Episode 13 - Yoga for Executive Coaching and to Heal Trauma
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Please enjoy this excerpt featuring as we discuss the benefits of yoga in leadership development and mindfulness.
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IN THIS EPISODE:
How we bring the ancient wisdom of yoga to our coaching practices featuring Erin Owen, Dr Chiara Hayganush Megighian, and Ronna Schneberger. What was your path to yoga? How does yoga philosophy influence your coaching? What would you most like others to know about the ancient wisdom of yoga that shows up for you everyday?
LINKS & ABOUT
Please learn more about our outstanding guests and some of the resources shared in this episode.
Dr. Chiara Hayganush Megighian
Erin Owen
Ronna Schneberger
RESOURCES:
Doug Silbee, Presence-Based Coaching: https://presencebasedcoaching.com/doug-silsbee-legacy/doug-silsbee
Corina Benner, Wake Up Yoga: https://www.corinabenner.com/
Anahata Yoga Therapy: http://www.anahatayogatherapy.ca/Anahata.html?20210513
TRE Yoga: https://traumaprevention.com/
TRE Method for PTSD: https://trescotland.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Case-Report-of-a-Former-Soldier-Using-TRE-TensionTrauma-Releasing-Exercises-For-PostTraumatic-Stress-Disorder-Self-Care.pdf
Thomas Huebl: https://thomashuebl.com/
https://thomashuebl.com/the-anatomy-of-inaction-climate-complexity-change/
Mount Assiniboine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Assiniboine
Anjali Mudra: https://www.bodhisurfyoga.com/meaning-of-anjali-mudra#:~:text=The%20Anjali%20Mudra%20is%20the,of%20the%20other%20yoga%20asanas.
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Please excuse any errors in the transcription.
Recorded Intro (00:05):
Yoga philosophy for Everyday Living, a podcast to bring the ancient wisdom of yoga to inform your everyday living, on and off the mat. Hi, I am your host Monica Phillips. So often we sabotage ourselves because of the chatter in our heads. This podcast will take you through the eight limbs of yoga with leading yoga instructors and introduce you to executives who have brought yoga into their lives so they can thrive. Please listen, subscribe, and share it with a friend.
Monica Phillips (00:41):
Welcome to Yoga Philosophy for Everyday Living. I'm really excited to have two really special people join me today for this episode, and maybe we'll have a third. We'll see, but I wanted to find a way to bring some of this everyday living into the conversation and our guests today are women who are in a coaching pod with me and as coaches, how we use yoga to show up in the world. And we have Erin Owen, who is an executive coach to senior executive MBAs whose drive for success has left them wanting greater meaning in life. She is also a certified yoga teacher and Ronna Schneberger, who has been teaching Hatha Yoga and Irest Yoga Nidra since 2000. As a professional hiking guide in the Canadian Rockies, she explored how to take yoga and meditation outside while hiking and created what she calls eco yoga. Ronna has gone on to become a coach and leadership facilitator, and has brought these principles to her clients with great results. Welcome ladies. So we talked about this a little bit and I would love to have each of you share your path to yoga and how that shows up for you, how it influences your coaching. Erin, would you like to go first?
Erin Owen (01:52):
I found yoga through a friend who had it really as part of a party. "Hey, let's have a teacher come and we'll do this thing." Later, I was having back pain and, this is old school, I found this VHS tape from Rodney Yee on back care yoga, and I would do it at home and I would get some relief, but it wasn't really until I started to do yoga on a weekly basis, that I started to really see myself and use the yoga mat as a mirror for finding those truths, that yoga makes so clear. And one, after the other, I started to peel away the layers of the illusion of corporate life and how important it was to achieve a job title and a certain level of compensation, and eventually left my corporate career and became a coach and became a certified yoga teacher and certified Reiki master. And throughout this path have found ways to integrate East and West so that not only I can find my own purpose more, realized in my life, but help my clients do the same.
Monica Phillips (02:51):
Finding yoga helped you make this massive life transition.
