Cozy Yoga Life Ep12 Real-Life Struggles: Divorce

In this episode of Cozy Yoga Life, we dive into a topic that isn't often discussed in the yoga community: divorce. Many women who go through yoga teacher training experience a profound sense of clarity and confidence, leading them to reassess their personal lives, including their relationships. For some, this means making the difficult decision to leave unhealthy marriages or partnerships. Join me as we explore how yoga can serve as a catalyst for personal transformation and why so many women find the strength to walk away from toxic relationships after embarking on their yoga teaching journey.

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Transcript

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You're listening to Cozy Yoga Life, the podcast for yoga teachers who crave more from their practice and lives. I'm Shannon Caldwell and I'll be your guide on this journey of simplicity, self care and self discovery. So let's cozy up, unwind, and dive into today's episode. Hello, cozy crew, welcome back to another episode in season two, where the theme is real life struggles of yoga teachers. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking about divorce. A life challenge for all of us, for sure. And one that unsurprisingly also affects yoga teachers. Not only do I have personal experience with divorce, but I have also mentored so many yoga teachers as they navigate ending relationships and divorce. When I look back at all of the yoga teachers that I have trained and mentored since I started, which was 2003, I believe that there is an individual out of every class who ended up going through divorce. Either while they were in the middle of yoga teacher training or very soon after. I do have a few instances where participants went through yoga teacher training and everything on the outside appeared to be fine. Then they reached back out to me several years later and tell me that they are going through a divorce. And the first bubbles, or the idea or seeing their relationship in an unhealthy light, happened in yoga teacher training. What is the parallel to yoga teacher training and divorce? I think that there are several factors that play in to a person deciding that they want to end their relationship. On the surface, people come through yoga teacher training to learn a skill. They want to learn to be able to teach yoga, share this transformational practice with other people. However, in order to lead other people, they themselves have to go through a transformation. So many people who start yoga teacher training, they're unsure of themselves. They don't have any confidence. They just know that they have this whisper to teach and something is pushing them to do it. They're scared witless to stand up in front of people and teach, but they're going to take this big, hairy goal by the horns and they are going to do it. They're going to accomplish it. Obviously I don't have experience with how other yoga teacher training programs are run. I can only give you the benefit of how I conducted my teacher training programs. Yoga philosophy is a huge part It is the first module that I go through in every session. I want all of my participants to have that foundation in yoga studies and yoga philosophy, so that as they're going through the rest of yoga teacher training, they have something to reference. Why is this happening? Why do I feel this way? What can I do about it? Two big components of philosophy is self study, which is found within the eightfold path. When we study ourselves we gain a deeper self-awareness. We also begin to see things more clearly. That veil of illusion is lifted off of our eyes and we truly begin to see things for how they really are. When this happens, a lot of the times, it triggers for that individual to make profound changes in their life. Sometimes that change starts with just taking better care of themselves. To listen to themselves and to put themselves first. As participants evaluate one life choice, they begin to evaluate all of their life choices. For me personally my yoga practice and the support that I got from the yoga community, enabled me to go through not one, but actually two divorces. That's a hard admission for me because most people can forgive one divorce. It happens. You make a bad choice. It doesn't work out. Then you get to know yourself better and you remarry. Tell someone you've been divorced a second time or a third time or even more and they begin to look at you like there might actually be something mentally wrong with you. So I don't always share how many times I've been divorced because I don't want to have to go through the shaming and the judgment and the stigmatization that comes along with being divorced more than one time. My parents were some of the most vocal people not happy with my decision to get divorced. My parents just celebrated 60 years this year. So it's always been my parents shoulder-to-shoulder in everything that they do, and to have one of their children to be divorced multiple times. My mom took that as a personal shame or personal burden that she had done something wrong in the raising of me. However, if you asked my parents now, they would probably with some reluctance, admit that the decisions that I made, that they didn't agree with at the time, Were in fact, the best decisions for me. Because now I'm in an incredible relationship where we are equal partners. We're equal parents. We have an incredible son together. My parents absolutely love their grandson. If I had stayed in those other marriages that might not be what my reality is now. I share that because I want you to know that no matter who your loudest critics are, who your harshest judges are, they don't know what's going on in your life. They don't know who you are. They don't know why you're making the decision that you're making. Don't let people who have so little to do with your life dictate how you lead your life. I had to learn to block out all the noise. Look at my life as objectively as I could and make that decision. This is not a good relationship and it's time to end this relationship. I didn't plan out that way, but this is a good time to talk about the emotional fallout that happens when you decide to end a relationship or get a divorce. Especially if you, the person are a yoga teacher, a woman and you instigated the divorce. For whatever your reason you decided this is not for me. I'm clearheaded about it and I'm walking away. I have coached and coaxed and mentored many women who made the decision to walk away. One of the common emotions that they express to me is how sad they feel or how much grief they're going through. They're like, why do I feel this way? This is exactly what I wanted. Why am I so sad? Why am I going through all of these different stages? I have to remind them, and if you're going through divorce and it was your choice, and you're having all of these conflicting emotions this is a good reminder to you as well. Most of us associate grief with death. Somebody dies and we go through this cycle of emotions till we finally get to the place of acceptance. If you back out from that and you take more of a bird's eye view of divorce or the end of a relationship. And a way that is a death. It is a death of what used to be normal for you. And it is a death of routines and things that you found comfort in and things that, that you were used to. And now you've been thrust into this whole new world that you're having to find your way through it. And it is common and it is normal. To miss