The choice for the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga

Each week my yoga teacher asks me what has happened since I have last seen her, what I’ve been practising, how my teaching is going, that sort of thing. This week I heard myself telling her how difficult I have been finding it, how the practice takes me to a much deeper place than I have ever gone to previously, and how tough this can be at times, not only because of my own processing but because I cannot teach in a way that isn’t respectful of this, and authentic, and how that takes me to a much more vulnerable place and this demands more of me; greater involvement. 

Since discovering the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga my life has changed significantly, perhaps not visibly to others on the outside but certainly the inner landscape has shifted and some of the holding and old patterns have dropped away, and yet still there are more layers that continue to reveal themselves to me. I am always surprised by this, that which we think we might have resolved pops up again later for even deeper exploration, another thread, another connection, because there is always somewhere else to go.

There was a time when I thought our experiences were linear, much like I thought our life was linear too, the path between birth and death, although now I know that it is not so clear-cut. That our past informs our future as much as it informs our present and that there are past life experiences that weave their way through our current reality, and decisions made in the future that will impact how we consider our past, all connected but not linear with a clear beginning and ending. 

Life is a cycle, much as our breath is a cycle, the moon follows a cycle, the seasons follow a cycle too. We are a cycle manifest as we also wane and wax, and yet there is this conditioning to live in a constant manner, controlled, linear, a start and a finish line, an objective to achieve, a result to gain, a right way and a wrong way, something to validate a sense of certainty and sureness in a life and the world that is ever changing.

I see this played out in yoga too. Only this week I witnessed a student really struggling in class with my touching her, encouraging greater ease, changing things a little, trying to facilitate her letting go of her armour, the conditioning, but this was taking her completely out of her comfort zone. She had spent her life refining this armour, of keeping herself safe, and while she has found her way to yoga and actively encourages a hands-on-approach, she struggles when it comes to truly letting go into those deeper places, to the areas that are uncertain and vulnerable, to the parts that cannot so easily be controlled. 

Vinyasa yoga allowed me to hide behind my armour too and control more of where I didn’t want to go, keeping me stuck at a point that was comfortable, that did not give too much of myself, not deep down. The Scaravelli-inspired approach entered my life, took a hold and wouldn’t let go, and as a result I have had no choice but to explore more of these places and let go of some of the armour that I had created to keep me safe, yet was suffocating me and denying me the depth of sensation that I have since experienced. 

It’s only now I realise how my yoga practice and the flow and strength of a vinyasa approach were, in many respects, helping me to hold on to patterns and emotional repressions that were no longer serving me, yet to look at them honestly was impossible, because the practice did not allow that depth of feeling, it was too fast-paced and encouraged only superficial involvement of muscles and of awareness.

There was an expectation of outcome, of being more flexible or stronger, of being able to practice advanced postures even if I had to pull, push or somehow force myself into the positions, as if that alone validated my worth in the world, and demonstrated my progression on my yoga mat. I know that yoga offers us so much more than this and I embrace the other limbs, but from an asana perspective, I found it very difficult to move beyond this pattern on my mat. 

It is my experience that it is very easy to get caught up in the superficial and in the illusion, you have only to look at the images on Instagram. Yoga teachers are often the worst, filling their websites and Facebook pages with photos of themselves practising advanced postures as if this proves their worth as a teacher and encourages students to want to engage with them on this basis alone. I’d rather know how they are living their life, and the love they are bringing to the world and to themselves, how they are in relationship to self and to others then what poses they can practise.

This is really for me what yoga is all about; our relationship to self and letting go of anything that prevents us living our truth and our potential in this lifetime. The more we enquire into the nature of self and accept our own true nature, the more likely it is that we will find greater intimacy in all our relationships, deepening our experience of love, living a life of increased freedom and harmony, experiencing bliss (ojas) and recognising more of the sacred that resides in everything – we become more conscious and this feeds the collective.