Erin Owen (02:56):
Absolutely. Just the ability to see myself in a totally different light. I remember one moment on the mat when, very early on, the yoga teacher said, "now step your right foot forward to meet the left." And there was no way that my leg was going to come forward. And I had this moment of facing my competitive identity. Well, if I can't step my foot forward, I'm not going to be able to do X, Y, and Z. And it was actually my competitive nature that drove me to continue in yoga in the beginning, even though ultimately it helped me to really melt that away and not worry so much about comparing myself to others or what I thought I should be.
Monica Phillips (03:34):
My yoga mentor, Tiffany Russo - Imagine you're lying on your back and she says, "now flex your foot, bring your thigh to your hamstring, and can you get your hamstring on the floor before your foot?" Honestly I don't know if this is possible in anyone's body. It's definitely not possible in my body. And what I love about this is that we get to poses later in the Asana practice where something might be possible in someone's body, but it's not possible for me. And so if I'm noticing that we start off with this pose, that is absolutely not possible it takes away this pressure of saying, can you. Can you notice, can you witness? And I think this is this massive life lesson, because we often don't notice. I love what you said about this rush to getting out of our heads. We are so stuck in all of these visions and ideas of what is important. And we realize it's not important at all. Actually it doesn't give us what we need in life at all. And so when we can notice that in her body, the power of the Asana practice that helps us, gives us space to breathe, gives us space to draw in, to sit with ourselves. Ronna, tell me about your journey to yoga.
Ronna Schneberger (04:45):
I just did local classes at the rec center. This is like late nineties. And, um, I just thought I would get really relaxed and I hadn't really felt that relaxed ever. So I just kept going to classes. And then my yoga teacher, Anne Douglas decided to try to teach 200-hour teacher training. And so I did it, and this is 1999. I had no intention of becoming a yoga teacher. That just seems so far off, but I just did it for personal growth. And then once I did it, it was very transformational for me, just really being embodied. And I didn't have those words back then, but just really being embodied, finding these places of calm, just the journey, the journey that we go on. And it's all individual. When we go through these yoga teacher trainings, whether we become a teacher and it can be really transformational.
Ronna Schneberger (05:26):
And so I was so inspired, I decided to teach. And so I started teaching and I'm also a guide, a naturalist and a hiking guide here in Banff National Park. And so I thought, wow, I'd like to take this outside. And so I started exploring ways of taking it outside and doing walking meditation and doing yoga outside and the time and just, you know, peeling back these layers as Erin said, so that we can just dwell in our true nature in that stillness, in that abiding presence, that we are just giving people these glimpses of presence. So I did that. And then I had this opportunity to do walking meditation and outdoor stuff like this, melding this with leaders at the Banff center, um, with their leadership development courses. And so I did, I would take them for these walks and do walking meditation and reflections.
Ronna Schneberger (06:09):
And I can't tell you how many letters of profound experiences that leaders had sent me over the years, doing these simple practices. And, and it's just like, what both of you were saying is when we can stop the chatter for a little while and just get present in our bodies in the moment, there's this beautiful experience that happens of clarity, of calm, of deep reflection. We just know things and we kind of let those lenses, those masks, those burdens that we all carry to some degree or another, we just let those go. And we come back to the moment and it's just really, it's a beautiful process to watch. I'm doing different kinds of coaching, but that's still the basis of getting people outside. I find the mixture of doing this outside adds an extra layer of magic to the whole piece of helping people get settled, and still in themselves.
Ronna Schneberger (06:58):
And I just kept doing it. I found when I did, I'm still working on my iRest yoga nidra teacher certification. It's been like four years now. I just, and that process took it even deeper. It's abiding in that stillness. It's abiding in our true nature, knowing that it's always there. It's not like I have to get somewhere. It's always there. And this beautiful practice has just helped me peel away these layers that no longer serve me or be present to these parts of myself that have been unintegrated. Things happen in our lives when, throughout our lives and by just learning how to sit with them and welcome them, they get integrated again, and then they don't have to grasp at trying to get my attention and I can just welcome them all in. And so it has been a profound journey for me, and it continues to unfold, which is even more beautiful.
