growth Archives - Elisabeth Perucca

December 29, 2017April 10, 2018

Wrap up 2017 with my annual Year in Review

Laying down the foundations of a new alternative healing approach, that's what 2017 is about. What is yoga therapy? What does the ideal and most healing yoga therapy class looks like for me? Experimenting Yoga for Renewal. Transforming it. Testing it again. Re-changing it. 2017 has been an altogether exciting and grueling year full of questions--and sometimes answers. Here's 2017 in seven photos.

January-February

I lock myself in my home office, and collect yoga training and gestalt training material as well as my experience as being my own yoga therapy patient to design a 3-day workshop, "Thriving After Illness", the cornerstone of Yoga for Renewal's alternative healing approach. Its purpose is to help people find their inner fire after illness. In the middle of this, I take a break to participate to Atlanta's version of the Women's March on January 21, the day after Trump takes office.

March-April

After a unsettling month of March during which I am naturalized as an American citizen, I teach "Thriving After Illness 3-day Workshop" for the first time ever at Vista Yoga, Atlanta, in April. While teaching the program, I have the confirmation it works. I feel relieved and more grounded.

May

I feed my blog with blog posts, teach individual sessions of yoga therapy, and realize that "Thriving After Illness 3-Day Workshop" can help everyone, not only people who are recovering from illness.
I bring the best French tradition ever, the "apero"--drinks and finger food before the real dinner--to friends in my all-in-one home/office/yoga studio duplex, in SW Atlanta. More grounding comes along.

June-July

It's time to say bye bye to the beautiful loft, in downtown Atlanta, where I've taught Yoga for Renewal's weekly class for the past months. I modify "Thriving After Illness 3-Day Workshop" so that it's adapted for anyone who needs a "decompression week-end", not just people who are recovering from illness. "Thriving After Illness 3-Day Workshop" becomes "Yoga for Renewal 3-Day Workshop".

August-September

Again, Vista Yoga hosts a Yoga for Renewal premiere. There, I teach a 4-class series over four weeks, a "sampler" of YFR 3-Day Workshop, in August for the first time ever. Ten students--the series is at full capacity--help me grow as much as I help them.
A new community. A family. That's what I (finally) find in the Deep South after ten years living in the States. It all starts with my friend Stacie inviting me to her wedding on August 21, the day of the total solar eclipse, in South Carolina, on the path of totality. Shifting experience.

October-November

I participate in a two-day training on healing circles in the tradition of Native Americans. We're a dozen of volunteers who have committed to be part of a Trauma Response Group in SW Atlanta. That style of healing circle is used in some of Texas' prisons to ease up conflicts. I realize how opening up can be challenging in the American culture--maybe more so that in the French culture. In November, I teach my 4-class series over fours weeks for the second time, at Candler Park Yoga, Atlanta.

December

Back to the roots. In France with my mom (center) and our cousins, Giovanni (left) and Rosine (right). All three of them emigrated from Italy to France between 1949 and 1964. Out of five surviving siblings, my maternal grandmother (Carmela Picano) and three of her siblings (Concetta, Crescenzo and Antonio Picano) left Italy. Carmela, Crescenzo and Antonio emigrated in France while Concetta left for the U.S. My paternal great grandfather, Geraldo Tartaglia, was one of the first Italians to commercialize Italian fine foods to the French. He had a foot in both countries.

December 1, 2017April 10, 2018

Time to Regroup After a Year of Testing My Yoga Therapy Method

My naturalization ceremony on March 10, 2017, in Atlanta. Several people have asked me the same question lately, "What (the hell) makes you stay in the States, these days?" I always give the same answer, "I've met a community of great people, my people."

Yoga for Renewal works. That's the good news. Man, it's been a process. The next step is to make myself known. Right now, time to renew.

I’m a yoga pioneer, and I’m going through a rough time right now. I’ve spent this year building the foundations of my yoga therapy business, Yoga for Renewal, in Atlanta where I live. These days, it seems like every time I open a door, I find a stop sign on the other side--so I’m feeling stuck. And since YFR brings to life what I carry intimately in my soul and what I’m here for, this bothers me.

