Your Yoga is too Small with Lizzie Lasater

What happens when a legacy of "radical rest" meets the modern era of constant noise? In this episode of This is Yoga Therapy, Michele Lawrence sits down with Lizzie Lasater—Restorative Yoga teacher, architect by training, and a vital voice in the evolution of modern yoga.

As her mother, yoga pioneer Judith Hanson Lasater, prepares to retire at age 80, Lizzie reflects on the longevity of a teacher, the structural integrity of a healing practice, and why slowing down is actually an act of civil disobedience. We explore how restorative yoga serves as the "urgent medicine" our over-stimulated nervous systems need right now, and how the practice evolves to meet us across every season of life.

Whether you are a long-time student of the Lasater lineage or a yoga therapist looking for deeper insights into the "architecture of rest," this conversation offers a profound look at staying present in the silence.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

• The Longevity of a Teacher: Lessons learned as Judith Hanson Lasater steps into a new season of life at age 80.
• The Architecture of Rest: How a background in design influences the "structural integrity" and building of a restorative practice.
• Rest as Civil Disobedience: Why being still is a radical, necessary act in an era of over-stimulation.
• Yoga Through the Ages: Trusting the practice to meet us even when our physical capacity shifts.
• The Silent Wisdom Body: How to teach students to listen to their inner guide when there is no movement to distract them.
• Holding Steady: The vital importance of a personal practice for yoga teachers and therapists.

Featured Guest: Lizzie Lasater

Lizzie Lasater is a Restorative Yoga teacher and architect who focuses on the intersection of design, stillness, and somatic healing. She produces digital courses, hosts international retreats, and writes a popular weekly newsletter exploring the deeper dimensions of yoga.

Resources & Links:

• Lizzie Lasater’s Website: lizzielasater.com
• Subscribe to 'Dispatches': Lizzie’s Weekly Newsletter

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome to This Is Yoga Therapy. I'm your host, Michelle Lawrence. Join me as we venture beyond the mat into the fascinating intersections of yoga and health. Each episode brings you candid conversations with the visionary leaders and practitioners who are truly shaping this field, sharing their stories, insights, and the profound impact of yoga therapy in action. Hey, it's Michelle. Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to bring up one thing. If you're enjoying this is Yoga Therapy, the best way to support the show is to like, subscribe, and review. Whether you're watching it on YouTube or listening on your commute, your engagement really helps us scale. So please take 10 seconds to hit that subscribe button or leave a review. It really makes a world of difference. Okay, let's get into today's episode. Well, welcome back, folks, to This Is Yoga Therapy. And today is a very special episode as we explore the work of our guest and the evolution of a legacy. And my guest today is Lizzie Lassiter. Lizzie's a restorative yoga teacher, an architect by training, and a vital voice in the modern yoga landscape. And she's also the daughter of Judith Hansen Lassiter, who's a true pioneer in our field, and someone I've had the honor of hosting here on the podcast before. And as Judith prepares to either retire or scale back from teaching this year at age 80, it feels like a really good moment to acknowledge the seeds she's planted in her daughter, obviously, and in so many yoga teachers out there. But I'd love to see how that work is really blooming now through Lizzie's unique lens. And it's such a joy to meet you and have you here today, Lizzie, and take a bow to that legacy and talk about your work and where we go from here.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

It's an honor to be here. Thank you, Michelle, for inviting me. And thank you, dear listener, for listening to this conversation. Legacy is such a big word, and they are huge shoes to fill. That's not even how I think about it, really, as filling those shoes. I feel so lucky to be student number one. I often joke that I've been practicing yoga since the womb. Yeah. Because my mom has been practicing for since the 70s, and she studied personally with BKS Aingar. So it's really a lineage, is the word that I think about. I was born into this practice, into this family. I got to learn up close what it means, first of all, to be a student of yoga. And Mama always says she's a student of yoga who teaches. Yeah. But I think that modeling has been so powerful. The way she gets up in the morning and does her practice without a lot of fuss or ceremony or resistance. And the way yoga is not just a part of her physical practice, but it's completely bleeds into the way that she lives her life off the mat. So yeah, she has been talking about for years that she's going to retire. She's threatening to retire, and it is slowly happening. She just turned 79 and she sees in herself signs of aging, which are normal and beautiful, and she wants to give herself grace. I want to give herself grace and support her in slowly stepping back. Number one with the traveling and also withholding so much complexity, which is where I see she is not as eager to do as she used to. Sure. So we're doing smaller projects or projects where her role is um more as our wise elder. We have a somatic woman course coming up on May 20th, and it's all about celebrating menopause. The tagline of that course is menopause is not a mistake. And what I see mom's role in that is she is this light ahead of us on the path. And so she teaches in that course guided shivasanas and holds that wisdom piece for us that how our practice can evolve over the years, become more therapeutic, become more supported. And I feel so humble to be a part of this journey with her.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

