Why I Stopped Teaching Yoga

Yoga is supposed to make you strong and supple, calm and centered, right? Millions of people are using this ancient practice to help them look and feel their best. So why did I stop? Through The Fajardo Method of Holistic Biomechanics, I have been given an experience of true health in my bodymind - healthy physiology, a functional and fit body, and a mind that is relatively resilient to stress. Yoga might have the appearance of giving you some of those things at first. You might think you are more flexible, calmer, and feel pleased with the satisfaction of working on yourself. In yoga, we are forever working on ourselves: trying to progress in the pose, trying to move further into the asanas, trying to have the proper form, lots of trying! Now that I have stepped away from teaching and practicing yoga, I see how yoga kept me and my fellow yoga students mentally occupied with all the instructions we were constantly following (keep the inner heel anchored, deepen the hip crease, draw your shoulders back and down…) We were changing our musculature mostly by pulling on our muscle attachments (a frequent site of injury for yogis). We were getting ego boosts from achieving more advanced asanas and attaining extreme ranges in the poses. (Do we really need to take our ankles behind our necks?) The adrenaline/cortisol release from the breathing practices created an addictive high that kept us coming back for more.

Unfortunately, all those poses did not create joint space or hydrate my fascia or make me more resilient to physical or emotional stress. In fact, I lost integrity in my joints as my hips and shoulders became hypermobile and unstable in their sockets from turning myself into a pretzel. The good feelings that yoga created disappeared soon after class until the next time I forced myself into extreme positions and exaggerated breathing. I now know those expansive feelings were misleading and represented the blissful flood of stress hormones that get released in Fight or Flight so that we don’t get distracted by pain while we are fighting or fleeing.

Now that I know a system that has actually supported my body to heal itself, I cannot in good conscience continue to teach students to move into positions that may create wear and tear on their joints, disrupt their body chemistry with stress hormones, or maintain the mental control over the body and breath the way yoga demands. When we stop using our conscious brain to tell us how to breathe and move, our unconscious brain handles those activities elegantly and effortlessly. Until you experience the effortlessness of this state, your body and mind will need the next hack to function optimally if your physiology is actually in the stress response or Sympathetic aspect of your Nervous System, rather than the Parasympathetic division or Repair and Digest aspect. 

See the Working with Me section to see how The Fajardo Method of Holistic Biomechanics can give you tools to have the physiological and physical health you desire.