Yet it’s a courageous heart that goes deeper, and not everyone is ready for this and I am in awe of my students for being open to greater possibility and potential. These are students who are not scared to do the work, to look at themselves and their lives honestly and be open to the change that yoga can bring with the tears and the sighs and the yawns and the releases. 

This is the path I know in my heart that I have to take, even though there are times that it is very difficult and while I never question showing up on my mat each day, I do question whether I want to keep teaching because this is not easy either. Yoga has changed everything, and the deeper I take my practice, the more I read the scriptures and try to live my life from an aligned and authentic place, the harder it becomes, because there is no place to hide, I can’t numb out like I’ve done in the past. 

The universe made it very clear the path to travel with its nudges and synchronicity and coincidence. During 2018 I had a real desire to visit the Outer Hebrides to see the Callanish Stones. I don’t even know how I had heard about them, but they entered my awareness and that was that, it didn’t matter how challenging it was to get there (and with a young family in tow), or the cost, I just knew I had to go. Interestingly I had always been drawn to a song called ‘Stornaway’ by a band introduced to me by a friend, and I’m pretty sure this laid a seed as the idea of visiting Stornaway fascinated me.

I didn’t know until we were there that the Callanish stones are said to be aligned to the moon and of course there is a Goddess association too. It wasn’t the stones though that had the greatest impact, although they are remarkable and I could have spent much longer hanging out there were it not for the children, but it was the yoga that was to change my life in ways that I could never have expected and yet in the very back of my mind I was starting to realise that I needed a change and there was a hankering to further address some issues that I had been trying to pretend had been healed around disorder eating and intimacy.

We happened to be staying in Uig,  which I didn’t appreciate when I booked, was an hour drive from the main town of Stornaway. I like to attend classes wherever I am travelling in the world, because it takes me off the beaten track and gives me the opportunity to widen my experience of yoga, it’s become a passion. Fortunately, it turned out that a lady called Julie teaches yoga in Uig village hall from time to time and as luck would have it she was on the island the same time as us.

I only attended two classes with her but they left quite an impression on me because they were so very different to how I had practised previously and I was aware of my ego wanting to go faster and to show that I had a stable practice and Julie was probably very aware of this too as she tended to my ego at the same time as showing me that there was another way. 

The practice was slow in pace compared to what I was used to, but absolutely what I needed, even if my head and my ego had a hard time letting go of the idea that I needed to be ‘exercising’ my body to be practising yoga. This was a hang-over from my earlier days of yoga and the manner in which – I now realise – I was using asana practice as a way to maintain my eating disorder and feed my negative relationship with self, remaining in denial of both.

Julie suggested I contact a lady called Sophie Whiting who lives near Brighton as she knew that this wasn’t too far from Guernsey. I dismissed it initially, I had no knowledge of Sophie beyond the recommendation, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I contacted her on a whim really, and she responded from Thailand where she was teaching, and we arranged that I would visit a few months later in March 2019 for a one-to-one, tying it in with a regular visit to Brighton to see Ewan’s best friend. 

Sophie is a wonderful lady, totally different to any other yoga teacher I have met previously and I shall never forget that first session with her in her mobile home in Littlehampton. I lay on my mat and she asked me to begin by taking apanasana, the wind relieving pose, knees to chest, and I did so in my usual way, hands on shins, gripping knees to chest, and she was immediately on me, highlighting all the many ways I was pulling, pushing and both harming and exhausting myself in that one pose. 

I had never thought about it like that before, never considered the manner in which my practice was adding to my pattern of self-harm and my already sleep deprived and exhausted state of being; I’d become so used to feeling tired all the time by then and completely conditioned to the notion that vinyasa yoga was good for me, that I never truly questioned it (although in the back of my mind from an Ayurvedic perspective, and I was studying Ayurveda by then I knew it was not the best approach for my pitta tendencies). That one session of mainly lying and breathing on the mat was utterly life changing. 

It took me to a place that I had never been before, to a very calm and centred place that I cannot even describe or put into words because to do so would limit it and it cannot be limited, that is the thing, and I realised then that I had found something very special inside myself, sacred, and I knew that I needed to look more honestly at the way I was practising and the impact this was having on me.

