Jivana Heyman 0:37
Hello. Welcome to the Accessible Yoga Podcast. I'm Jivana. My pronouns are he and him, and I'm joining you from Chumash land, which is known today as Santa Barbara, California, joining you from my home. Thank you for joining me, especially because, I don't know, the world feels really kind of chaotic and overwhelming. So thank you for taking the time, for joining me here, for this really amazing conversation. I really do appreciate it. It means a lot to me. I love this conversation with Matthew Sanford. I love Matthew Sanford, I'll just say. He's been really important to me in my teaching journey. So I'm just so grateful that he agreed to come onto this podcast series, since I'm celebrating 30 years of teaching. I really don't know if I'd be here without him. He's not only a pioneer, but he's always supported me in the background. You know he's always encouraged me, and that means a lot. Maybe you have people like that in your life, kind of like a senior teacher who gives you advice or an encouraging word, and you know how much that means. So I just want to say Matthew's been one of those people for me, and I'm very, very grateful. He's also absolutely brilliant. Sometimes I don't even know what he's saying. Like, it goes over my head, I have to listen again, but I often find that he touches me in ways that go beyond my mental capacity. So like, it's almost like his words and what he's saying shift the way I feel or think about something, even if I can't verbalize it exactly. So I'm curious what you think. Please send me a message or write me a note. I'd love to hear your feedback about this episode or about any of them, honestly. I'd love to hear from you or just tell me how you're doing. How are you? So, I'm happy that you're here again, excited to share this episode with you, and I hope you'll join me after when Deanna and I have a conversation about yoga and trauma, which is a really important topic, so I'll leave it there. Here's my conversation with Matthew Sanford.
Jivana Heyman 2:34
I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Offering Tree, for making life easier for yoga teachers. They have an all in one platform for your website, scheduling, and email marketing, plus they're dedicated to helping you grow. You can join one of their upcoming free webinars. There's one on June 27th where you'll learn strategies for driving growth, building community and boosting sales. And on July 16th, you'll discover, quote, "Why you're not selling out your classes and what to do about it," unquoute. That sounds like a good one. You can head over to the shownotes to register, and also in the shownotes, you'll find a discount for Accessible Yoga Podcast listeners and a free trial at Offering Tree. So thanks Offering Tree for all you do for yoga teachers.
Jivana Heyman 3:42
Hi, everyone. Welcome back. So excited to be here with Matthew Sanford, hey, Matthew, thank you for making time for this. I really appreciate it.
Matthew Sanford 3:49
It's an honor to be part of your 30 year reflection.
Jivana Heyman 3:52
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, you're a big part of it, actually. So I have some things to share about you, but before I share that, maybe you could just introduce yourself or something. I mean, I already introduced you before we started here.
Matthew Sanford 4:05
Yeah, I'm Matthew Sanford. I'm a yoga teacher and author. I've been practicing since 1991, founded Mind Body Solutions, a nonprofit in 2002 and I've been working to transform the experiences of trauma, loss, and disability by connecting mind and body. And basically, I've been thinking about consciousness for a long time. In fact, I'm on the final stretch of another book that is pretty much everything I've been thinking about since I was injured at 13. But it's short. It's a short because it's going to be a challenging book too. It's both.
Jivana Heyman 4:47
Oh my god, I'm so glad to hear that. I know you've been working on them for a while.
Matthew Sanford 4:53
Yeah, this one, just for about just over a year, year and a half. And their name's kind of funny. The working title right now is called, A Skull, Wolf, and a Hula Hoop: Meditations of a Broken Yogi, maybe. (Wow!) But it's on consciousness, but yoga students and teachers are going to be like, wow, he's saying stuff from a different perspective that I've already been studying, but it's from a different perspective. So it'll be good for, I hope, a wide audience, but probably not a bestseller.
Jivana Heyman 5:25
Don't say that, you never know. Never know. I mean to me, your first book. I don't know if it's actually a bestseller, but it's a bestseller to me. And I actually, you know, someone asked me recently what the most important books are for yoga teachers to read, and yours was actually the first one that I mentioned. (Wow, that's an honor. I appreciate that.) Yeah, I just want to say, for anyone listening, they really need to read that your book, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. It's just such an incredible book, and it was really, really meaningful to me. When did that come out? I'm trying to remember what year. (2006) Yeah. So I think that's the thing. It's like, you were teaching, well, you've been teaching longer than me, I guess, and you were talking about accessible yoga before me and before anyone else that I know. So that's what I'm so grateful for, and that's what when I talk about how you've impacted me, it's just being there and doing this and having that book out and knowing it was out there when I started my journey was really, really important to me.
Matthew Sanford 6:29
You know what's fun for me, having been, you know, long in the tooth in that way, I think of my work and the work of Mind Body Solutions, in some way, as very loosely analogous to the band The Velvet Underground, which supposedly, they sold 20,000 albums only, but it turned into 20,000 bands. My goal has always been to have a couple of chords out there to get you to think that whatever your journey is, to do whatever you're going to do and turn it into a band and turn it into a whole story. So I've never been after trying to be out, but have a couple of chords that go, oh, and get you to think. Sounds like my book had that effect on you, right? (Totally.) A couple of chords and you went, oh, I think I'll make a band. Great! (Exactly.) From my life experience, and that's part of the point of Waking is hopefully you see your own story and the story I told there, and you then you go, make your own band, right?
Jivana Heyman 7:30
Yeah, I definitely, made my own band.
Matthew Sanford 7:33
Yeah, big time. You've made a huge band and you have your own chords, you know, like, there's only, you know the one thing as a teacher that I think...I had this really amazing encounter with a shaman who is also an academic, Michael Harner, who was head of anthropology, both that, I think, at Princeton and at Berkeley, or maybe it was Stanford, and I got to sit next to him during an event where I got an award, and he's a guy that's was the very first guy to study with and take drugs with shamans back in 1961. They wouldn't talk to him until he did this drug, so he did that, and he was able to do that and have that whole path and enter that world, while also being able to stay in the academic world. And he wrote The Foundations of Shamanism, like kind of one of the beginning textbooks of that. And I asked him early on, it was in 2010 when I asked him this question. I asked him, this isn't the story I was going to say, but it has affected me a lot. I said, so how have you done it? How have you lived in two worlds? How have you, like, been in the world? So he takes this drug, and he has this, what he thinks is this trip, and he thinks it's all subjective. And then he goes back and sees the shaman and they ask him, before they'll talk to him, the group of shamans say, "Well, did you come across the tree?" And he went, "Yeah, I was there. I sat at this tree." And they had mapped whatever the reality is that they wouldn't talk to him about anything until he had gone and see, and so they had been mapping this area of whatever this is, the cosmic consciousness. And he they wouldn't talked him until he ended up at the same tree.