Monica Phillips (07:40):
That's beautiful, Ronna. I was thinking of something really funny, which was in my Co-Active Training Institute coaching program, during process coaching, one of the fellow students said that, gave us a metaphor about how process is sitting in your pee. And I think of it, when we're babies, right? Babies wear diapers and they cry when they have pee. As adults we get so used to this discomfort. This is also because we're all in this group together for positive intelligence, sitting in the uncomfortable, holding on to those negative emotions. At what point, do you want to get up and then move forward? And you do have to witness it first though, you have to witness it. You have to recognize it. You can sit there for a long time if you don't recognize it. I was just thinking that there's so much power in that sitting with something, being with it, and then noticing, do you want to take action to change it? Do you want to draw in the niyamas recognizing what we have within ourselves? Do we want something else to come from this experience? Create something more than we ever thought was possible through the experiences that we have shared with others.
Ronna Schneberger (08:45):
There's an element that sometimes we have to metabolize what's just happening or what is happening in order for us to get to that next, whatever that next thing is. But first we have to sit in the pee or just sit in it for just a little bit and metabolize it. I've been using that word. I just love that word before we have to let it go through our system, work itself through our system, not for days or years, but when we truly feel an experience, it only really takes a few minutes. It's when we don't is when it can take years because we haven't allowed ourselves to truly feel it. And then often once we felt that, then there's a recognition of, we know what the next step is, or there's an understanding or a willingness to go to the next step, but first we need to metabolize it. And I think that's where this practice of just sitting with being present to what is, it's so powerful, simple as it is. It's not easy.
Monica Phillips (09:32):
I shared this on a few podcasts now already, but I'll share it again really quickly, which is - I'm going to be a huge fan of Ethan Cross - he wrote this book, "Chatter" and he references that we as humans are able to think of as many negative thoughts in 90 seconds as what are spoken in a one-hour, 6,000 word State of the Union address. And that is a whole lot of negative self-talk going on. In the work that I do I love to learn about neuroscience and how this is all connected in our bodies and the vagus nerve and the amygdala and what's happening. And that our brain and our gut actually developed together in utero and share neurons. And there are more neurons in our gut than our spinal cord. And when we think of that and we think of, well, what's supposed to be all powerful up here is actually happening here in our center, in our guts. And these gut instincts that we have, that is your body saying, Hey, there's a brain up here. And then there are all these neurons down here talking, saying, you have irritable bowel syndrome. Maybe you need to pay attention to what's going on in your body. These triggers are so real. And we have so many auto-immune illnesses that start in our gut that come from our gut and they radiate out. And if we're not in touch with our body, we're going to miss those signals.
Erin Owen (10:48):
I think that's such an important point and a great example, IBS, because we all might have our genetic predisposition for illness but I found that in my own health, the more I could practice being present with what was actually happening in the moment, the less likely I was to get ill. It was almost as though, by the time it came to the point of an acute illness, I had been ignoring and resisting, dealing with something that was right in front of me for years. So for me, that ability, there's that yoga sutra, "Yoga Citta Vritti Nirodi," to quiet the busy monkey mind in order to actually see clearly. And then by doing it, the gift is robust health in every dimension.
Monica Phillips (11:32):
Erin, was there a point where you were practicing and you thought, I have to get certified in this?
Erin Owen (11:38):
Yeah, so I had been regularly going to classes at Wake Up Yoga. It was in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philadelphia with a teacher, Corina Benner. And I was initially drawn primarily to the philosophy, the history. And it was so in order to learn that I need to also learn how to be a yoga teacher. Okay. I can do that. I think like Ronna, I didn't imagine that I would then go teach. One of the very profound things that my teacher Corina said in a class was the only way to get around something is to move through it. And the entire class that day, the sequence of poses, this is a Vinyasa class. It was designed to face our edges on the mat and learn how to move through them rather than resist them or push them. So that moment really said, Oh, for me to go deeper here, I want to learn the philosophy. I want to understand the holistic aspect of all the limbs of yoga and how it all fits together.
