I pour everything into my yoga teaching, but I have never really tried to develop my personal practice. I have been intimidated and frustrated by meditation (my monkey mind does not stop). I have been turned off by the easy excuses for mindlessness justified by skewed yoga teachings (like the idea that positive thinking alone can change the world--as if such a thing could undo systems of inequality). I have been skeptical of assumptions about the power of energy (like the chakras which are undetectable by the naked eye). But, once again, I find yoga (and YogaFit) changing my mind....

Despite the many physical and mental benefits I have received as a result of my yoga teaching (tools for managing and alleviating anxiety, balancing emotions, clearer thinking, improving body awareness, and increasing self-esteem), I thought that I did not have the time or the space—or the need—for a personal practice. Teaching was my personal practice.

As a life-long learner, any kind of yoga workshop or training inspires my teaching, but the recent Mind/Body Fitness conference I attended is the first time I have been inspired by a YogaFit training to develop my personal practice. As I note in YogaFit Full Circle: An Evolving Teacher Training (part one), between taking Level 4 in 2012 and taking Level 5, Pranayama, and Meditation and Mindfulness in 2017, I explored some of the world of yoga beyond YogaFit. This space, and my own evolution, found me ready to learn new dimensions and ideas that I had not been ready to integrate in the past.

In my evolving teaching, I have only dabbled in the “woo-woo” of yoga. These moments have been mostly experimental and exploratory; they come and go as I remember and forget and rediscover. It has taken a lot of time and integration—kinesthetically and ideologically—for me to be ready for a deeper understanding of breathing and meditation and a deeper understanding of myself. Through this time of exploration and integration, I find that a lot of the woo-woo actually makes sense. And some of it makes sense for my teaching and my personal practice. And the following, I think. makes sense to share....

Teaching Re-Commitment: breathing and yoga wisdom (in baby steps)
I am always telling my classes—yoga and cardio—to remember to breathe. Participants regularly thank me for this reminder. I give these reminders because I know the importance of breathing, mostly from my own practice. When I teach, I teach from my own body and if I am forgetting to breathe, then I know I need to remind my classes to do so.

But my one-day workshop on Pranayama really drove home the importance of breathing—not only of breathing, but of breathing effectively. The three-part breath and the principles of one breath per movement have been ingrained in my mind and body and cemented in my teaching; sometimes I would teach lion’s breath or alternate nostril breathing or equal ration breath, but these were often just attempts at variation and experimentation. I'm starting to bring in more breathing techniques like bee's breath, horse lips, and Amy Weintraub's Hara breath.

Effective breathing means not only emphasizing the inhale (as I always do), but also emphasizing the importance of the exhale. While I always say exhale, I had never thought about why the exhale is at least as important as the inhale. As my trainer (Kelly Gardener) said, “you have to let it all out to get it back in.” Further, we learned that 70% of the toxins in the body are released through the breath; if we are not breathing those toxins out, we are keeping them in. Optimal breath can equal optimal health.

Effective breathing means reversing the habits we have been trained into (paradoxical breathing where we inhale and suck in our stomach) and breathing all the way into the lungs, expanding the ribcage and the belly with the breath (what is referred to as lower body breathing). I had practiced this breath, but I had not understood what this kind of breath was actually doing for our bodies. I had not thought a lot about the function of the breath to nourish our bodies.

I had uttered things like “breath is life” and “breathing consciously is the simplest form of yoga,” but I had not fully integrated or embodied what these phrases mean. In a world that induces anxiety, breathing can slow things down and help alleviate to stress and to fuel every one of our bodily functions. This is particularly true of the nervous system, which can be relaxed and stimulated through breathing.

Breathing consciously can also help to keep us present in our lives—in the here and now, so to speak. A few months ago, I came across a quote from an ancient Chinese philosopher who said that if we are living in the past, we are likely depressed, and if we are living in the future, we are anxious. Only when we live in the present can we find peace of mind. This is one of my biggest challenges and I work to bring this focus on the now to my students as well as to myself.

Commitment to Personal Practice: daily meditation (KISS), positive affirmation, movement, music, mantra, and conscious breathing.
For most of my years of yoga, my personal practice has been synonymous with my teaching. The benefits I got from teaching were enough, I thought, even though sometimes I have felt the need to also do yoga just for me.

On my hiatus from YogaFit, I began to develop a personal practice, but this practice has been more reactive and sporadic than proactive and consistent. The tools I learned from Bo Forbes (myofascial release, interoception, and yoga for empaths) infiltrated my teaching, but were the foundation of my personal practice. So while I introduced “football” and other techniques with the tennis ball, my exploration of these tools have been mostly developed through my practice—suddenly feeling the need to roll out my feet or back, suddenly feeling the need to focus on my breathing.

My YogaFit training with Kelly Gardner (Pranayama and Meditation and Mindfulness) and Sandi Cartwright (Level 5) gave me permission to play with breathing and meditation, the tools to make my personal practice my own, and the impetus to establish a set of rituals that give my mind/body what it needs.