Matthew Sanford 9:41
I said, "So how have you lived in two worlds? I mean, on one hand, you're in academia, and in another hand, you're hanging out in the rainforest with seekers of consciousness, like, maybe that's never been on the planet, right?" And he said, "Well, yeah, it is hard." Said something like to me, he was like, 88, 86 and just had a stroke, not till before that, and he answered me over the course of like two hours. So I had to really be on every level fiery to understand what he was saying to me. But he said to me, yeah, there's only four or five people in the in the world, in the universe, that I could actually talk about where I've been, and one of them turns out to be his wife, because she took the drug too. The other thing he said is that as a more practical piece of advice, he said, and this really affected me with what I done with Mind Body Solutions and my teaching, he said, "For the longest time...," and this is his answer to how to live in two worlds, two realities, right, which, on some level, for all of us to bring it back to the listeners, once you've taken the yoga plunge in a way, you are in a different world. You don't quite fit into your world anymore. So think about all of us on the continuum, right? And he was given advice from an extreme continuum. But you know, we all know that when you go to tell your family, like, oh my god, I do yoga, and it's great, and you gotta try it, and they give you like, the like, what are you even talking about? Or your friends or your social group. So everyone has a version of the story as a yogi.
Matthew Sanford 11:18
He says to me, "I finally learned that you're not even planting seeds as a teacher, that if you want to live in both worlds right and stay grounded, that as long as you're attached to even planting seeds for other whoever you're interacting with, you're going to be caught between the worlds, between what you know and what you think they're getting, and that'll split you at your core." And his advice, he goes, "I wish I had learned this before I was like in my late 70s." And he said, "And I'm passing it to...," he does it like as he obviously shamanizing me with a story, right? And he says, "All you can do is emanate. That's it. If you get attached to making sure people are getting what you want to say. If you are attached, I'm going to stick to what I need to say, God damn it. And you know, because it has to be the way I say it, you're still trying to plant the seeds you think need to be planted. All you can do is live the reality of what you're emanating and that's the way you stay whole." That was a deep effect on me. It helped me stay on the path I was on because Mind Body Solutions had already been going for eight years, especially in some of my seeking and exploration, you just pass on what you can pass on. I often say what I'm trying to do with adaptive yoga can't be taught, it can only be shared, and then it's, it's not yours anymore. It has to go. You don't even get to be attached to what you think lands. So that's one of the stories.
Jivana Heyman 13:19
Thank you for that. I actually have a quote by you, I think in my latest book. I'm not sure which one. I've quoted you in all my books, but the latest one I have that, where you talk about sitting next to somebody, like, sitting side by side with your student, instead of, like, as the teacher across from them. I love that, just a simple image of side by side, (Which defines a lot of my whole...) But also with the planting seeds, it just reminds me of gardening, because, you know, I used to be a professional gardener, when I was trying to make a living teaching yoga. Couldn't do it. It's a huge part of my life, and it's come up as a theme in this series, because we're looking back and I feel like when you're talking about planting seeds, I mean, the thing about being a gardener is you kind of learn to let go. I mean, I learned about non attachment from gardening, which is basically, you don't have control. It's like, I support nature, I can plant something, but whether or not it grows, I have no control over that, you know. And sometimes I'll plant seeds and they won't grow, but sometimes I plant five seeds, and one will grow really strong, and the others will, like, be small, or they'll die. So, I mean, you know, it's like, I just can't control that.
Matthew Sanford 14:24
Sometimes you get a stray seed and a tomato comes where you thought it was going to be a carrot, right? I mean, you don't know, or a different flower, or you don't even know.
Jivana Heyman 14:32
Or like, actually, last year I had grown tomatoes the year before, and so I had, like, a stray tomato in my flower bed that was just doing amazing. I was like, what? It's like, I didn't do it, you know, like, I didn't plant it there. A bird probably brought over there. But it's just like, nature has a way. Anyway, but I appreciate that attitude of, kind of, feels like non attachment.
Matthew Sanford 14:56
That's one way of saying it, for sure. Or what you can do is just play whatever you're playing as well as you can. Another maxim I have in my head is, it's not what the teacher teaches, but it's what the student takes. That's, you know, for them to do whatever they do with it, right?
Jivana Heyman 15:15
Yeah, right. I know, we can't control it. Well, I just wanted to say one way that you had an impact on me is that when I moved to Santa Barbara 2013, I met with Ana Killingstad, I met her here. She had been your assistant. She had moved to Santa Barbara the same time I did and then we hatched this plan to run an Accessible Yoga Conference. And I said, "Oh, if only Matthew Sanford were coming."
Matthew Sanford 15:46
She was my neighbor.
Jivana Heyman 15:48
Oh she was neighbor too. Okay. She worked with you and taught with you, right?
Matthew Sanford 15:52
Totally. She was instrumental at shifting some of the content towards more hands on, adjustments and sensations.
Jivana Heyman 16:04
Well, I'm glad we're talking about her, because she was a huge piece of my life in terms of just helping that seed grow, the Accessible Yoga Conference. And then she called you, and you're like, sure. I know you don't travel much, but you actually went to school here in Santa Barbara.
Matthew Sanford 16:18
Yeah, I went to UCSB for graduate school in philosophy, yeah.
Jivana Heyman 16:22
So you were willing to come, and you came, and so it was just that moment when you said you were coming. I was like, "Oh, wow, this is actually a thing, like, this conference is really happening!" (That's cool.) So that was just hugely meaningful to me. And you also wrote the forward to my first book, by the way. (Yeah, yep, I remember that too.) You've had a big part to play in my life, but I want to hear more about you. So I know I had asked that question of all of our guests. You know, what I kind of summarized for you, which is, like, is there a story, teaching, or practice...you already shared one, but you said you had another on your mind.
