Let's Make a Health Connection Series #2 with Heather Jolma-Fray

Why this resource is helpful:

"I identified myself as a yoga teacher for 15 years and it was really through covid and the extra time that I got at home to dive deeper into my own yoga practice and considering myself as a yoga teacher really started to come up for me in terms of the training that I had. So if you think about a grapefruit and an orange mixing together you get this beautiful fruit called an ongello. Something like this. So the way that I was taught yoga is a very western style. I got a stamp of approval from an organization called yoga alliance. Yoga Alliance sort of came into the west came into america and became the governing body of
deciding who was qualified to be a yoga teacher and who wasn't based on different trainings that they went through here in America and that was all that I knew about when I decided to become a yoga teacher.

There wasn't much talk in my training about the fact that yoga in its truest form and in its honest form was born from hindu people, from the indian diaspora and that this is where that analogy of the orange and the grapefruit start to come together because what I was taught to teach was this beautiful crossbreed of this onjello so it's neither yoga from its traditional roots of Hinduism or Buddhism or taoism. Not Taoism from the indian diaspora noris it western exercise and breathing, it was a blend of the two. And so, what the last year has been for me is about discovering the roots of what i was taught in my yoga alliance certified teacher training program and what I have discovered is that i don't, I wasn't taught yoga from a lineage-based perspective, meaning I am detached in my understanding of yoga from it being a hindu practice. So it's no longer, I feel, correct for me to say that I am a teacher of this really vast, really ancient practice that I literally just know, like imagine me wiping my finger across the Icing, you know a little sliver of icing on this huge cake. That is what I understand is just this tiny sliver of what the practice is now that little bit is fantastic and highly beneficial. But... I don't feel like it's right for me to claim to be a teacher of something that I truly know so little about especially without the stamp of approval, really, of someone who should be giving me that stamp of approval, someone who comes from a hindu tradition."

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