Reclaiming ownership of my body through yoga

Sardinia, 2016

I will never forget the impact my first yoga teacher had on me, a beautiful woman named Sara from Italy. I was on a family holiday in Sardinia, where there was daily yoga classes. She was the first person in my life to recognise my unhealthy relationship with exercise and to see me in ways I hadn’t been seen up until this point in my life. I would arrive to the early morning yoga practice having already done an hours workout and she would always look at me with softness guiding me to be a little more gentle on myself.

I had flown straight to Sardinia from Mallorca half drunk, where I’d been on my 6th year holiday in Magaluf. I’d spent most of the week blacked out due to only eating 1 orange a day and using alcohol, as I always did, to numb all the disconnect I felt in my life. I have lived most of my life deeply disconnected, to my body, my intuition and to many, many people, starting with myself.

My best writing, storytelling and poetry is autobiographical / confessional. My intention with this piece and all my writing going forward is to comfort and soothe others. I have always found words on the honest, messy, raw, often chaotic, shared human experience, to be the most cathartic. I do want to make you aware at this point that there will be some mentions of sexual trauma so if this is something you would rather not read at this point in time please discontinue here.

Time for a trip down memory lane, I have always had strong athletic ability and been praised so much for my external, how I look or can perform. I was a competitive gymnast as a child trialling for Ireland from the age of 9. I would cry before every session, begging not to go to my 20 hours a week of training, This was too much for any child. I loved cartwheeling around with my friends until I didn’t. Being forced into the splits with both feet raised on spring boards so my pelvis would invert was not my idea of fun. I was eventually allowed to quit but not without a lot of guilt tripping over wasting my potential and throwing away chances of the olympics.

This is how I first became disconnected to my intuition. My gut feelings that were always guiding me, my stubbornness, my inner knowing, being told it was the wrong choice by everyone around me (except my loving grandparents). This really instilled a lot of uncertainty in honouring and listening to my truth. Oh that catholic guilt bites pretty hard at 11.

I took up hockey soon after and never liked it much either. I was always a decent player and fast sprinter without much effort. Naturally I began receiving a lot of praise from everyone around me. By this point I trusted other people's opinions of myself more than my own. It was confusing as I was being conditioned to believe my ability to perform at a sport was where all my self worth lay, I began to believe it was the reason people liked me, alongside my identity being a blonde, tanned, beautiful, skinny, private schooled, hockey player. Misery with a capital M.

I promise you this essay is about yoga but there are still a few more things discuss. Namely my ‘cool’ phase, when I was in 2nd year of secondary school, I had multiple boyfriends, learnt how to social climb, began drinking etc. To be honest I was having a lot of fun and doing what I wanted, which naturally caused havoc for everyone in my life. Some people or a particular person in my life believed they had the authority to nit pick every romantic choice and decision I made as a young woman. I was exploring my innocent sexuality as I tried out different boyfriends. While I understand this person's control essentially came from a place of love, it really affected me and the autonomy I felt I had over my own body and my ability to make choices going forward in life. I also experienced sexual trauma at this time and the combination of everything led me to chose to become completely celibate for 5 years. I started thinking in very black and white terms, becoming addicted to exercise, accompanied by body dysmorphia and disordered eating. What fun.

This is why one of my biggest devotions is to empower women, young and old. I want to chip away at and heal the sexual shame of women that is deeply ingrained in Irish society. There is a difference between a woman embodying her own confidence and sexuality despite a patriarchal system that tries to convince her otherwise and a woman believing that her body and sex are the only things that make her worthy in a man's world. They may look the same visually, but feel completely different. It's true that we need to dissolve the outdated paradigm of women's bodies being objectified by the media for a male gaze. But I also believe feminism needs to move beyond the idea that in order for women to be empowered, or a woman to be a feminist, we need to cover our bodies up and not express our sexuality.

I hope the picture I’m painting is clear, these are just a few examples of how things chipped away at me over time and I began to lose my voice and ability to trust myself. Everyone in my life had such strong opinions of how I should behave in the world, what was best for me and who I was. My body always felt like it’s sole purpose was performance, or not my own, from competitive sport starting in childhood onwards, as well as sexual trauma in my early and late teens that manifested in all the wrong ways via hyper sexualisation in my early twenties and numbness in a lot of areas of my life.

