The Kindest Thing You Can Do for Yourself (Season 7, Episode 10)

As we’ve been exploring treating ourselves with kindness this month, I’ve been thinking about what I think the kindest thing you can do for yourself is. Here are some hints at what it’s not (though these are close!): taking a nap, petting a cute animal, looking at videos of cute animals online, or even thinking about cute animals. 🙂

In addition to that, I also respond to a listener question about how to make time for home yoga practice when you’re teaching four yoga classes each week.

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Transcript

(00:04):
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(00:04):
Welcome to Love Curvy Yoga, where we believe the best pose is your pose. Now let’s get into it.

(00:16):
Hi, how are you? Anna here. So happy Valentine’s day if you are listening in real time. We are not very big celebrators around here, but we do have a ritual that Nic and I have been doing every Valentine’s day since our first, well I guess after our first. So after our first we realized, uh, we don’t actually like eating at fancy restaurants, getting dressed up, making reservations or waiting a long time. So ever since then we eat Thai food either at the restaurant or take out — definitely take out this year — and watch a romcom. So for a long time we watched The Wedding Singer, but after about 10 years of that we were like, you know what, I think we’ve seen it enough. So we made a switch. Uh, so since then we just kind of go with whatever is streaming. Last year we were trying to remember, I think we watched Two Weeks Notice with Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. And I wish that we had not already watched Always Be My Maybe on Netflix because it’s so good. Maybe we’ll just watch it again. I don’t know. So we’ll see what is streaming, what we end up watching today. So whether or not you celebrate, you’re single, partnered, somewhere in between we have some curvy Valentines for you that are all about celebrating you exactly as you are (That’s a little Bridget Jones shout out for the romcom lovers out there). So I’ve got a link to those in the show notes for you. Okay, up next. The kindest thing you can do for yourself

(01:59):
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(02:04):
As you may know this month our theme in the Studio is The Kind 29, so we are doing our best to treat ourselves with kindness every day of the month with both a video practice and an invitation. Speaking of in the last podcast episode, if you listened, I talked about how I’m just making quick notes on my phone anytime I show myself kindness and I was wondering if you are doing it too. So if you are, let me know. I would love to hear about it. Here is one of my recent ones from February 5th I wrote “jeans were hurting my feelings so I changed my pants into something comfier.” Life changing. And I love that phrase “hurting my feelings.” I got that from this woman Stasia who has a program called Stasia’s Style School and it’s really about dressing in a way that feels really good for you. It’s not any of the traditional quote unquote flattering nonsense. It’s really a more empowering thing that I haven’t participated in, but I follow her on Instagram and really like that she says things like, clothes should not hurt your feelings.

(03:21):
So as I have been thinking about how we can show ourselves kindness this month, I’ve been really thinking about the things that maybe aren’t front of mind but make the biggest difference. And for me the biggest is trusting my own experience. I think this is really one of the most profound ways that we can show ourselves kindness mostly because we often don’t trust our own experience. So let’s just talk through some of the ways that this can show up, even though there are so many different manifestations. So one example is we run everything by a committee. So not necessarily a literal committee, but maybe you have to check in with all your closest friends, call someone in your family, run it by your coworkers when you’re making a decision instead of realizing that you are the committee. So shout out to the writer and teacher Rob Bell for that line,We are the committee. I think it is really helpful because a lot of times we can feel like, Oh, someone else is gonna make that decision or take care of that thing. And you know, this sort of proverbial committee out there, when really we have so much more agency than we think.

(04:46):
So another example here, how we may not trust our own experience. Maybe you get a gut hit, uh, intuitive feeling, however you want to phrase it about something, but you ignore it. Maybe because it’s a quote unquote good opportunity or because you’ve, it seems like everyone else likes that person. So why wouldn’t you? Or this seems like something that maybe you should be doing. You know, there’s so many reasons why we can ignore those things. Uh, some other examples, you know the old way doesn’t work anymore, but you’re scared to try something new or maybe you diminish things in your life that were genuinely hard by saying things like, Oh, first world problems. And this is 100% not to dismiss privilege, which is an essential consideration and something that is true and valid and that we all need to be thinking about, but rather to hold it all together as a both/and.