Monica Phillips (12:35):
So you mentioned Sutra 1.2, Yoga Citta Vritta Nirodi. What would you most like others to know about this ancient wisdom of yoga that shows up for you every day?
Erin Owen (12:44):
Simplicity of it. You can get so busy in our cognitive thinking, our rational mind about trying to rationalize things and figure it out and problem solve. And there's this idea of death by analysis. Just take a couple breaths, sit quietly. If it's hard to do that, move the body with the Asana, with the poses, but it's so simple to drop the layers, drop the illusion and be with what's right in front of you. Not easy, right, Ronna, but simple.
Monica Phillips (13:15):
Tell me about how the yoga philosophy shows up for you every day, Ronna.
Ronna Schneberger (13:19):
I think the biggest piece that, like much of what we're talking about is just the willingness to meet the moment. Sometimes I'm not, but I'm more aware that I want to, and I'm willing to, and the richness that comes out of that, even though there are challenging moments, but there's more of a habit now, or the practice of moving towards just as Erin was talking about the practice to move towards something versus avoid it or move away. I'm not always graceful at it, but there's a willingness and there's a knowledge that I need to go to those moments and just be as present as I can. One, there's richness. And two, if I avoid things, then they're just going to come back and bite me later. So just this richness of living in the moment, like I said, I'm not always doing it, but I do it more often now than I ever did before.
Ronna Schneberger (14:02):
And being conscious of the moment. There's the other practices, things like being compassionate towards myself and others, it's this, these really basic things. It's these really, really basic things sitting with myself. Sometimes I don't do as much Asana as I used to, but I do more meditation, whether that's inside or outside and acknowledging that my needs in yoga change over time and that it doesn't have to look like somebody else's and it's totally okay for me to trust what my body and my mind need at this time. And just also having skillsets to sit with myself when something is bothering me, I didn't know how to do that before. I was never taught how to do that. My parents didn't know how to do that. And so this just gave me tools as to how to sit in that and how to, without holding onto it and how to create space for others to do the same.
Monica Phillips (14:49):
I'm so glad that you said that. My mentor, Tiffany Russo, she talks about making the simple hard, and you say simple things, but actually being present is probably one of the hardest things for humans to do. When I see students who are high-achievers new to yoga, Savasana is a really difficult thing. There is this grace in making the simple hard so that when we get to these things that are hard, we know how to make them simple. I'll welcome. Chiara into the conversation. Hello, Chiara.
Dr Chiara Hayganush Megighian (15:19):
Hello everybody. Hi Monica. Hi Ronna. Hi, Erin.
Monica Phillips (15:24):
Chiara Megighian is in our Positive Intelligence coaching group with us and is also a certified yoga instructor. Chiara, tell me a little bit about your background and then I'll ask you another question after that.
Dr Chiara Hayganush Megighian (15:36):
I am a leadership coach and my school is Presence-Based Coaching led by Doug Silsbee and now by Bebe Hansen. And, um, I found TRE yoga and Eugenie Khaleeji to be a wonderful integration of my coaching practice.
Monica Phillips (15:56):
What was your path to yoga and how does yoga influence your coaching?
Dr Chiara Hayganush Megighian (16:00):
I started yoga as a way of having more coordinated movement that was many, many years ago. And, um, when I decided to go through the training, I wasn't really sure how that was intersecting with my coaching practice. I was still following the fact that it was going to be beneficial for my body, for my moment. In our training when we do yoga philosophy, they ask you the question, what is yoga? And you need to learn it by heart. Yoga is the control of the thought waves of the mind. And all of a sudden I said, "Oh my goodness" this is there's also something else. That was my discovery through the teaching certification of how yoga was helping to control the salt waves of the mind. Therefore through yoga, I could consciously decide to change my reactions and that was perfect for coaching. So one of my aha moments in yoga, so the TRE yoga has completely different names for the poses.