That's beautiful. Thank you. Can you share more or say more just through witnessing her and her practice and her teaching? And then, of course, as your mom, but as a human being too, really. What are some of the lessons you've learned about the longevity of a teacher? Because I think that we all can benefit from hearing this.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Well, one thing I sometimes say to her when we do live, these big live cohorts, and we'll be on with a hundred or two hundred students, and we'll take questions on Zoom. And sometimes afterward, I'll be like, Mom, that answer was amazing. Like the woman who talked about what was going on in her hip, like, how did you know that it was her left saccharillic joint? Like, how did you? And she just kind of laughs and says, Because I've seen it before. Like I've seen it. And so that's what she helps me remember is that it is an accretive, an additive process of becoming a great teacher. It's unfortunately not something that happens after a 200-hour training, and then we're like, I see that it really is the layering of just decades of working with students and of her, you know, enormous interest in the body, studying physical therapy, studying Sanskrit, studying yoga philosophy. She's just endlessly curious and drawn to this work, wants to learn everything she can, is still learning. Like she at 79 takes piano lessons. Someone comes to her house and teaches her piano. And so after dinner, she practices her piano, you know, which is completely inspiring. And I she's she is going this year again to Spain with her partner, and they are gonna stay at an Airbnb for three weeks and take Spanish classes. Yeah, and it's like I'm I keep calling it the oldies study abroad semester. Great, it's inspiring, right? She's not shutting down, and I think she brings that curiosity. That's what she teaches and talks expressly about and encourages us. We have a monthly call called Office Hours, which is in on that, yeah, yeah. Oh, and so the this monthly mentorship for yoga teachers, like she talks about she thinks many of us are not curious enough in our own home practice. Like she says, I don't think you're experimenting, I don't think you're getting on the mat and trying things out.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Because that's where she gets a lot of her best insights. She says, uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

You gotta do it, right? You can't just lay on the couch and read the books or look at the yoga journal. Yeah, and you gotta teach. Like, yeah, you know, practice comes first for the practitioner, uh, their own personal practice, and we'll finish with that question. But also you have to teach in order to hone that teaching skill. Well, let's talk a little bit about you next. And so your backgrounds in architecture. I didn't realize that until I was preparing for this conversation. And in yoga therapy, we often talk about structural integrity, not just the bones, but in the practice itself, right? It's this building process and looking at it holistically and all the factors that could contribute. I'm curious how your eye for design influences how you build a restorative practice. How does that feed in?

