Overview

Overview

Haven Yoga and Counseling

SCROLL DOWN

Overview

Haven Yoga and Counseling

A place to reclaim the beauty and wisdom of your perfectly, imperfect body.

Hi, and welcome to Haven.

We're really glad you're here.

Titles

Titles

Your body is more than an image. It's more than an object. Your body is your home.

At Haven, we believe bodies—all bodies—are elegant and wise. We practice yoga and engage in counseling to re-remember how to inhabit ourselves.

Stats

Stats

Is one of your intentions for 2019 to move more? To find more space inside of yourself and your body? I've developed Wild Body for those of you who are longing to feel wild and free. It will get you moving in ways you've never moved before. You'll press into your edges. You WILL feel more alive. Join us tomorrow evening at 7:30pm! Follow the link in my bio to reserve your spot.

📸 : @iambenwade
I am a wellness educator and a yoga teacher, and it is insanely difficult for me to motivate myself to move. It's so confusing. Movement, and yoga in particular, is something that gives me so much life, and yet I have to channel all the energy inside in order to get myself to a yoga class. What I've realized is that underneath my resistance to move is a visceral feeling of fear. I believe there are a lot of reasons for this fear, but one of them is a fear of my sexuality. I was taught, implicitly, from a very young age, that if I am embodied--I am sexualized. If I am pressing into my edges, I will be devoured. So I learned to hang back when it came to being in my body. I was taught to hide my sensuality from the world because I would be A) attacked by some man B) would be shamed by my community for showing my body in a way that would ‘make’ a man do something to me. Learning that I shouldered the burden of sexual responsibility made me feel like my body was a weapon I needed to keep hidden from myself and everyone else, until my wedding day.
.
Needing to hide my body made it scary to be in my body. When I moved it, I felt like I had to move it in a non-sexual way. But movement is only enjoyable when we press into the edges of our skin! So, I moved in a way that was preoccupied and hesitant. Eventually, it felt safer for me to stay frozen. .
We are required by culture to be active and moving often, but if I move my body I am more vulnerable to attack, physically and energetically. This creates an inner tension that requires massive energy to combat.
.
So, how do we motivate when our body has been something we've needed to shield ourselves and other people from? I'm still unpacking this question, but I think it has something to do with following what feels good, practicing discipline, and learning to tolerate shame. The last decade of my life was learning to unshackle myself emotionally. The next decade of my life will be dedicated to unshackling myself physically. Will you join me? Check out the link in my bio to see a line-up of the yoga classes I'm teaching this week.

📸: @iambenwade
Last weekend a friend asked me if I liked my body. I told her, "I don't like my body. But I do love my body." It surprised me, because I've never articulated my truth in that way before.
.
My mental fortitude is not yet more powerful than billions of dollars spent through advertising and thousands of years of white supremacist, patriarchal, oppression. We live in a capitalist system that benefits financially when women are insecure about the normal bodies they inhabit. We also live in a system where a woman's primary value comes from aligning with a version of sexual attractiveness that is defined by male preferences. These powers combined ensure that women in our culture will feel ashamed of their body in some capacity. In this current system, the myth that we tell ourselves is that if we are beautiful and thin we will be loved. Even though I deeply believe that this story is untrue, the feeling of it being true can sometimes feel overwhelming, because the messaging of my body shame can sometimes feel so loud.
.
But I love my body. That doesn't mean that I always have good feelings towards it, because I don't. Love is a verb. Love is doing, serving, care-taking for the body, despite how you're feeling towards it. Loving my body looks like finding gratitude for all it allows me to do in this life, and allowing that gratitude to fuel action. I love my body when I brush my teeth, when I take time to stretch, when I light a candle, when I make a delicious meal, when I take a long bath. Indulging the senses of the body fills us with life-force, and over time these little daily actions we take on behalf of our body begin to fill us with energy and internal spaciousness.
.
We fight body shame when we allow the parts of ourselves we don't like to be seen. Shame cannot survive in the midst of vulnerability. That's why I'm allowing you to see me. So that together, we can reclaim the beauty of our imperfection.
.
Next week I’m teaching Good Body Yoga again (Mondays from 9:30 - 10:15am), a class designed to get you reacquainted with your body and to teach you how to offer kindness when kindness feels really far away. I hope you join me!

Fixation on changing your body is a clever way of avoiding the pain of how you’ve been made to feel about your body. Because it is likely painful to have your particular body. Your body was too chubby for someone, or too tall for someone, or too skinny for someone, or too alluring for someone. For someone else to tell you that your bodies is not good enough (either directly or indirectly), that is a curse that sinks into your bones. When we fixate on changing our bodies we are fixated on relieving the anxiety of our bodies being potentially unacceptable to other people. We misdirect the pain of having our body assaulted by someone else’s expectations, towards ourselves. No body is wrong. Bodies are different. In order to get to body love, we have to feel the pain of being othered. This will suck. There is no getting around it. But you were designed to not only feel pain and love, but to become whole inside of it (this last line is totally stolen from @glennondoyle via Love Warrior…which you should all run out and buy immediately). When discomfort and disgust towards your body emerge, try not to see this as continued evidence of your body being wrong, but as an opportunity to watch the old story rise up to the surface and to witness it with compassion until it feels the satisfaction of being paid attention to. Whenever we feel pain or disgust or hatred towards our bodies, these are not direct reflections of the reality of our bodies, but are stories of wounding that are asking to be told. 💃🏻❤️⚡️✨🙌🏽#goodbodyyoga #longlivethebelly #yourbodyisahaven #havenyogaseattle #glennondoylepleasebemybff #yoga #healthateverysize #haes #yogabodyimage #yogabodylove #bodyimagemovement #bodyimagecoach #bodyimage #bodyimageawareness