Matthew Sanford 16:56
I didn't even mean to share that one. That one just came out. Like, remembering that, that all you get to do is emanate, play the chords you play, and then whatever happens in the world, and it is a form of non attachment. Another one I think, goes all the way back to when you know, I think about what led me to practice yoga, in large part also why I've explored what I have explored, to the extent that I've explored it. Which, it's been interesting for me, a lot of my study has been experiential exploration. So I would not say I'm someone that spent a lot of time, a lot because I've read so many Western philosophy books, I haven't been someone that's studied yogic texts. I've been more experientially exploring my experience and then checking now with people that have read texts and more texts than I have, and just practitioners that are more learned in it, like, through you, for example. I always kind of compare, like, is what I'm saying consistent, you know, what I've experienced. So I've been that way. And a lot that comes from when I was first injured, and this is actually a scene in Waking, when I'm first injured and I was in the hospital for six months, and they're telling me, and I've been laying flat, I'm so injured, you know, I was in intensive care for nearly a month, and, you know, all this stuff is going on and I'm kind of getting acclimated and being told in words that I am paralyzed, but I don't even know where my body is. I literally, it's all...but I'm feeling tingling or humming or something in my whole body and they're telling me I have no sensation below my point of injury, which at that time, I didn't even realize my abdomen was paralyzed too, because I paralyzed from the chest down. I didn't even know that because I'd never rolled over. I was so injured, I had never even moved. So I had no idea that I didn't have any abdominal control or direct control.
Matthew Sanford 19:11
And so they're telling me, there's no point in sensation. And I go, wait, I have sensation. I can feel some. It's a tingling, it's a hum, it's this other level of sensation. And and they're saying no, no, and they end up convincing the 13 year old boy that I don't have sensation, and I believe them. I kind of believe them, but I never really believe them. I was like, okay, you say that, but I kind of feel this. Well, it turns out, like I've just said multiple times in interviews, that ends up being the cornerstone of my yoga practice, and part of it is that their definition of sensation, the Western medical model's, definition of sensation is too limited. And that expanding the definition of sensation and not thinking either sensation is purely physical or sensation is mental or in your head, that's a false dichotomy, that our consciousness is much more interwoven and subtle than that. That's why we have things like, oh, it's psychosomatic, or what's the placebo effect? We have all these words, but it's kind of unexplored territory, where I think you learn as a yogi, that the intersection between mind and body. It's a quality of energy that's different and it's in consciousness, but one way to get there's mental one ways to get their physical. But in fact, it doesn't quite exist in either realm, exactly. This is a lot of what my book's about that I'm writing right now. So in a long way, you know, there's all the ways of talking about that more from a yogic text stuff, but what I started to encounter in yoga was an ability to work with and sense and not be able to directly control the level of sense through yoga methodology or practices, a way to feel what I would call, if I'm talking to a room full of doctors, it depends what you say and to what room full of Doctor, you know, room you're in, what I would say, part of my nervous system that didn't get rehabilitated, right. That there's the subtle body, the subtle parts of experience. Only one way into is through breath. That's one way, right?
Matthew Sanford 21:22
One of the things, I think, is one of the revolutions of Iyengar Yoga is the almost over emphasis on alignment and precision, shows you methods for prana, moving without breath. And then when you combine the two, you've got it happening from all sides, right, and so I encountered a method of yoga that allowed me to actually work with change gravity, check into sensation, learning to breathe. Instead of pushing my breath into places in my body, get, like, gravity moving the subtle body from my sitting bones to my heels, lifting my chest and having my breath follow the train tracks of what was happening in my physical body. So I've been trying to to to explore not just levels of healing other than curative, but parts of what, depending on the group, I'd say the nervous system, right? That aren't ever going to make me lift my leg against gravity, but are going to literally make me feel connected more to the universe and my whole body. And that's part of what Mind Body Solutions have been after for a long time. So that story of a very narrow view of sensation basically led to everything. And it took me 12 years, until I was 25, to start yoga in Santa Barbara. My yoga teacher was in San Diego. I was in graduate school, and I was like, wait, there's something else going on here and I'm tired of saying it's not, and I miss it, and I'm going to figure out to work with it. And yoga turned out to be a methodology that allowed, there are techniques, that allow you to experience subtler aspects of human consciousness. Call it whatever you want. You know what I mean? You can call it however you want to conceptualize that.
Jivana Heyman 23:18
So I really I appreciate that. It's a great story, and I that's an interesting perspective on Iyengar. I was thinking about that too. Like, like, how yoga just perceives us differently. Like, I think, I think a lot of people, a lot of yoga students, struggle with bringing that kind of...our cultural mindset, perspective, to yoga practice. I think that's kind of what we end up with now. Like, contemporary yoga feels to me like it's like we bring our mind to practice that comes from, like, another, different perspective, like it comes from a perspective that we're already full and integrated, you know what I mean? And we come from this separate perspective that where our mind is somehow separate from the body at all. And that's not even a thing. In yoga, the mind's breath and body are all there already. I always say it's like the koshas, so just levels of energy, of the same thing, and it's all temporary, but the spirit is who you are. So it's just interesting to me, because I feel like we try to bring, like we put our perspective on yoga a lot.
Matthew Sanford 24:34
I think that's right. I mean, I think, but, you know, we all have to come to whatever material we encounter from our own conceptual framework, right? And so this idea that we have more, that's one more split up. There's really useful things about thinking about it that way. It's a big, big section of my book that's actually on trauma. It's about the where you get injured in the experiential realm of consciousness. Not trying to go right down to how it affects the brain exactly, and not just trying to talk about just emotionally, but trying to go like, no, what spaces in human consciousness get injured when your autonomic nervous system gets hijacked? What's happening? How is that level below your mind? How is it below and different than your body? So there's a whole section on this where I talk about the sensation of trauma and how it lands in inherently empty spaces and consciousness.
Jivana Heyman 25:37
Yeah, and you might join us for our trauma series and talk about that more.
Matthew Sanford 25:43
The other thing I would say is that, so in trying to get that, there's an empty part of our experience that human beings struggle to fill, and a lot of the pathology you see in societal, social, political, and historical things are not dealing with the emptiness we inherently have as part of having access to an energy through our minds that is different from the energy in our bodies. That there is something qualitatively different and bodies. A lot of what I'm trying to say in this next book is that human beings have been in love with their minds a little too much. That, in fact, the body is miraculous because it brings life around emptiness. Literally, your body keeps you alive, but it also takes space, empty space, and fills it with life. And somehow we fell in love with the other part, right? It's like, wow, we really got caught up. Historically, think of all the belief systems and all the denial of the body and all this stuff, because there's something miraculous about our minds. It's a super power. It's unbelievable, except the emptiness that spawns a mind also lives alive in the body. If you can combine them, right, then you're hitting the core of consciousness, as opposed to the split worlds between mind and body, right? And I think trauma is such an important thing to study, not just how we overcome and deal and heal with trauma, because it's an intersectional injury. It literally injures at multiple levels of consciousness, right? Of how we conceptualize consciousness, which gets to your point, right? Like, it's not if you assume we're whole to begin with, you know, then that's one perspective, and it's a good one, and there's useful reasons to differentiate between a mind and a body, right? There's reasons why that doesn't quite work. And people use the word spirit a lot, right? People use soul, like, we have a phenomena that is our experience and how we split it up. And trauma somehow cuts across, a mortal threat, somehow cuts across all levels of consciousness. However, whatever words you put to describe them, it hits us right at the core of our connection to existence.