The word intimacy has been surfacing a lot for me recently in different workshops, retreats and held spaces. Intimacy = Into me I see. I don’t believe many people saw me for who I really was as a young woman. I know I never felt seen anyway, which is validation enough.

I was really lucky with my cousin Fiona, an angel sent from above to help me navigate this earth, as well as one of my oldest and dearest friends who has restored my faith in men while simultaneously breaking my heart, he has helped me in more ways than he might ever come to understand. Thank you both. The world needs more people like you.

Surfing in Baleal, Portugal, with Fiona. 2018

It's time to talk yoga now.

My journey and path into yoga was always about returning to myself, learning to see my body as my home, my intuition as my best friend and my voice as my own. I love to teach slower, less ‘performative’ styles of yoga, as I used to call them. But I have to say I’m so grateful for some of the teachers I’ve come across recently, who I am now lucky enough to

call friends. They are reintroducing me to the playful side of movement again. The young girl in me who loved to cartwheel for the sheer joy of it and not because she was being marked out of 10 in competition.

Arriving home from Sardinia that summer, after finishing my leaving cert, I knew I had found something really special that I wanted to keep with me for life. I made it to the yoga society in my first year of college a few times and nearly fainted in a Bikram hot yoga class. I’d gotten a free pass to at freshers week and needless to say I never returned. It wasn’t until I came across my favourite studio, YogaVeda Living in Blackrock, that I took to yoga consistently. It was primarily an Ashtanga yoga studio when I began practising there in the lead up to summer of 2017. Ashtanga is a very strong practice with the option to bend your body and build strength in many different fun and exciting ways. As I’ve said multiple times already, I have strong athletic ability and my body tends to respond pretty fast to most forms of exercise from muscle memory.

I took to Ashtanga like a duck to water and became addicted to the yoga high I would feel after a 90 minute session. This studio remains a safe heaven for me, run by husband and wife, David and Paula, no mirrors and no messing. This studio will always have a big place in my heart. It is where I completed my 200hr teacher training and met some amazing people on similar paths to myself. By the time I had begun my teacher training with David and Paula, the course had evolved into a varied training offering a strong foundation in yoga, as well as yin and ayurveda.

After having had such a positive full body, mind and spirit reaction to Ashtanga yoga I was convinced it was all I needed. The summer of 2017 I moved to Costa Rica for 3 months when I was only 19 to chase my dreams of surfing. Surfing and skateboarding are my sports that I chose for myself and I find pursuing them gives me a tremendous amount of autonomy over my own life. I wouldn’t even consider them sports, they nourish my soul and give me the biggest sense of freedom I’ve ever felt in my life.

Unfortunately my crusade to Costa Rica is where some of my deepest sexual trauma took place and I came back a shell of myself. Not telling anyone at home and only posting the sweet life on instagram. I would make attempts to return to Ashtanga yoga with the same enthusiasm and consistency I had started with but I was never able to keep it up for more than a few classes here and there. I knew that it had the power to make me feel so well and good in all aspects of my life so I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to bring myself to the mat like I used to. Resistance. Oh boy, oh boy. My favourite word.

This got loads of likes

Playa Grande, Costa Rica. 2017

Que, yin yoga.

I would like to write a love letter to yin for how much it’s helped me. Maybe I will someday, maybe this is it. I call it my first love but I suppose that’s not entirely true. Yin is my favourite form of yoga to teach because I really believe in its power to heal, to bring us back to ourselves, to reconnect us with our intuition, our internal guidance system and our truth. It is all internal and about connecting within, it's one of the lesser egoic or preformative styles of yoga. In its truest nature, no form of yoga has anything to do with ego or performance and I really am looking forward to teaching more energising styles and maybe even Ashtanga someday.

I am committed to helping others find their way back home to themselves through the practice of yoga. I really do trust in the practice of yoga as a powerful healing modality. Any form of yoga when practised with even a little consistency, will bring about very positive benefits over a short space of time. While my 24 years on this earth have been meandering and I do wear many hats, being a yoga teacher is one of my greatest honours and I take my job very seriously. When I am holding space for someone, I understand it may not be for everyone, but I also understand I am now in the position that Sara, my first yoga teacher once was for me. The chance to leave a lasting impression on someone's life, for them to think to themselves, there is something in this, there is something here, maybe I could feel better, maybe I deserve to. I hope to make my classes fun and playful in their own way and their own time. I would love to have you in one of my classes, all parts of you are always welcome.

Namaste, peace and love,

Anna x