In the months between signing up to train as a yoga teacher and the start of the course I was filled with self-doubt. Flicking through manuals and building up my practical experience in online and face to face classes, I started to question what I was thinking. As a 40 something who slipped a disc at the age of 17 and has suffered recurring sciatica and lower back pain since, my movement felt limited, I considered myself stiff and inflexible, unable to contort my body into particular positions and certainly not a typical yoga teacher.
Yet, having developed my own practice during lockdown, stretching by myself in candlelight as a way to focus my anxiety away from the uncertainty of the time, I had developed an appreciation of yoga as a way to simple be with myself. With a ‘monkey mind’ rendering me unable to sit still for long enough to mediate, I found yoga a moving meditation that invited me to journey inwards and notice sensations as they arose and actually begin to observe, and be with, myself in the present moment.
It was this very understated experience of yoga that continued to call me back when I had doubts and which led me to take the plunge and turn up on the first day of training. Noticing my -very human- tendency to compare myself to the other students, I needed to keep reminding myself that yoga can be an opportunity for a deeply personal encounter with yourself, far departed from throwing particular shapes on the mat.
As I began to delve into the history of yoga, I began to see some overlaps between the theory of yoga and the person-centred approach to counselling, which I am trained in. “Yoga” in Sanskrit roughly translates to ‘yoke’; to bind or unite. It is a reintegration of our head with our heart, our body with our mind; also the experience the joy of this union. When our head and our heart are pulled in two directions, our ‘self’ is divided between fear and compassion, which leads to a ‘disharmony of spirit’.
Developed by Carl Rogers in the 1940s, person-centred counselling centres around the client’s experience of themselves, not the therapist as the ‘expert’. He postulated that each individual has an ‘actualising tendency’ to grow and reach their full potential and live in accordance with their true nature, but life experiences, such as the ‘conditions of worth’ – or the beliefs people have about what they need to do, or who they need to be, in order to gain acceptance – mean that they become distanced from their true self.
In person centred therapy, the client is offered conditions of acceptance, empathy and unconditional positive regard so, at their own pace, they can begin to enquire within. With time, these conditions, within the context of a therapeutic relationship, might assist a person to refamiliarise with their ‘true self’, their organismic self or inner being. In this context, a person might be able to reach their full potential – their true potential – a term Rogers called ‘self-realisation’.
Rogers’ most quoted expression is arguably; “the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change”.
In yogic philosophy, the first sacred texts of Hinduism depicted a universe that is interconnected by a single principle called brahman. The main teaching is that brahman exists in the unchanging core – the atman – of the individual. Traditionally, yoga was a path to re-unite with atman; our essence.
Yoga, like counselling, can be an enquiry within and a path towards self-acceptance. Far from twisting, pulling, forcing or heaving my body into shapes it doesn’t make, simply listening to what it is saying can help me understand myself in ways I never did. And only when I can be with, rather than resist, a sensation could I notice a very gentle shift, and even perhaps an unlocking, an unravelling or new space, strength and possibility begin to reveal itself.
Both yoga and person-centred counselling can be seen to be centred around a relationship; the relationship with your inner, or true self, which has been there all along. Personally, yoga means coming home, returning, or uniting with my ‘self’; under the layers of ego, adaptations or self-concept, accessing a universal peace and stillness within that is ever present, but often muffled under a lot of noise.
…And I’m very glad I drowned out the noise and finished the training!