SPEAKER_00 8:43

I think everything feeds in. I studied art history undergrad, and then I studied architecture. I did a master's in architecture, and what I was so attracted to was the design process. I wanted to figure out how to go from zero to one. And the art history education had honed my aesthetic perspective, I would say. My intuitive, in German, the word is bauch gefühl, my stomach feeling like my belly brain about what it is that I what I like and don't like. But in architecture, it is a painful process. Learning how to design is for me was a painful process of moving from zero to one. And I sometimes call my work at lasiter.yoga our learning platform. I see my work as a course architect. So I'm applying a lot of the same skills and intuitions in going from zero to one. So I mentioned our somatic woman course. We wrote that course in 2023-24. So with mama Judith Hansen Lasseter and our collaborator Mary Richards, who ours who is our resident anatomy nerd, the three of us over a bunch of meetings, start with the idea, okay, we want to do a menopause yoga course. Go. Like, let's, you know, and how do you go from that blank page to literally a 30-page outline that we have now for this course? How do you build that? How do you refine it? And a word that I use and love, especially I have a program called Start Before You're Ready, where I mentor yoga teachers and wellness professionals about visibility and finding their voice and putting themselves out there into the scary internet. And I talk a lot about iteration. And that is a word I learned in architecture school. And iteration means doing something over and over and over. But instead, and it's exactly Michelle, as you were pointing out with teaching, it's not just doing something in repetition over and over and over. The important part about iteration is you do it and then you look at it, think about it, maybe talk about it, maybe show it to someone, a mentor, a professor, another student, and then you make it again. And then you make it again and again and again. And this process of reflecting on what you've made and then making it again, I think is a fundamental philosophy and skill that I learned in design school that I apply to creating online course experiences, and also in how I teach, how I even think about like, okay, you have to write a description for a retreat, my Italy retreat next summer. Like, what did I teach last year? What did I like about it? What do I want to change? What worked? Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Yeah, so helpful. So helpful to well, to and to look at those things from other professions. We probably most yoga teachers have had another profession, right? And I I like to say that those things can inform our yoga teaching and yoga teaching and practice can make us better at all those other professions that we might also still do, right? It works that way. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about restorative yoga and why it's so needed now. I would say, of course, we all know this that we're overstimulated, there's constant noise, there's so much to filter through. And you've said that restorative yoga is more than just relaxation, it's a form of civil disobedience. So why is this the case? And why is it really such important medicine that we need right now?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

I love this question. What's your experience, Michelle, with restorative yoga?

SPEAKER_01 12:46

How much contact have you had? Lots through the last 20, 25 years. You know, I teach a weekly restorative class for cancer survivors, and I have just benefited from the practice itself. And it is not the only thing, uh, only style of asana I practice either. Um, but I've had quite a bit of experience with it.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Okay, fabulous. So I will give the definition for our listener who potentially has had less experience with restorative yoga. The way we define restorative yoga is the use of props to support the body in positions of comfort and ease to facilitate relaxation and health. So, what that looks like from the outside, the way we teach it, is putting our bodies into positions that are extremely comfortable, physically comfortable, in order to manipulate the nervous system to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic dominance, where all of the good stuff happens: immunity, fertility, all of the stuff in the blood, the central nervous system, hormone health, etc., is all happening when the parasympathetic system, growth, repair is dominant. So why do I think, how do I think this relates to our larger lives? Well, I know that our current form of capitalism, this kind of consumption capitalism that is selling our attention, wants us to be plugged in and either consuming or producing at all times. When I step back from that and choose instead to disconnect from the internet, to disconnect from all forms of productivity, to disconnect from consuming and producing, which are all prerequisites of lying down in a comfortable position and closing your eyes for 20 minutes in a restorative pose. I think that that's a radical act in our current culture. And the default, which I honor and respect, and and or I don't even know if default sounds pejorative. I don't mean it that way, but one pattern is to march in the streets and to make noise in resistance. There is a different path, which is to pursue our own silence, which I believe will radiate out when we shift our nervous systems and our internal state that affects everyone that we touch in our lives, in our communities, and in the larger world is the dream.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Thank you for saying that so well. Let's also talk about really kind of the merging of the legacy that you're carrying forward with your mom, and also how you're evolving it. But then I'd like to know really about how your practice and your own teaching have changed and evolved over different seasons of your life. So, you know, the practice when you were 30 years old, how does that look different from the practice your mother taught when she was 30 versus where you teach now from?

