Lessons Learned,
Lessons Taught
Dr. Gail Parker
Yoga saved my life. I love yoga and have practiced it all of my adult life. It has and continues to shape my consciousness, and it teaches me that my power lies in my ability to create my own destiny through awareness, intention, desire, and focus.
To set the stage, I came of age during the Black Power, Civil Rights, and Black Is Beautiful movements. Angela Davis and Nina Simone were my “sheroes.” Sporting an afro, which was every bit as full as Angela’s, was an outward manifestation of my commitment to dispelling the notion that there was something inherently unattractive about black people’s natural appearance. Black really was powerful and beautiful and I wanted the world to know that I regarded myself, and all black women as both. What I hadn’t learned yet was the power of loving myself from the inside out. Yoga taught me that. This is a story of how my consciousness evolved through body awareness.
In the late 1960s, I met a man at a college rally sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality. Interracial dating was frowned on at the time, college students faced expulsion for it, and interracial marriage was still illegal in some states. In spite of that, or maybe even because of it, we decided, after a three-month courtship, to get married to show the world, including our parents who disapproved, that we could change the world. We married the same year the Supreme Court ruled laws on mixed-raced marriages illegal. We were both twenty and barely knew each other.
As I look back on it, our marriage was an act of political defiance more than anything else. I naively thought that this act of open rebellion could change other people’s hearts and minds. I did not know at the time that the only heart and mind you can change is your own, and that you can only accomplish that through individual personal transformation, not by acting out. I learned this lesson the hard way through experience. Teaching it to others became my life’s work.
My husband turned out to be a verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive man. The day we got married, and for the following year, I was the object of his abuse. His violent rages seemed to come out of nowhere. I was terrified of him and was as careful as I knew how to be not to trigger him. I walked on eggshells continuously. Nothing worked. No matter what I did the abuse continued. Why didn’t I leave? Circumstance and pride. In 1967, no-fault divorce was not an option, domestic violence was not considered a crime, and blame the victim was the name of the game. To make matters worse, I was ashamed of myself for marrying someone I barely knew. I blamed myself for his abuse, and I blamed myself for taking it. So I didn’t tell anyone what was going on. Instead I stayed and tried to make the best of a bad situation.
We shared a car. Both of us worked. It was my habit to pick him up from work in the evening. One afternoon I made a decision to remain at work to complete an interview I was conducting. I had no way to reach him to let him know that I would be about fifteen minutes late (there were no cell phones then). When I arrived to pick him up, he was not there. My heart sank. Instead of waiting for me, he had taken the bus home in a driving rainstorm.
I knew he would be furious by the time I arrived home, and sure enough, there he was waiting for me inside the foyer of our apartment with a leather belt in his hand. When I walked through the door, he began screaming obscenities at me and beating me with the belt. As usual, I was totally unprepared for the assault.
Afraid to defend myself, I felt victimized and helpless. But there was something different this time. I am not really certain how long the attack continued, but at some point during it, time slowed down, almost coming to a standstill. I felt as though my body was floating above the scene of this whipping, and I remember hearing a voice inside my head say as clearly as if there had been someone in the room talking to me, “You know he’s crazy, but you must be crazy too for putting up with this.” And then something in me literally clicked. In the instant of becoming conscious of my own insanity, I was transformed from the victim of an abusive husband into a woman who had choices. I knew then, even though I was not yet ready emotionally or financially, that I would leave the relationship.
I never said a word to him or lifted a finger to defend myself, but the most amazing thing happened. Immediately following, or maybe simultaneous to becoming aware of my own craziness for putting up with the situation coupled with my decision to leave, he stopped hitting me and screaming at me, dropped the belt, and walked away. We never once spoke of the incident, and yet he never raised his voice to me or lifted a finger to harm me in any way after that. Miraculously, it was as if he somehow sensed that he would never be able to treat me that way again, and I knew it too. Something in me had shifted.
In a moment of profound awareness, I had taken personal responsibility for my own sense of well-being. In an instant, I had changed on a deep, fundamental level. The shift in me completely changed the way I regarded myself and profoundly changed the way he interacted with me forever. Once I realized that I had choices, within months I was enrolled in graduate school, moved out of our apartment, and filed for divorce. My newfound freedom came from my awareness of myself as a worthwhile human being, deserving of all the good that life has to offer, with the power to choose the life I wanted to live. I was no longer a victim. I was free.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, I now know that it was yoga, which I had been practicing for about one year when this event took place, that woke me up and ultimately saved me.
