Jivana Heyman 0:17
Hello, welcome to the Accessible Yoga Podcast. I'm Jivana, and my pronouns are he and him. I'm joining you from Santa Barbara, California, to Chumash land, and it's a beautiful day here. Hopefully, you're having a good day wherever you are. Thanks so much for joining me for this conversation with Libby Hinsley, talking about yoga and hypermobility. She's really such an expert on the topic, and I'm just so excited that she was willing to talk to me and share just incredible amounts of information in this episode. So, if that's a topic that's interesting to you, I think you'll really enjoy it. And then afterwards, Deanna and I talk a bit about book writing. So, if that's something you're interested in, I hope you'll stay and listen to that as well. All right, here's my conversation with Libby Hinsley.
Jivana Heyman 1:14
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Jivana Heyman 2:11
Okay. Hi, everyone, and welcome, Libby. Now I know it's Hinsley, so I'll say your name right, Libby Hinsley. Yay! How are you?
Libby Hinsley 2:19
I'm good. Thanks so much for having me.
Jivana Heyman 2:22
Yeah, thanks for being here. And I wondered if you could introduce yourself a little bit to our listeners?
Libby Hinsley 2:28
Sure. Yeah. So I live in Asheville, North Carolina, and, you know, where to begin? On the yoga front, I've been a yoga teacher for a little over 20 years, and training yoga teachers for maybe 10-12, years at this point. And in the process of teaching yoga, I got really interested in people's injuries and how the body works and all of that, and that led me into physical therapy. So I became a physical therapist about 15 years ago. So at this point, I practice as a physical therapist, and I specialize in treating people with hypermobility syndromes, connective tissue disorders like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, hypermobility spectrum disorder, and related conditions. So, you know, along the way, part of my investigation, both in yoga and in physical therapy training, was my own history of very chronic, bizarre things, you know, happening in my body, and I got diagnosed myself with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome about six years ago, and it was really at that time that that became a big focus of mine, which is why I wrote this book, Yoga for Bendy People.
Jivana Heyman 3:40
Right, and we both have it. There it is!
Libby Hinsley 3:44
And so that really came out of my process of understanding these conditions a little bit better, understanding my own experience a little better, and wanting to put something in the world that would help people have a different conversation about yoga in the context of hypermobility. I was a little frustrated about the - I don't know - maybe simplistic nature of discourse around hypermobility when it came to the yoga mat. So that's kind of what was the inspiration for that book.
Jivana Heyman 4:16
I want to ask you more about that too. I mean, about what we do need to know as yoga teachers. But I just want to say, actually, I can't believe it's four years ago now that this book came out! Because I have to say it's been a while since I've read it. (Yeah.) Because I was very excited to see it when it came out. But what were you gonna say? Were you gonna...?
Libby Hinsley 4:34
Oh, I was gonna say I'm also a mom of two bendy kids, ages nine and 12 at this point, and so I would say that they kind of have organized my sense of purpose and how I am in the world, is being a parent.
Jivana Heyman 4:52
Wow, me too. I have two kids, but mine are older. My husband and I adopted two kids. Now they're 20. Well, they're both about to have birthdays, but they're 24 and 20, and soon to be 25 and 21. Yeah, so I'm old.
Libby Hinsley 5:10
Well, I was a little bit old to be having babies! I waited till just about the last minute.
Jivana Heyman 5:17
Well, still, but those are great ages. I mean, kind of! You know, adolescent ages... kind of exciting, fun times.
Libby Hinsley 5:24
It's fun. I think we're still not quite that real hardcore teen stuff. It's coming soon, but this is a sweet spot.
Jivana Heyman 5:33
Yeah, I mean that teen stuff. Like, I kind of love and hate it. It's something really great. Like I'm kind of a little oppositional myself in the way I live in the world, and so I kind of appreciate that they're kind of that... how they were dealing with that, like trying to like, find themselves. (Yeah.) But also I find that there's a lot of assumptions made about teenagers that are not really fair, right? You know, generalizations, similar to what we're talking about today, like around just things that people think about something that may not be true, and of course every teenager is totally different. Some can be very sweet. I hope yours are!
Libby Hinsley 6:13
Me too!
Jivana Heyman 6:16
Actually, what I found - and we don't have to talk about it too much - but like, they relate teenagers a lot to to those toddler years, you know, in terms of brain development. And I was just thinking about how my teenage years for my kids were just like extreme. They were like extreme versions of themselves. Like whatever they were doing already, they were just doing a lot more of that. So it wasn't like a big surprise. I think a lot of parents get scared, like, "What are my kids going to be like? You know, but it's just more of themselves, I think, and sometimes that's a lot.
Libby Hinsley 6:49
That makes sense. Yeah.
Jivana Heyman 6:51
Anyway, well, I was struck by what you just said, though. You were saying that you became a physical therapist after you were a yoga teacher. I think that's so awesome. You just basically really dove into the... it looks like the science side and the kind of medical piece that so many people I think don't do. (Yeah.) That must have completely changed the way you teach yoga, I would think.
Libby Hinsley 7:14
I think so. I mean, bidirectionally, it definitely changes how I am a PT, and it certainly changed my perspective on yoga for sure. I think the experience of having a chronic health condition, multiple chronic health conditions, also really changed my perspective on yoga culture, especially, you know, having kind of grown up in sort of the fitness yoga scene a little bit, and having chronic pain and chronic health issues that I was trying to yoga my way out of for a long long time, or meditate my way out of for a long long time, and kind of that I think what a lot of people do: yoga practitioners, yoga teachers, they sort of beat themselves up in a yoga kind of way to try to like, be better or get better. And if we were only doing the yoga more correctly or whatever, then we'd be better. And that's unfortunately a lot of the narrative out there in - I wouldn't say just yoga culture - but maybe let's call it toxic wellness culture, in a way, where we have a hard time just accepting that some parts of life actually just suck. And yoga isn't here to fix them necessarily. It's actually here to help us be with them and have a different relationship with them and maybe develop some skills, some self-care strategies that make life better with them. But you know, I'm not going to have different connective tissue. Do you know what I mean? Just because I practice yoga, it's not going to fix this.
Jivana Heyman 8:54
I really appreciate you saying that because, to me, it's actually something I share quite a bit about around ableism and yoga and ageism too. Like, I'm currently teaching a program about Older Adults, and I think this idea of changing or fixing our students, I think, is dangerous for yoga teachers. And it does seem like that's what we're taught to do. That we're somehow... if it's just the right alignment, the right amount of practice, somehow they'll be different than they are. It feels really in opposition to the basic yoga teachings, yoga philosophy, which is more around, like you said, like accepting that sometimes some parts of life are really crappy. (Yeah.) And actually, but I think being accepting of it can make it less bad, right?
Libby Hinsley 9:38
That's right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's the whole idea, you know. That's the pathway. It's like we do a lot of avoiding what's uncomfortable, and if we can sit and be with it, you know, then it's actually a little bit better, sometimes. It's just like you know, talking about your feelings makes them a little less unmanageable. It's kind of a basic theme, I think, in a lot of traditions and practices. But it's really hard to do. And expecting or wanting yoga to fix something, especially you know, bringing that attitude as a yoga teacher, I think, causes a lot of harm and disempowerment, unintentionally, but I think we can just like kind of soften into this reality of human suffering and be with it and be with our students in a different way. I think it makes it a lot more powerful. And I think my training as a PT just kind of shed light on just how complex humans are just physically, and how complex physical symptoms and complaints actually are. You know, sometimes the body does weird stuff that we can't really explain, and we can't explain it mechanically all the time, but it just is, It's like the body, unfortunately, culturally, we separate things out. We like go to PT to deal with our body, and we go to a psychologist to deal with our, you know, psycho emotional stuff. And anyway, it was all these silos, and that's not how the human being works. It's all mixed up together.
