July 11, 2025 • 33 mins
There's been a cultural obsession recently with optimizing your life, your health, your body and more. And while optimization can provide support and scaffolding, there’s a hidden danger of focusing too much on optimization.
I’ll unpack that silent drawback in today’s episode.
I’ll also share an update from my most recent trip to Montana and the status of my yoga teacher training program.
You won’t want to miss this great episode!
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Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold it's all about and write,
(00:24):
write your story. Write you write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and I'm so excited
to be here today to record this episode, in part
because i have a really fun update to share with you,
and in part because I'm excited to talk about the
topic that i want to talk about today. And these
two things correlate and coincide. But first I'll start with
the update, which is that I just made it back
(00:51):
from a week long trip in Montana where I was
certified to become a yoga teacher. I have been working
towards the certification for six months now, I guess in
January of twenty twenty five, and have been working so hard,
putting in so much physical effort, so much emotional effort,
so much mental spiritual effort. And I'm so proud of
(01:11):
myself and so thrilled to finally have completed this program.
It's a two hundred hour teacher training program, and it's
just the beginning. There's so much more left to learn.
But I really do feel so excited and proud of
myself that I did this. I set off to achieve
this certification at the beginning of the year and it
felt so daunting at the time, you know, putting in
(01:31):
two hundred hours of training. And here I am. I'm
standing at the end of the program and I'm finished,
and I had the most amazing week in Montana. I
feel like I came home stronger and with so much
to share, and so I'm just really thrilled to be
able to be here and share some of that with you.
The topic I want to talk about today is related
to what I learned when I was in Montana, and
the topic has to do with this idea that we
(01:53):
have in our culture right now of optimizing our lives.
This is a topic that's been around for a long time,
but I feel like it's all so become somewhat of
an obsession in our culture lately. This obsession we have
with optimizing our lives and optimizing our habits and optimizing
our eating and optimizing our health. And while I don't
think there's anything wrong with trying to get a set
of habits in place or putting certain things in our
(02:14):
life on autopilots so that we don't have to think
about them, in fact, some of that can be great
and really helpful and extremely supportive and provide the needed
scaffolding so that we can achieve the things that we
want to achieve in our life and also just feel
good all the way around. So I'm not saying that
no to that or that this is a problem. What
I am suggesting and what I want to unpack today
(02:35):
on today's episode, is this idea that we have that
once we optimize our lives, once we optimize our habits,
once we optimize our health, that then the expectations should
be that we feel good all the time, that we
never really have any issues or problems, we never feel insecure,
we never feel devastated, we're never really heartbroken, we always
(02:57):
have good boundaries, we're always just sort of on top
of everything, we always feel in control of our lives,
we're always you know, in touch with our agency. And
not only is this just unrealistic, but also one of
the big takeaways for me from this experience becoming a
yoga teacher is that these feelings that we have, these
experiences that we have that really challenge us, that push
(03:19):
us outside of our comfort zone, that bump up against
our boundaries. That you know, these moments that we have
of even like having bad boundaries, or having a moment
of heartbreak or losing something we love, or feeling sad
or being frustrated, or having a bad attitude or whatever,
like all these things that we would consider quote unquote
(03:39):
bad are actually the agents of change. They're actually our
agents of growth. And so we're trying to clear out,
to almost rainbow wash our lives or clear out anything
that we would consider negative, trying to optimize and make
it perfect. And this obsession with perfecting and optimizing our
(03:59):
lives actually keeping us from our greatest growth. So what
I am saying is that optimization, optimizing habits, optimizing health
can provide the necessary scaffolding in order to grow, But
we actually don't grow until we touch the suboptimal, until
we touch problems in our lives or negative emotions what
(04:20):
we would call negative emotions, or until we bump up
against our own boundary and push ourselves even past that boundary.
So optimizing can actually become a sort of obstacle to
our own growth. And that's what I want to talk
about today, about how some of us might be avoiding
the very thing that could invite us into a deeper growth.
If you think about how stories operate, and if we're
(04:42):
looking at our lives through the lens of storytelling, a
narrative arc is built through the tension of problems. And
I've talked about this many times before, so I'll just
kind of blow past this quickly. But I've talked about
before how problems are the fuel of stories. Problems fuel stories.
Without problems, there is no story. So I say, in
the book and write your story. I talk about how
(05:03):
a push up without gravity isn't meaningful. It's just kind
of a meaningless motion. It's not going to make you
any stronger. Gravity is the agent of change inside of
a push up that makes you stronger. You have something
that you have to push against. It is, in one view,
the problem. It's the energy that you're pushing against. It's
the obstacle that's in the way of making the motion
(05:26):
that you're trying to make. And yet that very obstacle
is what generates the strength, it's what builds the muscle.
And so without these obstacles inside of our story, there
is no story. A story without problems is a meaningless story.
It's pointless, it's purposeless. And yet so many of us
are trying to clean out our lives of these problems
by optimizing every aspect of our lives. And while I
(05:49):
think optimization can provide some support for us, I also
think that an obsession with optimization might be keeping you
from your growth. So let me start by saying, I've
wanted to become a yoga teacher for a really long time.
