No one else can do your work for you
Some thoughts on energy, power as medicine, and the importance of having guides on our own personal path of living.
When I was in massage school to become a massage therapist our student clinics were the hands-on practicum for applying our learning. My hours were booked solid with people requesting massages from me. I worked so much I made myself sick. Partly because I didn’t have the tools then to manage my own personal energy field or make any psychic barrier between me and the person on my massage table. I dropped out of massage school never to return or finish my certification. One of the big lessons I learned from this experience was that most people were coming to me to “fix,” them. They would lie down and let me do the work. I quickly realized I did not want to be in this kind of relationship with people and their healing (wholeness).
I was very clear with myself that my role was to co-create and co-facilitate a healing (whole) experience with the people in my life whether they were on the massage table or on the sticky mat. Which is why I resonate much more with being a teacher or practitioner of yoga because (hopefully) the language is very clear: I am not in the business of fixing anyone. I can’t heal another, healing comes from within. I am not here to do any one else’s work for them.
What I love about teaching yoga is the fact that even if I wanted to I can't “do” anyone else's yoga (or healing, or business of whole-human-making) for them. Here is a more clear delineation of co-creativity. 1.) I live in the world of nature, I am nature, I learn with and from nature. 2.) I need teachers to help me learn and take me where I’ve never been before. I need teachers and yet my teachers cannot do my work for me. 3.) I am the only one who can do my own soul-work. God willing and with good graces, I get to do my work along side other practitioners in this lifetime.
I also want to acknowledge that there have been times in my life when I could not do my work of healing alone and I needed surgery to put me back together again. There have been times when I no longer knew what to do for myself to get well so I sought the care of someone with more knowledge and understanding of the human body than me. Although the body never lies, and I’m an advocate for using one’s own personal instinct and intuition, I also have direct experiences with wanting, needing, and advocating to be under the care of supervision of a trustworthy source—I too have been on the receiving end of doctors and healers, no always able to co-create because I have been very, very ill at times in my life. Sometimes I need help in translating what my body is saying from another skilled practitioner of medicine.
As a yogi-in-training, my teachers often talk about taking personal responsibility for what is within our own personal energy field. The journey then becomes about cultivating discernment on the path of yoga (life) with awareness, knowing that I need teachers and at the same time not giving away my pawer to the “other” naively believing that they alone have the power to save me, fix me, or make me whole again, without me also taking responsibility for managing my mind, emotions, and all the stuff I do every day that pulls me off my center: managing my own chitta-vritti, the machinations of the mind-body-souling-complex (souling, not a typo, more on that later).
Where do I give my power away? Where do I waste my recourses? These are useful questions to take note of, not bludgeon ourselves with and build a case for “all the ways I can’t get well,” etcetera. My wisdom teacher, Lee, used to chide his students for giving away their power to “the health food movement.” It's a good lesson in inquiring where and how we all leak energy and give our power away.
One way I have sought to strengthen my own person energy field is through the application of oil on the skin. Simple yet profound. In every culture there is a form of “laying on of hands” which implies an act of concentrated attention, with bodies, engaged in a shared experience of moving energy toward harmony and healing, seeking homeostasis and balance. Abhyanga is a Sanskrit word meaning inunction of the limbs of the body. It is the act of applying oil (which is food) to the largest organ of the body (the skin) for the purpose of greater intelligence and connectivity of the whole organism. The skin eats and absorbs the oils and uses it as a form of nourishment and fortification.
“Take your power back,” my yoga teacher, Bhavani, often says to us. She doesn’t necessarily say how, but leaves the “how-to” up to each of us to figure out on our own terms.
Take your power back. Power, as it’s defined in many indigenous, means medicine. Remember your own medicine. Forgetting and remembering is the human condition. My question to myself lately is, how can I embody my own learning in such a way that I am irrevocably altered? Remember, “Learning occludes knowing,” as Stephen Jenkinson reminds us, “Learning is calamitous to what think I know for sure.”
In my own experience, what a good teacher does is turn us back on ourselves so that we can live our questions, come to the answers on our own and animate them in our lives. Good teachers are guides who motion us back toward our highest, deepest Selves.
Cheers to doing the work it takes to BE human and a little more humane!
On-going yoga classes: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays 8:00am-9:30am. Check out Shinay’s local offerings in Prescott, Arizona here.
Join Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra Study Group Sundays 11:45-1:15. Find out more information here.
“The Tender Hearted Warrior” Yoga Immersion happening September 7, 8, 9, and 10, Thursday through Sunday 7:00-12:00. Find out more information here.
Listen to Yogi’s Roadmap Podcast with Bhavani Maki here.
"Where do I give my power away? Where do I waste my recourses?" These are high-powered questions, and not for the faint of heart. I have been inquiring in this direction a lot lately, almost surprised that I have to keep asking them throughout my life, over and over. But that's the beauty of them, they always apply as a tool to go to the next level of serving.