Dr Chiara Hayganush Megighian (17:13):
So it will be all messed up what I'm going to say, following the traditional naming of the poses. But as we were moving into what we call cat, the teacher was inviting us to open our chest and open our shoulders. I realized there how most of the times this is not the way we move because as we come up, we tend to lift our head first and then to come up with our chest. And this is really how we function. We think first before opening our hearts. So that was an incredible illumination for me on how to really go deeper into the poses and how they mean in our everyday movements.
Monica Phillips (18:09):
As I learned more about the body and how we hold ourselves, I have a deeper appreciation for the Asana practice. And even in my Brain Breaks with my clients, I will invite them to just take a forward fold, to get the head below the heart, which activates our pressure trigger and brings us back to our parasympathetic nervous system. It takes us out of our survivor brain reduces our emotional triggers. It helps us regain calm, and then we get to be clear-headed and all of you know, like all the amazing benefits that come with that. And it is so simple. But how often do we actually show up like this in our bodies? How often do we actually give ourselves honestly, 10 seconds to take a forward fold. Yoga for everyone is so important to me. I did an episode with Dianne Bondy on ahimsa and this could be at the wall, puppy dog pose. This could be in a chair, forward fold. You don't have to have a huge range. You don't have to be flexible. You don't have to have balance. It's creating it, it's creating it and finding it in your body.
Erin Owen (19:14):
Specifically to that point, I found that when I was teaching yoga, my clients who were really intensely in their head, it was almost like too much for them to try to wrap their head around all the Sanskrit names and the sequencing. And that along with my own experience led me after my Vinyasa certification to yin yoga certification and finding a way to not only let go of the mind, but literally let go of the musculature of the activation of the muscles and to get under the connector into the connective tissue. And I felt that the connected tissue became symbolic. It's where they've found through research that the Chi flows, the Prana flows, getting to the core essence for the client of what's really there. What really matters after peeling away all the efforting and all the trying to figure it out with their head. So for coaching, I was always looking for ways to get to that state of being for the client more quickly, because you might have a half an hour, 60 minutes in a coaching session, and the client's really wanting results. And over time I was looking for shortcuts, if you will, right to get there quickly. And I found that to your point about folding over like a simple pose, that I could have a client just plop down on their office floor, go into butterfly and just fall forward, knees out to the side feet together and just let go of everything, let their head fall down. And then it would shift everything for them in less than three minutes.
Dr Chiara Hayganush Megighian (20:47):
In the Collective Trauma Healing training with Thomas Hübl, he mentions the body as a cup, a cup for all our emotions. And if we can explain this to our coaching clients, that our body holds the stressors, the tensions, the trauma of whatever sore, and we can help the body release this, this trauma just by paying attention. And it's so much easier than getting constantly re-stressed. I think it's, it's a great offer that we do.
Monica Phillips (21:22):
I'll mention this work, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It's an incredible book and he was a psychiatrist and saw the huge shift in the profession through the 1970s, and now has brought in yoga to heal trauma and PTSD. If you Google him, you can find this great five-minute YouTube video on how he uses yoga to heal from trauma. It is across every discipline. The more research I do, the more I find, the more I connect to my body, what's possible. It is in the body and it is this just incredible sense that we have to allow ourselves to feel. We are rushing through society and we don't stop and allow ourselves to feel in our gut, in our heart.
Erin Owen (22:11):
I'd love to ask Ronna, can you give us an example in nature, when you're actually guiding a client through the mountains, through the woods, what's an example of what you do and what you see the shift being in, in the client.
