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Aug 26, 2022Liked by Guy Duperreault

"yoga and meditation are often not enough to heal our trauma"

Thank you for saying this. If someone wants to do those things, and it helps them a little, they should do so. But I've seen numerous talk therapists and psychiatric treatment centers embrace "mindfulness" as a cure, and they have it dominate the limited time they have to work with emotionally-wounded people.

As a result those clients are unhealed and become completely discouraged.

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Yes. Our most beloved therapies come from a tradition of head not body. They will talk about the body and think that words are enough. Our society wants to look at what is life by killing it and then doing autopsies. And do not see how inane that is. Talk therapy and yoga can be like that: palliatives that often cut us off from the truth of who we are, shadow and light, ease and dis-ease.

I loved the Constructive Living Therapy by David K. Reynolds. The biggest challenge he faced with clients was to get them to do the physical and emotional exercises because most believed that reading about them was good enough.

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Yes. Well said and thank you for the comment.

The yogi-Buddhist teacher and scholar, Micheal Stone, talked about his plateau after 7 years. He despaired that he had wasted 7 years. Then he came to someone who showed him that Yoga was not a mind practice. It was an exercise to develop powerful engagement in the 'real' world through the integration of mind/body/spirit. Yoga is so easily confused as a body exercise, disengaged from the mind and designed for the mat.

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Dec 17, 2022·edited Dec 17, 2022Author

Yes.

My partner and I were talking about that too as it relates to our finding an 'unconventional' teacher. If we met him a few years ago his approach would have been good and the depth of what he is actually teaching lost to us. We wouldn't have been ready for him then.

Stone makes the observation that at about 6-10 years the dedicated yoga practitioner will be faced with the realization of what yoga is really asking them to *renounce* [strikethrough] embrace. They freak and back off. Then focus on becoming a specialist in some often obscure aspect of yoga and lose their sense of humour. :-D And so true.

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LOL! Yes. Great point. Edit done.

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Wonderfully insightful article, Guy. Thank you.

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Thank you. As noted, my partner and I noticed that this group of senior yoga teachers were not *yogis* because they were besotted with being in *their* gurus presence. It wasn't a big surprise that they 'went' mostly to sleep because they were *already* asleep.

Their guru could not wake them up. LoL.

In yoga there is an axiom: problems created by the mind cannot be solved at the level of the mind. It is the breath that brings the mind under control, like the string which controls the kite. I add to that, "and without the string, the kite does not fly."

It really is a fascinating time we are living in. The truth of our collective inattention and distracting and, in a way, laziness, with respect to our social practices of the last few hundred years, perhaps more, has now made itself known. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.

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