One of the things I’ve worked on this year is my elevator pitch. Here it is. “YFR is the unique yoga therapy approach that I’ve developed, situated at the intersection of yoga and therapy. It brings two healing modalities together--the unique yoga practice I’ve learned from my yoga teacher in France, Aline Frati, and a time where I invite participants to become aware of what is weighing on their heart and share—I call that time ‘the healing circle’.”

Not bad, right?

If the person I talk to looks interested, I keep going. “You want to know what you truly need in your life, right now? There’s a grief that’s weighing on your life and that you haven’t allowed yourself to go through. Whatever gets in the way of your joy will come up in a YFR class so you can contact it, name it, feel it in your body and transform it into free energy.”

The whole year, I’ve taken two steps forward and one step back.

I started 2017 designing YFR’s three-day workshop, which captures the essence of my approach. For three days, participants practice yoga, then share what is coming up for them in a healing circle, then return back to the yoga mat for more breathing and postures, then back to the healing circle, and so on.

I taught the workshop for the very first time in the spring. There were only three participants. Still, the group was enough to show me that my method worked. One participant became aware of how physically and emotionally strong she was despite a serious chronic condition; another recognized her need to grieve after the loss of a loved one; while the third left before the end of the three days, avoiding addressing her guilt.

Later in the year, I designed the Yoga for Renewal 4-Class Series--a condensed version of the workshop. My first series brought together a group of ten. Yeah! Each week for four weeks in a row, I taught a two-hour class where participants practiced yoga and came together in a healing circle.

During this series one of the participants became aware of how vital it is to express how she feels. Another spoke her truth to a loved one, something she had never done before. Another dropped out half way because of a sore throat, or maybe a trip out West, or maybe both.

I’ve also had to cancel a workshop and a series for lack of people registering. That sucked.

“Write an elevator pitch.” “Put less text on your flyers.” “Put more text on your flyers.” “You need to teach in hospitals!” “Have you talked with chiropractors?” “Do you think the French would be more receptive to what you do?” My friends’ suggestions and questions have uplifted, helped, confused or depressed me, depending on what they said and my mood in the moment.

There are a few things I know for sure. The body and soul are inseparable. When we contact and express our emotions, we move towards better physical, psychological and spiritual health. I’ve developed YFR based on those principles. Yoga for Renewal works—for those who are ready.

Last but not least, I’ve gone too far to give up!

Next week, I’ll fly home to Paris, taste my mom’s home-made pizza and get nurtured from her wisdom, walk on the city’s bridges, go salsa dance with my friends, make eye contact with cute guys in the streets, taste the world’s best wines, joke with my cousins, share my journey with my yoga teacher, and experience whatever the universe has in store for me. Au revoir. I’ll meet you on the other side for more Yoga for Renewal.

"Feeling and do some yoga", that's how a client describes Yoga for Renewal.

November 14, 2017April 10, 2018

Yoga Teachers, Therapists—Help Your Clients with Yoga for Renewal

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.

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.

October 27, 2017April 10, 2018

My Big Move’s 11th Anniversary–in 11 Photos

Here's a photo gallery to celebrate when I first moved from France to the States in Atlanta, Georgia, eleven years ago, and my blog's first anniversary. It's been a ride.

2007.
Atlanta is both enchanting and brutal. I have to re-learn everything, while exploring my new existence with my American husband. Every morning I roll out my yoga mat in our living room. The yoga I practice --and that I've learned from my French yoga teacher, Aline Frati-- helps me to dive deep inwards and navigate through the misunderstandings in my relationship, and the hazards of being a new immigrant. Still, I feel I don’t fit. Six months later, I push through the door of a therapist’s office. He listens and says, “Be who you are”. I feel an instant relief in my chest, and keep going.

2008.
At a wedding with a theme--The 40's. Feeling isolated in this transition year. John travels for his business a lot. Thank goodness, I pick up a writing gig. I spend most days in my home office. I visit my family of choice--Valerie and Dave in Orlando, FL and Jenny and Larry in Lansing, MI. My friend Carole from Paris comes to visit. I also manage to attend, for the fourth year in a row, Aline's annual week-long yoga retreat, in Southern France. There, I pause and feel. "Teach! You're ready!" claims my yoga teacher.

2009.
The "American dream" collapses. John is out of work part of the year. I find a huge writing project--which helps! I spend days in my home office, writing. Feeling isolated and that I have lost track of myself. What about my dream of teaching yoga? I sign up for a yoga teacher training and spend the summer building my (arm) muscles to prepare. In America, I find yoga is about fitness and strength!