I discovered that Sophie is a Scaravelli-inspired yoga teacher, not an approach to yoga I had ever consciously tried previously and this alone fascinated me, because despite the many countries and the many yoga studios I have visited, I had not connected with a Scaravelli teacher. Although a few months later I would realise that I had, in London, a few years previously attended a class with John Stirk, again on a whim, and I know now that he is Scaravelli-inspired.

But then, I didn’t know that, I just attended the class because I liked the sound of it, of going deep, of finding the inner calm and centring, and I clearly remember returning to the hotel to join Ewan and Elijah, and saying that it was the strangest class I had ever attended; I didn’t feel like we had done anything, we certainly hadn’t exercised the body or moved much from our supine position, yet I felt so different; calm and centred!

It was the same with Sophie. The way it made me feel grabbed my attention and I spent that evening and every evening thereafter reading all I could on Scaravelli-inspired yoga and on Diane Long who was one of Vanda Scaravelli’s two main students, and who had been Sophie’s teacher for many years too. I noticed that Diane was due to hold a workshop in Scotland that September with another Scaravelli-inspired teacher, Louise Simmons, who was also a student of Diane. I contacted Louise to find out if there were any places remaining on the workshop, yet knowing that it was unlikely I could attend, but I felt to make contact anyway.

There were spaces and Louise was keen to know how I had found my way to her, and I explained the sequence of events and she was very welcoming, and I apologised for wasting her time as I knew I couldn’t attend the workshop, but I knew even then that it hadn’t been about that, that I needed to book a session with Louise who offers one-to-one sessions via Skype. That was over a year ago now and I have been studying with her since then, weekly for the last six months, and she has guided me to places that my yoga practice had allowed me to avoid all these years.

Yet it took me a while to settle into this new way of practising and of moving and of being, despite knowing on some level that I had been shown this way for a reason. And as if to confirm that, and yet even then it took me months to accept it, last summer, a few weeks into studying with Louise and a few weeks after taking my Ayuvedic exams and when I was run-down and exhausted, I went on a weekend workshop with the energetic Stewart Gilchrist in London.

I love Stewart, he’s dynamic and inspiring and his approach to practice was everything I used to love, hard, strong, fast, go, go, go, push, pull, achieve, get into postures you haven’t gotten into before, on and on. Even the breath was forced. It is a yang and masculine practise and yet he has a huge following of female yoginis in London, who also love this approach. Run down, I had developed a cough by then, which just got worse over the weekend, yet I pushed through, sucking cough sweets as I practiced and sat for relaxation to ease the coughing. 

I barely ate and barely slept, my energy was all over the place feeding into the remnants of eating disorder and this association I had of ‘doing’ hard yoga, not eating, getting caught up in the body and forcing it to do things, look a certain way, all about the external and getting this crazy energy going on that is uplifting and slightly euphoric, like a natural high, but one that finds you running on nervous energy, and far from calming your mind, it makes it race, but it is addictive like drugs and you want more of it even though you know (or I know by now) that it is doing you harm. 

Returning home I was in a mess, my pitta tendencies and pitta vata imbalances, of the need to over work, over extend and over-do, had been pushed to a new edge, both with the exams and now with the yoga and I crashed and burned. The doctor diagnosed a virus, but I wonder now if it was simply exhaustion, the exams and my drive to do well, my ambition then, had challenged me and the yoga, well that had merely added to the general mess I found myself in and I was done; the rest of the summer I wasn’t able to function properly, my immune system needed some tlc. 

I know now that that this was really the turning point, that I had to look very honestly at my life and see what wasn’t working. Yet what I realised is that the changes that needed to be made had to be made inside of me, not outside of me. It wasn’t about getting a new job or a new house, or changing my diet, it was about letting go of all the stuff that I was holding onto that were no longer serving me, and this centred around my linear and masculine approach to being, reflected back at me every time I got on my mat – they say that our approach on our mat reflects our approach to life, so true!