SPEAKER_00 16:27

So the first thing I'll say is that mama has always been so generous in encouraging me to evolve. And her primary thing is I just want you to understand what I'm teaching, but I want you to teach what's true for you. So that has kind of been the background and prerequisite for decades now. The other thing that I will say about evolution, you know, I was just talking to her last night. We were talking about practice evolving and what her practice, we were really talking about how mama was saying at 79, her practice these days, her home practice is about 40 minutes. It's a lot supported. It's very therapeutic. It's like doing the things she knows are gonna make her physical body feel good that day. So if she's got a shoulder thing going on or kind of like the routine that she knows, okay, my sacrum is a little bit out. I gotta do this and this, the movements for that. And then she likes to stand on her head to kind of prove to herself that she's still got it. But I think the way I understand and the way I see when I when we're together, the way her practice is, is very different than the way my practice looks these days. I am raising two wild six and a half-year-old boys. I'm running a business, I have a house, I have a partner. I have, I'm in this phase of aging elders, is what I call it. So it's like, it's not just my parents, but it's like my partner's parents and my partner's siblings' spouse's parents. And like it's it's all around um my brother's partner's parents. Like it's like diseases and hospitalizations and surgeries and declines and diagnoses. And so I am very much in that middle phase. I'm 43, where it's like I'm still caring for my children on a visceral level, feeding them and sometimes cleaning them and cleaning the house when they track mud, as my kid did today, all the way from the terrace. Just like carrying some kind of muddy bowl and spilling all the way into the kitchen. Um, right. So I'm that, and then I'm also, you know, um holding hands of friends and family members who are losing and watching the decline, as am I, of our elders. So, what my home practice is right now is actually quite fierce. I need, I'm doing a lot of strength training. I'm in paramenopause, like I'm feeling it. And so when I go to the mat, a lot of days I need to go into a tunnel of breath and focus where there's no other input or distractions. And it's interestingly, what I'm really called to is like a lot of challenging strength work and a lot of restorative. And they both are tunnels. They're different, you know, it's like, but I need this experience. I do a seated meditation practice in the first thing. And then often I do what we call somatic strength, which Mary Richards, our anatomy expert, has developed. She was an NCAA athlete and has always lifted weights. And she has developed, she's also an amazing yoga teacher. She's developed this methodology of using resistance bands and body weight. It's very from the mat and so therefore very yogi-friendly. And she uses like the breath instead of counting. But I'm super drawn to that. I want to break a sweat. But the thing is, and to answer the last part of your question about how it what I think my mom's practice looked like at 30 versus mine or hers at 43 versus mine, I do think there has been a shift, a very welcome shift in at least the yoga bubble I find myself in. That there's an encouragement to bring other modalities onto the mat and into the practice and consider it real yoga, um, and a questioning of some of the inherited, the strictness of the inherited forms. It's a huge question that underlines our somatic woman program. Is like, okay, you find yourself in paramenopause, menopause, or beyond. Was this physical practice that you inherited, maybe it was a vinyasa flow or basically Krishna Macharya lineage practice? Is that the best thing to serve your body right now, to serve your longevity? My answer right now is no. So I'm letting go or modifying many, you know, we teach from the female pelvis at lastitter.yoga very often. So we talk about like in case you have a female pelvis in triangle pose, you don't need to be heel to middle archer heel to heel. You might want to give yourself a little more space, or especially in poses like Vera 1, Vera Rajasina 1. Maybe you don't need to be on a on a um tightrope. Maybe you need to make space in case you brought a female pelvis to the mat today. So that's what I'm doing is giving myself permission. And I, the question I ask with all love and respect to the lineage and where these practices. Came from. But I wonder if these physical practices that were designed, we know, to suppress male sexual energy that were taught in my lineage, if we look specifically at BKSA Angar to my mother, for example, taught by a Brahmin man who had domestic help, who had a wife and a team of domestic help. We can just say that's a fact. And now I am, as we talked about, this woman being stretched on both sides who doesn't have domestic help, who's cooking and tidying. I have some help with cleaning, but I don't have a staff. And I'm running a business and I'm serving thousands of yogis around the world. So, like the question I allow myself the audacity to ask is like, what how can this practice serve me and meet my life right now? Because I don't think that there were a lot of people in my lineage back through the history of yoga who lived the life that I'm living now in the body, the female body that I'm living in now, having had, for example, a cesarean section, cesarean birth of my twins, right? So maybe I need to make some, maybe I not even just need to, but maybe it's okay for me to make some different shapes.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yeah. It's such an important mention, right? That things have changed. And now we do feel like there's permission to support ourselves and what our unique needs are. And I think yoga therapy is very much in that vein, right? Um, we are not focused on perfection of shape and it needs to look this way. And so that has been such a shift and a welcomed one. And and I would also say, I'm curious if you'd agree, there's also now more science available about the importance of strength for women and menopause and all the other things, and how you know the strength in the legs helps your brain and your memory and cognition as you age. So we have these practices that we can maybe feel like we're allowed to now embrace for ourselves. And we also know how important it is because of science, to bring weights into the yoga practice if you want, or you know, bring in things from other disciplines, like you mentioned, so that we can use the body to keep the brain healthy.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Oh, I love that emphasis. And I think, you know, something mama likes to say sometimes is your yoga is too small. And so I think sometimes we get too myopic in our thinking about, like if it's not exactly this shape with this. I mean, I've literally had dinner parties with yoga friends had arguments about what the back foot is supposed to be doing in triangle pose, you know, like we're really or what, you know, like whether the back pelvis is allowed to come with us or we want to be between two panes of glass. Bring it with you, by the way. If you want a happy secret reactor. So I love that framing about I'm interested in in in a happy brain longevity. And I think we're too narrowly focused on the physical practices because the key insights of yoga for me go much deeper, right? It's like it's the pranayama, it's lengthing, linking breath and movement, it's the exploration of the inner states, it's the yamas and the niyamas, it's um todajushtahu's farupe vashana. Like there are these key philosophical and I would say sort of techniques embedded in yoga that are so powerful. And if, as I consider, if my entire attention is absorbed on my breath, and I'm doing really great form lunges, as I did this morning, like stepping back and doing a lunge, and then stepping forward and doing a bunny hop, holding a couple weights because osteoporosis prevention and all the things you just had, building muscles in the lower body. If I'm doing those slowly with awareness, rhythmically with my breath, like why isn't that yoga?