2010.
I bump into a training in the practice of Gestalt therapy. We're four trainees and Leif Roland, gestalt practitioner and trainer. All of us are foreigners! Over six months, I learn to become aware of what I feel in the present moment, to respect that, and to be fully present for others. That's where I meet Julia De Leon, my soul sister, and Ciprian Stan, who tragically passes away in 2014 from ALS. I want to teach yoga in a "new" way. My intention is to teach the yoga practice I've learnt from Aline Frati, my French yoga teacher, and complement the practice with a time where students can share how they truly feel. I give the "protocol" a name--Yoga for Renewal.

2011.
My dad comes to visit me, us. He's astonished by the cars, "they're all brand new!" and Savannah. He's also appalled by the "bad" wine that is served in restaurants. One day, while I drive him to the local fresh market, he says "you have to have killed mother and father to get used to here!" It's a French saying that we use when we refer to someone who is or has accomplished something particularly difficult. I stay silent and think, "yes, it's one way to say what I've experienced."

2012.
While working as a freelance writer, I train as a certified yoga therapist. I teach my first-ever Yoga for Renewal group class series in Candler Park Yoga in Atlanta. I am testing, for the first time, the power of the combination of yoga and a healing circle where I encourage students to connect in deep and personal places, all for their personal development. The students' progression over the series tells me the "protocol" works.

2013.
My marriage is falling apart and neither of us are aware of it. John and I buy a house in the 'hood in Southwest Atlanta, 11 miles from Atlanta's Northern suburbia where we live--an ocean apart. It's a big, healthy house --4,000 square feet--which needs lots of interior renovation. The first time I step inside to visit it, the solid stone necklace I'm wearing breaks apart, for no reason. I see the stones roll everywhere on the floor... Looking back, it's a sign. The house feels too big. I still say "yes" to the purchase because of a big den that we can convert into a home yoga studio, and to save the marriage.

2014.
My friend Randy, a talented astrologer and coach, tells me what he sees in my chart for the coming months. "You are going to go over a big bump. It will be at the scale of an atomic explosion. After this time, you will find your purpose, the real reason why you came here." Randy is right. Within four months, John and I separate, my dad is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer while I'm diagnosed with a second breast cancer. I move back to France to take care of myself and regroup with my family. Before leaving Atlanta, my friend Julia introduces me to her friends, a group of sensitive, like-minded people who love to connect, help make the world a better place and party.

2015.
After my treatments, I return to Atlanta to divorce. Three months later, I'm back in Paris for my dad's funeral. That day, I look at the sunset from my parents' house, just outside of the city. I've looked at dozens of sunsets from their place but that evening is different. The sunset is the most beautiful and intense I've ever seen. Back to Atlanta, I infuse Yoga for Renewal with what I've learnt in the past year--a huge lot.

2016.
A trip to Italy, the place of my family roots, changes something that is deeply buried in me, something transmitted from my lineage. While hiking in the mountains, I have the chills and feel I need to deposit, at this spot (photo), the pain my mom and my ancestors have endured on this land, and reclaim the pride of being of Italian descent. The same year, I decide to let go of my writing business to dedicate my time to Yoga for Renewal and build its foundation in Atlanta.

2017.
I find my voice with my blog and I walk Yoga for Renewal from the toddler's stage to the young child's stage. It's now clear--what makes me tick is to help people process feeling that have been buried alive through the yoga practice and the healing circle. I start establishing the brand and the protocol in Atlanta with a three-day workshop and a group class series at Vista Yoga. Another group class series is planned at Candler Park Yoga. This is also the year of connectedness, festivals, new friends, new community, dancing and music. The journey to be me continues.

October 13, 2017April 10, 2018

Pinktober aka The Month of OVER Giving

A couple of days ago, lying and finding balance and support on a branch of the huge old oak tree that lies on the ground in my backyard. On Sept. 4, the tree looked so strong it seemed it was going to be there for ever. Irma and its winds brought it right down later that day. If the oak tree had fallen the opposite direction, it would have crashed the place where my neighbor, Ronika, her family and I live. As she put it,"We're blessed!"