Jivana Heyman 11:17
It's all mixed up.
Libby Hinsley 11:18
Yeah, it's all mixed up.
Jivana Heyman 11:20
Oh wow, we said a lot of things I want to talk about. So I just want to go back to the idea of trying to fix our students, and I just wondered if you have some general concerns around how we try to fix our hypermobile students? I imagine that's kind of something you know about.
Libby Hinsley 11:37
Yes, you know, it's interesting when it comes to hypermobility, there's a bit of a spectrum of kind of perspective on this. There's either people who are really afraid of it, and they see a hypermobile student and they freak out and they're like, "Ah, you're gonna break. Be really, really careful!" And they start using all this very careful language, and it's very scary. And the hypermobile person, especially if they've been symptomatic for a while and maybe been trying to figure out what's going on. In the medical world, they've seen a lot of specialists -- nobody really has any answers for them. These conditions aren't well understood. They already are afraid of their body because they don't understand it, and so that kind of language is really problematic. I'd say it's the most problematic thing we could do as yoga teachers is act like we're afraid of someone's body, because it's such a powerful message that encourages them to be afraid of their own body and encourages a sense of fragility mindset. So that's one end of the extreme. But on the other end of the extreme, it's like people are still really celebrating their hypermobile students and encouraging it, and using language that says, "Hey, go even farther. You're the example." I'm going to lie down on you to show the class just how far someone could go in this pose, as if it means something. And that's equally problematic, you know, and can lead to a lot of injury, but also can lead to that student... because I've been that student, I was always that student, you know, before I became a yoga teacher, and and even during that those early years. I was the person who was had ridiculous range of motion. It's not normal. It's not because I was like a better person. It's because I have literally a connective tissue disorder that causes hypermobility, and I was praised for it. But underneath that, I was suffering so much for so long, and it just is confusing for that person who has symptoms. Maybe they have chronic pain, anxiety, sleep problems, all kinds of things, but they go to yoga and they're like a rock star. You know, everyone wants to be like them. Oh my gosh, you should become a yoga teacher. You're so good!
Jivana Heyman 13:52
Right, we praise the flexibility in yoga.
Libby Hinsley 13:56
Yeah, but somewhere in between there, you know, I think the the first example, this extreme over here, is that person who might want to fix the hypermobility and see it as a really scary or bad thing. And I guess the main thing I would say to that person is it's not scary to be hypermobile. It can be complicated, and the student can be more complex to understand, especially if they have joint instability. In other words, they're dislocating joints. But just having hypermobility is not the same thing as having instability, and that would be the most important message that we understand. Someone can have a lot of range of motion and be really stable and strong throughout their range, and ideally, that's what we want, and that's what you see in circus artists, you know, performers like that. You see big ranges, and they train for it. And among the hypermobile students out there, you'll have a wide range, highly variable presentations. Some that are much more, you know, truly fragile, dislocating joints, we really need to have a different approach. And some who are not that way. You know, they're not falling apart, but they may have other issues. They may have pain or sense of muscle tightness, or just sleep problems, or you know anxiety issues, things like that that often co-occur.
Jivana Heyman 15:26
I've also seen, in my student, I've worked with a lot of you know disabled folks who have different conditions, neurological conditions, where hypomorbility is more the result of a different condition or medication. Like, there's a common medication, Baclofen, that's used for people who have a lot of muscle spasticity, and that creates that kind of hypermobile situation. And that's been an ongoing issue for many of my students. You know, they can like kind of push their body into any shape when they're in that on that drug, and it feels, yeah, it feels... I don't know if it's scary, but I think it's scary for them because they don't know because it's medication induced and dose related, they don't really know what to expect any given day.
Libby Hinsley 16:14
That's so interesting. I had not heard about that. That's really interesting. Huh...
Jivana Heyman 16:20
Yeah, because when you have that spasticity, it relaxes the muscles, but then it can be bent anyway. I had one student; he was paraplegic, so he was paralyzed from about the chest down. And when he was taking the medication, he could just like fold himself like a pretzel, and it was just like he was proud of himself. And I kept telling him, like, you know, that's not really what we're doing. Like, he had preconceived ideas about yoga, and I was just like... yeah, so I mean, that was like an ongoing issue with him because he really did want to perform, and that was kind of sweet. But yeah, that was kind of scary.
Libby Hinsley 16:57
Yeah, and I think that performance is a big part of it. Yoga culture, you know, kind of pushes performance, celebrates performance still. I guess it depends on what kind of pocket you're circulating in, but that's dangerous for all of us, really. It misses the whole boat of yoga, which is sad, you know, and also pushes people towards more risk of injury, no matter who you are, anytime you're trying to perform, but especially the hypermobile person because they may get out at these big end-ranges and they might dislocate a joint, or they might just have an experience where nervous system is cueing danger because, this isn't a safe place to be. I've lost my motor control. Perhaps out here at these end-ranges have a harder time controlling those parts of my range of motion. And in response to that, I may have a little bit of backlash from my nervous system that says, "Muscles tighten down, go into your protection mode, and create more pain." I mean, that's what that looks like in the bodies. It looks like, oh my gosh, my muscles feel so tight, and they hurt, and they're ischemic, they don't get good blood flow, therefore they become acidic, and that's a whole chemical irritant.
Jivana Heyman 16:57
Are you saying that happens when you do more of the end-range stretching?
Libby Hinsley 18:19
It can. It certainly can, and sometimes, not always, but that's often people will say like I'm stretching and I'm stretching because I feel so tight. It's a common experience of a of a hypermobile person. They've got this big range, but they're out there at the end of it stretching because they have a subjective experience of tightness, and I think what they're looking for out there is some sensory input, actually, and that's important to feel because the bendy body is so complicated. It's like, it doesn't feel a whole lot sometimes until it gets way out of the end-range, and finally the tissues are under tension enough to stimulate those receptors in the connective tissue that tell the brain what's happening down here in the body, and we feel something. And that's so important to feel like we're in a body because when we don't have that input, we kind of can feel untethered, and a lot of people describe it like they feel like a windsock or like a balloon that just is untethered, is just flying off into space, and the sense of getting to end-range and feeling some tension is like, locating for them. It defines their edges, and that is grounding. That is regulating. It's just that it's also problematic because it's way out here at a place that may not be, you know, safe for the joints, especially if we are prone to dislocating or subluxating, which is like a partial dislocation. And because the nervous system now might respond to that experience with like, "Whoa! Rein it in. We're not safe. We're gonna clamp down so that you don't go there again because we're not sure that's a safe place to be." Now we have a reflex, kind of a rebound, more tension, and a lot of people feel that cycle. Like, I'm stretching and stretching, but I just feel more tight, and so it's a conundrum. You know, it is.
Jivana Heyman 20:19
It's a conundrum. I've seen you focus a lot on strength. Is that one of the answers you would say?
