nathalie shushan

My 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training with Lakshmi Rising in the jungle remains one of the most transformative experiences of my life. It makes sense: it was designed that way. Liz, the founder of Lakshmi Rising, has organized a curriculum that not only dives into the history of yoga and its philosophy, but offers an integrative system that puts you in touch with yourself. That is, after all, the purpose of the yogic path. It takes you, step by step, directly to the truth of your nature.

I recognized this morning’s practice from Costa Rica. It shook my understanding of the world the first time, so the memory floated easily to the front of my consciousness. The sequence felt joyful, then, with an element of looseness and play. The theme was about inner dialogue. I am loving awareness, Liz encouraged us to recite, while guiding our bodies to move in special ways. This time, the sequence showed me my rigidity, which felt frustrating and disheartening for a moment. I heard my mental chatter: an imagined conversation between Liz and me, in which I explain why this practice is so challenging for me, what this year has looked like and how it’s all felt in my body, why it made me stiff. When I noticed it, I let that all become quiet, and I replaced it with “I am becoming a woman who is stronger and more mobile.” With that shift, I understood that the practice was a step in the direction of where I want to go with my body – somewhere dynamic and fluid.

Vṛtti sārūpyamitaratra.1 When we are wrapped up in the fluctuations of the mind, unable to stay present, we risk identifying with our thoughts. To recognize (!) and modulate (!!) the movement of the mind is no small feat. From a physiological perspective, there is something particularly powerful about doing it in motion. Nervous system regulation meets neural pathway rewiring. Whether or not you’re doing it consciously, practicing yoga gives you the tools regain autonomy over your experience. It puts you back in the driver’s seat of your life. If it sounds like magic, that’s because ~it’s science~. A spiritual practice with a scientific method.

We spoke about ahimsa yesterday and what we can do, practically, when we notice trains of thoughts that are harmful toward self. “Engage with it curiously,” I suggested. “Where does this thought come from? Who does it serve?”

“Neutralize it,” Liz offered.

“Sometimes,” Mimi said, in a quiet way that demanded our attention, “I put it down… and I find that it melts. Or I come back to it and it feels lighter. Or I have more strength to hold it.” And there seemed to be a collective exhale after that, a sigh to acknowledge the wisdom of it, the melting of our edges, the neural pathways that are engrained so deeply that we can’t see above them. They feel like a valley of death sometimes.

I’m doing a lot of identity-based work right now, and all of it requires me to become intimate with my own mind. Instead of manifesting a life that I want to build, I am contemplating who I want to be and acting like her: creating the pillars of my identity and embodying them. These bridge affirmations, bridge statements, bridge manifestations feel powerful. I am always becoming! And I always already am!

In general, I am the kind of person who has to know something as completely as I possibly can before I feel comfortable offering it. I tend to keep things close to the chest. Sometimes, I tell myself that I’m working on that quality – fear insidious behind the mask of perfectionism – but other times, like right now, I’m happy to give myself grace about it because I can feel myself stepping onto the launchpad with a sense of earned confidence. In this moment, I don’t mind being someone who has to refine before I iterate, even though I know it’s a different, more painful path. I constantly have to remind myself that there is no such thing as perfection, only a desire to aim for something like it. Underneath everything is devotion, a perfect practice.

Because of that, this is my fourth Yoga Teacher Training. None of them felt coincidental. All of them seemed to come to fruition almost magically. Not without effort or obstacle but, ultimately, the path to each cleared, the timing felt divine and I felt powerfully changed by the experience. I remember, during my first training, Annabelle said “some teachers teach their whole lives with a 200 hour certification, and some don’t teach until they reach their 1,000 hours.” “That’ll probably be me,” I said, half-joking, not realizing I was speaking something true into existence.

“Haven’t you already done one of these? Like, that’s irresponsible,” a friend said while we were talking beneath scaffolding on a rainy day on the Lower East Side.

I listed the reasons why doing this training felt important to me. A lot of what I’m trying to do in this essay is justify why I went for my fourth training in four years when my teaching experience is scattered at best. Part of the truth is that I love learning, and learning about yoga specifically gives me a bottomless kind of energy. Sitting in an upright position listening to a lecture fills me with an acute, distinct and immeasurable joy. As an adult, I also enjoy the process of discernment. Does this resonate in my body? Does this challenge my beliefs? Can I learn this or integrate it in a way that proves or disproves its benefits? Most importantly, the purpose of all of these trainings is: How can I ingest this so I can offer it up?

When I enter into an immersive yoga experience, my body immediately becomes more mobile. It has me questioning the details of my stuckness, the underlying mechanism that keeps me pinned down and makes my bodily movements feel inaccessible. I started last year soft, strong, pliable, and I spent the past year neglecting my body, abandoning it in so many ways that it stiffened.

A story I’m telling myself lately is that asana is hard for me. I’ve even heard myself say it aloud a couple of times. I furrow my brow afterward, longing to take it back, to breathe the words back into my body so they don’t infect reality. What I mean to say is that I am in the process of getting stronger. This is the unfolding.

It is hard (a story and a truth) and I love the challenge of it. I am fiery by nature and, while I sometimes appreciate some space from the flame, the fire of transformation, the discipline of it, is invigorating to me. We just left the year of the snake, a time of shedding, and I find a real pleasure in burning everything down to reemerge from the ashes. I’ve done it over and over again, big life sheds. A liberation. In it, I get to see what is real, what is lasting.

if you have any friends that are interested in yoga, wellness or embodiment practices, invite them along on the journey.

Becoming a yoga teacher wasn’t always in the cards for me. When I first arrived to the mat, it was a sanctuary that I wanted to leave unsullied by responsibility, a place for peace and for effort. That felt like enough. Over the past few years, that’s shifted. Yoga has become the foundation upon which every other thing in my life is built, a practice I know intimately from multiple unique perspectives, including healing from injury and chronic pain, feeling disassociated from my body and yearning to come home, living in a body that tends toward stiffness. I’ve shifted from “asana is challenging to me, so who am I to stand at the front of the room?” to “the challenge itself is the benefit, and who am I to withhold what I’ve learned?”

I know that there is always progress still to be made, always farther still to travel. At the same time, I am feeling perfectly positioned to offer whatever guidance I can so each person can come to know their own embodied wisdom.

For now, I’ll leave you with these questions: have you tuned into your thoughts recently? can you recognize any patterns? do they take you where you want to go?