It’s quite a thing to say, isn’t it? After all, it’s just yoga, what possible harm could it do? Quite a lot, actually, if not done properly. When introduced to it in the wrong way, the impact on a system already split from trauma can be devastating. Things one is made to do in a yoga setting when they are not ready, depending completely on context, of course, can never the less leave scars behind, as in our case. My name is kireonna, and during my time here I helped the system get back into things of this nature with the help of outside people who actually knew the limits of what they were doing, understood fear for what it was and did not try to force us into things we were not ready for. But it is the story before this that I have begun the telling of today, which the rest of the system will finish on my behalf, in our collective person, once my time here is over, and which led us to this point and laid upon our hearts the burden of fear and the blockage of our true expression.
Remembering is painful, but remember we must, in order to heal. Our first forced chant was in the winter of 2009, with a yoga teacher who was in training at the time. She brought in a mat, rolled it out on the floor, and then had us sit on said mat, according to the memories I’ve been able to gather together. She then had us chant the syllable ‘om,’ which is supposed to be a grounding, calming and healing thing to do, however since we were not ready, and were driven into doing it with no explanation, we resisted. Our chants were forced, and at the same time brittle. We obeyed the adults, just as the behavioral abuse we’d thus far been subjected to had taught us. The rest of the sessions were mostly enjoyable, after the chants were finished, and in fact gave us a solid, useful foundation for what we’d need to learn next. But the forced chanting at the beginning of each session emptied our soul in some ways, because for 8 years after we’d refused to hum anything, or linger over any vowel for too long of a time.
We’d disconnected something that was meant to help us so completely from ourselves that, for more than half a decade, the very idea of singing ‘om’ was alien to us, and caused fear just by its presence in our minds. That reaction simply was because we were not prepared beforehand. We were not told that we would be chanting at all, nor were we informed that such chanting was to help us, or that we might get joy from doing such a thing. We were, in more ways than one, thrown into the fog. That’s not to say we didn’t ask what the perpus of our commanded action was. We did inquire, and were told that it was something asked of this teacher in training by someone who held power over her. In other words, something which was meant as a deeply spiritual act, was turned into something that wasn’t meant to do anything more than please someone we didn’t know anything about and had never met.
As though that wasn’t bad enough, toward the end of our time with this teacher in training, who, at the time, we thought cared about us, we were subjected to an unwelcome smell during a session with her. The smell was that of some kind of oil brought by this supposedly caring figure, which, she claimed, helped some people focus. For us, it had the opposite effect, shattering our concentration and causing us to want to vomit. Though she only subjected us to this kind of thing once, it left a mark that was much like the aftertaste in one’s mouth after finishing something tart. We’ve avoided strong smells all our life, and to be, for all intents and purposes, forced into a situation where we had no other choice than to smell just such a thing was the event that shattered our confidence. We shut down our breathing in a way, closed down any enjoyment we’d had, and told her exactly what we thought of the so-called good smelling thing, and after that she never did it again, but once was enough to leave an impression, the stamp on the package that finalized our unconscious commitment to rise from the ashes that these times were becoming.
The sessions, at some point, stopped. For 2 years, we hardly noticed this, and probably would have kept on not noticing it if it hadn’t been for regular encounters with the woman who first had guided us. When we were in seventh grade, after many tears had been shed, words had been spoken and printed, and conversations were held, we resumed doing yoga with her again, only to find that much had changed. We asked ourselves, from the very first session, where the caring person had gone, not because she was overtly harsh with us frequently, Not because she made us uncomfortable by the way she touched us, but because she neglected to tell us what was going on, ignored and silenced our surprise, and began putting forceful, rushing things into a slower practice that should never have been there. In the first session, our breathing, quiet in its resting state, was demanded into loudness; in subsequent ones, our gradualness was labeled as tentativeness; towards the end, we were even called ‘weak.’ The mind mattered very little in that practice, and words that referenced protection of one’s heart were said with a hollowness that we cannot begin to replicate. Talk of ‘grounding’ was also done with a lack of context being ignored. In other words, once again things that were first spoken with deep meaning were thrown into a money-driven, mindless mess that was passed off as yoga in a setting that could have cared less about quality of practice.
The meaning of the word ‘yoga’ is ‘union.’ Union was neglected here, replaced with a cold division that was boosted by teachers and figures who held power. The lack of an equal ground with those of our same body age, a void caused by the mentality, however unconscious, of said people, and our already very different way of living in the world made necessary by blindness, drove us to seek support in these figures in power, and seek mentorship in those adults who we’d trusted in years past. But even in the calm that was eventually discovered through louder breathing on our own, even through the moments of mild joy we reluctantly experienced in our first yoga sessions in 2009, and even through the fact that it was we, not they, who had requested a second opportunity to repair the damage caused by the abrupt ending of that time, union never once entered the context for which it was intended. A practice which, in its wholeness, involved the mind in equality to the body, was torn to shreds, rebuilt as a pure physicality’s godsend, and presented to us, a system who valued mind and body as those who practice yoga in its wholeness do and have done for thousands of years. Granted, in seventh grade we would not have been able to understand everything about the mind that we do now, but at the very least the practice we did deal with could have included simple deep breathing, or relaxation of some kind, involving the mind in some way. We cannot say we all agree on whether or not it was better that mental aspects were not involved, however, because either way, some kind of hurt would have been inflicted. But regardless of potential possibilities, one thing is clear; the ‘yoga’ we experienced was no yoga at all, but rather a physical labor dressed up in yoga elements and pushed out the door looking like an extremely cheap knockoff, complete with lack of mental involvement, sold to a 9 year old body with occupants of many ages, then repackaged in a tattered and shredded mess and sold back to the same group when their body was in seventh grade for the cheap price of their stability in an emotional sense.
It’s not yoga, not if yoga means union. If the translation from Sanskrit to English of that word’s meaning is to be relied upon, then as far as we’re concerned, what we experienced did not align with union, and so cannot be thought of as yoga. Trying to force the word ‘yoga’ onto what we experienced would be like trying to say that white and black are one color. It’s not factual, and it’s dishonest. Surely that’s not the foundation anyone wants for their practice, a practice which calls for peace, love, joy and truth, at least in its whole form, but of course, when you strip something like yoga down to only a physical motion sequence, anything goes, which is why since seventh grade we’ve avoided anything even remotely connected with yoga if it looks like just another cheap knockoff of what it was meant to be. Eventually, we left that teacher behind and began working to heal the damage caused by her corruption of union, but things like this take time. That doesn’t mean we can’t put out a message to the world, one that says that if you value truth, love, joy and peace in your yoga practice, if you value the mind as equal to the body, and if you value spirituality, do not just give in to every yoga class you see, but rather find community through the world wide web or in your location. Physical effort is not a substitution for yoga in its whole form, and no matter how you look at it, what we experienced was not yoga as we understand it; for a practice that lacks a connection that begins union is not a practice that we want to be part of again in our lives, and so we will not be.