Warrior 101
By Antonia Small, ERYT-500, Maine AgrAbility, January 2025.
I’d rather be with the bears than do yoga,” said Heather Strout Thompson (F/V Gold Digger) when she and I first met.
Wild guess: you’ve never set foot in a yoga studio. I mean, it’s hard to know who yoga is for, when it’s advertised as super bendy skinny people sweating too close together in exotic locations – am I right?
We westerners have taken techniques designed to calm internal hurricanes and turned them into marketing campaigns for expensive leggings with an air of righteousness.
(And for the record, Heather, I’m with you: I prefer the woods too.)
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, yoga was training for warriors to keep their shit together in battle.
Now that sounds more like you, doesn’t it?
Yoga marketing strategies have kept the folks most likely to die on the job away from some of the best tools we have to remain resilient in the face of great stresses: breathe efficiently; remain calm; use your strengths; train for your weaknesses; don’t believe everything you think; and say thank you.
Most of you have a yoga practice already, even if you don’t call it that: you must be mindful or die. You definitely use your strengths. You revere wild places. You pursue a meaningful job. You are at home in all kinds of weather and times of day. You don’t believe much of what anyone else thinks.
And, maybe most importantly, you love the life you live – as long as folks in suits stop interfering with it … (What do you mean? I AM CALM AF!)
Yoga originated 5000 years ago, mainly as
teachings to establish mastery of the mind, but also to optimize the mind/body connection. Much like Stoicism, it offered a framework to learn inner control amidst external chaos.
Yoga works with the nervous system, which has a few branches, including the autonomic – which has two more branches: the sympathetic (SNS) and the parasympathetic (PNS), which make up our stress response. Your SNS is the fight or flight aspect: your giddy up when you really need it. PNS is your rest and digest system. Ideally, you’d move back into your PNS after SNS activation, but we all know how difficult that can be when the hits just keep on coming …
Mammals have the skills to rebalance this stress response when it gets activated. Humans have consciousness, which means we need a good 24-48 hours under normal circumstances (by “normal” I mean nothing else can set you off) to recalibrate.
We need tools when we don’t have the luxury of
long timeouts. We don’t want to live in constant giddy-up mode, or it gets jammed, and we get ugly.
“What about my beer and recliner?” you may ask. “Gummies and a nap? I mean, I relax between trips …”
Yah, no.
Relaxation and self-regulation are not the same thing.
Relaxation is a good first step and part of yoga training, but self-regulation is like building a better boat for the storm. If we only attend to the relaxation phase, the hull will collapse under pressure.
Yoga training includes mental preparations of inner discipline and outer conditioning; physical drills; tactical breathing; sensory awareness drills; single pointed focus; concentration, and flow state.
These are the 8 limbs interpreted by Yoga for First Responders (YFFR), designed for military, fire, rescue and police departments. As a yoga instructor, I’m required to keep learning. YFFR has reminded me why I think yoga is important for folks who work at sea.
It’s a perpetual rollercoaster.
But we can’t live on the battlefield full time.