Jivana Heyman 28:31
Yeah. Well, so, what I hear you saying is that, I mean, maybe this is not the words you're using, but that, like to me, spiritual growth occurs through that injury like that's where we grow is through the challenge.
Matthew Sanford 28:45
It can. What I'm trying to say, though, in this book, and I develop it, you know, is that the quality of loss, instead of being an end, loss is a lens. So if you think about my injury, right, one of the reasons that's allowed, and I think this is true about people who live with neurological deficit and with any kind of disability and with any kind of trauma and loss, is that like, if you think about it, I hear in my legs what presence would feel like without any control and direct feedback. Now you can tell me that doesn't exist and I don't have sensation, and I would say that's false. There's a hum here. There's something that happens. And I think you probably get it in your meditation practice. And you know what I mean? Look at the different limbs of yoga, you totally get how they're trying to get to the part. Turns out the hum is unified with everything. It turns out, because I have more stripped away, I don't have control of my outer body, my paralyzed body has become probably a more important teacher than what I can control with my muscles, right? And I can see why people sit really still and just breathe, because maybe you're more at the core of what's happening. The thing is, I'm kind of worried about the world, so I'm really interested in how that core truth happens and connects back to the world.
Jivana Heyman 30:22
I mean, to me, the trauma that I thought of when you said that, for me, was living through the AIDS epidemic and losing my best friend and most of everyone that I knew. I mean, it was like they were literally dying around me at a young age. So, you know, it was, like, so traumatic to be, you know, 19, 20, 21 and like, you know, just have that kind of death and disease and illness it was.
Matthew Sanford 30:47
One of the great teachers is an influx of death energy. I mean, part of what I'm trying to say in this book, remember, this is more a philosophical book. That's how it's going to be challenging, but it's not about texts. You have to think about some things. Is that, one of the paradoxes of human consciousness is that we can sense the presence of something that we cannot perceive. Human beings have struggled to bring it to words. Think about what faith is as an innovation, right? There's a reality here that it's beyond words, it can't quite be described, right? We sense it in our nervous system. We can sense it without the ability to conceptualize it. So it turns out, I call that non-being like we can sense what isn't here, right? Yeah, and that death is our best encounter with what's not here. So you have death all around you, it's coming into you. That's why, like some of the greatest times of pain, but also of growth, come from losing a loved one, because it rips the empty space wide open when you lose a loved one, yeah? And you're left with the raw undercarriage.
Jivana Heyman 32:11
So that's what you're saying about trauma in general. So trauma is that opening.
Matthew Sanford 32:17
Yeah, yeah, and it's scary, and the mind doesn't process it that well by itself. I'm presenting again at the Boston Trauma Conference coming up here, and I'm out there because a whole bunch of psychologists are taking a more somatic approach to trauma, but they're doing it somatically only from mind to body, they're not as good at facilitating experiences from body to mind. And they need to do both, someone that's lost connection with their body, need to have experiences of support in their body that start to penetrate their mind, that's trying to deal with what it can't deal with, right, like water coming into dry soil. The body's already solved the problem of being here. It's already here. The mind struggles. And so like, if someone that's hyper vigilant with trauma has got a mind that's trying to control things it can't control, doesn't know how to be in his or her spine or their spine, right?
Jivana Heyman 33:17
It's interesting to say that there's a relationship between the trauma and then the way to, I don't know, heal it, or the way to address it. You know, like if it's a mental or emotional or physical trauma, maybe that's related to how we address it. And, you know, I hadn't thought about that before. I mean, I always thought about, yeah, I mean, yoga offers all those levels, but it's true that people often, and often for good reason, people go to therapy or go to psychology, but there is something special about a yoga practice in the physical part.
Matthew Sanford 33:52
And even the quieting part, one of things you learn in asana, right, is how to integrate Shavasana into movement, how to integrate the stillness. There's an unchanging part of your consciousness, it actually is an energy source. And it actually is crucial to realize the unwavering part in asana as a source of energy, right? And that's part of what you're studying. That's why I try to use asana because, remember, I'm trying to, like, one thing that's so wild about minds, is, without a body of mind never touches the world, right? It has to come through a body. It's part of what the paradox that of human beings have struggled with is that they have access to an energy that is completely inert without a body.
Jivana Heyman 34:46
Yeah, you reminded me of a sutra, actually, that I was going to share. You know, the one? You know, Patanjali only talks about asana a little bit. There's a second part where he talks about lessening the natural tendency for restlessness and meditating on the infinite, posture is mastered. Like that's actually the teaching that you just described, you know, it's like stillness through dealing with our natural tendency for restlessness. So finding stillness, and the way we do it is by, like, expanding, you know, or or connecting to the infinite.
Matthew Sanford 35:19
So like, for me, exactly what you're talking about. For me, that even gets as practical as when you center in the beginning of a yoga class. For sure, you're trying to calm down your mind and, quote, be more present and all the things, right? But you're also recognizing that the stillness part of your consciousness is an energy source, that there's a different quality of energy that will lead to more graceful action, if it can be integrated, if the quiet part can help modulate and balance out your will, then you're going to integrate aspects of the energy that comes through human consciousness in a way that's really important. So like, I always want my students to realize when you're centering, you're opening the door to more energy, and you're continually trying to study that in asana, trying to figure out how to integrate your will into the flow of prana that was already here, right? And, compared to the difference between going over a lake in a motorboat or a canoe, right? A weightlifter is going through the water in a motorboat with a propeller. A kayaker is figuring out how to be in the flow, the prana, use their paddling strokes to go with the current, bringing their physical strength in service of prana, as opposed to trying to control and over control the prana.