Libby Hinsley 20:26
I would say that is one of the answers in general. I think the answer, and this is one thing that yoga teachers can really kind of focus on with your bendy students, and maybe all the humans in your class, but finding ways to give sensory input to this person that are not at end-range, because that's such a big craving for the bendy body, is it wants to feel something. It wants to have its receptors, its little mechanoreceptors stimulated, and the brain and the body of a bendy person, they have a tougher time connecting. The brain has a tougher time understanding where we are. Our proprioceptive sense is usually not as good as the average bear, and of course, we can get better with practice. But it wants to feel, you know, it wants to practice knowing where we are better. It has a hard time with that. So sensory input is super important. Now you can do that with dynamic stretching. Like you don't actually have to get to end range to feel something, but you need probably to get under a little resistance. So whether that's in yoga, kind of resisting a stretch or pushing into something like a strap or a block, any kind of prop -- that can be helpful input because we can do that anywhere in the range of motion to then feel some sensation coming from those muscles. I love self-massage. I'm a really big fan of like using therapy balls and other tools to give some mechanical and sensory input. It might be pain relieving. It might just feel good, but it's locating also, and it says, "Hey, here's your body. Brain, get to know it a little bit better. Go ahead and map this a little bit better." And I've got these better connections, and now, when I actually go to use my muscles, they're more connected to my brain already. So I think the self-massage is super powerful work, actually, for several reasons. And then, yes, strength training -- the resistance is like magic for my body, and you know, not for everybody, but for a lot of bendy bodies I work with. The sensory input of heaviness is so grounding. I feel like when I'm holding a barbell with weight on it, I feel the kind of grounding that I was looking for in yoga practices for decades, you know, and and maybe got taste of for sure. I think yoga is really powerful that way too. But for me, I need a lot more input. I need more stimulation to feel my feet on the ground, and that heaviness is what brings it on. So it's really I see that a lot. People will just pull on even like a little resistance band, and they're like, "Oh, this feels so good," you know.
Jivana Heyman 23:16
Well, it's funny though because I'm actually naturally tight person. Like, I may be the opposite of hypermobile, and yet I also found that strength training really helped to relieve the tightness in my muscles, so that it went the other way for me too. It was it didn't it didn't necessarily make me tighter. I mean, occasionally, but usually it actually just gave me, yeah, a different sensory experience that wasn't the frustration of always trying to stretch something that wouldn't budge. Like, strength added the ability, the capacity of my muscles, I think, to just be engaged. I was just more conscious of them than just simply stretching in a static way.
Libby Hinsley 23:56
That's right. That's right. And what's cool is that you can think about strength training, and I think this is an accurate way to think of it, it's dynamic stretching. It is not different from stretching, right? Putting our tissues under tension when we contract them. We're putting them under tension when we stretch them. And if I'm doing a deadlift, you know, on my way down, I'm stretching my hamstrings with a big load. It's like a loaded stretch in a way, and coming back up, and that dynamic back and forth. Yeah, it has that effect for me too. It's what makes my muscles feel better. When I'm all tense and tight, a weight workout is kind of what does the trick for me.
Jivana Heyman 24:39
That's interesting because especially there is some debate around whether asana is strengthening or not. I wonder if you have thoughts about that. I mean, you're definitely talking about resistance training as what you're encouraging, but with asana, I just wonder about that.
Libby Hinsley 24:54
Yeah, I think asana is... that's not where asana shines in my world, you know, the world according to Libby. Asana is super powerful, and I like it for a lot of reasons -- and strengthening is not one of them. So why I like it is, I like it for rhythm. You know, I like it for cultivating a sense of dynamic rhythm, like breath and movement kind of linked up together, and that sense of just rhythmic movement can be so grounding for people. I think it's fabulous at helping to cultivate some like motor patterns, like neuromuscular coordination and patterning. That's really important and can be a great foundation and translate to life, you know, and really help us. I think that it has a good role to play, well, for nervous system regulation, which is where I think yoga really shines across the board. But, moving and getting that felt sense and embodiment through yoga, asana can be really helpful there too. And then stability. So, like strength, kind of depends on how you define strength, whether we could really say asana is an effective strength tool. I think of it better or more as like a stability training tool, where stability means - if we wanted to use like, I'll tell you my definitions that I go on - stability means our ability to resist movement under a load. Okay, like plank pose is your ultimate example of stability, or even just like a tabletop balance, bird-dog kind of thing. Those are stability, static stability things. We're specifically not moving. Okay, whereas strength, I would use the definition of our ability to move a load against, you know, gravity or some external force, i.e. a barbell or something that we are moving. In yoga, we don't have much of that. We can push on the wall, we can push on the floor, but we were not really lifting or squatting anything heavy unless we brought in weights to our asana class, which in my mind is a little weird, you know, because it's like not really asana. So anyway, so to sum it up, I think asana could be a great foundation for building some sense of muscular engagement and learning how to tune into that, but if we want to build strength gains, i.e. get stronger and able to move heavier and heavier loads, we must do progressive overload strength training.
Jivana Heyman 27:35
I always want to put like a little asterisk to my question, which is like, you know, for the Accessible Yoga community, we're often looking at people who are disabled or older folks, and I think that it's a slightly different conversation around building strength in those communities, and that's where I see yoga - or asana really - having such a bigger role because so many people aren't ready to do progressive overload, they don't have the capacity. And so I just get a little frustrated when I hear that conversation in the yoga world about it not being strengthening. So I appreciate your subtlety addressing it, actually, because I do think maybe that's where those students need to start. (That's right.) It's more like consciousness of how they're feeling in their body, how proprioceptive awareness and interoception too, like to get a sense of what can I do with my body without injuring myself. Because I just feel like some people are very... is the word disassociated? Like they're just not in their body, and so, you know, it's interesting because I found something you said earlier really struck a note with me, which is that you were saying that you call them bendy folks, I think you said, bendy folks don't have a lot of... it seemed like you were saying interoceptive awareness necessarily. And I thought that was interesting because - and correct me if I'm wrong - because I find a lot of people with disabilities... Maybe hypermobility is not really a disability, I'm curious what you think about it, but often people with disabilities are more sensitive, that actually have created a greater sense, greater awareness, or interoceptive ability. Or people with chronic pain actually have greater interoceptive ability because they become sensitive to so much input. Do you know what I mean?
Libby Hinsley 29:21
Right, that's right. Yeah. So yes. So what we know about bendy people is that their proprioceptive sense is usually impaired. They don't have as good a sense of their position sense, but their interoception is highly sensitive. Yes. So that's consistent with that, and everything's kind of turned up. So inner sensations can be very overwhelming and really hard to interpret accurately. There can be a sense of just general internal discomfort, you know, and so I think yoga practice, asana practice, all the breathing, all the things that we do in yoga class can be really powerful at helping us get to know those interoceptive sensations in a place that feels safe, so that we can start to investigate: what do they mean? What is this information telling me about my body? Because that's hard to figure out and takes practice. But yes, that's interesting that that is a theme across different types of disabilities. Yeah, and I think that you know going back to your question about disability, you know hypermobile EDS, all the other types of EDS, hypermobility spectrum disorder, all of these conditions and their related comorbidities -- certainly, a lot of people with those identify as disabled people, and and it really is about their function. It's kind of like, you know, if we define disability as far as roles in society and what is our ability to kind of participate in these different levels of life and different aspects of life how we want to, absolutely. I don't know if people are like, applying for disability services in this country. Is EDS on that list of conditions? I think it's maybe not. I know a lot of people, a lot of my patients and stuff are going through that process or have been through that process. It's tough because they're not well understood. But what really characterizes this type of disability is that it's dynamic, and so for a lot of folks, one day they might feel pretty okay and they present like a really high functioning person, they're walking around. You know, they look like me, kind of. And then on another day, they may be using their walker or their cane or their wheelchair. They might not be able to be upright at all because they're having such a big POTS flare. All kinds of things could be going on, and sometimes there's not a lot of rhyme or reason to it. That's really frustrating, and it can be frustrating because it means the people around them have a hard time understanding their experience, and therefore believing their experience. So they go through a lot of like all the gaslighting and medical trauma that people do.
