4/11/24 Live Session Recording
Welcome! If you were unable to join live, kindly watch the recording and share your reflection as you are able. Consider having a notebook or journal with you as you watch to capture any thoughts, insights, or questions you may have.
Please share your thoughts and questions about Sonia Brown-Diaz's presentation of cultivating and maintaining relationships within facilities. I will add Sonia's slide presentation once it is shared with me.
Please also reflect of the topic of Svadhyaya (self-study). Timing for this topic ran a little short and I do feel there is more opportunity to discuss further, specifically to elaborate on how to share self study opportunities on the mat during yoga programs and to provide more context to how analyzing what we experience (relationships/media/pursuit of knowledge) can also provide support and insight to self study.
Next, consider how you may structure a class specific to the participants offered in the section below. This workshop will extend to next week's live session, but please take time with this offering and consider how you might create a class to welcome and meet the needs of the suggested individuals. You are certainly welcome to share here!
Breakout Room Workshop
Creating a Trauma-Informed Practice
Who is sharing the space?
- Adult Population
- Lived Experience of Trauma (unspecified)
- Three Participants are new to practicing yoga
- One Participant:
- Is wearing an ankle support
- Shares that they have COPD/Asthma
- Expresses lots of energy and shared they are very physically active
- Reports low back pain
- Verbalizes that they are “forced” to join yoga
- Presents as tired and shares that they have not been sleeping well
As always, please consider scheduling office hours if you would like to discuss any topics further!
I would like start with I enjoyed the speaker a great deal. I loved what she brought in was really about her experience in how the systems in the prison really are and that it is us who needs to conform and make the best of a maybe bad or not ideal situation. I also found that her grounding / centering spoke more to me and I believe it was the actual words and presentaion. As far as self study I am very into working my path and really is how I landed here. I normally lean more into education to guide me to my path and to be a better self. I continue to struggle to look inward for the things that I don't know I'm supposed to be looking for.
I enjoyed hearing Sonia's experience with building and maintaining relationships with facilities. She has so much valuable knowledge and experience I'm very grateful she was able to join and share this with us.
The topic of Svadhyaya is intimidating and exciting at the same time for me. Maybe more intimidating at this point right now. Holding myself accountable for everything in my life is kinda overwhelming. Grasping the importance of knowing myself and why I am the way that I am and knowing I can change the parts of myself I don't like about me definitely has empowerment at the end of the road but I'm working on finding that empowerment on the journey as well to support me in becoming who I really want to be in this world. I've definitely come a long way but there's more work to be done.
I know I struggle with self-trust. I have ideas and goals for myself but I don't implement the things I need to do to get there. I tell myself I will but I don't make it happen. So obviously I have no trust in myself and put myself through this seemingly never-ending cycle of constantly letting myself down. I'm unreliable and lack integrity with myself. These are key parts of building trust. I need these things to build trust in my relationships with other people so of course I need them for my relationship with myself too.
I'm currently stuck in this loop of "I know I shouldn't be doing this (and the action is mostly over-eating/ emotional eating), but I'm going to do it anyway" and then feeling guilt and shame after. Or "doing/ not doing this makes me kinda feel like a fraud sometimes because I'm not living what I want to share with others as a facilitator". How dare I share things with others that I don't embody myself? Why aren't those feelings enough for me to change my behavior? Maybe right now I don't actually want to change my behavior and that's why I don't. It feels like something I "should" do. That's not good enough for me to maintain/ actively work on changing or creating a different behavior. Because thinking it's something I "should" do, I'm not changing the behavior for me. I'm doing it for someone or something else out of obligation. That's never going to last. I need to reasses my "why". Why do I hate that I over-eat? Because I want to be able to soothe myself in better ways. I'm disconnected from myself in that aspect. I'm not listening to what my body is actually trying to tell me. How can I promote self-soothing in others when I can't do it myself? I'm also holding myself to an unattainable high standard that I should be able to self-soothe myself 100% of the time before I can share these methods with others. But I'm human. And therefore not perfect. I can improve my self-soothing but it will never be perfect.
I don't like sitting with the discomfort right now. But that only perpetuates the discomfort. I need to choose my hard. It's hard being in this awful loop of self soothing with food and not addressing the actual issues. But it's also hard to sit with the discomfort and figure out what's really going on inside me so I can understand it and heal it. But which will serve me better long term? Obviously the second option.
This has been a great reflection for me. And I know I've been avoiding it haha. I don't like admitting there's parts of myself I don't like. I'm hard on myself. Reflecting on all these parts of our life where we show up and seeing if I like who I am in all these situations has been eye-opening. Every moment I can start to make changes where I want to see change in myself. That will build trust within myself. That's something to look forward to and enjoy as it progresses. Every moment I am reborn and have the opportunity to show up as my authentic self, the person I wish to be in the world and the person I know I am at my core when I'm not influenced by my kleshas.