches “Tantra Yoga” in the style of Rod Stryker. I got there and set up and a woman came over and said “Hi, Linda. How are you?” I don’t get to this studio on a regular basis so I don’t know the students and I was surprised someone knew my name. I said hi, fine thanks, how are you?, and she said, “I remember your class. It changed me.”

Now my brain is working overtime…OK….she looks a little familiar….where….how….huh?

I said, “I’m sorry I don’t remember you…where did you take my class?” She mentioned the studio where I used to teach, two years ago. She told me that I taught my yin-yang yoga class (actually a workshop) and that I did a chakra meditation afterward.

She said that she had barely done yoga before walking into my workshop. She said that the chakra meditation had “blown” her apart. I can’t even remember what I did because I never, ever remember what I do from class to class — I channel yoga. Seriously. She motioned from her crown to her root and said “everything opened up. I was like, ‘wow’.” Her eyes glowed from the memory and she gave me a big smile.

I thought, but did not tell her, that I did nothing, she did it all. I merely gave her a road map.

I stood there, stunned. Many of you think I am Ms. Yoga Snark, but I’m here to tell you, I have self-esteem issues as a yoga teacher. Even though I study at one of the most prestigious yoga schools in the world, I still think I am not good enough. I think that I am nowhere near worthy enough to teach globally next year, that I do not deserve the opportunities that are coming my way.

When she finished her story I told her how grateful I was to hear her compliments. She said, “it was because of you and your class that I decided to do teacher training” (which she is currently doing.) I stood there amazed. One class and a woman whom I never saw again. Until today.

Never underestimate the power of yoga. And I will never underestimate myself again.

There was a reason I did not make it into Chicago this morning. I needed to be reminded that I am worthy.

addthis_pub = ‘yogagal60510’;

I’ve got a secret — and it’s not deodorant

by L. Valdez Karl

Amazingly I received the link to this video from a friend in India who saw it in the Washington Post — “The Dirty Little Secrets of Yoga Teachers.” Or, the light in me honors the stink in you.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/271557392

I don’t know which is worse: the smelly butts or the creepy dude yoga teacher. “Savasana massages”? I don’t want anyone touching me in savasana! Let me guess…he only massages the young and the skinny.

addthis_pub = ‘yogagal60510’;

I am my shadow self

by L. Valdez Karl

Scott from Scott’s Thott’s posted this Seane Corn video and I wondered what your thoughts were about it.

A long time ago I did a workshop with Corn where she said almost exactly the same thing. When she mentioned the junkies and the whores I looked around the room and saw more than a few eyebrows go up and eyes go down. While the asana practice was good, I loved what she had to say even more.

Corn says that the teachers she is most attracted to are the most human, the realists who are honest about their history and path. In my last workshop with Sarah Powers she said the same thing: that her favorite teachers are the ones whose “humaness” shines through. I agree.

Last weekend I became 55, a fit, fabulous, “woman of a certain age.” While I have my aches and pains I don’t allow my body or my thoughts to define me — I am not this body, I am not my thoughts. And on my birthday I realized: I should be dead. There was a time when I and others thought I would not live to see 21. I tried to kill myself when I was 16. Ask me if I care who knows that.

And now I’m planning my 4th trip to India. I’ve come a long way, baby.

I teach at a domestic violence shelter and the ladies told me that they appreciate me so much more because I’ve been where they are now, that I am not a “white suburban do-gooder” (their words) trying to tell them how to be.

I question how some show biz yogis can teach me because I wonder if they’ve been where I’ve been — abuse, rape, addiction, and domestic violence. I usually do not trust the om namah shivaya types with the ethereal smiles and the wispy, breathy voices. I am a survivor, so what can they teach me? I’d rather get down and dirty.

I loved Scott’s comment:

“A friend and I joke about the “Om Shanti” and “Namaste” crowd. These people who say Yoga is all about love and light, peace and happiness are deluding themselves. It’s so pretentious – just say hello, how are you, have a good day… whatever. I would no more say Namaste to someone (outside north India) than I would say bonjour or auf wiedersehen.

If Yoga isn’t pushing you outside your comfort zone, it ain’t really Yoga. Leave the frills off for me, mama, and gimme an extra dose of darkness.”