Kelly made breathing and meditation far less intimidating and easy to integrate. In fact, what I learned about meditation told me that I am already practicing meditation techniques; I am just not giving myself credit for “meditation.” Meditation is not about tuning out, but about tuning in; it is like “falling awake,” Kelly told us. And so even though I often feel like maybe I am not doing meditation right, at least I am doing it consistently. As Kelly assured us, trying is doing. I think about meditation now through the “keep it simple, sugar” acronym of KISS; no need to overthink meditation. In fact, that’s kind of the point.

In my development of my personal practice I am trying and doing simply. I have more than 19 days in a row of morning meditation—something I never thought I would be able to do. I am also less skeptical of positive affirmations and mantra (even though I remain skeptical of some of the claims that are made about “The Secret,” for instance).

I have reinvigorated my love of moving meditation and the power of music, and I practice conscious breathing far more often throughout my day. I have routine and flexibility; I decide what kind of meditation or breathing techniques I need based upon the moment rather than a prescribed plan, but I set aside time every morning. I continue to play with ideas and approaches and to evolve my personal practice for my own self-care as well as my continuing evolution as a teacher. While I look forward to where all of this will go, I am increasingly content with simply being here now. And that’s also something I thought was entirely impossible.

I officially began my yoga journey in 2005. I had taken a few yoga classes before I took my Level 1 training with YogaFit, mostly a summer session that my friend taught to the only two people who showed up (me and my husband). I regularly taught a variety of cardio classes and had taken a Pilates training program, but I still thought that yoga was just a bunch of stretching (and some woo-woo stuff I had little interest in). I took the training mostly because the Washington State University Student Recreation Center paid for me to go. My fitness perspective was changed forever. . . . But my yoga practice is still slowly evolving, mostly through my teaching.

This slow evolution is part of the point of YogaFit; they want you to take what you learn and practice and apply it, coming back for more when you’re ready. Many of the women I have met at YogaFit trainings find YogaFit and compete their 200-hour training certification in a few years. I have been working on my hours for about 12 years. My road has not been so direct. I have wavered from the YogaFit path because of the demands of my career in academia or my doubts in my ability and desire to fully commit to yoga. I have had to process and practice what I have learned at trainings—to teach it and integrate new ideas into my classes (amid my multiple other professional and personal obligations).

YogaFit has grown exponentially since I started my training. The depth and nature of the programming has also changed. When I began, there was much more of a fitness focus and in addition to the five levels, there were programs like YogaButt that were targeted to health club audiences. While it maintains the accessibility of “yoga for every body,” and makes yoga accessible to populations like my local YMCA, YogaFit provides a solid basis in yoga philosophy and tradition. It also encourages adaptation and innovation—permission to play and encouragement to take yoga beyond preconceived notions.

Today, YogaFit offers a 200-hour training and an additional 300-hour training (which qualifies for Yoga Alliance's 500-hour certification) as well as a 100-hour certification for YogaFit Warriors and a Health track (formerly YogaFit therapy). These programs are oriented toward not only teaching content, but also teaching how to teach and to integrate ideas from training into personal practice. The trainers I had—just two of the whole team—were amazing. Kelly Gardner brought wisdom and perspective from her work in the field of mental health (and was funny and full of practical accessible examples) and Sandi Cartwright was an excellent teacher, grounded and wise with a wealth of knowledge and a foundation of experience in the world of fitness.

Further, YogaFit offers a supportive community—the #YogaFitFamily that can be found at the Mind/Body Fitness Conferences across the U.S. and increasingly in social media spaces. Its emphasis on teaching and its commitment to community, as well as the ways it empowers women, has brought me back to YogaFit.

I never thought that I would do my 200-hours. There was a 5-year break between taking levels 1 through 3 and taking Level 4. I took Level 4, in part, because I was working on my book, Women and Fitness in American Culture, and felt I needed more training to make some of the arguments I was making. After taking the Level 4 training, I thought I had had enough. I learned a lot over the four days of training, but I never even thought I would take Level 5 training (the final “level” in the 200-hour certification). Level 4 included a lot of elements of traditional yoga, and I didn’t really see the relevance to my daily teaching.
In the five years since taking Level 4, I have explored some other yoga venues like the Yoga Journal Live conference in New York, and I have learned a lot of things that I have integrated into my teaching, largely because of the foundations that YogaFit gave me. In fact, what I learned from Bo Forbes in her workshops inspired me to pursue yoga further. So, I found myself back at YogaFit.

I also found myself back at YogaFit because I recently decided that I wanted to complete my 200-hour training, mostly because I wanted to further pursue my academic work in fitness, and in interdisciplinary approaches to yoga specifically. To be taken seriously, I thought, I needed at least my 200-hour certification (500 hours still seems out of reach!). So, while I found myself at the YogaFit Mind/Body Conference in Minneapolis for practical reasons, the full circle of yoga gave me so much more. Most of all, it gave me positive reinforcement of what I know, what I teach, and how important this work is to me and to my communities.

While I still struggle with some of the “woo-woo” of yoga, I can’t ignore the many connections and synchronicities that yoga generally, and YogaFit specifically, have made for me. My four days of training—one-day of Pranayama: The Science and Practice of Breath and Cultivating Prana, one day of Meditation and Mindfulness, and two days of Level 5: Integration—illustrated that I have absorbed so much more of yoga (and YogaFit) than I realized and reinforced the power of yoga in my teaching and my need to continue to develop my personal practice.