what you left behind, even know it is something that you wanted to walk away from. And of course everyone's different. I can't say how long you will have to work through those conflicting emotions. Every day you get up and you address it. And every day that grief and that sadness feels a little bit less and it's slowly replaced by your new life and the freedom that came with making that decision. And I don't necessarily mean the freedom of being free from the relationship. For so many of us, we become a different person in marriage. We change up so much of who we are. We deny ourselves, we pretend, we stuff, feelings down. Because we don't feel safe with our current partner. And so when we walk away from that relationship and it takes some time to get to know you again, to get reacquainted with this person. For you to remember who you were before you changed for that relationship. That's the kind of freedom that I'm talking about. And while I don't wish for anybody to have to go through that kind of struggle because it is, it's a hard struggle. It takes courage to walk that path. I do get a sense of pride when an individual finds the strength to do what they know is truly best for them. What do I mean by that? Let me share just a couple of the stories. Not naming any names. I remember one yoga teacher. We were working on the hand balancing postures. I'm showing her how to tweak the posture so that it works better for her and I remember her looking at me and she said, I told my husband that the moment I could do this posture that he was in trouble. I didn't think anything about that comment but the next thing I know she is flying. She's balanced in crow pose. She has it for maybe two or three seconds and then fell out of it. But it was the look on her face. It was the look of wonder and amazement, and you could just see the confidence explode all over her. She looked up at me and she said, I can do it and I'm like, yeah, absolutely you can do it. But she wasn't talking about Crow pose. She was talking about no longer staying I'm in a relationship that didn't serve her. I have had participants, who start sharing a completely different random story and that winding path leads them to admit in the safe space, with that support of their community to admit, finally out loud for the first time, that they're not in a healthy relationship. That their partner or their spouse treats them terribly, even to the point of abuse. That's probably a really good place for me to pause and reiterate that I'm not a counselor and I don't provide legal expertise. I am just sharing the experiences that some of the participants have had. In that moment, when that individual made that admission about her husband abusing her. The whole group just came around her and cocooned her and held her during this huge burden that she kept inside. For who knows how long she had young kids. I think they were like around the three and five years old. So I know she'd been carrying this burden around for at least that long. And I am happy to report that that individual through yoga teacher training not because of anything that I did, but because she found the clarity and the confidence to start taking steps, to get her and her children out of that relationship. I had a very brief conversation with her a few months after the yoga teacher training session ended and she told me, you know, when I look back now, I see that I wasn't in yoga teacher training to become a teacher. I was in yoga teacher training to have that realization and to have the unconditional support that I received from everybody in that room and it gave me the courage to do what I needed to do. Not everyone who goes through divorce is comfortable sharing in a group. I've had many participants hang back until everybody has left and then they share what's going on in their lives and their relationships. I've had people who come to me after yoga teacher training and are like, you know, I'm really struggling. Our relationship is struggling. I'm a new and improved person and my spouse or partner is not comfortable with those changes that I've made. It's made me realize that I'm not in a healthy relationship. Then I've had individuals who reach out to me years later and they tell me the first seeds were planted when I took yoga teacher training. I can think of two ladies right off the top of my head, they knew exactly what they wanted to do but they planned their way out. They had children who were still in school and they wanted to make sure that their children had graduated high school first and then they took the steps to leave that relationship. I'll share one more conversation that I had with my parents. It was my father and I in the car, we were going to the elementary school to pick up my son. We got on the topic of marriage and divorce, but my dad's comment was along the lines of. There's too much divorce too, but today. People just don't know how to stick it out and make it work. Marriage is tough and you have to weather the tough times. I responded to my dad. I said, you're right on that there is a lot of divorce. You're right that marriage is challenging and it's not always happy unicorns and rainbows. When you and mom got together. She graduated high school one week and she was married the next Saturday. For most of their marriage, my mom has been dependent on my debt. My dad's been the breadwinner and my mom was the stay at home mom until I reached a certain age and then she started doing part-time jobs. Women today, we have very different choices. My father was adamant that I finished college so that I would never be dependent on a man. His comment at the time, I found ironic, because that was always why he was pushing me to go to college so I could take care of myself. And I can take care of myself and since I can take care of myself, I have choices. So if I find myself in a relationship that doesn't serve me, where I'm being taken advantage of, where I'm being used more as a housekeeper and a babysitter than an equal partner in a marriage. I have the ability to say this doesn't work for me and my partner can't hold over my head. Women have choices that we didn't have 40 years ago. We don't have to stay in toxic and unhealthy relationships. If you've been divorced, or are contemplating divorce, I hope that this episode has helped you a little bit. For me, yoga was instrumentalin helping me through my divorces. It gave me a safe space. It gave me a way to work through those conflicting and rollercoaster emotions. It gave me a community that supported me, regardless of the decisions that I made, and it was a place that allowed me to reconnect with myself. Yes, divorce can be painful, but it also opens up so many doors, new growth, new possibilities and an inner peace that was always just out of reach when you're in a relationship that doesn't serve both of you. Divorce can be a sensitive topic but I still invite you to share your stories. Drop them in the comments. Reach out to me through my DMS. I'm always here to support you. Remember, you're not alone as you navigate the ups and downs of teaching yoga. And if you're looking for more clarity and confidence in 2025, stay tuned. I can't wait to share with you about my book that's releasing in November. Until next episode, cozy crew. That wraps another soul nourishing episode of Cozy Yoga Life. As always, thank you for letting me be a part of your yoga journey. If you enjoyed today's authentic conversation, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Until next time, stay cozy, take care of yourself, and keep it real.