Jivana Heyman 29:40
nd I I mean people should self-identify as disabled or not. You know, it's a choice for each individual to make. But I'm also struck by this question of like, what interoception is like for different people? I think as yoga teachers, I don't think we really have a lot of awareness of the different inner worlds that our students have, and how, and in the ways they feel safe or not turning within. And I think we make a lot of generalizations, maybe because we have to when we're teaching a group class. But I'm not sure how much awareness we put... I guess there is that awareness in like quote, "trauma-informed yoga" that like people have had trauma, but I don't know if it's just trauma. It feels like it's also this. It's like sensation and pain, and, you know, is it comfortable to close your eyes and sense what's happening inside your body? Do you know what I mean? Like that's not comfortable for a lot of people.
Libby Hinsley 33:15
Oh, it's really uncomfortable for a lot of people. And when I think about this population and so much of what I see and have experienced too, I think back about my early years teaching yoga and the kind of things I would say to my classes about whether to fidget or not. You know, even like I'm making commentary about fidgeting, it's so ridiculous, but I think I actually did that, and now I feel terrible about it because, you know, people just need to stim. Like, so many of people in this population are also neurodivergent in a wide range of ways. Sometimes all of the ways at the same time, and they're managing a lot of processing sensory information and being in a space with people they don't know, with the weird lighting and the weird music, and you know all the different pieces of the experience that are unfamiliar to them until they become familiar. But they're managing so much; it's so overwhelming, and everything is just turned way up. You know, I just imagine this interoceptive step; just the volume is cranked up, and I see this sensitivity so much in my patients who have EDS and related things. The tissue sensitivity is so profound. You know, the type of kind of pressure and input that most of us might assume, of course, that's not painful. For some people, it's really really painful, like exquisitely so. And there's this heightened sensitivity that is physiological. It's not even psychological, right? It's all mixed up together, but we can explain it physiologically. Bendy people have different brain structures. They've got different propensities because of that for chronic pain and hyper vigilance and things that sort of mount that sympathetic response more quickly.
Jivana Heyman 35:07
And is that why the neurodiversity connection?
Libby Hinsley 35:09
It may be. It's not that well understood, but it's incredibly high overlap. People with hypermobility are like four to eight times more likely to have autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, Tourette's, even higher. It's OCD, all of the things. Actually, so I think that keeping that in mind is really useful for yoga teachers. That we have no idea what someone else is experiencing on the inside of their body, and it can be intense, and we'll cope with that in a variety of ways. And it might look disruptive, or you know, I don't know what's the word. You know, it might... what's the word I'm looking for? Oh, disrespectful, almost like wiggly and doing their own and all that.
Jivana Heyman 35:58
Well, like I always say, like just we need to stop projecting our experience as yoga teachers onto our students. Like, we can share our experience if we want, but we have to own that it's our experience and not assume like this practice is really calming.
Libby Hinsley 36:12
That's right! Oh my gosh, yes, we really need to stop naming people's experience for them. That's just, oh!
Jivana Heyman 36:21
I mean, sometimes I think it comes out of like trying to be encouraging, you know. But I think it can be the opposite.
Libby Hinsley 36:28
It can be. It can be. It's so hard. I mean, I I'm certainly guilty of it myself, and I try to refine that and say, you know, how do I want to say this? You know, and what's the most neutral way I can say this, basically, and have it be just an exploration. And all the answers are the right answers, and we're here to kind of find out, you know, what is your system, how does it perceive this today, and what's it do with it, and what's your experience? And when we can allow a lot of different experiences with our language, I think that helps bring that fear down for the students, who many times are already scared.
Jivana Heyman 37:07
Right, but all these things together - I mean, the few things we're talking about - I think all kind of connect to this idea of yoga not as performance, and that there isn't a right way to practice yoga or wrong way. And I think a lot of yoga teachers, maybe because we don't get a lot of training, you know, we come in and we just like maybe it's fear that we want people to all look the same or look the way they look in the book, and then it just feels like we've missed out on an opportunity to create just an awareness of the expansiveness of the practice and the potential it offers for everyone, which is individual. Do you know what I mean?
Libby Hinsley 37:42
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Jivana Heyman 37:44
I wondered if you could talk about yourself a little bit, if you'd be willing. Just how it's been for you, just navigating this in your life and yeah, in your teaching too. Like, I think one of the things that's missing in the world a little bit, or the yoga world, is conversations from people who have lived experience with something who are also a teacher, talking about what it's like to teach from that place. Do you know what I mean?
Libby Hinsley 38:11
Yeah, definitely, definitely, and and I do think that having had experiences of significant, what I call it like, chronic illness, you know, to some degree, really gives me a different way to view students, and I just don't expect things out of students anymore. Or even my patience, like I'm just patient with people, and I'm let them have their process, because I would say about eight years ago I got really really sick. It was after my second daughter was born. She's nine now. About a year in, six months to a year in, I just fell apart. I had always had a bunch of different stuff, but it was all kind of manageable, and I always thought it was probably kind of normal. And things really, really exploded after babies, and that often happens. There's like an event. It's either a viral exposure, a really stressful event, a hormonal event, and then symptoms just erupt. So I developed pretty significant dysautonomia, POTS, which is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, and a lot of bendy people have that. I thought I was probably dying of heart failure. It was debilitating. I was nursing. I'd go upstairs to feed the baby and I felt like I couldn't calm down for hours. My heart rate would just spiked, and no one knew what it was. I went to all the doctors, and no one mentioned POTS. And you know later I learned about it myself, and it's really easy to assess for. And I for sure had it, and I I still have it, but it's manageable now. I'm not that symptomatic anymore. But anyway, at the same time, I also developed what I now know was mast cell activation syndrome, which very often this is the trifecta that I'm talking about. There's the bendy, the itchy, and the dizzy. The hypermobility stuff, the dysautonomia, and the mast cell dysregulation, which is causes a lot of inflammation, mast cell histamine, and other things. So I was having, I mean, headaches, brain fog. I was getting lost in my neighborhood; I've lived here 20 years. I mean, it was really profound. Like I was really, really unwell, and then I developed all this chronic pain, horrible, horrible, just pain, especially my feet, and I still have foot pain. I haven't been able to go barefoot in eight years, and you know, in the beginning, I was really embarrassed about that because I was a yoga teacher and yoga teachers go barefoot, you know.
Jivana Heyman 40:45
Right.