Here's the story of how, as a double cancer survivor, I found what breast cancer means to me as an illness. Maybe this story will make a difference in a life out there. Maybe yours.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month helps me recognize my humanity through my two biggest battles —a first bout with breast cancer in 2004 and a second one ten years later. I also reflect on my sister fighters, survivors and thrivors –whatever we feel we are--, and on my sisters on the other side.

Let me share a (real) story that will tell you what breast cancer means to me as an illness. Hopefully, it won’t have anything to do with your own self at all. Or maybe it will resonate for you, or for someone you know. If that’s the case, my hope is that it will make a difference in your life or someone else’s.

In March 2015 soon after my treatments, on the French West coast. I had just dropped the pink scarf I had worn for the past five months. My goddaughter, Clara, then six, convinced me with her question, "What's wrong with your hair, anyway?"

January 2015. I’m coming out of the woods after being diagnosed with breast cancer seven months before. I’ve found a refuge at my parents’ home, close to Paris, and I’ve finished the big chunk of my treatments –surgery and six rounds of chemo. My hair is (temporarily) gone, and the incision and infection following my surgery six months before, won’t heal. My father is fighting his own battle against lung cancer, and my marriage is on the edge of a cliff. Thank goodness, I manage to keep the infection localized, despite chemo, my tribe’s here, and my writing client has put me in charge of a fun, global video project.

Along with the medical treatment, I begin the process of spiritual treatment, with the first step being to finally recognize who I am, instead of looking for others to recognize me. What are my dreams, beliefs and values? What makes my soul unique? Do I love my husband? Do I want to go back to Atlanta?

I have the answers deep inside. I feel I still need confirmation. That’s when I call Caroline Quemerais, an astrologer and healer, for answers.

When I step into Caroline’s home office, in the ‘hood right outside of Paris, I feel uneasy. I contemplate getting up and leaving, but, within seconds, decide to stay. She looks at her screen, on which she reads my astrology chart.

“Your father was not present by your mother’s and by your side when you came to this world. His absence was powerful. It gave you the unconscious message that you were not good enough for him to be here. This has shaped your intimate relationships. Ever since, you’ve chosen men who are absent when you need them, and you’ve over compensated to be accepted and loved by the men of your life”. I freeze while Caroline talks. Her conclusion resonates even deeper in me, “that’s what breast cancer is about. It’s about a woman’s belief that, in order to be loved, she needs to give—a lot. It’s about giving so much, and feeling it’s never enough, that she grows a third breast—a tumor.”

The appointment lasts a long, intense hour where so much is said that I’ll end up with a bronchitis the next day. I’ve since realized that I prefer working with healers that leave certain things unsaid. That day, though, Caroline tells all.

She sheds the light on positive information, too. “It was difficult for your father to decide to be away when you were born. He had to work far away from home to take care of his family’s needs. That’s love too. You can see that now.”

While listening to Caroline, I remember what my father had confessed to me as soon as he was diagnosed, six months before, “When you were born, I was up North (of France), working on building a school and supervising a team of four workers. I could have dropped everything to be with your mother. Then, I would not have been paid and neither would have the other workers. We all needed the money--badly. So, I decided to stay another two days until we were going to be done, and then run to see you.”

March 2015, two weeks later, at my friend Carole's costumed birthday party, all dressed up in the 70's!

I hear Caroline saying these words over and over again, “Play the princess! Be a princess! Be loved for who you are, not for what you do!”

You, too, may want to say those words, to yourself or to a woman you think needs to hear them.

Happy Pinktober.

September 27, 2017April 10, 2018

Stop Thinking Positive! Do Your Shadow Work Instead

Last February at Ballethnic, the dance school at the end of my street, where I attend afro-yoga classes. What I love about my teacher, Theresa, is that we both share who we are, our shadow side, before or after dancing.

Ready to feel your heart with authenticity, speak your truth, and free up the energy stored as suppressed emotions?

When you attend one of my group classes you practice yoga for sure. You also, at some point in the class, whether at the beginning or the end, sit in a healing circle. “What do you feel, right now?” “What do you need, right now?” are questions I’m likely to ask you. That’s because I believe healing requires each one of us to have the courage to go inwards, connect with, and recognize what we truly feel—whether it’s what we consider positive or negative emotions.

