| Teaching to the Deeper Healing
Ana Forrest has taught many serious yogis. Take your pick of well-known teachers, people like Jill Miller, Isaac Pena, Baron Baptiste, dig around in their backgrounds, and you’ll find that many of them have studied with Ana, been inspired by her, or hung out and practiced with her at the Santa Monica Forrest Yoga Circle studio.
She’s the grass roots, underground matriarch of many a practice. She’s a fierce and merciful yoga warrior whose life work is “Mending to Hoop of the People,” and to this end she’s created a deeply intelligent and healing practice that is steeped in Native American traditions and constantly evolving as she and her hoop of teachers evolve. Ana’s skill in sequencing is unparalleled, and her ability to draw forth the truth, power, and beauty of her teachers and students is superior.
I spoke with Ana over the telephone last week, asking about the development of her yoga style, the effects of it on the human body and spirit, and why it might be of interest to people who have never experienced it before. I hope you enjoy, and join Ana and I for a juicy yoga ceremony this weekend at PURE East.
–Erica Mather
EM: You invented a yoga style. What did you find missing that you wanted to add?
AF:I found many things missing, but what I found was missing the most was the connection of how to make use of a yoga practice to address the challenges that I was facing. For example I had incredible amounts of pain in my knees and back, my head and neck. Also, the emotional agony I lived in, and the disconnect from my spirit, which broke my heart…. I created Forrest Yoga
so people can make use of their yoga practice to address the challenges that they are facing. What works? And how can you shift it so it works?
EM: How can I add your perspective even if I haven’t formally studied with you?
AF:To learn how to teach yoga, you must be taught how to teach, which also means going through the ceremonies that deep inside connect you to your power, so that you can connect to your authentic self and teach from there, which is way more important that learning any teaching technique. You learn to teach from your own power and love, and taking a class does not teach you that. It just teaches you how to do asana.
Then, of course, you can take a Forrest Yoga Teacher Training. In the meantime, you could study the DVDs, and Five-day Audio CD Intensives to learn how I teach different levels and how I sequence…but you’ll only learning a little bit. You must work with me in a context that teaches about teaching, because taking classes teaches about how to do yoga, but not how to teach.
EM: You’ve created some distinct “Forrest Yoga” poses. How often do find yourself creating new poses?
AF: Usually it comes around the need, but sometimes playfulness. When something is not being addressed, the pose is the pathway for addressing the need. Sometimes in the creation of poses comes out of creative play, not out of a need that has gone previously unanswered. For example, a creation that came out of need is “Ana’s Boat Series.” [editor’s note: a three-part series of therapeutic exercises that build off of boat pose.] Boat almost handled the problem. Cobra Pushups almost handled the problem, but there was a whole segment of my spine that was not being addressed, and it took some experimenting to find the asana pathway to the part of me that was weak, injured, and un-nourished
EM: What guidelines or suggestions can you offer for aspiring teachers?
AF: Get on your wind horse—your breath—and take it on a journey inside. Stay present. If you catch yourself teaching in a habitual way, explore how you can change your habits and you will never be bored. If you stay within the confines of your habitual patterns, you will be bored everywhere you go.
EM: How do the Forrest Basic Moves
invite the nervous system to unwind and release personal memory?
AF: This depends on the personal memory and the Basic Move. Let’s start with an ungrounded person who has had life experiences that disconnect them from the legs. Teaching this person to get Active Feet [Press evenly through the ball of the foot and the heel, lift the toes.] helps them get a new stability in their body, which definitely unwinds all kinds of anxious holds, and subtly teaches them how to walk through their life path and their world with more awareness.
Let’s talk about the neck. Learning the Basic Move of Relaxing the Neck [in a pose like Triangle, instead of turning the head to look up at the ceiling, relax the neck, allowing the ear to move towards the shoulder and opening up the side of the neck] reduces the stress levels through the entire nervous system which then affects the entire musculature system which effects the way the brain functions and the chemicalsthat the brain produces. Another wondrous aspect of relaxing the neck is the possibility of deep and true internal communication between the brain and the rest of the body’s wisdom centers, the chakras.
When we have information flowing between our chakras and our brain, we make better decisions; we have our full “counsel wheel.” Each chakra is like a wisdom keeper for our life. To consult with each one gives us a broader perspective on how to solve our life problems instead of just asking one anxious, confused, caffeine pumped-up, isolated, mad-man in the ivory tower, brain.
When one makes decisions based on information from all of our power centers, instead of just the brain, this sets us to move through our lives more wisely, and makes us proud of the way that we live, because we make wiser decisions; because we’re accessing more of our wisdom, which always feels good.
Often teachers and students new to Forrest Yoga will ask me about how this practice connects you to the emotional body and why is it important to do so in the practice?
Unresolved or undigested emotions store in our cell tissues as pain, fat, dullness, or disconnect. When we nuke someone for stepping on our toe, it’s an over-reaction that’s embarrassing. Practicing Forrest Yoga warrants a space for the release of these pockets of emotional backlog. When emotional backlog is released, it makes us able to respond to our life in a fresh way, instead of being subjected to the way we might react to the years of backlog that get triggered at some point. And it’s much less embarrassing. When we’re disconnected from ourselves, we’re disconnected from those that we most love. When backlog releases, we are more able to connect to what matters most to us, what is most precious to us.
EM: As a highly experienced teacher, do you still have the experience of teaching a class you didn’t feel so good about? How do you handle that situation?
AF:Get grounded, get connected. Study what felt weak or disconnected, and implement what I learned from that study in the next class. I’m constantly assessing my classes, which is why they continue to change and grow.
I do not teach automatically, and anyone who does is shutting down their power as a teacher. Hunt it down, and get rid of it forever.
EM: How do you find inspiration in poses that you have been practicing for 30+ years? Furthermore, how do you inspire others when you are teaching these poses after the thousandth time?
AF:Teach to who’s in front of you, not how many times you have to teach something. Teach people how to inhale with the freshness and curiosity of, “If I can teach this person to inhale, I can change their life, and how exciting is that?!” I do not accept boredom or cynicism in my teaching, hunt it down, risk being authentic, and take a deep inhale before speaking, and it will be fresh.
EM: Why is Forrest Yoga a good fit in the New York yoga culture?
AF:Because the majority of New York people I’ve met have really quick and clever minds, and like to be challenged by new things. Many of them need to breathe, they need adventure, they need discovery, they need that challenge. That is true everywhere, but overall the people who go to New York need and crave the adventure and that exciting pace. But they also need to know how to get off that adrenaline wave, and they need to know how to surf the exciting energy, which the deep breath and the relaxed neck will give them.
Forrest yoga will provide them with the skills to surf the exciting energy without getting sick from it. Relaxed Neck, Deep Breathing, Connecting to your authentic self: these things make our life adventure much more enticing.
EM: We love your mp3 downloads on your website and we would love to see more videos from you. Is this something we can expect in the near future?
AF: We’re recoding more this year. It’s happening soon! MP3s will be coming out on YogaVibes.
For more about Ana’s workshop at Pure, click here. |
, I’ll post ‘em! 