Libby Hinsley 40:46
And so I wrote about this in my book a little bit, like a little side story about you know getting this clean pair of shoes that I would just wear at the yoga center and the kind of looks I got. I had a student come up to me and really like, I mean, she was just furious. I would defile the sacred space in such a way with shoes. (Oh wow!) And I was like, "Oh my God, they're clean. I've got a foot problem." Like, are you serious?
Jivana Heyman 41:11
Just so you know, I always tell when I'm training teachers, like, let your students wear their shoes. You know, like when you're working with people who just need them as a support. It's a mobility device, right?
Libby Hinsley 41:22
Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, I just was really... my experience was, I didn't have any answers. I went to so many, so many doctors, PTs, acupuncturists. I brewed the Chinese herbs for months. I mean, I did all the things. I did the celery juice, like you name it, I saw it: naturopaths and functional medicine doctors, and the cardiologists, and the rheumatologist, and the GI doctor. I mean, it was like an odyssey. And this is what so many people go through with conditions that aren't well understood in the medical community. Sadly, these are the folks who are highly vulnerable for the snake oil stuff, right? And because they haven't gotten answers in traditional medical settings, therefore they are gonna sign up for the super expensive, all the programs, all the sort of like alternative complementary stuff. Some of which might be highly valuable. I'm not saying that it's not, but when we have unidentified actual conditions that are, you know, definable and treatable, we miss the boat a little bit. Anyway, so that was me. I did so many things that never touched any of it because I had not identified what was going on. So it's been a really slow climb out of that place. Really slow, you know, starting with very little activity building up for me with the strength training a couple days a week, I'm up to walking a few miles at a time. I'm managing my POTS. I I take in a ton of sodium every day to manage my dysautonomia. I mean, like four grams of sodium a day, every day, all the time, and I always wear my shoes, right? And I'm still kind of on the foot odyssey thing, but it's been a really slow climb, and it's important to track that because it is so much better now. Like two months ago, I actually started a new job as a physical therapist in an actual PT clinic, which I haven't worked in in 10 years, so and I wouldn't have been able to have this job. There's no chance I would have been able to manage it. I would have been on disability, literally.
Jivana Heyman 41:28
Was there something or you're saying all the things? It was just all the things, because one of the themes in the podcast this season is about balancing self-care and service in a way like you're working that new job, but it seems like you've really invested in caring for yourself. Like you've tried all the things, and you're still... like strength training sounds like that was key.
Libby Hinsley 43:53
That was key, and it's like steady state cardiovascular exercise that that did not send me into a flare, so like five minutes, you know, six minutes, and you build up one minute at a time, type of thing. And because I had really severe chronic fatigue, you know, sleeping 12 hours, waking up completely as exhausted as before, you know, that pathological fatigue that so many people have. It is so hard. The idea of even making an appointment to see a doctor, like that level of energy output seems insurmountable, and it's hard to believe that I was there because I'm not there now, you know.
Jivana Heyman 44:33
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, it's great. I just want to say, like, I've had many students with that type of fatigue, and I just want to say what an honor it is when they come to class. And I know that's the only thing they've done that whole week. You know, like it's taken their whole week to get the energy up just to come to that class. And it's so incredible as a yoga teacher to hold that space and just recognize the investment they're making. You know, not to overwhelm yourself, but just to recognize how meaningful it is.
Libby Hinsley 45:02
Gosh, yes.
Jivana Heyman 45:03
To offer a space for people, yeah.
Libby Hinsley 45:05
It is. It is so powerful. Just your presence is like, it's really medicinal. You know, like that person comes -- they come for the connection. They're not coming to like get better at their squats or whatever. They come for the human connection because it's worth the output, and you know, and that says a lot about you as a yoga teacher, that a student uses their limited energy to come spend time with you, and so it is an honor. And I think if yoga teachers just keep that in mind. That what an honor it is to have someone choose to come, be in your space and move and breathe together, and that's really what it's all about. And that is healing. You don't have to accomplish X, Y, Z. You really don't. And I think, you know, and my journey out of that real health slump really had to do too with a lot of kind of come to Jesus conversations with myself about my life and how do I want to live my life? Like, what's important to me? So here I am with this overwhelming stuff. I have two little kids, tiny kids, completely overwhelmed. You know, for me, it took some real rearranging of my relationships. You know, I was married. I, you know, needed to really change my life in some really, really big ways. I did, and on the other end of it, I felt so much better. So I think it's also important to know how much all the threads are all wound up together. The structural, the physiological, the psycho-emotional, the relational pieces are all feeding each other.
Jivana Heyman 46:47
That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I wanted to mention that I'm going to be teaching in Asheville. I've never been there before, but I'm coming in February of next year. So maybe you can come by and say hello.
Libby Hinsley 47:00
Oh my gosh! I would so love to! Oh my gosh, that's so exciting! I spent so much of my time at the Asheville Yoga Center. I taught there for 18 years. Like, I was there a lot. I still am there twice a year to teach a weekend. Like next month, I'm teaching a weekend on hypermobility for yoga teachers, and then in the spring I'll teach an anatomy weekend, so I'm still very tangentially involved. But that's so fabulous!
Jivana Heyman 47:27
I've never been to Asheville, so I'm excited to come.
Libby Hinsley 47:29
Oh good! I hope you love it. I hope I'll get a chance to meet you actually in person.
Jivana Heyman 47:34
Yeah, come and say hello when I'm there.
Libby Hinsley 47:37
I will.
Jivana Heyman 47:37
All right. So I guess we can leave it there. You shared so much. I just want to thank you for your generosity, and yeah, especially that personal piece. I think it's just really helpful, you know, to hear about your story and your journey. And I really, I appreciate your work. And you're on faculty now for the Accessible Yoga Training. So I'm excited about that too.
Libby Hinsley 47:59
And me too. And I'm so honored. Thank you for having me, and I really hope your students, you know, get a lot out of it and have their interest piqued about hypermobility.
Jivana Heyman 48:10
Yeah, it's such a great topic. I really appreciate what you're doing. So thanks so much. Thanks, Libby. All right, take care.
Libby Hinsley 48:16
Take care. Bye.
Jivana Heyman 48:17
Bye.
Jivana Heyman 48:27
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Jivana Heyman 49:18
Welcome back, everyone. Hi, Deanna. How are you?
Deanna Michalopoulos 49:21
Hello, Jivana. I am well. How are you?
Jivana Heyman 49:24
I'm good, thanks. Nice to be with you. That was a great episode, huh? Libby is amazing. I really enjoyed that.
Deanna Michalopoulos 49:33
It was such a great conversation and such a timely topic. I don't know. I think the algorithm lately has been serving me a lot of - even though I'm not a hypermobile person - a lot of hypermobility content. So it seems like there's a big surge of awareness recently on the feeds.
Jivana Heyman 49:50
That's funny. Yeah, I think it's always a big conversation in the yoga world. So I was so happy to be able to speak with her. I never actually had a conversation with her before. I had read her book. I had followed her on social media, and we just invited her to join the faculty for the Accessible Yoga Training Online, because I mean, so many people ask me about it, and I try to respond, and I usually just reference her work anyway. So it's nice to be able to go to such a great source, you know, as someone who has a lived experience, and she's also such an experienced yoga teacher and physical therapist.