Some call this process the “shadow work”. I call it “self-awareness”. Regardless of what we call it, this process is at the opposite end of the spectrum from “positive thinking”, which has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Visionaries of all sorts (authors, doctors, celebrities and more) have done a great job convincing many of us that we have the choice to either hold on to our painful emotions and suffer until the end of time, or let those emotions go and replace them with the beautiful things we want in our lives—a loving partner, a tribe that understands us, a job that is the reflection of our life’s purpose, the body of a god(dess), the financial abundance we deserve—and live happily ever after.

The thing is, forcing ourselves to think a certain way despite what we may truly feel, splits our soul instead of serving us, as a Brazilian shaman explains in an article originally published in the Huffington Post.

I believe the process that brings healing has nothing to do with thinking. I believe healing arises with our ability to feel our heart with authenticity. Feeling fully what is weighing on our heart, becoming aware of that emotion, whether it’s sadness or anger that we’ve suppressed, so we can keep going on with our lives. Experiencing that feeling in all of its stages and accepting it, is what makes us, ultimately, cross over to the other side, and become the entirety of who we are and find peace with ourselves. Just like a seed needs to live a certain amount of time in the darkness of the soil before it grows into the light and turns into a flower, that’s also how healing occurs.

Another component I find to be essential to healing is speaking our truth and sharing it with people who have the ability to receive who we are. When we voice what is going on deep inside us--when we show our authentic selves to others, we free the energy that we’ve mobilized to hide ourselves, we find our soul--our home, and we feel “whole” and more alive. See and recognize others. Being seen and recognized is what makes healing circles so powerful.

So what about yoga? The yoga I practice and teach is at the service of the “shadow work” or “self-awareness” process. It melts our emotional barriers down so we can have easier access to our true feelings. It also helps us integrate what we truly feel right down to the cell level. It makes us breathe into the space where the suppressed emotion was stored and free up that energy so we can live our full potential.

MLK-Retreat-PennCenter-SC — How interesting life goes... At the end of my visit on St Helena Island, SC, last year, I bumped into the Penn Center, the first school for freed slaves in the South before being an important refuge for Civil Rights leaders. This is where Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous " I Have a Dream" speech.

In August 2016, I spent a week in St Helena Island, SC, alone. I rolled my mat out in the Airbnb, and each day I walked back and forth between the mat and the beach. One day, I contacted the sadness I had felt and suppressed back in 2014, the day after my surgery, when my dad came to visit me in the hospital. We had both been diagnosed with cancer the same week, a month before. For the first time in my life, I sensed that my dad was lost. I felt I had to be strong for him and swallowed my tears. Two years later, in St Helena, that sadness surged. The ocean and the solitude helped the sadness to arise. And wow--did I sob that day! Then, my body and soul started a yoga practice, organically. On that mat, I felt all of my cells process the sadness, feel it, accept it, respect it and find peace with it. On that mat, I connected with my dad, sadness to sadness, in a powerful way, even though he had passed away a year before. Finally, on that mat, I arose from my ashes.

August 31, 2017April 10, 2018

My Heart Belongs To Avalon

Dave Webster, one of Avalon's landowners, leads the Eclipse Ceremony Parade on August 21 to get us ready to view the eclipse. We're on the path of totality!

From a celestial wedding to finding my soul's home. Here's my journey.

The universe, as well as my “stuff”, has shifted with the total solar eclipse.

August 18th, mid-day. Here I am, arriving at the gate of Avalon, a beautiful piece of wooded land with a river and a lake in South Carolina. I’m getting ready to camp for four days to join Avalon’s Total Solar Eclipse Festival and my friends, Stacie and Art’s, wedding. Avalon is greeting me with a blue sky and bright sunshine. Emotionally, my own weather report is different. I’m navigating a romantic heartbreak.

Over three hundred people are expected to join in this celestial weekend and I won’t know anyone other than a handful of yoga-teacher-friends.

The first person I meet is Helme, a soft-spoken, handsome guy. He’s setting up what looks like a Middle Eastern campsite in the forest. “Is this your camp site? It’s huge,” I say. “Yes, people like to stop by so I make it nice.”

Helme offers to give me a tour of the land on his golf cart. I feel a soothing, healing energy from my new friend and the people that are setting up their camp here and there. The land itself, is also giving me great vibes. We stop in a shaded spot by the river and instantly I know that this is where my tent belongs.