Ronna Schneberger (22:22):
Often I will start with some kind of walking meditation. So sometimes it's just a really basic, I usually do a sense meditation, and then some kind of walking meditation where maybe it's a mindful one where they just feel their feet on the ground. I've done it also where they just feel into the space that they're walking through. I find when I take them into nature. Nature has such amazing effects on us, all our bodies. It's really in our DNA to be in nature. So when we're in there and we hear the sounds and we hear that, feel the air in our skin and the smells, it takes us out of our head because the senses are the doorway to being present. So it's really a quick way to being present. And then I usually try to go to some amazing spot, do some yoga, with lovely views and things like that.
Ronna Schneberger (23:03):
And then I do mindful moments and no, the ground's not perfectly flat and the temperature isn't perfect. And maybe there's a bit of wind and your yoga mat's flying away. And so sometimes I just put the yoga mats away and they do it on the ground. And just then I'll make through cues to just really feel the earth itself and letting them to connect through their yoga, to what's going on in their environment to connect to their senses and just really taking the place through that place of presence that we've been talking about. And I find when they do, it's just, it's such an incredible experience for people to take in the grandness, especially at the place like Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies, anywhere really to take in that grandness and feel that bigger connection to life itself, it can be really profound for people.
Ronna Schneberger (23:43):
And then often I'll give them some kind of a sit spot. I've had military people come out and they said, you know, "Ronna, I don't do yoga." And I'm like, Oh, that's fine. Why don't you go sit on the rock over there and have a sit spot for an hour. And they came back to me six months later saying that was one of the most profound moments in my life. And so just by tuning them into their senses, slowing them down, giving them time to be without all this stuff that we carry around this, thankfully cell phones don't work in most of the places I take people, which is why I take them there. They don't get distracted and they can just be with themselves, with the land, with these places. Just that in itself is so powerful, but really that this, those little bits that help, you know, how they talk about in yoga, how the Asana and the pranayama, it all prepares the mind for meditation.
Ronna Schneberger (24:27):
These are all preparatory steps to being present so that they can receive the present moment even greater. So I see that in how I've tried to sequence things as we go to just let them settle into themselves. But nature is such a huge help.
Monica Phillips (24:40):
Is the picture behind you of Banff?
Ronna Schneberger (24:42):
The picture behind me is Mount Assiniboine. So it's just South of Banff. It's actually the border of Banff National park goes halfway through this mountain. This is, the side of this mountain is Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park. But yes, this is just generally rugged, beautiful, stunning mountains, glaciers, lakes that are aqua blue, like behind you, Monica. So I usually try to go to these stunning locations where I take people and you know, there's another thing about being in mountains like this is that there's nothing like a big mountain landscape to put your life in perspective.
Ronna Schneberger (25:11):
So in yoga and I don't remember sutras or whatever, but Eckart Tolle talks about this, too. And when we see these beautiful spaces sometimes there's this, ah, there's this gap in our, in our being in the moment. And, and these mountains do that for people. I will actually plan it. So I'll do this walking meditation up to this beautiful location. So I'm not talking, I just let them come and discover it. And they just, they stop, just stops them in their tracks, this view, and that's the gap. And when we can sit in that silence, that's this little touching into our, our true nature. It's staring at us. It's present in us. These are just all these little fun ways that I invite people into that experience of remembering.
Monica Phillips (25:53):
It's incredible. I went to New Zealand in 2006 and took a tour of Doubtful Sound. For those who haven't been, you take a bus to a boat, to a bus, to a boat. They take you all the way into the fjord. No one lives out here other than the tourists that come in, it is untouched. And there are these fjords rising out of the ocean that are magnificent. And in every direction there's water trickling down in some of areas, gushing, and there's penguins and it's everything, all of it. And they take you in. And so you've had this journey and then they, they come into kind of the depth of the Fjord and they turn off the boat engine and it's silent. And in that moment, I just started to cry. I was so in awe of what nature had created here. In those moments, it's what allows us to let go of this chaos. It allows us to see, clearly. I was talking with Dianne Bondy about ahimsa and ultimately access. Not everyone has access to grocery stores with fresh produce. Not everyone has access to nature. A really important part of yoga for me is healing. If people don't have access to nature, how do they see themselves in the world. Differently, I would guess.