Deanna Michalopoulos 50:23
I thought that was such a great addition to the training, because in yoga spaces there's such a glorification of hypermobility, and, you know, some people may not know that they're injuring themselves in the process. They may think that they're achieving some external sort of like, achievement, I guess, through these postures. So, like that awareness, especially for teachers, is so important.
Jivana Heyman 50:48
Yeah, it is really, what's the word? A conundrum that we have, I'd say, in contemporary yoga practice, which is we focus so much on these physically intense practices that seem to almost, I would say, fetishize flexibility as like the goal of yoga. You know that we need to be strong, but even more than strong, we need to be flexible. And I just think it's problematic when it can be connected to one of these conditions, you know, and like you said, could cause more pain and more suffering. It's so like against yoga, against ahimsa, you know.
Deanna Michalopoulos 51:32
So interesting too. It's so deep in our culture. I was thinking about flexibility. I am not a flexible person, right? Like I need to sort of, you know, focus on it a little bit just to maintain some balance in my body, and I know this. But, you know, I was just thinking when I was younger. I think I was six or seven, and my mom had Jane Fonda workout tapes. But I just remember, even as like a six or seven year old, I was interested in doing these videos because I wanted to be more flexible. Like, just to have like a child thinking that way, like it just runs so deep in culture. So it's interesting.
Jivana Heyman 52:10
I wonder why? Part of it is maybe gymnastics and athletes who you know do this as part of their sport, and I think. I know as a child, you know, the Olympics were always a big deal, and like watching the gymnasts was always impressive. And circus arts, you know, has had an impact, I think, but I'm not sure how it got so entwined with yoga. Like I said, it's kind of sad, and there's like a deep irony because I think we can be causing harm in the name of yoga, which is just wrong. And you know, I've had many students who are hypermobile who are in pain, and not only from their yoga practice, but sometimes because of it. You know, and come to me because they were in yoga classes that were too intensive and hurt themselves, or just in daily life, they found that there was often pain associated with these conditions. So I just want to bring that up. I feel like yoga teachers really do need to be conscious of it, and we need to stop focusing on flexibility as a goal. And I think I'm speaking... what is the word? Like, preaching to the choir -- because it's like here, the Accessible Yoga community, I think, has already figured this out. You know, I feel like we already know that yoga is not a performance, and that the external form of a practice is not really that important. It doesn't matter. You can't see yoga from the outside. And I remember learning that because my daughter Violet was a gymnast for a short time, just a couple years when she was young, like you were describing, she loved gymnastics and was really flexible. I don't think she's hypermobile, but she was very flexible and she could do a lot of asanas, you know, quote, "advanced asanas." And I just remember thinking, you know, her mind is not calm. She was a little bit wild. She was a wild child, and it just was like a good reminder for me. Wow, just because you can move your body like that doesn't mean you're doing a steady, comfortable pose, you know, which is how we define asana. You know, I love how Patanjali says asana is steady, comfortable pose, and then he goes on to say that the way we practice asana is by working with the mind's natural tendency for restlessness. We want to lessen the mind's natural tendency for restlessness by meditating on the infinite, and then posture is mastered, and so he's basically describing asana. Even though he's talking about a seated posture, there I recognize that, but he's still talking about that strong meditative seat as another way of meditating. That you're meditating while you're in this position, and also asana can be moving meditation. To be present with your breath or with sensations or whatever is going on, that internal focus is the yoga.
Deanna Michalopoulos 52:22
I really appreciated what Libby said too about as a teacher, if you notice that perhaps one of your students is hypermobile, like just to tread lightly with language because you don't want to scare your student either, and that really takes you out of like any sense of yoga, right, to be frightened of your body in a way that...
Jivana Heyman 55:29
Yeah. love that too. I love that. That part really stuck out stood out to me because she was saying - I didn't mean to interrupt you - but she was saying that like don't be afraid of your student's body. I just think that's such an important lesson for yoga teachers. Is that what you were saying?
Deanna Michalopoulos 55:45
Yeah, absolutely. And just like refrain from creating more fear because a student may be feeling fearful about their body themselves, right?
Jivana Heyman 55:55
Yeah, I think that's so important with all our students, or disabled students and older students, that I don't know if yoga teachers recognize the power they have in that simple regard, in the way that we react to someone's body, and if we have fear or almost disgust or something, like, I think there has to be an embracing of their body, and positive messages, no matter what's going on with them. I think we can help our student with, you know, kind of hearing positive messages about their body that can help them in their life, they may never hear that anywhere else. And yeah, I was really struck by that too. I love that idea that we shouldn't be afraid of our students' bodies, and we shouldn't project negative ideas about it.
Deanna Michalopoulos 56:51
I'm taking us now on a detour here, but it kind of reminds me of something Hala Khouri said in Trauma and Yoga Series that you hosted at Accessible Yoga, where it was everybody needs to like diversify their feeds, and so they're exposed to as many different bodies as possible, because you're attenuating your nervous system to like diversity, right? And so then when you have a diverse set of students in your class, you're not having a response, and that always stuck with me.
Jivana Heyman 57:22
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what's great thing about teaching Accessible Yoga. I mean, my students have taught me so much about the diversity of human experience and different bodies, and that it doesn't that... how do you say? Like your relationship to your body, I think, is more important than your body itself, and how you relate to it. You know, we're all going to end up with getting sick and eventually dying. It's just the human experience. But how do you relate to your body is really the issue, not how it appears. We're so stuck in that kind of - I don't know what it is - you know that external, especially in Western contemporary culture. There's such a focus on physical appearance and so much judgment. Sometimes unconscious, unconscious biases against different bodies, and that's why one of the things I think I mentioned in the discussion with Libby was about how I find my disabled students often more advanced in many ways, and I think there's this confusion that disability or a condition like hypermobile syndrome is, you know, that it makes a student more of a beginner, and I don't think that's necessarily true. I think a lot of disabled folks have more self-awareness because they've learned through their challenges. They've learned from their experience how to be in their body in a different way, and they're often more sensitive to their experience. And I think that is a very important thing to recognize as a yoga teacher, that if you have disabled students, don't assume that they're new or new to being in their body. It could be the opposite, you know. Do you know what I mean?
Deanna Michalopoulos 59:12
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's such an important lesson and it goes back to so many experiences people have just walking in a studio in their body, and then people make assumptions about who they are, and you know, and their practice that's so discouraging. It makes people not even not want to go back to that studio, but then it sours them on yoga, which should be accessible for everyone.
Jivana Heyman 59:35
Yeah, yeah. You know, one thing that I do that I don't know if I... I haven't verbalized this very often, but when I have students who I see them practicing and I see them doing something differently, maybe than I had suggested, I assume those are conscious choices that they're making, and it took me a while to get there. I used to think they weren't listening to me or didn't know what they were doing, but I changed and I learned because I'm often wrong, and I've found that if someone's doing a practice differently, if it looks unsafe to me, I might say, you know, that seems like... is that safe? Or I'll ask them about the choice they've made, but otherwise, as long if it's just different, I'm assuming that's because they want it to be that way, right? Like, if they're practicing on the opposite side than me, that's how they wanted to start. I assume that's a conscious choice. I'm not going to necessarily correct people if it's not something harmful, I guess. And I think that this idea of correcting is an issue where yoga teachers sometimes, I think especially newer teachers, get into a trap where they think that yoga has to be done a particular way and that there is certain alignment that we have to follow and that all the students have to look alike in their practice. And I think that's just wrong, I think alignment is individual, and it's basically about safety. You know, keeping them safe. So if you know if someone is doing something that seems unsafe, it's worth asking them about it, quote / unquote, "correcting" that. But otherwise, I don't believe in correcting. I think it's a misunderstanding, and I think a lot of yoga teachers are still being taught that, and it feels antiquated to me.