Matthew Sanford 37:01
One of the things I get whacked out about, I think about how prana doesn't really care if you're breathing. It goes through empty space. And this is really important stuff to communicate to someone with neurological deficit is their access to life force doesn't have to go through what they can control. (It doesn't have to be through the breath.) Yeah, and but the breath is a great, you know, the breath is miraculous, right? Because it combines retention with movement. Breath cycle, when you think about it, it's a little snapshot of existence, right? You have the movement and the breath, the aliveness, it gives you location. You have retention on the top of inhalation and on the bottom of exhalation. So in the complete breath cycle, you're literally traveling through life and death, right? And so what a brilliant innovation that planet Earth figured out how to do, right? I mean, it's like, wow. How did this stuff come to light? Because in a lot of the universe, it looks like there isn't much life out there, right? It looks like there isn't a lot, on this plane, at least. It's like, wow. The Earth did something miraculous. (Yeah, yeah, it really did.) And we are it's byproduct. Like, the earth did something incredible here, and we're it. We don't own our minds, right? I mean.
Jivana Heyman 38:38
You're incredible. You always just go to this place that is just like, so amazing.
Matthew Sanford 38:44
This book is going to be a lot of that. That's how it's challenging. (I'm excited!) The book is going to sound...I hope you'll write a blurb for it. (I hope I get through it!) But it's trying to be really easily readable, but you're going to like, can you touch a tree? Like, one of my thought experiments, can you touch a tree from 50 feet?
Jivana Heyman 39:06
I remember you teaching that in a training. That stuck with me, for sure. I think aboutthat one a lot.
Matthew Sanford 39:15
Yeah, it's one of those things. And like, you know, I had a yoga teacher say to me, realize the space between the muscles and the bones. Turns out that lights up the subtle body, makes me feel my legs more. Same with someone with a traditional body. It turns out that the space between the muscles and the bones is right at the intersection between what we can control with our muscles, what we don't control as well, which is the life force in our bones. So it's an amazing intersection that opens the subtle body. So there's parts of the book about this, the space between the muscles and the bones.
Jivana Heyman 39:53
That's amazing. (Yeah, so all this stuff.) Oh, Matthew. It's gonna be amazing. I'm just so excited that you're publishing it, because I know that you were working on books for a while, and not.
Matthew Sanford 40:04
I have a book that sits quietly and gracefully and flawed on my computer, but that was a stepping stone to this one, and this one's in paragraphs, and you're moving all over the place, and it's going to be a quick read. It's a shorter book, but doesn't mean it's going to be like, oh, you know. It's challenging, I think, in a good way, but we'll see. And I hope a yogi really goes, I can't believe he's trying to articulate that part of our experience.
Jivana Heyman 40:36
Yeah, it sounds incredible. I'm excited. When is that happening?
Matthew Sanford 40:43
Well I'm right at the last end of it, right? So I don't know. In terms of getting a publisher, we'll have to see. I don't know, but if not, I'll self publish it. We've talked about that too. I might do that. I don't know if I'm going to want to change it thatmuch, you know.
Jivana Heyman 41:00
Okay, well, I want to talk to you about that another time. But for now, I just want wondered if there's anything else you want to share, and I just want to thank you for this. You know, I don't want to take too much of your time.
Matthew Sanford 41:13
I kind of went to to all over the place again, but I hope it works for you.
Jivana Heyman 41:13
That's what I love about you, you're all over the place, but you're also very focused at the same time.
Matthew Sanford 41:19
Isn't that funny? I try to do that. If this doesn't work for what you wanted for the podcast, I'd do another one. Stay on target.
Jivana Heyman 41:26
[laughing] Don't be silly! It was amazing. Thank you so much. All right.
Matthew Sanford 41:32
You know, I really think, like, here's a line out of my book that I just have been thinking about it and laughing about, about one of the things that my yoga practice has shown me, and I think it's shown you, and it's shown everyone, is that there's something really important about the midline. It turns out that, there's, and I write it this way, there's a party of consciousness at the midline. And it turns out that bones are often the first ones there. In your body, when you think about it. Like, when you think about going through your arm, going through your legs, going through your fingers, going through your toes, bones are showing up at the midline. And there's something really important about that, even though for me to feel my midline, I've got to feel where my sit bones are and let there be empty space up between the mid up through so I lift my chest congruently with the empty space between the bones and the space between my sit bones. I can't quite control, but I can get my chest to catch it, and then my inhalation can expand it in my rib cage, and all of a sudden there's a party, right? Because you're alive, right? And that's the kind of thing. It's like, holy cow. I'm still at marveling about what yoga has shown me, right? I don't know what to do with it.
Jivana Heyman 42:46
I love what you said about bones. I was teaching about yoga for older adults and that's a big issue for older adults. Bone loss.
Matthew Sanford 42:53
For me too, for someone who is not walking on my...bone density is real...for women more, but for aging people. I mean, bones are freaking magic.
Jivana Heyman 43:07
Yeah and yoga is good. I mean, yoga has been shown to help, because you need that to build them without hurting them. You know what I mean? Like they need energy without being challenged too much.
Jivana Heyman 43:08
All right, well, again, if you want me to do it again, I'll do it again.
Jivana Heyman 43:26
[laughing] We'll do it again another time. All right. (Okay!) So let's leave it there,
Jivana Heyman 43:41
In some of my recent teacher trainings, people have been asking me if I think that yoga teachers need to have liability insurance, and I always answer yes, very strongly, because I think it's important that we protect ourselves. It also gives me a chance to recommend beYogi Insurance, which is the company I've used for years, and also a sponsor of our podcast. So thank you beYogi for giving me peace of mind. I appreciate the fact that you cover live classes, both in person and online and also pre recorded content. It really helps. And I'm not the only one who likes them. I know they have over 1,300 five star reviews. That's pretty amazing. So if you're looking for insurance, check out the link in our show notes, there's a discount for you with beYogi Insurance.
Jivana Heyman 44:33
Welcome back, everyone. Hey, Deanna.
Deanna Michalopoulos 44:35
Hello, Jivana. How are you today?
Jivana Heyman 44:38
I'm really good, actually. How about you?
Deanna Michalopoulos 44:42
I am also really good. I just got back from early voting in New York.
Jivana Heyman 44:45
Oh, wow, that's awesome. Thanks for doing that. Voting is essential. That was an incredible episode, wasn't it?
Deanna Michalopoulos 44:52
Matthew is brilliant. Yeah, I feel like there's so many nuggets in there. And this is definitely an episode where afterwards you need, like, some silence and space to kind of think it over and maybe even review a few parts. Because, I mean, like, Matthew is kind of like an ultimate thinker, like there's so much to gnaw on after that episode.
