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Building a safe(r) container

A student stopped me one day after class and told me this, seven or eight years ago at YoYoYogi in Portland. I’ve never forgotten it.

Isn’t that what we all want for our yoga students? For them to feel safe? 

Last night I taught the B. Yoga Basel TT cohort all about Yoga & Trauma Sensitivity. We covered everything from the basics of trauma theory to Bessel Van Der Kolk and Resmaa Menakem to Gabor Maté to reptilian brains to creating a culture of consent and how to offer quality hands-on assists and trauma-informed savasana options to guru power dynamics to the most burning question of all: whether yoga teachers should even be touching students in the first place. 

Whew!! It was a rich, nuanced, complicated, inspiring conversation — and it made me fall in love with teaching yoga all over again.

From San Francisco/Oakland to Portland to Boston to Basel, I feel grateful to have been a fly on the wall for some of the most thoughtful and progressive trauma-informed developments of the last decade.

Here in 2024, we are serving students more wholeheartedly and creating a safe(r) container for them at the same time. If that’s not ahimsa, I don’t know what is. 

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Morning light at B. Yoga

January is my favorite time of year in the yoga studio.

Brave newbies nervously unroll their mats in the back row. Packed classes pulse with eager bodies ready to (re)build a practice. There’s a childlike, not-yet-disillusioned sense of hope.

I teach in this radiant B. Yoga Basel space every Friday at 9:30am.

Join me for a little 🧘🏽‍♀️ and 🎶 and 🫁 and mostly ✨.

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Heart-openers to put in your pocket

Winter has properly set in here in Basel.

Medieval chimneys puff smoke, morning temps hover around freezing, and the Christmas markets are back in full swing. It’s exactly the kind of cold that makes you want to hunch over, curl up, and hibernate.

So in class the other day, we spent a lot of time flowing through poses like this: heart-openers, shoulder openers, backbends. When you can remind your body to stay open and warm and loose, your spirit will usually follow — even when the air outside is bitter.

Raja Bhujangasana (King Cobra) is one extreme example. It really doesn’t matter if you ever touch your toes to your head or not. You can get similar antidotes to winter from poses like Cobra, Dhanurasana (Bow), Bridge, Camel, Reverse Tabletop, and variations of Reverse Namaskar (or just grabbing your elbows behind your back) in Tree or a wide-legged forward fold.

Put these heart-openers in your pocket for the days when you’d rather close off and contract. A few minutes of asana can be the perfect counter to the cold. ☃️

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You Are Your Own Best Teacher

I’ve been re-reading Tricia Hersey’s recent book Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, and loving her emphasis on Womanist and Black liberation theologies.

This line jumped out at me today. ✨

It’s a version of something I often say in yoga class: Remember that you are your own best teacher, and you know your body better than anyone else. So take what I say with a grain of salt, and trust your own deep knowing as you move through your practice.

Did you grow up learning this sense of embodied trust in your own faith tradition? 🥴 Reclaiming it can be super hard for those of us who didn’t. (Ahem, Christianity.)

But that’s why I love the yogic (and Black Womanist, and ecofeminist) traditions. They cultivate that sense of inherent bodily goodness; of radical wholeness; of the fact that our bodies are wise and holy and strong, just as they are.

Grateful for theologians like Hersey who are spreading this powerful wisdom on a global scale. 🪷