When I was growing up, I always had the dream of becoming a medical doctor. But after I started higher math in middle school, that dream began to change. When I reached high school, I didn’t have aspirations to go to college or start a career right away. I am sure that was due in part to the fact that I loved spending time with my friends more than concentrating on homework. But the one thing I always had in high school was a job. I started babysitting at the age of 13 until I was 15 and old enough to start working in a restaurant as a hostess. After graduation, I enrolled in a community college because that is all my family could afford and, quite frankly, my grades from high school didn’t qualify me for anything more. After a couple of semesters, I decided I was not interested in that style of learning, so I started waiting tables to make extra money. The skills I learned working in a restaurant carried me for the next 15 years of my life. I could work in any restaurant, serving or bartending, and make the same or better income as another person would in a traditional 9-5 job. I have a love/hate relationship with the business. I would try to get out, but it always reeled me back in. And anyone who has worked in a restaurant knows what I am talking about. The money I made while in the business kept a roof over my head and my children’s heads as I was navigating being a single mom. But I was tired. I was really tired. Physically, emotionally drained. Years into working in restaurant business, I began a yoga practice and became inspired to teach. So I went through a teacher-training program, eventually made teaching yoga my full-time job, and let go of working in a restaurant. After a few years as a yoga teacher, I now sit with the question of whether I can do this full-time for the rest of my working adult life. That has got me thinking about what it is that I do, how much money I make, and whether I am happy doing it. For the most part, I am happy. There are aspects of this business I don’t like, but there were aspects of the restaurant business I didn’t like. I made about twice the income bartending than I do as a full-time yoga teacher. Do I need to earn more? No, not necessarily. I am remarried with a dual income now, and my children are happy and have their basic needs met – and then some – most of the time. I am happy with what I do, but is it enough? I believe so. But I also believe that it’s ok to question it. I believe it’s ok to walk away and rediscover what it is that you want to do even if that means taking big risks. So I invite all of you to do the same. Re-evaluate every once in a while. Don’t stay in a job that makes you miserable. Don’t do something that doesn’t make you happy – or know that if you do, it is for a greater cause like taking care of your children or saving for that big vacation. Your life has meaning and it has purpose. Make the most out of it because we work most of our adult lives, and those years should reflect the person that you truly are and the person you aspire to be. I have struggled with my own body image pretty much most of my adult life. I was told when I was younger I should be a model because I was tall and thin. So I gave it a try. I landed some mediocre contracts in Washington D.C., but I got rejected in New York. After a couple of years when I moved to Los Angeles, I decided to give modeling another try. I didn't “make” it there either. After all of my failed attempts at trying, I gave up on the idea of modeling when I was about 23 years old. First of all according to most modeling standards, I was too fat at 5'9 and 130 lbs, just one of the reasons amongst others as to why I didn't “make” it. Which leads me to think that I've pretty much been working on being skinner than I really am for a long time now. Everyone in my life tells me, I'm beautiful, I don’t need to lose weight, etc... It doesn't mean I still don't have a fucked-up perception of myself even though I know I shouldn't. It doesn't mean that I'm not hard on myself for gaining 20 lbs in the past 6 months because I went off of my birth control. Ugh! It is always some thing or some excuse. Like I told a friend the other day, someone can tell you a million times over that you are beautiful but unless you feel it nothing what anyone says will resonate with you. I look at pictures in Yoga Journal magazine and think I should look like that. I am a yoga teacher, I should be thin like those other yoga teachers. But I don’t look like that. I am not sure I ever will. I guess I am telling you this because there needs to be a huge shift in the way women’s bodies are perceived, and the way we as women perceive ourselves. We look at women that don’t have the magazine body and put them in a whole other category. Why is it all about aspiring to have a body you don’t have? Why not aspire to be the best you no matter what that looks like? Why do we put such a high standard on the way women look? Why don’t men get this sort of attention? These are all questions we as women should start to ignore and just focus on what our bodies are for, and accept them the way they are. We each have a purpose and need to start taking a bigger stand of who is in charge of our body image. Are you listening to the magazines that tell you to be a certain weight? Is it your family or your friends? If so, then start to say “enough”! All of the people that don’t lift you up in spite of a weight gain or weight loss should be ignored. Who cares if that model on the runway is 110 lbs. Maybe she eats cheeseburgers everyday and that is how she looks. I for one love cheeseburgers. From now on, I will try to be kind in my moments of weakness. I will smile at my body in the mirror knowing what I hold inside is full of character, love, and strength. And I am asking each one of you to do the same. 11 years ago, I started my yoga practice. I was pregnant with my first son and was looking for something to make me feel “normal” in my body when everything inside was shifting physically to make room for the baby. I felt the