Please don’t tell me what to feel. More importantly, please don’t tell me to be happy, or seek bliss. This is a message I am bombarded with daily as someone who works in the yoga industry. For me, the message is getting old and falling on deaf ears.
Think about it. How is someone supposed to choose happiness when they are in the midst of dealing with clinical depression? Explain to me how someone who is grieving the loss of a loved one, a person who by all rights is supposed to be feeling sad, should be seeking a blissed out state of existence? It’s not possible, nor is it healthy.
Hyper happiness is just as damaging as deep depression. Both states are extremes that need to be addressed and brought back into balance.
Having a twenty two year old yoga teacher hopped up on incense and kombucha tell the world to “find the joy in everything” is not only naive, it is annoying at best and insulting at worst.
The people I meet in yoga classes are usually coming to the mat for reasons wholly unrelated to bliss.
Anxiety, depression, cancer diagnoses, past injuries, you name it, people tend to find their way to the practice because they have been through some form of suffering.
Sure, some people come to yoga to find a new workout regime, or get a good stretch in. However, the more I practice and teach, the more I encounter people who are searching for some sort of healing help.
If anything, it wasn’t bliss that brought them to class, it was a desire to accept or at least learn to deal with inevitable pain.
Yoga can be a joy filled experience. It can bring happiness and bliss into life. However, It is also a practice that asks us to do the work. It asks us to endure a certain amount of reasonable suffering and discomfort in order to reach an end goal of internal peace — NOT hyper happiness or manic joy. Its end goal is peace of mind, body and soul. And peace does not come about without conflict.
The reason behind this mini rant? To encourage teachers not to direct people’s emotions when they are practicing. Don’t tell them how to feel. You have no idea what a person is bringing into the room. It is not your job to be a happiness ambassador. It is your job to create space for practitioners to experience and sort out whatever they are dealing with.
That said, bliss might not be the order of the day.
So please, for the love of sanity, do not force feed an emotion down someone’s throat while they practice.
By extension, in day to day life, if someone is sad or experiencing an uncomfortable emotion, they may just need to feel said emotion. If that is the case, create enough internal fortitude within yourself to simply sit with them while they quite literally feel things out. Remind them they are not alone by providing your presence.
Yoga Industry, please don’t tell me what to feel. Instead, give me space to feel and remind me I am not alone. Yoga means union – we are in this together. So STFU and let me feel all the feels.