(05:57):
I have been taking a yoga class from a teacher that I really love here who also become a friend, Kelly Sunrose. And she often brings the idea of trust into the classes that she teaches. So trusting the earth to hold us other things like that. And something she said a few months ago really stuck with me. She said, “we’re building the habit of trusting your own experience,” and what I really love about this is the idea of trusting your own experience as a habit. I know for me it’s really easy for me to get down on myself when I don’t trust my own experience. I would say less often than I used to, but still definitely often enough. But when I think about it as a habit or a practice, it takes off the pressure to get it right the first time.

(06:50):
The other day I saw that the meditation teacher and writer Ethan Nichtern shared something on Instagram that kind of speaks to this, so he said, “your practice is not a project. Your practice is a process. If you turn it into a project, you will always focus on short term failures and ignore longterm successes.” I don’t know about you, but that really resonated with me. I think it’s easy to miss the distinction between project and process, but it’s honestly really huge. It’s another way to kind of, another way to describe the longterm view that we talk about all the time here where if you just look at today or this week, your practice, your ability to trust your own experience might be discouraging. But when you take the longer view, things can really shift. So I think that this is an important point to keep in mind when we talk about trusting your own experience. Because let me just tell you how much this shows up in relation to bodies, yoga, body acceptance. There’s basically an endless amount of examples.

(08:07):
So let’s just go through one for each. So with your body, some ways that you may or may not trust your own experience, um, knowing that something is off for you, going to the doctor and then having them tell you, Oh, it’s fine, you just need to lose weight. Okay, I should do a whole nother podcast about this because it makes me so angry. I’ve definitely had this experience myself. I probably have talked about it here on the podcast, but in a nutshell, one time I had a broken ankle, an x-ray missed it, and the doctor told me to just go on Weight Watchers, so I walked on a broken ankle for two months before I went to another doctor who found it and by then it was too late and my ankle still hurts 11 years later. I’m only laughing because, Oh my gosh, what else is there to do at this point? It’s just so absurd. So really trusting in your own experience and knowing like, no, this is not gonna cut it.

(09:13):
In yoga maybe an example of something, someone saying that you will really get a pose or like a pose if you just push yourself a little bit harder. And then you, even though you’re like, uh, I don’t know if this is really a good idea. You do it and then you push yourself into an injury. Another example in body acceptance: You are out there feeling good in your own skin until you see body acceptance portrayed another way and you wonder if you’re doing it right. I am sure that you can think of many, many more examples and if you do, you’re welcome to send them to me. I always love to hear from you. And what I love about yoga is how it can help us through this practice process to learn to hear our bodies and ourselves more clearly, and the more that we can notice and hear, the easier it is to trust your own experience. It’s, I talk about this sometimes in relationship to body acceptance where it’s hard to trust something that you aren’t sure you even noticed in the first place or that you quickly dismissed because it was a blip on your radar.

(10:33):
The reason that I think trusting your own experience is the kindest thing you can do for yourself is that it’s really the foundation for everything that we talk about. It’s the foundation for developing a yoga practice that works for you, deepening your relationship with your body, shifting how you speak to yourself, honing your intuition, and so much more. I think that trusting your own experience is both the foundation and the scaffolding (Now, I’m not sure if that’s a structurally sound description from an architectural point of view, but just go with me.) I think it can be the foundation and the scaffolding of each of these things and particularly of how they work together.

(11:21):
So what are some ways that you might work with trusting your own experience more? Well, some of that I think we just talked about. So practice, definitely yoga and meditation can help tuning you into yourself like we were just discussing. Uh, another example is noticing. So some of that may happen through the yoga practice, but it can also happen, well still in the yoga practice, maybe a better way to describe it would be on the mat and off the mat. So this could be a journal, talking to a friend, a therapist, making a note on your phone, anything like that. That just helps you when you have an observation about yourself to anchor into it a little bit more. And then checking in with yourself before checking in with others. So I am definitely not advocating just ignoring the advice and feedback of everyone around you. I think that that would probably make you, uh, not a very great person. But I think we have a tendency to go to extremes where we either take everyone’s advice or we take no one’s advice. And I think there’s an in between. So just checking in with yourself before checking in with others and then checking in with yourself after you have checked in with others. And then I think the biggest thing of all is letting it be a process.