Erin Owen (27:14):
I think about that for the students that my husband works with because they are born and raised in really dense row house type situation in a fairly poor neighborhood, in a big, big urban city enter. There are a few parks, but the playgrounds are concrete. There's a pool that's open during the summer. That's free, but everything's concrete or steel or metal, mid little trees here and there, you know, and along the sidewalk, but a lot of the backyards are concrete. Where do you access nature? When you see that part of you, to your point, it must be that so much is missing. And it's hard to access the place of healing and wholeness without green, without the energy of natural rock, without water that's flowing freely rather than through a steel pipe.
Monica Phillips (28:00):
Have any of you studied grounding? The theory that we actually need our feet to be in touch with the earth without shoes and socks and concrete. Ronna, you have?
Ronna Schneberger (28:10):
Just a little bit. I also work as a forest therapy guide, where we do forest bathing for people - guided forest bathing. And so I'm inviting people to reconnect, to nature in these various ways. And sometimes people will be inviting them to take, touch the earth or take their shoes off or whatever feels right for them in those moments. But I know for me, when I take my shoes off and I'm outside, I feel grounded so much faster. And this is why I think nature is so cool. I love meditation, but I know when I go outside and I get quiet, there's a bigger presence that I can tap into. I don't really have a lot of words for it, even though I probably should, but there's this presence of myself in the world. I'm part of something much greater than myself. What's going on here and when my shoes are of or my hands are on the ground. It helps significantly even for a few minutes. Like it doesn't have to be hours.
Monica Phillips (28:55):
I love that you said you don't have a lot of words for it. And I'm thinking isn't that the point.
Erin Owen (29:00):
Related to this idea of grounding, I studied for a couple of years with a Taoist teacher and he used to talk about the importance of living no higher than above the third floor of a building. Because at that point, you completely disconnect from the energy of the earth. And it made me think about like Manhattan or cities that have these massive buildings and people that live on the 80th floor. Like they live on the 80th floor. I can't do that. And there's been so many years of my younger adult life that my husband and I loved being in the city and the energy and going out and walking to everything you wanted. But something started to shift so many years ago when we realized that whenever we did go off to vacation in more rural natural areas, that we came back to the city we are disconnected and we want more of that connection to nature. And this past year has been such a gift because we've spent extensive time in the mountains in Colorado and on the beach in Costa Rica. And I feel that deep, recharged connection to nature and the earth and the energy in a way that I might get a dose of at the end of a yoga practice because of the oxygenation that happened through all the breaths and movement.
Monica Phillips (30:08):
Yeah. And I love how you described the city being disconnected and nature being connected. I was thinking when Ronna was speaking, everyone should have the opportunity, especially those of us who have these really technologically connected work lives. Everyone should have the opportunity to disconnect from that. And, um, when I lived in Washington, DC, we'd go to this place, Seneca rocks in West Virginia, and it's a NASA satellite research center. So they block all cell phones signals, and it was the gift of going was that we would be completely disconnected, but I actually love reframing it into going out is actually that connection. And what's disconnected is the hyper-achiever, big city modality of constantly on. And what you are disconnected from is your body.
Erin Owen (30:56):
Chiara, I know that you've done a lot of work with yoga and coaching and trauma and all of that. When you're working with somebody who's experienced, what I call capital T trauma, really significant, violent, disruptive events in their life. How is it that you use yoga or begin to introduce to them what's possible for their, their path of healing?