Through the conversations and connections with women who teach yoga, to the ideas and practices we explored, I returned home renewed, rejuvenated, empowered, and grounded. . . . And with new ideas, new tools, new visions, new inspirations, and new possibilities.
 
More on the development of my teaching and personal practice in part two….

Last August I was contacted by a reporter from an Australian magazine writing about the rise of feminist fitness. First of all, how exciting is it to hear that feminism has been visible enough in fitness that it would inspire an article about the trend!? Of course, she is also from Australia, where this trend is a lot more visible. Many of the best sources on feminist fitness that I found while doing research for my book, Women and Fitness in American Culture, came from outside the U.S. But, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a writer from the Associated Press who covers fitness and she was working on a feminist fitness article as well. So, I guess rather than having this blog continue to sit in my inbox, I might as well put it out there! Below I include the Australian reporter's questions and my answers....
 
What role does feminism play in fitness?
Feminism can play several roles in fitness. A lot of times the role it plays is in thinking about women's strength. We might imagine that as women become physically stronger they will also become stronger in other spheres like politics. However, this is not exactly what I mean when I write about or think about feminist fitness. The direct correlation is not there. While women might feel more empowered through weight lifting and strength-building, just as many (if not more) women are afraid of getting too "bulky" and, thus, not being seen as feminine. Female athlete at the top of their sports even struggle with this fear. So the biggest role that feminism can play in fitness is to say that being healthy, happy, fit, strong, etc. can be achieved through any variety of fitness activities. Fitness isn't one thing, but it is feminist when it is about a whole body and whole person approach.
 
Has there been a shift away from the "bikini body" towards female empowerment in the fitness industry?
I'd like to say that there has been this shift, and perhaps if we think about it in terms of the fitness industry, then, yes, I'd say there is a shift from the "bikini body" to the strong, functional body--the kind of body that can run marathons or compete in Ninja Warrior-style competitions. But, at the same time, female empowerment is often sold as a part of a package of physical perfection. In terms of the images that promote fitness--in the industry and in pop culture and media more generally--I don't think we are there yet in terms of empowerment being more important than the "bikini body." We are still fed the correlation that strong (but not "big") is desirable and the bodies we see take a lot of time, effort, attention, and energy to maintain. When we see fitness as more of a way of life and less as a set of accomplishments, then we will be making this shift.
 
Why are we seeing a rise in feminist fitness bloggers and personal trainers?
There is a need for feminist fitness--in our fitness culture and in our personal lives. I think that women (and even men) can use the principles of feminism to take focus off of the superficial aspects of fitness and focus in on what is really meaningful and powerful. For instance, I've noticed a rise in blogs about being a mom and being a runner. Women are able to focus on the things that their bodies can do rather than the impossible standards that the media set. So we see a rise in bloggers who share their personal struggles and frustrations as well as their successes. We also see a rise in women of color and "fat" women claiming space and recognition in the world of fitness. Feminism makes spaces for marginalized voices and experiences.
 
And feminist approaches to personal training can really revolutionize this sphere of fitness. Personal training is much more about building a relationship and trust between client and trainer. A trainer who listens to her client, who understands the client's fitness goals, who looks for a variety of activities that are enjoyable to the client, who instills realistic expectations and works to dispel fitness myths is going to be more successful than a trainer who sets out a program of repetitions and then pushes the client through these exercises toward a goal of weight loss, for instance.
 
Why is fitness a feminist issue?
Fitness is a feminist issue for so many reasons. Fitness is just one of the many activities that is represented in the media in narrow, stereotypical kinds of ways. Feminism challenges such representations. Fitness is about taking care of ourselves, but also taking care of the people we love and the world that we live in. We have to practice the feminist idea of self-care in order to be able to do this. If we want to eat healthy, organic foods then we need to be working to ensure that these foods are available and affordable. This means we need to think about climate change and agribusiness. If we want comfortable, affordable clothing and shoes for our workouts, then we need to be sure that women in other parts of the world are not being exploited to produce those goods for the first world. If we want women's bodies and minds to be safe from rape, sexual assault, and other forms of patriarchal violence, then we need to work to change the standards and expectations of masculinity. Fitness is not just an isolated, individualistic pursuit bolstered by privilege; it is a responsibility to ourselves and to the world.
 
Would you like to see more feminism in fitness?
Absolutely! I would love to stop hearing women say that they are too fat, too skinny, too whatever. I'd love for men to be more comfortable and willing to take group fitness classes or to try yoga--to not be afraid of being seen as less than a man because they enjoy Zumba or yoga. I would love to see people embracing fitness because it makes them feel good and makes them able to enjoy other aspects of their lives more fully. I would love to see women stop shaming other women about their bodies and to see us all stop equating fitness with superficial qualities and outward appearance. I would love to see people use the word feminist when they talk about fitness. But even if they don't use the word, the principles are there and they are transforming fitness for many people, just as feminism has transformed the world we live in.