(12:47):
Okay. Up next we have a listener question and a few reminders.

(12:52):
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(13:03):
All right. Up first we have a question from a listener. So Krys K emailed me. Thank you Krys. And here is her question. I was wondering if you have any suggestions on how to incorporate personal home practice while teaching four classes a week. Okay. First of all, four classes a week is a lot. I just want to affirm that and I know that that is very challenging to juggle, particularly when you have life, maybe another job going on as many yoga teachers do. So my first piece of advice, and I have a few different things here and I think it’s all, you know, it’s kind of like what you’re talking about earlier where it is that process thing and some things are going to work now that don’t work later and vice versa. So the first thing is don’t be hard on yourself. So I definitely think that yoga teachers should have a personal practice because it is going to inform your teaching and that’s not the only reason. I think it’s important to be engaged with anything that you’re teaching, but it’s hard to teach when you’re not connected to your own practice because it just feels a little flat and blah, at least in my experience. And I have heard something similar from others.

(14:27):
So I think it’s good to have a personal practice, but I think that you get to define what that is. So I often hear yoga teachers kind of be moaning, Oh, I started teaching yoga and then I stopped practicing yoga because the time thing can be really complicated. And I think the reason that it feels like you don’t have time is maybe because you are operating off of what your yoga practice used to look like. So you may have literally had more time to go to yoga classes when you weren’t teaching classes. That makes sense. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t have, like you can’t have a practice, essentially. So I think defining what it means for you and not holding yourself up to some inner expectations, especially of what you think a yoga teacher, quote unquote should be doing. There’s a lot of that thinking out there that I think can be pretty detrimental. So allowing yourself to define it. And that brings me to the next one, which is keep it short. So a lot of times I think we can get a little bit wrapped around the axle with how long the practice has to be or how often you’re practicing or all these kinds of things that just, I think have a tendency to make us do nothing instead of make us do something. So if you’re short on time, then focus on keeping it short. Even if you don’t think it counts, let’s just say, okay, maybe you don’t think it counts, that’s fine, but you can just go ahead and do it anyway, even if it’s not counting. Um, because I think any, you know, we talk about this with everyone, whether you’re a teacher or not, that it really does make a difference even when you do a few minutes here, half an hour there, et cetera.

(16:27):
So in terms of that perspective, I would encourage you to look for pockets of time. So I know you mentioned a home practice, but that doesn’t always have to take place at home. So for example, are you at the studio or wherever you teach early and is there the ability for you to go into the space and do a short little practice before or after you teach? That might be nice. Um, another piece of feedback, I don’t know, a suggestion is to look for the book ends and transitions in your day. So maybe before your day starts or before bedtime or those natural transition times between work and home teaching and wherever you’re going next. I think that those can just be times that you can sometimes fit it in. And then just remembering to take the long view, like we talked about earlier, and know that teaching multiple classes per week, can be draining. And not just in terms of time, but also in terms of energy. So I think if you focus your practice on what fills your cup, then that makes it easier to prioritize. So if you’re feeling drained and a restorative yoga practice would fill your cup, then let yourself do it, even if it’s one Savasana for five or 10 minutes. Because that’s going to keep you connected to the nectar of your practice, what really serves you and fills you up. And that I think inspires and encourages you to keep going. And that I believe is much better than thinking, Oh, I need to do this really vigorous physical practice and then either not doing it because you’re too tired or doing it and then you’re further depleted. So I hope that that helps and you let yourself experiment with different things and see what works for you and know that whatever works for you now may change in the future and that that is all okay too.

(18:47):
All right, so thank you for sending in that question. Everybody listening, if you have a question you’d like me to answer on the podcast, you are very welcome to send it to me. You can send it to podcast@curvyyoga.com text it to me at (615) 852-8789 or reach out on Instagram. I am @CurvyYoga there.

(19:09):
A few reminders before we wrap up, so studio members, we are only halfway through The Kind 29 so you still have lots of support around this. I will link it for you in the show notes and if you are not yet a member you can join us this very moment. You can just go to curvyyoga.studio and I will also link that in the show notes. Okay, let’s close with one breath together. We’re going to inhale and exhale. The light in me honors the light in you. Namaste.

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(19:56):
Stay tuned next week where I will be sharing how to remember what’s true.