Dr Chiara Hayganush Megighian (31:18):
It's the simple things that we all know is breathing. You start from the simplest thing ever. There isn't anything that is stronger than connecting with love. That is the capacity that people with trauma has completely shut off from. That was my link. That was my aha moment. As I was saying earlier, when, when you have the ability of experiencing yourself, then you can connect and sort of inspire others to do the same. The connection comes from the heart. And at that point, anything is possible. Even the situation that seem desperately difficult. I used to laugh because my friends were asking me what was the kind of yoga that I was doing since it wasn't among the most renowned yoga schools. And, um, I was saying the yoga I do is not acrobatic yoga. So it's not doing those poses that are impossible even to dream of doing, but it's really spending a lot of time on how to slowly coordinate your breath and your movement, and really repeating until it becomes second nature. So that when you are triggered outside the mat, you can go back to that pattern of rhythmic breathing. And that is what helps you. So in a situation of trauma, Erin, that's the only thing you need. And then the processing comes as you, as you continue to be embodied. And Monica, as you were saying, Bessel van der Kolk, that's a difficult name to pronounce. The Body Keeps the Score. That's why he uses yoga to address childhood trauma.
Monica Phillips (33:14):
I love how each of us brings a different aspect of yoga into our work and how similar in this vision of where it starts getting out of our heads, how we bring that to coaching really the power of embodiment in all these different ways.
Dr Chiara Hayganush Megighian (33:32):
I just would like to share this. I was in a group of Positive Intelligence coaches actually that, uh, were coaching Christians. It's this group. I don't know if you heard about coaching for religiously-inspired coaching, something like that. And one of the participants was at a certain point, very concerned because the discussion was going into divisions. So the different religions, the different schools of religions. So I'm Christian, but I'm not Presbyterian because I'm not Unitarian because this, and I don't know what I'm saying, because I don't know any of these things. And so this woman was saying, I'm going to have a coaching workshop. And I'm very concerned because there's going to be people that may not be religious. They might be, you know, and it's just so easy. Where is the problem? Everybody has a heart. It doesn't matter. If you don't think about what divides us that you think what unites us. We all have a heart for me. That's our portal to our healing.
Monica Phillips (34:39):
I read about this in the War for Kindness. And it's, it's so profound. It's something I'm going to use in all my coaching. And especially in terms of what's possible. But the author talks about how in 1912 Wegener, this German Explorer noticed as he was checking the depth of the ice shelves in Greenland. And he noticed the ripple occurrence on the ocean floor, the West coast of Africa looked an awful lot like the East coast of South America and how they fit together. And he proposed this idea of Pangea, which we didn't accept until 1967. This idea's only a little more than 50 years old, which is so interesting because I grew up taking this as fact. And it's this, what I love about this is that the North American content has shifted almost four feet in my lifetime. Do I feel it? Do I see it?
Monica Phillips (35:28):
I believe it happens. I've read the science. Okay. So it happens, right. But how much do we reject because we can't see it, because we can't feel it. And ultimately that is faith. And this doesn't have to be faith in a higher being. This is faith in how we show up in the world, how we see other people, how we say there might be something happening here that I am not aware of. I love this idea that tectonic plates being, something that I absolutely understand that science has accepted as a relatively new realization. If we were overlooking that, that people actually disputed that this might be true. This is really interesting to explore. When we see great entrepreneurs, cause I live in Silicon Valley, they are going with things they can't see and can't feel. And that's what makes them so successful, because they have this faith in what they want to experience.
Monica Phillips (36:27):
They have a vision for what's possible. So I invite that into what we're doing here is that we have this power to give everyone this faith within themselves. Maybe ultimately we can't see ourselves being and doing this great work. So we have to have the faith to follow, to take the action, to follow-up and allowing it to happen. Any final words on yoga and coaching.
Erin Owen (36:55):
I'm going to steal Chiara's word and just say, it's all about the heart.
Monica Phillips (37:00):
Anjali Mudra, connecting into our heart center.
Monica Phillips (37:03):
Thank you all for joining me to share your beautiful insights on yoga and coaching and your journeys. And I heard a little bit of it before, but I always learn something new about each of you in these conversations. And it was really wonderful to have you share your stories here. Thank you.
Recorded outro (47:28):
Thank for joining me for Yoga Philosophy for Everyday Living. Please learn more about our guests in the show notes and check out their awesome yoga classes. Subscribe, like, and share this podcast with a friend. And please send me your feedback. I would love to hear from you. You can learn more at sparkpluglabs.co.