Marking 29 Years of Yoga Learning, Unlearning, and Writing Through it All

Marking 29 Years of Learning, Unlearning, and Writing Through it All

This month I am celebrating 29 years of publishing a newsletter.

This newsletter started when I was a new personal trainer, 22 years old, and I printed copies to hand out to my clients on visits.  When my business grew into a wellness centre, we started mailing newsletters to our client base, until that grew far too unwieldy.  We then made the transition to email – it was the early 2000’s and I had my first website, and email was still quite new and exciting. It might be hard to imagine, but people looked forward to getting emails back in those ‘olden days.’

While reflecting on this anniversary there are two things that come to mind:

• How adaptable my generation has been with technology
• How much I have learned and unlearned over the years

I remember so clearly the days of typewriters and fax machines, with pagers clipped to belts and hefty flip phones whose only function was to make and receive calls.  My marketing for my new business in 1996 was classified ads in local newspapers and free talks to community groups.  With these two extremely budget conscious methods I was able to grow a business.  Today, our communications and marketing are so much more sophisticated, and also so much more time consuming. No more writing up a 35-word classified ad and then getting back to my clients.  These days we have to spend hours developing social media content (like this!) to stay in front of new students and continue to communicate with existing or past students.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much I have learned and unlearned – not just adapting to new technologies or learning more in my field but learning about myself and unpicking habits and blind spots that have impacted both my personal growth and my professional life.

One thing I’ve become aware of is that I have quite a blind spot when it comes to assuming people are telling the truth, that they have people’s best interests in mind, and that we are all united in wanting a better world for everyone.

This is no less evident than in the ways I absorbed and endorsed a wide array of spiritual and pseudoscientific theories in my early years (and even my middle years) as a fitness and yoga professional. I trusted that published books were accurate, and senior teachers were speaking from some kind of evidence base when they said things like “Shoulderstand is good for your thyroid.”  Was I willfully naïve, or did I just enjoy having special knowledge?  Either way, I know that my past newsletters contained quite a grab bag of pseudoscience – some harmless, but some certainly harmful – and I regret that.  Although I can give myself some grace for being on a journey of learning, in my mind I do hold myself to a higher standard than my actions actually demonstrate.

At the time, these ideas made sense, or I wanted them to make sense. Part of this I know stems from wanting to understand the mysteries of the self and the universe. Part of this I think stems from wanting to be ‘part of the club’ – to be in with the cool yoga kids and share all the special, exciting ideas.  I know better now, of course, but cannot look at past newsletters without a deep cringe.

I write all this to you while still processing all these thoughts, so I don’t have a clear narrative, and I certainly have a lot more reflecting to do. But I do want to share with you these final three thoughts:

• If you, too, have embraced some ideas in the past that you see now were untrue, misleading, or harmful to you or others, can you give yourself some grace and move on?
• As much as I complain about social media, I have learned so much about yoga, health, ethics, and social justice from experts on social media. They’ve helped me to unpack some of my own mental habits and preconceived ideas, too. I am so grateful for the learning that educators share with us. It makes our world a better place.
• I am not much better at writing a blog or newsletter 29 years in, and that’s okay. I can’t be amazing at everything I do. Some parts of our journey are long and winding, and we have to just stumble along and do things a bit badly while we learn.

For now, thanks for reading, and for being part of this messy, evolving project with me. I am very grateful for 29 years of learning with you.

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