Teaching yoga at a homeless shelter

I find this a hard article to write, as there is so much to write about!

It’s been a bit more than a month since I started teaching a weekly class in a homeless shelter in the south of Manhattan. Well, homeless shelter is a bit of a misnaming in this case, since it is a “transition home”, which is mid-term housing for people who used to live on the street. So, technically, they are not homeless anymore.

The shelter is managed by the BRC, the largest association helping the homeless in NYC. There are 32 “clients”, as they are called, living there for a period from 6 to 24 months, until they can hopefully transition to stable housing. This specific location specializes in clients who have a history of mental illness and/or substance abuse.

It’s an interesting experience for sure, very different from teaching at an Iyengar studio.

• I have very little space and / or props. Four mats, and a wall once I’ve pushed the chairs in that room to the side. I bring my own blocks and belt to help, and of course use the wall and sometimes the very impractical sitting chairs.

 

• There is no planning possible (thankfully I was never truly a class-planning person anyways…). What I mean by this is that the class is supposed to be from 7PM to 8:30PM. But I never know when people are going to show up. Around 7PM, the security guy usually rings the bell to let residents know that the class is starting. Sometimes one of the students will actually be there at 7, sometimes I just wait until someone shows up. So far I have always had someone show up, but it can be 10, 15, 20 minutes after the class was supposed to start (I’ve put a limit on myself to leave if noone has showed up by 7:30PM). So I start when my first student shows up, and other students might join in (or not) at any point. Thankfully I already had a good training in this when I was teaching at my friend Daniel’s place, since he would regularly interrupt the class to go take care of his dinner.

 

• The students themselves are very different from what people think as “yogis”. Their fitness level is very low, and the demographic is mainly black males aged 30-70. I actually think it is great, as it shows that yoga is truly for everyone. I’m glad they are interested in trying it, and that they keep on coming back and work hard to improve their lives.

 

• A funny one to finish. You know how we all fart? It’s actually a question I’ve had a lot from people. What do you do when people fart, or when you, a teacher, farts during a demonstration for exemple? Well I’ve found that in regular classes, people just ignore it and go ahead with whatever was going on beforehand. They might be secretly judging the farter, but we’ll never know. At the shelter however, a fart is followed by a loud “SORRY!” and sometimes a laugh from the guilty and shameless farter, which I find both hilarious and refreshing.

 

Teaching in this setting has taught me a lot about myself as a teacher. I’ve had to let go of my Iyengar perfectionism. If I can get them to stretch a bit and get somewhat of the shape of the pose, that’s good. If I can relieve a bit of their back pain (main complaint), that’s awesome! And since they come back, I assume they find some value in my teaching. It has also stimulated a lot of my creativity, as even “easy” poses are sometimes out of reach. What do you do when child’s pose is a hard pose, and you don’t have props to help? Finally, I try to be more conscious of my adjusting students. Even though in my Introductory assessment I was told I don’t touch people enough, I am especially wary of touching people who have been through trauma, which this specific group of student most certainly has. So I try to ask every time if I can touch the student before adjusting them – but old habits die hard and I’m very guilty of regularly doing before asking.

For people interested in trauma and how yoga can help survivors, I highly recommend this book which I recently devoured. 

 

Finally, I’d like to advertise a Gofundme I created to collect money and purchase some more props for my students at the shelter. The money will go towards getting bolsters, blocks and blankets to make yoga more accessible to the students who have knee pain, difficulties to relax and a hard time stretching. I am sure they will be very grateful for any contribution you can make.

 

 

10 ways becoming vegan changed my life

Since the previous article was fun to write and ended up quite popular (maybe because it’s shorter than my usual rants? :’D) I decided to write another one on my other big, life-changing decision. Once again, no particular order…