The only time I showed up on my mat and didn’t buy into the old energy of trying to achieve and over extend was when Louise was teaching me, and I had such resistance! The practice calmed and centred me but my ego couldn’t cope with it. I wasn’t achieving! If anything it felt like I was going backwards, having to be so present and attentive and still, moving so slowly and with postures adapted as if I was a beginner, and yet the irony is that I was a beginner, I am a beginner, because there is always so much to learn.

I struggled to the extent that when our session finished I would spend the next hour practising in the way that I had always practised because unless I pushed and pulled the body and moved in an exercising the body way, then I didn’t feel like I had practised yoga, such was my conditioning! This need to practice in the old way only dropped away during lockdown when I finally accepted (and there was a dark night of the soul as I let go of holding on so tightly to the mind-set that maybe there was another way) that I could no longer practice in a way that was harming me and continuously feeding my imbalanced tendencies and ego.

I am always reminded of my favourite quote, “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you will always get what you have always got”. I remind myself of this when I know that change needs to come in. It’s very easy to keep doing what we have always done, always taking the same approach and yet wondering why we don’t get a different outcome. 

I recognised that I no longer wanted to live my life harming myself with my striving or from a masculine and linear perspective. I wanted to embody more of the deep feminine that is my nature. I wanted to be all that I am, not all that I am not. It is exhausting trying to be something that you are not and yet it is difficult  trying to be all that you are! This demands that you let go of the stories and the narrative and the ideas that you have taken on board about who you are from your friends, your family, your colleagues, your teachers and society at large. 

So much of who I had allowed myself to become has been shaped by my reaction to my life experience and to the notion of goodness and being good. I had given myself a hard time for much of my adult life, harming myself in immeasurable ways, hating myself, starving myself, destroying myself, sabotaging myself, trying to disappear from myself, out of body, denying my own nature as if it is somehow flawed because we are all so different yet judge ourselves by this misperception that we all need to be the same and thus deny our very own beautiful nature.

Louise has enabled me to reclaim more of my nature and let go of the crap that’s in the way. The journey thus far, our studying together has been illuminating, because there is nowhere to hide, I have had to step both out of the shadows into a place of greater vulnerability, and look back into the shadows to see all that is hidden. I could no longer zone out in a vinyasa flow, or push myself further away from where I needed to be going, not deeper into the superficial muscles which were already over gripping, but to soften into the softer places that I was always ignoring. Soft meant fat and when you have had an eating disorder the last thing you want is to do is acknowledge those soft places.

Yet it is the soft places and their vulnerability that have been the most giving of places to me. There has been a focus on undoing the tension, the holding in the inner thighs for example, that has prevented greater intimacy, part of the armour that I have developed in my quest to not feel deeper sensation for fear of what this might mean; feeling is tricky, especially that space between pleasure and pain when there has been harm done previously.

There is the softness of the inner arms, how much they love to hug given the chance, and the back of the body, how much this loves to be held, if only we allow it and let someone else carry some of the weight for us. Yet we struggle on alone so much of the time, being strong, and we shove the stuff we don’t want to feel to the back of the heart, hardening it, the shoulders rounding with the weight of it, preventing the ease of breath that allows prana and oxygen and lifeforce to fill our body, as if we are not worthy, damaged, must protect our broken heart that is now breaking us with the heaviness of it.

No, Scaravelli-inspired yoga does not let you hide from that. It brings you right to those places that you have been holding your pain and it asks you to let go and rest into yourself. You. There is responsibility. It cuts through the blame and victimhood culture and lays the responsibility right back at you. It’s your pain, your pleasure, you life, your drama, your narrative, your perception. And its perception that often needs changing. A breakdown to break through to a new way of seeing both yourself and the world around you. 

This is the reason the Scaravelli-inspired approach is so demanding and challenging, because there is no fixed mind, there is no right or wrong, no black or white, no good or bad, and therefore there is no methodology because that alone will fix the mind. The whole purpose of yoga is to free the mind so that it can be fully conscious, oneness, beyond the limitations of needing to separate and divide that creates dis-harmony within ourselves and disharmony within the world generally.