Yoga Transforms the Body, Heart, and Mind
The same year I got married, out of curiosity, I took my first yoga class at the local art museum. There were no yoga studios at the time. My teacher, I later learned, was regarded as one of Paramahansa Yogananda’s (Autobiography of a Yogi) foremost disciples. Without realizing it at the time, I was introduced to yoga by the teachings of a master. After my first class, I was hooked. In addition to Hatha Yoga classes, my yoga teacher also offered weekly Sunday services. He would read Paramahansa Yogananda’s Sunday Service lectures and then lead a meditation practice. I practiced and studied with him for one year before my individual personal transformation became obvious to me. That was fifty years ago, and I have been practicing yoga ever since.
My experience of yoga is and always has been that yoga is an inside out job. We actually change internally before the change shows up in our lives. It doesn’t change us all at once. Yoga is a transformative practice that changes us incrementally. Bit by bit, over time, it transforms the body by increasing balance and flexibility; it cultivates steadiness of mind and calms emotions in the midst of obstacles and challenges; it cultivates mental clarity and helps access intuition and the ability to listen to yourself and others at a deep and subtle level; it strengthens your capacity for self-love, fortifies your ability for self-acceptance, and emboldens your desire to be truthful and honest, not only with others, but even more importantly with your self.
The first principle of yoga is ahimsa, nonviolence. It teaches us to treat others with loving-kindness and to love ourselves as well. Regardless of the messages and stereotypes about body image that have been culturally communicated to us, yoga has, without fail, helped me love the skin and shape I’m in both on and off my yoga mat. Over my lifetime, I have experienced my hair as too long or too short, too curly or not curly enough, my skin color as too dark or too light, my body shape as too skinny or too curvy, my nose and lips as too thin or too full, my voice as too loud or too soft, my facial expressions as too serious or not serious enough. I’m sure there is more, but after fifty years of practicing yoga, my focus has turned away from my image and has become increasingly internal and more focused on my essence. Yoga heals bodies, minds, and hearts.
As a seventy-year-old woman, I am more focused on who I am, and less concerned with what I look like, or what others think about my looks. This is reflected in my yoga practice. Although I still practice asana five days a week, it is with more internal awareness. Additionally, it is by practicing restorative yoga a minimum of once a week that I strengthen my internal focus. I’ve discovered that being still brings me into alignment with my creative intelligence and an inner state of openness that supports wise actions. Over time, my asana practice has taken a back seat in importance to my meditation practice. I have always meditated twice a day, but meditation is my priority now. My growth continues.
Transformation Is a Never-Ending Process
I kept the story of being victimized by an abusive man a secret for more than thirty years until one day a student in a class called Change the World, that I was teaching at the University of Michigan, asked if it was possible to change abusive relationships through individual personal transformation. Prior to this, I had never told anyone this story—not my parents, my brother, my current husband, or any of my closest friends. I had buried the memory of that chapter of my life and, along with it, the feelings of humiliation and shame I had felt.
In response to the student’s question, I found my voice and told the story. Before I could feel regret or embarrassment about what I had shared in a very public forum, to my surprise, someone in the class said, “That is an incredibly powerful story. Thank you for sharing it.”
In telling the story, I experienced another internal shift and learned an important lesson. By making myself vulnerable and sharing a story that I had secretly regarded as a sign of my own weakness, I felt the story transform from a shameful, humiliating episode in my life into a story of courage and strength. In telling the story, which was in and of itself an act of courage, once again my perspective shifted.
The fundamental change in me, by telling that story, was my willingness to lovingly and wholeheartedly embrace those parts of me that I had for years regarded as flawed. This shift in perspective forever changed how I see myself and how I relate to the world. My clients and students have benefited from this shift, as I am much better able to help them lovingly embrace their weaknesses and flaws, which paradoxically transforms them into strengths. My family and friends also benefit, as I am much less guarded and defensive, more willing to be open and vulnerable, and have a greater sense of self-esteem, all of which allows for greater intimacy and closeness.