1. My skin cleared up. It had already become way better after I stopped eating gluten and dairy, but there was also a certain improvement when I stopped eating animal products.
2. I lost weight. I wasn’t consciously trying to, though I was certainly slightly overweight beforehand. I sometimes refer to it as losing “guilt weight” since I felt so much better after I took the decision, but more realistically it’s likely because vegan whole foods are less calory-dense, so I was eating as much, but it ended up being less total energy.
3. TMI, you’ve been warned. I started pooping VERY regularly. Everyday, often twice a day. If I don’t poop in one day, I now start wondering what’s up.
4. I learned a lot about nutrition and health (I didn’t go vegan for health, and would have likely stopped eating meat before if I didn’t think / had always been told it was necessary for me to be healthy. Spoiler: it’s not).
5. I started putting a lot more time researching a product before buying it. What it’s made of, what are the working conditions of people making it, what will happen to it once I discard it – things I didn’t think so much about before. I started looking more into the zero-waste movement as well.
6. I became more assertive and more of my own individual. I’m still not very assertive, it’s just not in my character and I don’t want to be that vegan (I guess my type of activism is simply normalizing veganism and showing that there are good / logical reasons to be vegan, not only pseudo-scientific banter). However, this was truly the first decision I took that showed a true shift from how I was raised, if not in values, at least how I interpret and implement them.
7.  People sometimes excuse themselves for talking about non-vegan food they’ve eaten or eating animals in front of me. Which I’m not sure what my feelings are about this? I mean, sure, I’d rather they didn’t, but then again, I ate meat for most of my life, so it’s not like I don’t know what it is…
8. I notice thought inconsistencies / cognitive dissonance much more, not only when veganism is at stake, and also how much people dislike having it pointed it out. Another side-effect of this, is that admitting that I had been wrong by adopting veganism as a new lifestyle & philosophy, makes me more reflective of my beliefs. Since I was wrong once, and for something as big as this, I could be wrong again. So I try to listen to arguments opposite from mine with a non-prejudiced mind. It’s not easy!
9. I notice how much animal products are in EVERYTHING, often unnecessarily or as cheap fillers, like milk in salt and pepper chips. WHY???
10. For the first time in a very long time, I am considering changing my career plan. Since my last year of high school, my mind was set on a career in drug discovery. Saving people’s lives by creating tomorrow’s drugs. And it is what I am currently doing, as a postdoctoral researcher in protein engineering, I design antibodies against cancer targets, which will hopefully progress to a personalized medical treatment for patients. However, I realize that the medicines I am making will have to be tested on animals (this is required by law). While I do think that this might have been necessary at some point (like eating meat was likely necessary for our ancestors to survive), there are now more and more technologies, like organs-on-a-chip, being developed which are better for testing drugs than using animals. I think using animals is unnecessary in many cases, as it has been shown in multiple cases that animal testing is often inefficient at predicting human reactions to a product (see this case  in France only two years ago). So I’m considering a possible career switch to science policy in the future.

The first time I saw the top image, or one similar, I was far from being vegan and my reaction was similar to the bottom one. I thought vegans were very stupid not to know that cows do not need to be killed for milk, and that would actually be against the farmer’s interest! The fact that they were two white / slim / seemingly affluent women didn’t help with the stereotype of “they don’t have anything better to busy their days with”.                                                                                                                                                           This is why I think this type of activism isn’t very effective. It didn’t make me connect the dots. I didn’t realize that cows need to be pregnant to lactate, so as soon as the calf is born it is taken away and killed rapidly to be sold as veal. And even though I had always been told to buy beef raised for meat and not beef raised for milk (it is compulsory to write which type of beef it is in France) as it is supposed to taste better, I never realized this what was they meant by “I want to live”. I was the ignorant one, yet I judged them as being ignorant. Tough lesson to learn…

10 ways practicing yoga changed my life

Disclaimer: the idea for this post came while I was in the shower, and I just felt like I HAD TO WRITE IT RIGHT NOW. So there you go, in no particular order:

1. I reconnected with my body and accepted it for what it is. I fell in love at first practice because of how it made me feel. At the time I was dissatisfied with my body and its refusal to conform to what I thought I ought to look like. Yoga made me accept my body as it was, and made me proud of the things it could do. Funnily, my body did change a lot with practice, losing weight (which I attribute to #3) and  weight training, to a point that I think it is what I wished it was at the time, but I’m not sure whether that it truly the case or whether I’ve just truly learned to love myself.
2. I stopped wearing make-up everyday. Linked to #1, and also moving to the Netherlands where the pressure to look put together is much less important than in France, especially the South of France. Still a + in my book. I do like to wear make-up from time to time but don’t feel like I have to.
3. I became vegan. Maybe the biggest # in terms of impact. While I like to say that I initially went vegan for environmental reasons but am now an ethical vegan, I don’t think that’s entirely true. Because I owe my dabbling into veganism to a reflection on yamas and niyamas we has to do during teacher training, and it was definitely an ethical issue.
4. My back stopped hurting. A combination of addressing my anterior pelvic tilt in teacher training and general strengthening of my core. I used to have really bad backaches which made me consider a breast reduction in university. I now rarely suffer from them, and if I do I know that twisting + supta virasana with a block between the shoulders will relieve the issue.
5. I met people I never would have otherwise. The whole amazing Iyengar yoga community of the Netherlands, and more recently, my students at the homeless shelter (more on this soon!)
6. I now breathe through my nose at all times, and am aware of my breath most of the time. My breathing is also slower than most people I know. This is both an advantage and an inconvenient, as it sometimes stresses me out to hear my boyfriends’ semi-erratic breathing.
7. I am much more self-confident. This came mainly with teaching. It taught me to speak up and be assertive.
8. I always have yoga pants or shorts in my suitcase at a minimum. Often accompanied by a strapped mat and blocks if possible.
9. Strangers come to talk to me in the park. Before yoga, nobody had ever come talk to me while I was hanging out in a park. If I practice, there is a 50% chance that someone will come talk to me about it. Also: people trying to imitate what I’m doing. Kids and grown-ups alike, and it’s happened that I feel like I have to intervene and teach them how not to break their neck while they attempt headstand.
10. I spend a lot of time upside-down and love ropes 🙂

 

Senior teacher Bobby Clennell in rope sirsasana