StacieAndArt-WeddingCeremony-Aug17 — On the solar eclipse day, Stacie and Art sing their wedding vows in the "Acoustic Chapel of Avalon", a space in the wilderness where the newly weds and their tribes have created a whimsically enchanting universe. Pure magic.

Little by little, strangers arrive and set up their camps around mine. Michael, aka “Oz”, is experimenting with a hammock-tent extended between two trees. “Let’s see if this is better than sleeping on the ground.”

Have I ever shared that I’ve often, if not always, felt misplaced, mis-fitted—like an outsider? Being sensitive and a people-lover has done that. As a child, I always comforted the kid who was rejected. Growing up, I wanted to be a dancer or an actress. Back then I didn’t see who I was, so I gave up those dreams, one after the other, for a “responsible” job. In the corporate world, I was an “internal journalist” which meant I met people, asked them questions about who they were and what they did, and wrote their stories in company magazines. I managed to have a role helping people feel good—at least about their professional selves. On the personal level, I’ve always had a hard time imagining myself in a “traditional” life—you know, married in my twenties, my husband and I raising our kids. Instead, I married, later, a man with a big heart although, at the time, he saw little of who I was—someone who needs to share her soul, not so much the material life.

Back to Avalon. After two days of strolling from my camp “neighborhood” to the meadow, from the meadow to the waterfall, from the waterfall to Avalon’s social area, here I am dancing in front of the stage where an Atlanta band is performing. It’s almost midnight. My friend Gloria grabs my hand, “follow me, we’re all meeting at Helme’s.”

There’s a fire pit in the middle of the large tent, and seven maybe ten people lounging around it. A young woman, Emily Kate Boyd, an Atlanta singer and songwriter, is playing the acoustic guitar and singing a soft song. More people enter the tent as the night goes by. A man plays the flute, and before long, three women play the fiddle. All spread the space with magic. A woman stands up and dances around the fire. When a musician sings “A Horse with No Name” with his acoustic guitar, my feet propel me upwards. Here I am, dancing too. Here I am, feeling I’ve found my tribe. Zero excuse needed for being the way I am. Zero excuse needed for feeling the way I feel.

HelmeHollyAndI-Avalon-Aug17 — Friends like Holly and Helme make Avalon magic.

I came to Avalon to celebrate Stacie and Art’s love, see the total solar eclipse, and camp in nature. In the end, I realize I’ve found my home. How about that?

July 27, 2017April 10, 2018

The Man Behind Yoga For Renewal

Laurent Malterre co-hosted, for years, therapeutic groups in the Bordeaux region with two other French therapists who trained (among other places) at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, in the 80's.

As a yoga therapist, I help my clients speak of their hurt. I work under the supervision of a French, licensed psychologist, Laurent Malterre, who guides me where to go and where to stop in that journey.

Yoga for Renewal is based on what the yogis have been saying for thousands of years—the body and mind are inextricably bound together. That’s how Yoga for Renewal has become a combination of yoga practice and the expression of one’s true feelings through language.

Aline Frati, my yoga master who lives in Paris, inspires the unique style of hatha yoga (yoga of the poses) I teach. In addition to Aline, a man is also part of Yoga for Renewal’s family. Laurent Malterre is a French, licensed psychologist whose practice is niched in one of the oldest streets of Paris, rue des Gravilliers.

Every other week, Laurent and I have a skype session where we share questions, challenges and results that my yoga therapy brings. How does yoga help a person melt their barriers down and, ultimately, share their true feelings? What does a specific symptom--physical, mental or emotional, say of a person, their story and healing path? What does sharing through language, after a yoga practice, bring to the table? How far can I go as a yoga therapist--not a talk therapist— in inviting a person share what they really feel through language?

We’re crafting Yoga for Renewal and what yoga therapy can be.

Laurent is a husband and father to four kids, who loves to spend time in his impressionist-style family countryside home, an hour’s drive from Paris, that he’s transformed into a small retreat center. Professionally, he has a passion for working on issues in intimate relationships and on gender and sexual orientation. He’s also an author and teacher of clinical psychology.

