About 3 years ago, I was in yoga teacher training and had to terminate my training due to personality conflicts with one of my teachers. It was private training and was run by a husband and wife team.
The husband was very professional, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about yoga. The wife was not, and it showed in her attitude and how she taught, as well as in her tendency to make up things about anatomy (such as calling the piriformis the gluteus maximus and saying only men had gonads). She would jerk my body roughly into positions instead of gently adjusting me, even yanking on my head to move it into “the proper place” during savasana, doing such things in way that suggested she wanted to cause harm. She would make catty underhanded remarks about how my chakras needed to be realigned. She would say I am insecure, that she could tell by looking at my energy and that we should set up a time for her to help me work through realigning my chakras, also while telling me that no one gave a sh*t about me (her words).
She was also an ayurvedic counselor and would tell me that despite my test saying that I was Vata-Pitta, I was actually a “very big girl”, with a round face and very, very kapha (I was 120 pounds, and did aproximately 2- 3 hours of yoga and 30 minute walks almost everyday at the time, so I was not big and my face is oval). She would thus prescribe me with a kapha oriented diet.
The situation reached its climax, when I was in class and she (knowing I had old injuries to my ankles and knees), had us do a balancing pose for a long time and then, without rest, transition into another balancing pose one the same side. Feeling pain in my knee and ankle, I had to sit down. She yelled at me to get back up and to stop being lazy. When I told her my foot was in pain, she told me to leave the class. I did so and promptly called her husband to terminate my training. Afterwards, she told people that she asked me to terminate my training and suggested that I wasn’t good at my job (massage) or that I was an unyogic person. This was in a small enough neighborhood that I found out the local hairdressers were talking about it to their clients.
I had never done anything to her that I know of and if I had, it was unintentional and likely could have been resolved with a polite adult conversation.
This is relevant now because, I think that the scarring and anxiety from that has affected me in an awful way. In the first few months after that incident, I would be occasionally uncomfortable doing yoga, but could still push through my workout and enjoy it, even getting to 97 out of 108 Sun Salutations at a local yoga event (personal record).
But as time went on, I enjoyed it less and less and started to feel unmotivated, then anxious and nauseated, then outright angry. Now, because I hate doing yoga, I simply don’t. I don’t want to feel this way, I just don’t know how to work through these problems to push myself back into my yoga practice.
In the past year, I have only gotten on my mat twice, because I feel so anxious, sick, dizzy and angry that I want to do something actually unyogic, like tearing up my mat and tossing it into a bonfire. I don’t trust the yoga teachers in the area, because my instinctive reaction is that they are liars about their spirituality and will try to sabotage me, which I know is unreasonable.
I know that the issue is that yoga forces these spiritual and emotional problems to the fore and also that I am having trouble assuming good intentions in others due to my own inner conflict. On that same token, I have found this to be personally intense and I am having an trouble with persevering. I want to work through it though and was wondering if anyone in this community has gone though something similar.
What did you do to re-motivate yourself or change your way of thinking? Any advice in general on how to work through it if you have been through it? I feel like quitting yoga is taking a toll on my health in many ways.
I am mainly interested those who have experienced this before.
Thank you!