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is to me, feels like it anyway, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:57

And I love this definition that yoga is a state, yeah, and the practices associated with that state. So the I think we're we can be we can get too rigid about the practices, right? And especially as we've been talking about, uh life changes, and it's not just, you know, we I we talk, we I frame it around the female experience because that's the experience I'm having this lifetime, but you know, with the decline of estrogen, it's like for a lot of female shoulders in midlife, chaturanga is probably not the best strength tool for us to be focused on. Whereas I practiced ashanga intensely for years in my 20s, I was fine. But now, aside from yoga, I've got a little click in my right shoulder, and I just don't want to risk it for what? Yeah. To make I often say, like, who are we trying? Well, what yoga police are we trying to please?

SPEAKER_01 28:02

So true, yeah. So I loved that little conversation we just had there. And I I'd like to go back to something you said earlier when we were talking about really restorative yoga as civil disobedience, if you will, peace begins with me. Kind of dip back into that, but in a different way. Because restorative yoga does often feel like such a silent practice. And you mentioned that, you know, there's the silent practice, yet it speaks so loudly to the wisdom body. And so I wonder how you teach students to listen to their own inner guide where there's no movement to distract them, or maybe it's hard to be there, right? It's hard to be there when there's you just have to be with yourself.

SPEAKER_00 28:53

Well, mama and I have actually just completed yesterday, we submitted our manuscript with the final copy edits to her publisher, an entire book about Shivasana. So I am obsessed at the moment. I've been we've been writing it for a little bit over a year. I'm very steeped in this conversation. For me, silence is like a nutrient that is deficient in our diets. And I know I live in Austria, so there's a lot of talk about vitamin D in the winter, and we gotta take the vitamin D drops and give them to our kids. And our how's your vitamin D? And are you low and are you depressed? And I think silence is a similarly underlooked, under practiced, undere-experienced nutrient for us because it's so easy to go through a day, a week, a month, a life now without any interstitial space of silence. We don't even have to have silence when we're walking, when we're at the grocery store, when we're in our kitchens, when we're sleeping. We can just listen to all our podcasts while we sleep. Or your noise machine, right? Yes. Yes. And I remember my partner and I used to have these conversations when our twins were little, like, you know, one year old. And I was a big fan of this music playlist. Like I had this kind of 45-minute playlist that I was trying to like program them. My dream was like, if we turn on this playlist at bathtime, like then they'll just understand that it's time to be quiet and go to bed. And I finally realized it was actually for me, like, of course, because I picked the it was like these songs that I felt were super soothing. Um, but he felt really strongly and won me over to the idea of like, but when they actually get in bed and we say goodnight and we close the door, he didn't want our habit to be playing music. And what we observed with friends and family of that time who had young children is that there, what I interpreted, there was sometimes this kind of aggressive desire, understandably, to get the kid to fall asleep. And they would use white noise machines or songs as a kind of like forced, forced on the child or the children. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to trust that silence has always been part of the normal human experience and that the way it connects to restorative yoga. And when I teach restorative yoga, and when we do our annual restorative yoga teacher training online at lasteter.yoga, we talk about how the only people that are bored here in the room are usually the teachers, like the teacher, the restorative yoga teacher. Your students aren't bored, you're bored. And we put such an emphasis on physical comfort. That's why we need all the props. If your student is physical body is extremely comfortable and you've framed it by explaining to them why it's going to be silent, that there's going to be silence, that you're holding the space, that they're safe. When you've created the conditions for physical relaxation, the physical body takes over. It's so desperate to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic. Your body leads you down into that juicy experience. And the silence I experience when I practice it becomes like a relief. Like, thank God. Thank God there's nothing here. And it's also incredibly powerful if a student says, or if I say, like, oh, I feel agitated in that silence, or I'm having such and such