We came into each other’s lives 15 years ago when he helped me through my first breast cancer. Back then, I lived in Paris. Laurent and Aline, who have never met, helped me find my way to health. While Aline guided me to connect deeply with my body, Laurent helped me become aware of the woman I was. Less than two years later, I left Paris for Atlanta--for love.

Fast forward ten years. I knocked on Laurent’s door again, in despair. In the course of one year, I had bought a house in Atlanta with my husband, met a soul who changed the course of my life, walked out of my marriage, and been diagnosed with a second breast cancer a day before my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. I felt so confused I thought I was mentally sick.

The ordeal forced me to look deeper at my shadow side. In those past ten years, I had, again, done so much in an attempt to feel loved, that I exhausted myself.

Breast cancer is the disease of too much giving and lack of self-care. Trust me.

Instead of searching for the love of another, this time, I started to turn the gaze to myself, to see the beautiful soul that I am--to see what my life purpose is. I found that inside my soul, there was Yoga for Renewal. With Laurent’s help, I explored, while navigating through treatments, what healing meant for me as a woman, as a yoga therapist, as a patient and survivor--what the yoga practice did for me, how the relationship with others and speaking my truth were also key to my health.

With Laurent’s impulse, Yoga for Renewal emerged as a “wellness protocol” involving a lot of yoga practice, punctuated with self-awareness and self-expression, through language.

Breuvardes-Retreat-Center — The retreat center, outside of Paris, where Laurent Malterre hosts small therapeutic group week-end workshops.

Giving birth to Yoga for Renewal helped heal my body and soul. I physically felt the miracle unfold. Slowly, from being my therapist, Laurent became a mentor. Yoga for Renewal was born. And so was I.

July 12, 2017July 26, 2020

Speak Your Truth. And Start Healing.

Jetaime-Cropped

Sometimes yoga won’t do it. How I realized that going into the hurt and speaking my truth is a must for healing.

Sometimes you can practice all the yoga you want but, it doesn’t do the trick emotionally. The poses and the breathing might help you relax and unknot the tension in the moment, but still, if you struggle with an unresolved emotional hurdle, you may need to find help outside of the yoga practice—perhaps by using your voice and speaking your truth—something that many of us dread.

Years ago, I had a personal experience that made me realize, in a powerful way, that there’s nothing like speaking my truth for my wellbeing. I had moved from France to the States only three months before. John, my fiancé at the time, and I had planned to get married six months later, in France, with our families and friends. We suddenly had to change our plans. An immigration lawyer advised us to get married within the next three weeks as I was on a tourist visa and the U.S. Immigration could stop me from re-entering the country the next time I was going to travel overseas. Three weeks later, we got legally married at the city hall of Marietta, GA. The experience turned out to be traumatic. The “ceremony” at the city hall was a group wedding—which neither of us expected. A dozen of other couples, most of them dressed in jeans, repeated their vows, along with us, after the city’s official, in a large dark room with no windows. It felt surreal. The cherry on the cake was that friends who said they would attend, didn’t show up at the “ceremony” nor at the small get together we had organized, without giving us a heads up.

Freshly arrived from my French culture, I was dipped into an ocean of ruthlessness—at least, that was my perception. I came out of the experience physically shell-shocked. And talking about my feelings with my new spouse brought tensions, so I gave up. I had to find a way to come to terms with my first life experience in my new country of adoption, one way or the other.

I naturally turned to the one tool I knew –my home yoga practice that I had learned from my teacher in Paris. I had never stepped into a yoga studio before and wasn’t going to until two years later. So there I was in the early morning, for many days in a row, doing yoga on my mat in our living room. Each day, the practice helped me unknot the tensions. Yet somehow later in the day, the feeling of being physically shell-shocked came back. Something was unresolved and showed up in my body despite the hours spent on the mat.

All of that changed the day a therapist I knew in France asked me over the phone, “How are you?” The question triggered tears and words. I started sharing what had been weighing on my heart for days. His full presence and deep listening changed everything within minutes. Suddenly, I could heal, continue on with my life, and plan our wedding party in France on Bastille Day 2007.

The experience came out to be a great teaching. I realized that, as a yoga teacher, I was going to use yoga to help people connect physically with the issues, and also help them use their voice to speak their truth. There was no way around bringing clients go into and speak about their hurt.

Being present. Listening. Going into the hurt. That’s what my yoga therapy method is about.