Jivana Heyman 45:12
You know, maybe we should just sit in silence, just reflecting on what he said, or just go back and listen to it again, honestly, because a lot of it was over my head, honestly. He's so brilliant. Sometimes I'm not sure I understand. You know, it's just so intense. And I've heard him, I've been a student of his for years, and, I mean, I've learned a lot. He does repeat themes, and that helps me. But, yeah, wow, he has a lot of thoughts, really powerful ways of seeing the world. Yeah.
Deanna Michalopoulos 45:51
Well, it's kind of funny, because that's what he kind of learned in his initial story he shared, right? It's not what the teacher teaches, it's what the student takes from it. So clearly, Matthew, we are taking a lot from your episode. And you, Jivana, you mentioned that, like, Matthew is such a big part of your journey.
Jivana Heyman 46:09
Yeah, he really is. He really is, because, I mean, I would say I was teaching lots of disabled folks early on in my teaching career, and I really didn't feel like I had a lot of guidance. I had some great teachers, people like Jnani Chapman, who was amazing. She passed away, but she created a yoga and cancer program and mentored me, and also Nischala Devi, who also mentored me. They both really helped me learn how to adapt to the people in front of me. But I had heard of Matthew and then I read his book, and I was just so impressed, because he, like, embodied it himself as a disabled person. He was able to share his subjective experience of, like, transformation that occurred through his injury, and then through recovery, and then discovering yoga, and how that practice touched him. His book just changed my life, honestly. I mean his book Waking which, you know, hopefully have a new book. He'll have a new book soon, but that's still, I think, his only book. And I would just say to anyone listening, I highly recommend you read that book. It is actually really readable. It's more like narrative, like he just telling a story, and it's so powerful and and moving regarding, yeah, that journey. I mean, it's hard, it's hard to read those parts, like the accident and the loss he had, and like, how hard it was when he was in recovery. But, yeah, I just feel like it's great for, especially yoga teachers, to hear that message, to hear his story, and to, like, hear it directly from him through his words.
Jivana Heyman 47:57
So yeah, I had reached out to him a number of times early on in my teaching, just to learn from him, to have a connection with him, and he never responded. Which now that I know that I know him better, I realize he doesn't usually respond to email. I probably shouldn't have, probably didn't take it personally, but anyway, I just thought he was ignoring me, and then it just felt like things aligned so beautifully when I moved to Santa Barbara and I became co owner of this large studio here at Santa Barbara Yoga Center and we had a beautiful, accessible space. And I was kind of reflecting on what to do with it, and I met a teacher Ana Killingstad who had just moved here at the same time as me, and she and I were talking. We talked about Matthew, and she turned out, like, randomly, she had been his primary assistant for many, many years, and just happened to move here to Santa Barbara when I did and we connected. And she and Matthew were very close. And I told her about my idea of having a conference, an Accessible Yoga Conference. And she said, oh, I'll just call Matthew and invite him. And I was like, what?! I was like, that's amazing. And then she did, and he said, yes, which was, like, incredible. Because, you know, he doesn't really travel very much, and he had never responded to me in any regard. So I was like, wow, he's actually coming. It turned out he actually went to college here. I think I mentioned that in the episode, but it was nice that he...He loves Santa Barbara, he was happy to come back. It just felt, really, I don't know what is that, like, things were in alignment for that conference to happen. That was, like, the turning point where I thought, wow, this is really going to happen. We're gonna have this big event. And it was scary because I had not done anything like that before. I'd never put together a big event. And, I mean, that's not true. I guess I'd done a little of that with my AIDS activism, to be honest, but it had been a long time, and never any kind of big yoga program other than trainings. And there was maybe 150 people at that first conference, something like that. It wasn't huge, but it was a lot for me. And he was there, I was so happy!
Deanna Michalopoulos 50:09
That's such a great story. And look where you are now. And that's also like a great, I think you really honored how Matthew was part of the beginning of your journey. And can you say the name of his book one more time, just so folks have it?
Jivana Heyman 50:23
Yeah, it's called Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. So it's worth getting, it's worth reading, for sure. And I also, you know, I'm so excited that he's agreed to be part of our Trauma Series, because, you know, he has never, since then, he hasn't really taught for us much. He actually we had a later conference maybe two years after that, because I always invited him every year, but he would often say no after that. But he did agree to be a speaker at our conference in Europe, but then turned out he couldn't come, sos he did a video, a live video feed for our conference in Germany, which was pretty fun, actually, to have him there that way. Anyway, I'm excited to have him as part of the upcoming series. I think his take on trauma and disability is really important for us to learn from. So I just think that's incredibly exciting. And we've run that series before, but this is the first time he's part of it.
Deanna Michalopoulos 51:29
Yeah, it's incredible. It was really interesting to hear him say that trauma is an intersectional injury. And I know the contemplation of consciousness is a big part of his work. And so when he said, you know, like, you're looking at injuries at multiple levels of consciousness, and how we can work through that. Anyway, really fascinating. His session is going to definitely be one to listen to.
Jivana Heyman 51:52
Oh my God. I know, I'm very excited. It's going to be awesome. That whole program is going to be great. The other person who's new that we haven't had in that series before is Michelle Cassandra Johnson, so I'm really excited about her too, and I have a interview with her coming up for the podcast soon, so people get to hear that as well.
Deanna Michalopoulos 52:11
I also want to pull a thread really quickly and just say that it's very inspirational, just looking back on, you know, you had, I know you've talked about how you conceptualized the idea for Accessible Yoga in a conference, and it kind of came out of your relationship with Cheri Clampett, your friend and yoga therapist, and, you know, wanting to kind of elevate her and her work, because she was doing such amazing work in hospitals at that point. And so this was this like seed and kernel of an idea, and it was scary, because you hadn't done anything like this in the yoga community space before, and you went for it and, like, look where you are now. And so I just wanted to, like, I don't put a post it up. So if anyone right now is, like, thinking about organizing, or has a kernel of that sort of idea, like, you should go for it. We need so much of that right now in many different communities.