“If Yoga isn’t pushing you outside your comfort zone, it ain’t really Yoga.”

Why do you yoga? Not “do yoga” because yoga is about undoing, not doing. Yoga does us. I’ve always thought that the reason more people don’t yoga is because stepping into yoga takes courage and many of us (most?) are afraid to see what might come up, we’re afraid of our shadow selves. It’s so much easier to push that shit down and resist our truths.

Roll around with your demons and become uncomfortable until it hurts. Set yourself on fire because that fire will either kill you or transform you.


yoga wisdom from a rabbit

by L. Valdez Karl

“What is Real?,” asked the rabbit one day. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you’re made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you…It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. Generally by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
—The Velveteen Rabbit

I believe that yoga helps you become real (real-er? more real?) It strips away your layers like the multiple skins of an onion, down to your essence. As the Skin Horse said, Real is a thing that happens to you, you become. Sometimes It sneaks up on you. You can’t think your way into being, you can only be. You can’t think your way to freedom, you can only be free.

I wrote here about a new spaciousness I have felt recently and it really hits me now and again. This just being is a lightness of being that is freedom, at least for me. The physical sensation of it is floating. Sometimes there are no words for these Things that happen on this Path, but that is my felt sense of it.

I think about people or things that I was very attached to six months ago or even one month ago and those attachments are gone….POOF!…like they never existed. Those attachments literally brought me to my knees, you have no idea. Of course “they” still exist but it is…different. Transcended. Free.

At my age I’m worn around the edges and yet somehow feel more alive than ever (you hear that Yoga Journal, with your ageist yoga advertising?), even with my aching back (the price of being uber-flexible among other things.) But I am not this Body.

I’ve been too many years on this earth to care what people think about me anymore. I’m not responsible for anyone’s happiness, only my own. I don’t tell my students what they want to hear, I tell them what I think they need to hear and what they choose to do is up to them. I am merely a yoga facilitator, I am nobody’s guru — “your breath will change your life”; “mindfulness begins now, not tomorrow”; “detach from the outcome and be free.” You can give a person the tools and show them how to use them, but eventually they have to build their own house.

In 7 years of teaching I’ve had students quit after one class and I have students who’ve been with me since Day One and I’m grateful for them all. I’ve heard it said that as teachers we get the students that we deserve. Maybe so. One day not too long ago a (former) private student told me that she did not like the way I worded things, that I was too harsh. That night another student told me that she does not have the words to tell me how much she looks forward to coming to my class every week. Same day, same teacher, same words. My voice off the mat is my voice on the mat.

“….once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I am not ugly. I am Real.

“I got lucky
I got everything I wanted
I got happy
There wasn’t nothing else to do
And I’d be crazy
Not to wonder if I’m worthy
of the part I play
In this dream that’s coming true.”
–“Pilgrim’s Progress”, Kris Kristofferson

yoga in the real world

by L. Valdez Karl


When I told a well-known and well-respected yogi who shall remain nameless that sometimes I teach in places where there are no props, she said with a sniff, “I don’t teach in THOSE places anymore.”

Well, now.  Maybe one of these days I will have permanently traded up my yoga teaching venues sans any dysfunctional yoga studio owners of course.  But in the meantime I look upon my teaching experiences with great affection because I learn from all of them.

This morning I was teaching my private class in my house and the security system’s alarm started screaming.  There had been a thunderstorm with a huge lightening flash over my house (talk about raising the kundalini) and shortly thereafter the alarm went off. And when I say screaming, I mean the sound feels like a drill going through my ears into the middle of my brain.  My students looked at me with that WTF look and I ran downstairs and tried to shut it off.  No luck.  Still screaming.  I went back up to my home yoga shala and told them not to worry, no one is breaking in and nothing is on fire.  Then it stopped. Then it started again.  By this time all I could was laugh.

I ran back downstairs and called the security company.  They told me that the power must have gone out momentarily or there was a power surge and the system was rebooting itself.  As I talked to the security company the message on the control box showed everything back to normal.  I could stop grinding my teeth.  I told the security person that the alarm had gone off while I was teaching a yoga class.  She thought that was hilarious.