thoughts. It's not that the pose is creating the agitation or those thoughts. The pose and removing all of the other stimulation is revealing what's already there. I always say your yoga mat is an island. There's nothing there you didn't bring with you. And so even when we have a negative quote unquote experience in a pose like Shravasana, which we teach for 20 minutes, so it's a little bit of yoga blah blah at the beginning to set the scene. And then I usually give my students like 16, 17, 18 full minutes of silence, and then I ring the bells and bring them out. So even if we have a quote-unquote negative experience in the sense of I lie there feeling an emotion that I don't want to feel or watching my spinning mind spin, it is still a victory in disidentification that I am able to notice and observe, and maybe even talk about or mention if I'm at a retreat like later at lunch, what I what I would like the fact that I see the mind and I have a separation and a space, a slight space between me and my mind, that's a positive experience. So your yoga is too small. My bubble is bigger. That even if I'm there experiencing a sense of grief or sadness or resentment or anger or all of the other human emotions that bubble up. There's this great meditation teacher, Lauren Roche, and he says that meditation is a great time to experience feelings that you didn't have time to feel in this day, this week, or this lifetime. That's true. And I love that. And I think restorative yoga we sometimes talk about as bodyfulness, you know, in parallel with mindfulness. It's a way we access the meditative state, which can be measured with brainwaves and blood chemistry. It's a way we access these deeper states that the yogis were researching, but we access it through the body rather than through the mind.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

What a beautiful answer. Anything else you want to share with our listeners about what you're up to, you on your own, you with your mom, what we can we'll add all the links in the show notes, of course, and then perhaps even just some inspiration for our listeners to stay steady in their practice and why that's so important in these times.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

Well, you can find everything I'm doing at Lizzie.yoga, L-I-Z-Z-I-E.yoga. If you go to that website, it's a shortcut. It goes to my website, and you can find me on Instagram and on YouTube where we give away a bunch of free practices. But the best place is to join my newsletter, which you can find there at Lizzie.yoga. I send every Sunday a short, honest email about it's often begins with an experience I have had that week in my life trying to practice more restorative yoga than scroll on the internet. Um, you know, as a mom in the thick of things. And I share lots of free content there. And I also hope that that newsletter is an encouraging place to remind you that a little yoga goes a long way. Number one, and number two, that restorative yoga counts as yoga. So that's what mom does is that she practices seven days a week, but on Sunday, her whole practice is restorative. And that is very encouraging to me. I don't practice every single day of the week. When we go skiing, for example, and I'm, you know, I wake up and I have getting my kids fed and dressed and out the door, and all of us, all the equipment into the car to go skiing. Like, no, I'll do a 10-minute meditation and then I make my coffee and I get on with things, you know, because I know I'm gonna be in my body all day physically on the mountain, that type of thing. Like, this is what I'll say, which I hope is encouraging. I am opening myself to be inviting myself to be less rigid with my practice, and instead asking myself, what does my yoga look like today? And I want to just encourage our listener, if you teach or if you practice, not to lose hope or to think that it doesn't matter, because we know scientifically that if you shift your internal energy state, which is what we're doing with these practices, if you shift your state, that will affect the people you come into contact with. And if you can give yourself the gift, we often think it's selfish to invest in our own practice, time, energy, and money, or to, you know, I I take a yoga class every Wednesday, and I have that conversation in my mind, like, oh, I don't know if I have time, just saves me two hours to go to this class, and like I should just do my emails because it's like Wednesday morning and the kids are kindergarten, so like I should really be like productive. I have so much stuff to do. But when it when I do give myself two hours to completely disconnect and dive into the one-pointed focus of a practice and relax into the gift of someone else teaching me and saying what to do and not thinking about what sequence to teach, it is so nourishing and it is so I think valuable for literally for the people in my life beyond all the benefits that I experience.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

