Bringing a student to breathe, to connect with their true feelings, and to name and respect what has been hidden. That's what Yoga for Renewal is about.
Yoga for Renewal is at the intersection of yoga and therapy. So if you're a yoga teacher or a therapist, YFR can help you help your own clients. Here's how.
Yoga for Renewal is what I carry intimately in my soul and what I am here for.
I am hypersensitive, a lover of movement (mainly dance), and I have a passion for aiding in healing. After years of preparation, I’ve designed YFR, a new healing approach, that is made up of both a specific yoga practice and a time dedicated to self-awareness and sharing.
The yoga practice helps a person develop their ability to listen to emotions and feelings that have been buried alive, to listen to what their body says—openness, relaxation or, on the contrary, constriction, pain or even disease. The time for self-awareness is a place where clients are invited to become aware of what is lodged in and weighing on their heart, and to verbalize and respect what they are finding.
Yoga Teachers—Help Your Students Put Words on Their Symptoms
At the end of my five-month yoga teacher training in 2010, each of us 29 students had to teach a yoga sequence to the rest of the group. I teamed up with another student and taught the last thirty minutes of a gentle yoga class. We had all been through an intense training which had stirred our personal “stuff”. I could feel the exhaustion in the room. Half way through the part I was teaching, everybody was in child’s pose. Intuitively, I sat next to a student I felt close to, and rested my hand on top of her back. She burst into tears and sobbed. After class, she expressed that she felt overwhelmed with sadness over the loss of her brother who had passed away years before, and for which she had never grieved. The five-month training and the class had brought to the light the suppressed grieving.
If you are a yoga teacher, more likely than not, you have taught a class where one of your students has had an emotional breakthrough. Because of its nature, experiencing YFR can help you listen with greater presence to what your students have to say, and help them put words to their feelings and symptoms. It can help you go one step further, as a yoga teacher, by showing you the way to your clients’ symptoms, using the power of words.
Therapists—Help Your Clients Reach Feelings Buried Alive, with Body Work
The first time I ever attended a yoga class, I had years of therapy behind me. The work —whether in individual sessions or in group—had helped me break down the walls of the “prison” I lived in to comply with my parents’ needs. That day, I took my first class in Paris with Aline Frati who has been my yoga teacher ever since. Something unexpected showed up for me. For the very first time I felt connected to my body. I felt the hurt of satisfying others--of years of pushing myself in an exhausting career and of an abusive relationship--within my tissues. Connecting with my body and soul so deeply put me on a fast-track to healing.
If you are a therapist, experiencing YFR will help you to help your clients reach and go through physical resistances and muscular restrictions that will bring them to feelings that have long been buried alive. From that place, you will be able to help your clients respect what has been hidden within their tissues, and within their soul. YFR’s body approach will help you, as a therapist, help your clients reach their deepest authentic selves faster than with using verbalization alone.
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Years of therapy, yoga, re-connecting with dancing and a love for healing--all led me to design Yoga for Renewal.
One of these days, I hope to meet you all on the mat.