Good thing I practice mindfulness meditation: “screaming alarm feels like this…”

Yesterday afternoon I taught to 20 musicians of a symphony orchestra in the massive basement of their auditorium.  As they sat in stillness before savasana I heard massive doors open.  I watched a janitor come in pulling a massive industrial size garbage can behind him on a platform with wheels that obviously needed massive amounts of of oil.  I saw the janitor and smiled, thinking back when I used to teach regularly in THOSE places.

Two other people walked in and opened the doors of a massive closet, the size of a room. The storage closet was lined with shelves of liquor bottles and the man and the woman rolled out two bars which I’m sure were for the audience for last night’s performance.  By this time the students were in savasana.   After class I told them that this was the first time anybody set up a bar in back of the room while I was teaching.

Years ago I taught for a park district.  I taught in their community center in a large a multi-purpose room with a stage.  Saturday morning class, all the women up in downward facing dog — “BREATHE, WATCH YOUR BREATH….”  In walk two uniformed policemen.  I was the only one who saw them because everyone had their butts in the air, eyes closed. “Everyone come down into child’s pose…hello, officers….”  Twenty heads jerk up.

“We’re just here to get the lectern,”, i.e., the one that was up on the stage.

“That’s nice, officers. I thought you were here to strip-search us.”

The men in blue laughed as they hustled the lectern across the stage, down the stage steps, across my teaching space, and into the room next door, the door slamming behind them.  Of course.  Door slamming.

Yoga teacher trainings don’t teach you how to handle these things.

Do you want to hear about teaching next to bagpipe practice and above a dog obedience class?  Fortunately these two things did not occur at the same time.

There is no sound on earth worse than bagpipe PRACTICE, not even a screaming burglar alarm.

A day in the life of a yoga teacher.

Oh, yeah. I’ve paid my dues.

get this book

by L. Valdez Karl

I have enough yoga and Buddhism books to read to last the rest of my life and into the next, but I’ve started reading “Enlighten Your Body: Yoga for Mind-Body Awareness”, and I can’t put it down. It’s not written by a show biz yogi like Rodney Yee or by an old master like Iyengar, but by Linda-Christy Weiler, a relative unknown in the western yoga world. The depth of her writing and her understanding about pure yoga surprised me (well, OK, it shocked me) because I know her name through the fitness organization NETA (National Exercise Trainers Association), one of the organizations that conducts “become a yoga teacher in a weekend” trainings. I humbly admit it — that was my own avidya….

Weiler writes about yoga from the somatic perspective, i.e., the body experienced from within (soma) and the science of experiencing the self as a body (somatics). This is something that I’ve come to appreciate over my years of yoga practice and teaching. I work with students on a daily basis who are disconnected from their bodies, whose minds are “out there” instead of “being here now.” Sometimes people are so detached from their bodies that they can not literally feel the difference between a rounded back and a flat back. They have no idea how to drop their shoulder blades down their back because they have never been asked to connect with their bodies. ANY sensation to them, no matter how small, is immediately interpreted as “pain.” They do not possess any filters, no varying levels of discernment, they either “fly” or they “cry”.

I truly believe that many people in this modern world have lost the ability to “feel”, both on a deep emotional level and on the physical level because modern life has so many things for us to attach to externally — the media, the latest computer, the latest electronic gadget, the latest whatever it is. It is easier and more comfortable to go “with-out” than to go within and feel and intuit and explore. I remember being in a yoga class where the teacher said that to do yoga takes courage, because yoga teaches people how to feel and sometimes that can be a very scary thing. Some people know more about the insides of their computers than they know about the insides of themselves.

I’ve only read the first 30 pages so far but have found more value in it than in some of the books written by the bigshots of the yoga world. Some excerpts:

(Weiler quoting someone else): “The way you practice asana is the way you live your life.” – I LOVE that! How many of us have seen students bully their way through a pose, lie in savasana with open eyes and tapping fingers, then are the first ones out the door after class leaving their mats and props behind for someone else to clean up?

“My duty is not to fix the world. My duty is to fix myself. And if by fixing myself, I have in any way contributed to fixing the world, then I have been
doubly successful.” We can not love or have compassion for others, if we do not love or have compassion for ourselves.