So the upshot of what occurred for me by finally telling this story was that another pathway opened to transforming what I had internalized as a shameful experience, to be kept secret, into a story of courage and strength that I now use to instruct others, and to be a more compassionate, open, and loving person. It also released me from a long-held but deeply buried belief that I am not “good enough,” which has opened many internal doors that were formerly locked away, freeing me to be more authentic, genuine, and efficacious in all that I do.
Tell the Story
Yoga, which means to yoke or connect, has taught me something else. Whether it’s an embarrassing story, a secret crush, or a family skeleton, each of us needs someone to confide in. Yet some truths seem so deep and dark we keep them hidden from everyone—our parents, our spouse, our siblings, or a best friend—hoping no one will ever find out about them.
The problem with carrying around a secret is that it can be toxic, costing you peace of mind, happiness, and even your health. Keeping secrets interferes with your ability to be yourself and to be intimate with others. Hiding parts of your personal history takes energy and is stressful. Ongoing stress poses a health problem due to increased hormone levels that cause inflammation and compromise the immune system. These are some of the reasons keeping secrets is a dangerous practice.
It doesn’t matter what your secret is: hiding debt, telling or concealing a lie, secretly eating or starving, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, or covering up physical and sexual abuse. Keeping secrets is a form of dishonesty that causes harm to us physically, psychologically, and spiritually, and sometimes it causes harm to others.
Yoga teaches us that truthfulness, satya, is a guiding principle of our practice both on and off our yoga mat. Our yoga practice teaches us that by shining the light of awareness on the hidden places within ourselves we can safely avoid their stress-related consequences. Even though the thought of revealing a secret can seem scary, once you take that first step, it gets easier.
Love Yourself / Change the World
I hope telling my story helps you find the courage to tell your story, whatever it may be, and to experience the loving embrace of all those with whom you share it. Yoga supports connection and intimacy to yourself and to others. It supports community. This is power. Secrecy supports denial, disconnection, isolation, and enables the continuation of abuse and other dysfunctional behaviors. This is disempowerment. Don’t get it twisted. There is no shame or weakness in being abused. The shame and weakness belong to the abuser; to all those who blame the victims of abuse; and to those individuals and institutions who would have you cover it up, hide it behind closed doors, and keep abuse a secret.
Unless you are a powerless child, being victimized does not define you as a victim. As an adult, regardless of your circumstance, no matter how it looks, no matter what you may think, you always have choices. The choice is to love yourself unconditionally. Your power lies in knowing that. I discovered this through the study and practice of yoga. Whatever path you choose to follow, make sure it’s a path that teaches you to love yourself from the inside out. Find your strength. Claim your power. Stand tall. Stand proud. Love yourself. Find your voice. Tell your story. Change the world.
Takeaway
When you’re preparing to be open with others about a secret you’ve been harboring, a good first step is to be honest with yourself. Journal, write a poem, draw a picture, or even write a song about the secret. When you feel more comfortable about sharing the secret, try role-playing what you’ll say with a trusted friend before you reveal the secret directly to others. If you don’t feel comfortable divulging the secret to someone you know, seek help from a professional who is obligated to maintain confidentiality.
Here are some suggestions that can help make sharing your secret a positive experience:
• Choose someone who is trustworthy, a good listener, open-minded, nonreactive, and nonjudgmental.
• Choose a place where you have sufficient privacy and a time where there are no distractions.
• Choose someone whose loyalties are not divided and who will not feel the need to tell another friend or his or her spouse what you’ve shared.
• Keep in mind that therapists and clergy are sworn to maintain confidentiality so long as your secret doesn’t involve doing potential harm to yourself or another person.
Remember what matters most is not the secrets you’re keeping. What really matters are the friends and family who still love you once you share the truth with them.
Gail Parker, PhD, E-RYT 500, is a nationally and internationally renowned media personality, educator, author, and thought leader. Her broad expertise in behavioral health and wellness include trailblazing efforts to integrate psychology, restorative yoga, and meditation as effective self-help strategies that restore emotional balance by reducing stress, anxiety, and symptoms of mild depression. She authors a blog called Taking Yoga Off Your Mat™: http://drgailparker.wordpress.com. Author photo by Shekenia Mann.