Deanna Michalopoulos 59:53
That's such an important lesson, and that's a relief because I'm doing things differently often, very consciously in class.
Jivana Heyman 1:01:32
Unconsciously or consciously
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:01:34
No consciously! Consciously different.
Jivana Heyman 1:01:36
Consciously! So you are doing... so right. So hopefully your teachers acknowledge that and don't try to change you or tell you to do it their way because you've made conscious choices.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:01:47
Instead of upward facing dog, I will go into locust. And there have been teachers who say, "Oh, or you can do locust. That's great." And I appreciate that.
Jivana Heyman 1:01:56
Yeah. So I love that, the teacher is basically following you, and I think that's beautiful. That example is a perfect example of a collaborative teaching environment rather than a hierarchical top-down environment where the teacher is actually taking a cue from the student. And I think that, like I said, over time, I think you start to do that naturally. You start to recognize that most of your students already know what they're doing, and even if they don't, it's okay. Like unless they're causing themselves harm or someone else, like I do want to keep saying that, but that's pretty rare, you know.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:02:32
Some teachers might have this question: What if a student is doing something rather distracting?
Jivana Heyman 1:02:37
Right. Well, so harm again. I want to bring up harm. Harm could be harm to themselves or to the other students in the room, and if it's really distracting, I think that's a form of harm because what it's doing is taking other people out of their practice. So if you're doing like an extreme asana, while other people and while the teacher is teaching something rather you know mild, and you're doing it in the front of the class and you're doing it in a way to get attention, that, for me, feels like it's causing harm to the other students. You're just trying to, I don't know, like I said, get attention or put on a show. I would say go get to the back of the room if you're going to do that, or just go to a different class. Like if that's the practice you want to be doing, then maybe this isn't the right class for you. I don't think it's immediate harm, but I think long term it's harmful. Someone needs to talk to that student about it. You know, why they feel the need to do that in the middle of the class and like direct them in a different way. And also, I think the problem in that situation is that the other students might compare themselves, you know, and think that they're not as good. But these are subtle things. It's so hard, you know, to know. You have to trust your intuition as a teacher. Like in the moment, if it feels right or wrong, you can kind of get a sense if it seems like it's harmful or not. Like sometimes it's okay if someone's being silly or playful. That's not always bad. Do you know what I mean? There's not like a simple answer.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:04:08
Yeah, of course. It's like the context of the classroom where you are, and of students. Like, is it a community that knows each other, or you know, there's a lot of different variables to consider.
Jivana Heyman 1:04:18
Right. And oftentimes what happens is there'll be a regular student at a studio who likes to come to all the classes, or likes to go to a certain time, no matter what the class is, and they're doing their practice no matter what's going on around them. And I just, I think again, if possible it's worth talking to that person, and just like you know, trying to get students to be sensitive to the other students' experiences, sometimes we have to help people in being compassionate and recognizing the impact they're having on those around them. And like I said, they could practice in the back of the room if they're going to do something very different. What I would do in that case is bring up the needs of newer students, and just say, you know, people might be confused if they're watching you instead of listening or watching me, and I don't want them to do anything that they're not ready for, something like that. I don't know. There's a way to handle it, but yeah, that's a good question. Yeah.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:05:19
There was an interesting class, just about distractions, there was a student sort of making noises and not like a mantra type noise, but it was like a release. And so, I thought the teacher did a really excellent, elegant job actually incorporating it for everybody, right? So instead of like hearing one person doing like a lion's roar kind of thing, like she had all of us do something, like, maybe a little more mild but similar, and I thought that was really creative in the moment.
Jivana Heyman 1:05:48
That's collaboration. So like I mentioned earlier, with when you practiced locusts instead of upward dog, like it's the teacher bringing in a collaborative approach, and that's like actually, I'll just go back to the ABCs of Accessible Yoga, by the way, which is...
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:06:06
Let's hear them!
Jivana Heyman 1:06:07
Oh yeah, so A is agency, so the students can do, you know, whatever they want, like they're free to make choices about their body and their practice. But B, there's boundaries to that. This is a yoga class, and my job as a teacher is to keep everyone here safe and make sure that everyone has a positive experience as best I can, you know, to the best of my ability. And then when there's an issue, C as collaboration, we come together and figure it out. And that's exactly what you described in both of those situations: is the teachers collaborating with you by actually integrating, or with the other student integrating what they are doing into the class. So the teachers actually, you know, bring everyone back together when someone goes off on their own, which is a really interesting technique, I would say, to do. Really smart too. There's so many ways to collaborate, and maybe that word isn't sufficient. I don't know if there's a better word, but it works with ABC!
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:06:59
No, I think collaborate works.
Jivana Heyman 1:07:03
Compromise? I don't know. Communicate. I mean, usually there's some kind of like, interaction that can occur when there's tension there, right? When there's tension between someone's agency and the boundaries you've created, you know, as the teacher. And again, going back to ahimsa, are you keeping everyone, including yourself, safe in this environment? And then, how do you really, how do you address it? I mean, often my experience has been that it's sometimes tension between students. Like I had the student who would always, he would like assist the other students, even though I didn't want him to. Like he just had been practicing a while, and basically he was like quietly teaching behind the scenes, and like to me that's harmful because he wasn't a trained teacher, and I didn't know what he was exactly telling people. So what I had to do with with him was to say, like, I had to talk to him outside a class and be like, you know, I see you wanting to teach, maybe you should take teacher training, like you know, become a teacher. But in these classes, I'm the teacher, and so I'm responsible for what's happening.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:08:18
Boundaries. B, boundaries.
Jivana Heyman 1:08:19
Boundaries, yeah. And I only learned boundaries by having children because I'm like a people pleaser and I'm very shy. But my children, especially when they were teenagers, taught me about how to have firm boundaries. So thank you, Charlie and Violet! Yeah, boundaries.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:08:40
Well, it was a great conversation with Libby. Thank you, Libby.
Jivana Heyman 1:08:45
Yes, thank you, Libby. My God, that was awesome. Anything else you want to talk about?
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:08:49
Did you want to talk about an update for your book?
Jivana Heyman 1:08:53
Yeah, maybe quickly. Just say, you know, I had said when I started this season that I wanted to kind of bring people along the journey of writing my new book, Yoga Meditation, which you're editing, and so I thought, yeah, I mean, can we talk about it for a few minutes? Like, I'd just love to talk about where we are with it, which is basically, we're deep in the editing, maybe nearing the end of editing. I don't know, and I just want to say the reason I think it's worth mentioning is that editing to me is the hardest part of writing, and the most important part. Like I could write all day, like no problem, just blah blah blah. But like to go back and edit is the real work, for me, of writing.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:09:40
Or the magic, depending on your perspective!