“Today’s trendy version of yoga have cute and clever names like Spinning Yoga, Yogilates and the uplifting ‘Yoga Butt’…but I wonder if these programs provide
a valid mind-body experience. …something essential to the experience of yoga asana has been forgotten…and this essential element is exactly what yoga asana is all about. It is the attention given to the somatic aspect of the experience. It is
the unfolding understanding of how we can apply the lessons of asana toward the evolution of the self…” As my journey to the heart of yoga in India taught me, yoga is truly about personal transformation.

“I no longer sympathize with yoga students who tell me that they don’t have enough time in their busy lives to commit to a yoga practice or to eat breakfast or to get enough sleep, etc. When people say ‘I don’t have time for this,’ what they are really saying is that they have chosen their priorities and ‘this’ is not
one of them. We can always find time for what we really want to do. Over-scheduling is the most blatant sign of a life lived without attention to
one’s priorities… The time crunch mentality deceives us into thinking that our time should only be allocated to activities that result in a net gain. We believe that anything else is silly and insignificant…”

As my own teaching has morphed and evolved, I am no longer reticent about telling students certain things, such as that yoga is a committment, first to themselves, then to the deeper aspects of yoga — anything less and they are cheating themselves. When people find out that I teach yoga, sometimes I hear “I heard it’s supposed to be good for me, but I don’t have the time…” or “I read that meditation relieves stress, but I don’t even have 10 minutes to sit down…” I tell them that is exactly the reason why they should run, not walk, to their nearest yoga or meditation class. Why is it that people make so much time for other things and for other people in their lives, yet consider themselves so unimportant, so unworthy of nourishing themselves? I have noticed this particularly more so with women than with men.

It’s a good book, and I look forward to diving more deeply into it.

paz yoga

by L. Valdez Karl

“Paz” is Spanish for “peace”. “Peace yoga” sounds like a beautiful concept to me, and in my humble opinion, what yoga is really all about. Yoga is about peace, healing, transformation. I won’t get into the differences between “health club yoga” and “traditional yoga”, because I can assure you that one group of students I have could not care less. They don’t come to class wearing $90 yoga pants, or have leather yoga mat bags, or wear chakra balancing anklets. In fact, they don’t even own yoga mats and could not tell you where to buy them. But they are my favorite yoga students because they totally understand what yoga is really all about and they all got it on the first night of class.

My karma yoga at a domestic violence shelter. I teach once a month to the Hispanic women’s support group. Some women understand English, others do not, so I have a translator for my direction. This in itself is interesting and amusing. We have lots of laughs when we go from la mesa to la gata then to pose of a nina to el perro.

These women are not shelter residents, but they come once a week for instruction or support regarding legal, financial, or job issues. They see me only once a month. But if you saw these women meditate, you would think I was leading a vipassana retreat. I do not have any other students who are more concentrated and focused in their goal for inner peace. When I teach my other classes and notice how some students lie in savasana with their eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, or tapping their fingers, or looking at their watches, I think about las yoginis mexicanas and their peaceful faces. It overwhelms me.

These women have been emotionally and physically abused. Some have left their men, some have not. All have children they are trying to protect. But when they come to see the “yoga lady”, they know that the 90 minutes is for them, and no one else. Maybe it’s the only hour and a half they’ve had for themselves all month. No one asks me about fancy poses or about getting a yoga butt. They ask me how to breath. They ask me about the Divine. I always tell them to go inside and find that true Self, the Self that they were born with that no one can ever take from them. The Self that no one can hit or call stupid or call a whore. One young women told me that she saw herself bathed in a white light, standing outside herself, watching herself meditate, and how happy and calm that made her feel. I told her how beautiful that was, that some people who meditate for years never see things like that, and she started to cry. Afterward the group leader told me that this woman has a little girl who keeps asking mommy why she goes back to daddy after daddy hurts her. I have not seen this woman since that night. I hope she is still bathed in the white light.

They ask me if yoga can help them with their aches and pains and whether yoga can diminish their big bellies left over from having children. They love doing Fire Series, but they love going inward to find that true Self even more. I tell them that my teachers in India will show me many ways to help them. I’ve explained to them how KYM teaches a theraputic yoga style, and that when I return I will show them everything. They’ve told me, please come back from India, we want the yoga lady here, because after class we feel happy. Now it’s time for me to cry.

Yes, I will come back to show them what I’ve learned, because I have been where they are now. Paz yoga, healing, and transformation, por mis yoginis mexicanas.

namaste