But when you have spent a lifetime living in a society and being part of an education system that encourages separation and division and the notion of something being fixed (look at how we cling to science as if science holds certainty and look at how science has been thrown  by Covid, no one can agree, and yet everyone turns to science as if it might save us, yet science can’t even work out how we are here) and you have been practising yoga in a way that feeds into this with its idea of fixed alignment principles and this being ‘the way’, it is very difficult to let that go.

You feel yourself adrift, not sure where to hold to bring back that certainty that you have lived your life trying to create. If I live this way then I can expect this outcome. Yet where is the joy in that? Where is the fun in the spontaneity of play? Where is the space for the sacred and for the unknown to enter it? How is it possible to grow when you have fixed yourself to something just because it feels safe? You have only to look at children and the manner in which they are enchanted by the world simply because they have not yet fixed by having to look or feel a certain way. 

We have to learn to live with uncertainty and the paradox that comes with this. Today we might move this way, another day we might move that way, all the while being gentle and kind to the body, allowing its own innate wisdom, not forcing our will upon it, awakening our spine and bringing greater freedom to the body and the mind. 

As Vanda Scaravelli famously said, “Movement is the song of the body”. There is something very beautiful in practising in a way that allows this, yet it can be extremely difficult trying not to control it but it is in the allowing that our perception will shift. I came across an extract from one of Ken Robinson’s books which I think beautifully highlights this point:

“As human beings, we love in 2 worlds. There is the world that exists whether or not you exist. It was there before you came into it, and it will be there when you have gone. This is the world of objects, events, and other people; it is the world around you.

There is another world that exists only because you exist: the private world of your own thoughts, feelings and perceptions, the world within you. This world came in to being when you did, and it will cease when you do. We only know the world around us through the world within us, through the senses by which we perceive it and the ideas by which we make sense of it.

How we think about the world around us can be deeply affected by the feelings within us, and how we feel may be critically shaped by our knowledge, perceptions and personal experiences. Our lives are formed by the constant interactions between these 2 worlds, each affecting how we see and act in the other.

What people contribute to the world around them has everything to do with how they engage with the world within them”.

I’m grateful that the Scaravelli-inspired approach and Louise, my teacher, entered my life. For a long while I considered that maybe I would just have to rely on my own inner teacher, yet I knew that my ego and it’s control was getting in my own way and I was stuck, I couldn’t quite make myself practise in a way that I needed, such was my attachment. I can clearly understand now, the reason that Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras imply the need for guidance from someone whom you trust, who has already trodden the path so that they might shine a light into the dark; there is an intimacy that comes with this too. 

Since practising Scaraveli-inspired, and more so in recent months when I have felt I have no choice but to teach this way too, simply because it would be inauthentic otherwise, and lack the sacred, which underpins all of me, there has been greater intimacy in my life, in my relationship to self, but also in my wider relationships, in love and in life generally. There is a depth of sensation that I have never experienced previously, and a deeper honesty about the many ways that I have been harming myself, by my inner critic and my negative thought patterns. There is also greater appreciation for the self, love of self, which has been mirrored back at me. 

I am sorry to those students who have studied with me but find this approach too confronting for them in its slower pace and need for deep attention, and I am grateful beyond words for those who continue to study with me, who trust that I may help them to find more of what they already have inside of them. I am grateful that I have the opportunity to learn from these students too and hear more of the song of their body, so that together there is greater harmony, in the class and in life generally!

We must not forget that there is always a bigger picture. The stars and the moon and the planets have made it very clear that if humanity is to truly awaken, if we are to live from a more conscious place then now is the time to move beyond the superficial, to go deep as we open to spirit and let this guide us. While it may be tough and there may be tears and yawns and sighs and a deep weariness in the resignation that will follow as we truly let go, the breakdowns will feed into the breakthroughs and life will flow through you in ways you could never have previously imagined. You won’t be disappointed. xx