Jivana Heyman 1:09:45
Feels like work right now, but thanks for that reframing.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:09:49
Editing is... yeah, and I feel like with AI now, right, people kind of cut editing short, right? Like, and AI, and like the urgency of like getting something out there. Like social media has taught us, like something happens, we need to write it, we need to produce it, needs to look very shiny, needs to go out. But, you know, traditionally publishing was a very long process, right, between like writers and editors and like back and forths. Like you know, it took like three months to put out a magazine issue. So it was traditionally very slow, and there was time to go back. And you know, just the pace of everything today is very different.
Jivana Heyman 1:10:32
Right. And traditionally, with book writing, the way it would work is, and still does mostly, is that you make a proposal which usually has just a couple sample chapters. It's usually a proposal to a publisher, it's not a finished book, by the way. So people get confused about that. It's very specific questions. Often they're marketing related questions, but there's like a clear synopsis of your book, table of contents, and a few sample chapters. Once they like it and they want it, they offer you a contract, and then you have literally from the contract, usually, publication date is two years later, so there's usually a two-year period between contract and publication, and that's a one-year period for writing the book, and then one year for producing, meaning like that second year is either spent with editing and copy editing and proofreading, designing, and then creating marketing content. So I mean, yeah, talk about slow. I couldn't believe it when I got my first book contract. It was two years later, I was like, what? I don't know. My mind couldn't imagine it was going to take two years, but it did. It did take two years. And this book has taken me years because I started this book years ago, and then I actually put it aside, and then just came back to it. Now it's been about a year.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:11:59
nd I'm a slow editor, so!
Jivana Heyman 1:12:01
You're not. No, you're not. You're busy, but no, you're a great editor, and I really appreciate your input. But I was thinking about how editing feels very much like meditation. Of course, the book is on meditation, so that's like all I'm thinking about these days. But I feel like editing is like meditating, because, for me, I have to almost quiet my mind when I'm reading and just try to see it or hear it for the first time again, and that, to me, is always the hard part about editing is letting go of my understanding of what I think I'm trying to say versus what it actually says on on the page. And that's always hard to do, to have any distance from your own writing, and I think editing demands that. And reminds me a lot of a practice called active listening. Do you know active listening, where when you're in conversation with someone and you try to hear what they're saying without thinking about what you're going to say next? Do you know what I mean? That's like what I find editing is like constantly trying to focus, constantly focus my mind and let go of my preconceived ideas about what I wrote. It's very hard for me.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:13:11
It definitely is a practice, and I've always said, to me, it feels like a mindfulness exercise because you're reading it, there's the content, there's accuracy, there's things you want to question. But then it's like, how do you feel while reading this? So if I'm reading something and I want to make like a substantial change or I have a substantial note, I will make my notes. But then I have to go back and, like you said, sort of read it fresh. And I often do that just to make sure I'm being fair. I'm like, was this my mood at the time, or like, you know, is does this note still stand? And so it's interesting when I go back and it's like the same feelings come up, the same like I'm trying to read it fresh, and I'm like, okay, no, that note stands.
Jivana Heyman 1:13:56
I love that. I love when you do that. I mean, I love when you give feeling reactions. I don't think a lot of editors do that, just so you know, but I appreciate it because I think that is important. We want people to have an experience when we're reading, and so you'll say something like, "This part felt scary." Or like, what was the word you used? I can't remember what word you use, but you just...
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:14:17
Anxiety provoking
Jivana Heyman 1:14:22
That's awesome. You know, it really helps me to clarify what it is I'm trying to say. So yeah.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:14:29
You know, there are different types of editing too, right? Like, so being clear if you're writing, like, what kind of editing do you need? Do you need someone to help you with the overall structure of the book? Like, you know, a publishing house won't often play with structure so much. You might have to go to somebody else, like you know, before you give it to a publisher, right, your final draft, because they're not going to be so deep with everything.
Jivana Heyman 1:14:53
Yeah. No, that's totally true. Like these days, I think a publisher would usually demand that you get an outside editor to do that kind of detailed work, like or not detailed, but maybe bigger questions about your writing and the content. That's what they're basically paying you to do. They usually handle more, like you said, the other kinds of editing: copy editing, which is the more grammar and basic structure, like more structural in terms of the writing itself, and then proofreading where it's correct, which is correcting mistakes. But it's true, there's at least three levels of editing, if not more, and that took me a while to understand. Anyway, we're still in the first phase of editing.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:15:41
But I think it'll go by quickly after this.
Jivana Heyman 1:15:43
Yeah, I mean, I'm still hoping to publish in October, and since it's self published, that means that is kind of up to us to decide. But that's dangerous too. You know, it's like the great thing about having a contract with a publisher is like you have to do it. A the hard deadline is so great in a way, but I think it'll be okay.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:16:07
Well, it'll certainly be okay. It'll be great.
Jivana Heyman 1:16:09
Yeah. No, I'm enjoying the book more, actually. I'm feeling better about it. It's so funny to watch it come together and how it when I first wrote the first draft, it was like all these separate pieces, and now it feels a little more cohesive. Like, oh, this is actually a cohesive book that has a logical progression and flow. That's a new feeling. So I'm excited about that.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:16:39
I want to add, like, space is so important for that. Like, if you're writing something, anyone out there, like you know, just make sure you write it and you know, and authors usually say put it in the drawer. It's like a proverbial drawer for a period of time and then read it fresh. (Oh yeah.) Because then you're gonna get so much more out of that reread and re-edit when you're like, okay, I have distance from it. I can come back. I could see what needs to be woven. I could see what I don't need.
Jivana Heyman 1:17:06
Yeah, definitely that helped a lot. I mean, having this time, because it's been a couple years now on this book. Time has helped me. The other thing I probably will do, and I haven't done it yet, is when I get near a final draft, I usually will print it out, which seems like a waste of paper, but it really helps me to read in a different format, to get off the screen, and to actually sit with it. Like, I don't know what it is. Yeah, changing the format of the way you read it, even on a different device, can help for editing, I think, to give you that space, you know, that you need. Anyway, well, thanks for all your editing.
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:17:44
Reading it out loud sometimes helps, if you're trying to get through a certain passage. And, you know, this is silly, but sometimes I'll just change the font because something will pop in like a sans serif that didn't pop in a serif. And so this is a weird thing, but sometimes if I'm editing a short essay, it's easy to change fonts.
Jivana Heyman 1:18:05
Oh, I do that all the time. I don't think that's weird. I think it helps a lot. Yeah, anything that works. Anyway, I'm interested if people have questions. I mean, first of all, I would love some more questions. We didn't have a question this week for this episode, but I'd love some more questions and comments. So we can, you know, we have links. You can leave a voice message or a written message if you have comments or questions about book writing, I'd love to hear. If you're working on a book, let me know. All right. Well, should we leave it there?
Deanna Michalopoulos 1:18:38
Yeah, let's leave it there. This is great.
Jivana Heyman 1:18:41
All right, thanks, Deanna. Thanks again, Libby, and thanks everyone for listening. Okay, bye.
Jivana Heyman 1:18:55
Before you go, I just want to mention one more thing, and that is our Accessible Yoga Mentorship Program. It's a really special place where we come together as yoga teachers for peer support, encouragement, to learn, to answer each other's questions, and to practice together. It's such an amazing way to find that support that yoga teachers so often need. And I'd love for you to join us. I lead one session a month, and then Rodrigo Souza leads the other, and it's a great way to stay connected and keep improving your teaching. You can find more information on our website at accessibleyoga.org. There's also a link in the show notes. Hope to see you there.