So true. Thank you so much for sharing that and everything else here today. It's been such a delightful conversation. I'm so glad to have met you, and I look forward to staying in touch.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Thank you, Michelle. I have a I have a final question for you. Uh I'd love to hear just open-ended off the cuff. What are you seeing in yoga therapy, in the trends and the evolution of yoga therapy? Tell me one thing you like that is happening and one thing that you don't like.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

Well, I will say that one thing that I like trend-wise is that yoga therapy is becoming more adopted as a um an adjunct, as an integrative healthcare practice, right? In places where there is recognition, and I think these places and spaces are increasing, recognition that health is whole person health, right? And yoga is whole person health. So it is such a nice fit. And so I am seeing that adoption, and it makes sense and it's encouraging, and it feels like a trend.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

I see that's your pet peeve. What tell me your pet peeve?

SPEAKER_01 40:52

I guess my pet peeve is that by and large, and I'm speaking as a person who lives here in the US, um, by and large, yoga is still equated with fitness asana. And so whilst there has been expansion in understanding yoga as a therapeutic model, uh, unfortunately, there's still a main disconnect around what yoga really is, in order because of this legacy and focus around fitness and physicality, that I feel like sometimes we still have a long way to go.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

Oh, absolutely. And I know as a yoga teacher, when I tell someone that I teach yoga, what I notice so often is that their eyes then break eye contact and look down at my body. And what I interpret or have for years interpreted is exactly what you're saying that when we say the word yoga, the thought bubble most people are having is fitness, exercise, the physical body, having a yoga body, being slim, all of these things which are sort of irrelevant to so many of them. And then I often find myself in non-yoga contexts. You know, my husband is an architect and we'll be somewhere, this is one of his events, and then I'm suddenly being like, Yeah, but I mostly teach like we're sort of yoga, which is like lying down and we're not really doing anything. It's not like acting, it's not what you're thinking. It's not what you're thinking.

SPEAKER_01 42:35

Yeah. Sure. Sometimes I tell people, like, I in if they ask what I do, a stranger, I'll say, like, I'm an entrepreneur or I'm a small business owner. I don't ever even bring the yoga in initially. Of course, they want to know more, like what kind of business, what kind of entrepreneur? And so we get there very quickly. But I find if I start with like I'm a yoga teacher or a yoga therapist, that it makes the conversation small.

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Oh, that's such a good way of putting it. It makes the conversation small. It makes the kind of tree branching diagram of the next thing they're gonna say very small. It's only gonna be like, oh, my friend, my my friend does yoga with so and so on YouTube, or where can I take a class from you? Or I tried yoga. Or I tried yoga, but I didn't like it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:32

You know, it's like uh-huh, yeah. So and I I test these things out all the time, right? How I want to put myself out there. But yeah, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a podcaster, which I think is just so funny. I I actually never lead with that.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

I love that. I sometimes say I am building an online community, yeah. An online community. And then I often really talk about um we're the online community that's empowering yogis to practice from their own embodied experience and not inherited roles. And then then suddenly that's like so much that they're like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

Whoa. Yeah, uh-huh. They're they're not thinking about the yoga mat anymore. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much. I look forward to staying in touch, really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you, Michelle. What a pleasure. Thanks again for listening. If you're interested to learn more about who we are and what we do, check us out at inner peaceyogatherapy.com.