Jivana Heyman 53:04
Yeah, and I would say that the thing that really touched me about it was a collaborative approach, that it felt that, that it was a group effort, like all the teachers who came were really part of it. And I mean, I had to do a lot of background organizing. But I would suggest anyone who does have a seed of an idea, and that's like seed of something Matthew talked about in the episode, I would say you could really like plant that seed. And part of that, the way you can plant it and water it and nourish it is actually by collaborating with other people. Like it doesn't have to be done alone. Sometimes I see a lot of yoga teachers, we're kind of isolated - often it's just us and then our students. And what I say in all my trainings is like, we need more peer to peer connection in the yoga world and like, if you have an idea for, I don't know what, like a community you want to serve, or like a conference, or whatever it is that you want to create, I would say, find like minded people and try to work on it together. It can just be really incredible. The whole Accessible Yoga Conference, and how the ones we did for years and years just was such an amazing example of how it was like, people say that I created it. But really, it was like, already there. I don't feel like, I don't think I really did very much. It was more just like, that was already happening. There was this whole movement of Accessible Yoga in the world way before me. But it's like, I think I helped to bring people together. That's all.
Deanna Michalopoulos 54:39
It's always, you know, before you actually do it, before you actually reach out to people to collaborate, it's always like a surprise. People are more than willing and want to collaborate. I think people are just waiting for that, you know, for someone to kind of thread the pieces together, bring everyone together. It's surprising how much people want to help. (Yeah, definitely.) That's not surprising, it's just, what's the word I'm looking for?
Jivana Heyman 55:05
I mean, I think it's interesting to be honest, because I feel like it goes a little bit against capitalism. I think sometimes yoga teachers, we're often trying to fit, like, what is it, like, a square peg in a round hole by trying to teach yoga in a capitalist system. Yoga is spiritual practice that really is not, it's not about business and all of that. And yet, the same time, yoga teachers need to make a living. So I think the way through it is through a more service and community oriented approach like this, where you focus on collaborating with like minded people, you can create programming that you can still get paid for. But where it's, I don't know, there's some other element there that moves beyond the normal capitalist, I don't know what the word is, self-centered salesy kind of approach. To focus on, who am I serving? How can I reach them and how can we do it together, like, how can we move forward together? It almost seems like that's the answer for all of us at this time. You know, when the world feels so I don't know what the word is, just scary and a little dark. I think we need to reach out to each other and recognize that there's so many people that have good intentions, have really loving hearts, and that want to do good in the world. And I think if we connect with each other, we can do really great things.
Deanna Michalopoulos 56:31
Yeah, beautiful. Well, Jivana, we do not have any questions this week. Oh, so no voicemails. So please, if you have a reflection of any episodes or question about anything related to Accessible Yoga, please submit a voicemail or a question, and we'll get to it next time. But I have a question for you. Okay, so for a yoga teacher, a 200 hour certified yoga teacher, what is one thing that they could do to be more trauma aware in their next class?
Jivana Heyman 57:05
That's a great question, and I also just want to echo what you said about encouraging people to call in with their questions. There's a link in the show notes. You can leave a voicemail or you can send a written question. I love to hear from people. It could be a comment too. I'm happy to hear comments. So, yeah, your question is great. I mean, also appreciate that you specified a 200 hour trained teacher, because sometimes when you have conversations around trauma, I think we forget to really begin with scope of practice, reflecting on what is my training? What does it allow me to do professionally and ethically? Because trauma is a very sensitive area where people often need trained professionals to support them. And I don't think, you know, as a 200 hour trained teacher, I don't think we need to feel responsible for helping someone get through trauma, like, that's not what we're trained to do. A 200 hour trained teacher has barely just learned how to teach yoga. I mean, 200 hours is, I don't want to say not enough, but it's just a minimal amount to just be in front of a group and and I feel like we put a lot of pressure on 200 hour teachers to do everything and to be everything for everyone. So I kind of want to take some pressure off them, to be honest, and say that if something really does come up in your class where someone is, like, having a trauma response, you need to just refer them out to somebody else.
Jivana Heyman 58:26
Actually, can I tell the story? I think I told this in one of my books, about the first class I ever taught. Do you remember that? Have I told you that story? (Yeah, share it here.) Okay, well, it's related to this topic of trauma, because I am an incredibly shy person, like, to the point of being incapacitated by shyness. I mean, I have history of anxiety, and that's how it showed up in my life, like I would be afraid to speak in school, always, like, I would never raise my hand. I was, like, silent. But then yoga really pulled me out of my shell. I loved yoga so much, I just was dying to teach and share it. So it got me to the place where I was willing to stand in front of a group of people and speak in public, even though I just hated the idea so much. So my first class was, like, really devastating for me. I was just a total mess. I'm sure I hadn't slept. I was a disaster. And, you know, for any new teacher, it's overwhelming. It was like a full class, and I was kind of in a panic mode, and then this woman directly in front of me, she just like, literally had her mat right in front of me. She immediately laid down on her mat and started quietly sobbing, and continued to cry for the entire class. It was almost an hour and a half long class, and she cried the entire time.
Deanna Michalopoulos 58:26
This is your very first time ever teaching?
Jivana Heyman 58:57
My very first class that I ever taught, because I remember it so clearly that day, that class, since it was my very first one, and she just laid down and started crying and cried for the whole class. I mean, it wasn't like loud crying, it was just more like gently sobbing. She was curled up in like a fetal position on her mat, and I literally could not do anything for her, like, I was so panicked myself, that is, I decided all I could do was ignore her and just barely get through, you know, teaching. And then, I mean, I wasconcerned about her, but I couldn't actually find a way to address her and teach. So I just ignored her, and at the other class, she came up to me and said, thank you so much for letting me be here. I just wanted to be in a place where I could feel safe and cry. I was like, oh, you're welcome. That was just all I could do just to get through. But I guess it worked.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:00:46
What do you take away from that class now, years later? Tell us.
Jivana Heyman 1:00:51
I mean, I think I would do the same thing now, honestly. But I think the only difference is now I would check in with her and just be like, are you okay? You know, do you need anything? You know, like, is this okay? Just kind of have, like a conversation, or some kind of open line of communication with her as I went through the class, and I think that's maybe what I wasn't capable of doing back then. But because I think communication is the key to being trauma informed, having open lines of communication. But also just, that allows for there to be a sense of agency. You know, that students have a sense of being able to speak up or do something that they want to do. So like being open to a student's input. There's a certain way of setting that tone in a class that I feel like makes it trauma informed. And I don't know if I was quite there yet, but that's what I would do now. Does that make sense? That kind of, yeah, it's like more of a conversation than just like me giving a presentation in front of the room.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:01:57
Absolutely. It sounds like, yeah, like an acknowledgement of everyone in the space in some way, shape, or form, right? And then creating space for people to, you know, receive what they need in that moment.