benefits of yoga almost immediately after I began. It was about six months into my pregnancy when I moved from California to Baltimore to be closer to my family. I could not find a pregnancy yoga class in my area so I bought a yoga DVD for pregnant women and began a home practice. This is what launched my inspiration to become a yoga teacher. It wasn’t until three years ago that I went through a teacher training program to receive my professional certification. And everything that happened before this time has led me to where I am today. My father died, I had another baby, I separated and eventually divorced from my now ex-husband, I moved four times, worked a full time bartending gig, and the list goes on. After I began teaching yoga, I took on a handful of studio classes and started building my business… …which leads me to the present day and a story about how hard work and what we put out into the universe comes back full circle. I was in line at a coffee shop in the airport earlier this year when a woman in front of me randomly started talking with me. She was telling me about what she did for a living and I was telling her the same when she stopped me and said, “You teach yoga? I am looking for someone to lead the pregnancy yoga program at my hospital!” So we exchanged information and went on our respective ways. After returning from my trip, I contacted her and after several emails and a few months, we finally met. And take a wild guess who is now running her hospital’s pregnancy yoga program? It took 11 years for all of this to happen. 11 years of ups and downs – the good, the bad, and the ugly – for this to take place. Some people call experiences like these coincidences, the law of attraction, or even karma: but I call it not giving up. As 96-year old French-Indian yogi Tao Porchon-Lynch says, “nothing is impossible and there is nothing you cannot do.” I will never give up. I will continue to work hard at what I believe in and have faith that it will always work out the way it is supposed to, good or bad. And it is my deepest hope that if you’re reading this, you trust and believe in yourself too. Grief. What does that mean exactly? Most of us relate to grief as losing someone by death. But honestly, grief is generally associated with experiencing any significant loss in your life. It could be a job, a dream that won’t come true, a relationship or divorce, a home, money once had and now lost… To me, it is important to understand how we can relate to these losses as we navigate through this life. I have experienced loss abstractly and concretely. My father died by suicide when I was 27 years old. I received a knock at the door from a police officer telling me my father had taken his life with a gunshot wound to the head. I am sorry if that comes off harshly, but it is, and it was. But what was harsher is how I had to deal with this death. We had a funeral, disposed of his belongings, sold his business, his house, and that was it. That was it. After going through the motions of getting rid of all of his things and associations with his life, I was still left broken and wondering how to pick up the pieces. You see, as Westerners we have been conditioned to push away our grief when we experience a loss. Like I said earlier, you have a funeral, do the necessary things, and get on with your life. I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know if it was OK to cry, get mad, be confused, or be relieved. So, I did and felt all of those things, and I sat with them. I allowed myself to really feel everything that was flowing into my body emotionally, physically, and mentally. I think at times this was confusing because I hadn’t “gotten over it” yet and since we are conditioned to grieve in a certain way, I was still grieving after the one-year anniversary of his death. As a matter of fact, the second year was harder than the first. Time has moved on, and it has been eight years now since his passing. I have found peace. I learned to breathe, I learned to meditate, and I learned that through yoga, I can always come back to me. Over the course of the past eight years, I have experienced other losses. I got divorced from my first husband, which was a whole other way of grieving. This loss was more empowering, and I was able to feel whole again through my physical body. I became more aware. I felt sadness in a different way, because I knew my life was changing for myself and for my children. I still experienced some of the same feelings as when I lost my father. I was angry, sad, confused, and relieved. It was after my divorce that I started thinking about grief and why it is we push it away. I started to think that grief is just as powerful as love, and the stronger the love, the more intense the grief would be. I started to see throughout the years that we have the tools to be closer to our true selves if we can feel what it is we are actually going through instead of denying it or accepting it too quickly because that is what we are “supposed” to do. There are so many reasons to deny loss, and it would take up too much time to list them here, but one of the only explanations I have is that we cannot control death. If your path is to experience loss, then you will. I can’t think of one person I know that has not been affected by loss in their life. I have taught yoga for a few years now, and it has been through my practice and my teaching that I have learned how powerful healing can be when you are going through a loss by practicing yoga. It has transformed me from my darkest of days to my lightest of nights. It is there for me when I feel sad, when I am angry, or when I need to find clarity around my own grief. It can be there for you too. We may not be able to control all of the things that happen in our lives, but we can control how we deal with them. To register for my next Yoga for Grief workshop, click here! |
About TiffanyTiffany (RYT 200®) is a student and teacher of yoga living in Baltimore, Maryland. Archives
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