Jivana Heyman 1:02:10
Yeah, and that's also exactly what I would say these days. I would say, like, this is your practice. Really do whatever you need to do. You can adapt or not do it as much as you want. So for me now, if someone did that in class, I would kind of be excited, and I would just be excited that that person was taking care of themselves and had the like wherewithal or the self awareness to be able to do something like that in the midst of, you know, kind of the social pressures of doing what everyone else is doing, you know, which is what happens in yoga. Sometimes we end up doing things maybe that we don't want to do, just because everyone else is doing them, or because the teacher expects us to and we want to impress the teacher. We want people to like us. We want people to think we're good at yoga, like we have all these kind of, you know, expectations and inner competitiveness that I think drives us to not really listen to that inner voice, which is what yoga is actually trying to get us to do.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:03:00
You know, I was at a studio class last night. I've been back to kind of, you know, mainstream yoga classes since I needed access to a shower for a few weeks. And it's been really interesting. It feels like, you know, kind of exiting this, like very comforting cave of this community and other communities like it in the yoga community that I've been privileged to be part of. And, you know, it's kind of interesting, because you can tell right away when someone sets an invitational tone. And last night, it was a tough, quote, unquote, physical sequence. And, you know, I think half of us kind of tapped out at some point in a respectful way, because she made it clear, like, take care of yourselves. And you know, at a certain point, she was walking down the middle of the studio and she said, I'm seeing some great choices here. That was, like, a beautiful way to acknowledge without pointing or singling anybody out. And I just appreciated it, because no matter what you were doing in that moment, you felt good about your choice.
Jivana Heyman 1:03:42
That's beautiful. Thanks for sharing that. I really appreciate it. I think that's exactly it, you know, like, because, unfortunately, I think the opposite happens, that if we don't do that, if we have this expectation that people should fall in line, that we're the teacher, you know, we're the ones who know, and you're the student you should follow, it actually takes away from the benefit of the practice, ironically. It's so interesting, I've been thinking a lot about the word discipline and how yoga is a discipline, and we maybe get confused about what that means. As teachers, we think we have to be disciplined, but I think yoga is not a discipline in that way. It's an inner discipline that is more like, I don't know, a discipline, I have think of a better word. It's more like, just like direction, like a path or instructions for how to go somewhere. Like, if you're asking me, like, how do I get to such and such a place like, that's what yoga offers like. Well, here's some directions to go down this road to get to that place you want to go. But a discipline is to say, well, you have to go this way. This is the only path, you have to take, this road and this road and this road versus it's generally that direction. You can find your own way there. Sometimes I use the analogy, like in Google Maps or something, if you put in an a destination and then it pops up, like, car, bike, walking, public transportation. You know, have you seen that? You know what I mean? And you can pick the one you want. Like there's all these different ways to get to the same place. You can pick, like, do you want to walk there or do you want to bike there? And that's your choice.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:03:57
I have to quote the amazing, wise Tracee Stanley...(Yes, please.)...who talks about, and this is what she writes, "Like softening the edges of discipline." So also, she says, you know, "Transform discipline into devotion," which is a really beautiful way of describing what you were just saying.
Jivana Heyman 1:03:57
Tracee says it better, usually. Yeah, no, that's beautiful. Wow. Okay, I think, I guess I totally agree with her. I just want to say, like, what I'm trying to...I'm not verbalizing this well, but I don't want to take away the word discipline. I want to reframe what it means. Because I actually agree that yoga is a discipline, but I just don't think that it's being applied correctly. I think it's an inner discipline. You know, it's like, it reminds me of like as an adult when I'm trying to learn something, how it is to learn a new skill and take on a challenge, versus, like, when I was a kid doing it. Like, it's just such a different experience to choose something to learn. And it's a discipline, in a sense, but there's a choice there.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:05:17
It' sort of self driven, right, in a way that isn't like...(And you're choosing it). Things that you're choosing it, it's not based on something authoritative out of you. You have to do this in order to attain or achieve or something or another, right? That's a little bit of the difference?
Jivana Heyman 1:07:17
Yeah, exactly. It's choice based. I don't know why, but it's reminding me...I know we should probably stop, but I'll just say one last thing. It reminds me when my kids were little, and I remember my daughter was so funny. She would always challenge me, you know, and just say no. Like her favorite word was no, like, whatever I would say, she would just say no. And I love her for that, she's so strong, and I think it's amazing, but sometimes it was really frustrating, and so I just started to learn how to redirect. Do you know about that?
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:07:40
Tell me more about that.
Jivana Heyman 1:07:54
Redirection is a skill you use with children, and I often use it myself, which is that rather than opposing someone's action and just saying, "No, don't do that." Like, I remember, okay, for example, she was one time she was writing on the wall, or, like, drawing, she was drawing on the wall with, like a crayon or something. And I was like, instead of just...I know her, like, if I went to her and was like, "No, stop." She she would do as much as she could before I pulled it away from her. You know what I mean? Like, she would do more. That's just her tendency. And so I learned with her that I would have to find something more appealing to redirect the energy. So be like, you know what? Let's draw on this paper instead. Like, Oh, here's a here's a really pretty piece of paper. This one's actually pink. What about what if you drew on there instead? What would that look like? So it's like, take the energy you know of her drawing on the wall and redirect it to something that's a little more constructive and less destructive. And I find I use that a lot personally, in my own mind, but I also feel that way about teaching. That teaching yoga, there's a chance to help students redirect their energy, rather than to like, oppose them and control them. Just feels more, it just feels a lot, I don't know, more enjoyable and respectful people's humanity and their basic human rights and freedom of choice. Because I think sometimes I've been to yoga classes where I'm like, what is this? Like, this feels like, you know, I don't know...you know what I'm saying?
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:09:36
Absolutely, that you don't feel controlled when you're in a space.
Jivana Heyman 1:09:43
Yeah. I mean, I've been in a lot of yoga spaces where it's like, you need to conform, you need to do what everyone's doing. And I don't mean just physically intense asana, but places that have almost like, traditional places where there's a lot of chanting, a lot of meditation, and it's like, you have to do it this way. You have to sit like this. You have to face this direction. You have to do this. And I feel like sometimes I want to do the opposite. I want to draw on the wall. I'm just going to say, I just, I want to draw on the wall.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:10:16
I think that's a good place to leave it.
Jivana Heyman 1:10:18
Okay. Thanks, Deanna. Thanks, everyone. And thank you, Matthew Sanford, what an honor. Thanks for talking with me. Thanks everyone for listening. See you next time
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:10:30
See you next time.