I can remember walking into my very first yoga class
in September of twenty fifteen. Months later, I filed for divorce,
(06:09):
and there's no accident there. There's definitely a correlation in
between starting my own yoga practice, coming into more contact
with myself, with my own embodiment with you know, just
paying closer attention honestly, like being in touch with my
body and how I was feeling, and also the disillusion
of my marriage. There's definitely no accident there. But during
(06:29):
my divorce, during the years after I separated and then
divorced from my ex husband. Yoga and the community there
and the teachers and the studio became an absolute support
system for me and just really carried me through a
very dark time in my life. And so I fell
in love with yoga. I fell in love with the
practice of showing up every day, the practice of hearing
(06:50):
myself more clearly, the practice of paying attention to my body,
the practice of being in contact with these other people,
the practice of learning from the teachers and the studio
and the two teachers and the people just became this
massive support system to me over the course of the
next several years. And then fast forward. I'm skipping over
a lot of the story here, but fast forward to
twenty twenty when I was living in LA and I
(07:11):
was a part of a yoga studio there. Actually, like
total side note, but one of the teachers who I
first took class from at how Yoga of East Nashville
moved to LA with his girlfriend around the same time
that I moved to LA and they opened a studio
there called Golden State Yoga. So I was taking class
from one of the same teachers that I started with,
just in a different location, which was really cool and
(07:32):
such an amazing serendipity that it worked out that way.
So I was attending yoga classes at Golden State Yoga
and then one other studio in the area when shutdown happened,
And when shutdown happened, all the yoga studios had to close,
and especially in LA it was a wild time to
be in such a densely populated area. But the restrictions
were incredibly strict, and so yoga studios were closed. There
(07:54):
wasn't any way to attend a class with a community
of people. And I did for a while keep doing
yoga in my lib room using you know, videos or
zoom or whatever. But I was pregnant at the time
and it just was really challenging for me to keep
up my practice when I didn't have the community that
I was used to. That was one of the big
draws for me was the community was just seeing people,
(08:16):
and even if these weren't people that I was like
hanging out with all the time, it was just like
coming together to do this practice together was a big
part of the draw for me. And so when I
was doing yoga alone in my living room, it just
kind of lost its luster. So when I moved back
to Nashville. I started taking a few classes here and there,
but I just didn't really get back fully into my
yoga practice, and then immediately got pregnant with Charlie and
(08:37):
just kind of a slippery slope from there, like I
just fell out of the practice of doing yoga every day.
So then fast forward again in twenty twenty four, when
I decided I wanted to do a teacher training. I
was researching all these different teacher trainings. I couldn't really
find one that worked great with my schedule. Then when
I found out that Hot Yogavas Nashville was doing a
teacher training and Brooke, who owns the studio, is a
friend of mine and I've known her forever since twenty fifteen.
(08:58):
When I started doing yoga, I reached out to her
and asked her about the dates and was like crossing
my fingers that this was going to work. So I
reached out to Brooke. I asked her about the requirements
for becoming a yoga teacher, for going through the two
hundred hour teacher training program, and when she listed out
the requirements for me, I just basically immediately was like, Okay, Well,
I guess that's not going to work for me, because
one of the requirements was to go to Montana for
(09:19):
eight days to do the second half of your certification.
And in my head, I was like, Okay, I have
a three year old and a four year old. Our
life is nuts. There's just no possible way that I
could up and leave for eight days and leave Matt
here to take the kids by himself and all that
comes along with that. And so I was like, Okay,
thanks for the info, but no thanks, I probably won't
be able to make it. But I did go into
(09:41):
my calendar and block off the Montana dates just in case,
and I wrote in there something like, where there's a will,
there's a way, Ali is in Montana for teacher training,
And just blocked off all the dates in iCal and
then shared the invite with Matt and just started kind
of thinking in that direction and hoping and putting some
plans together. If I we're going to go to Montana,
(10:01):
maybe this is what it would look like. So I
walk off these dates on my calendar. I'm feeling like
this is such a pipe dream. And then as I
moved through last fall, things just kind of started to
fall into place. Like One is, I made the decision
(10:22):
to take a step back from my coaching practice, and
that cleared a bunch of space. Two is, I lost
my dad last fall. Many of you know that, and
that experience of losing my dad just made me think
about the brevity of life. About how I mean, my
dad was sixty nine years old, he was out on
a twenty mile bike ride with a friend, he had
a cardiac arrest and was just gone in a second.
(10:44):
And so it just made me think about the brevity
of life and how you all we have is this moment.
And so I think that kind of opened up some
space for me too, And over the course of the
rest of the fall, I just started to set my
mind to this thing that I was going to do
this yoga teacher training, or at least that I was
going to stay really open to it and trust that
if it was meant for me, that it wouldn't pass
(11:05):
me by. And by December I made the decision to
officially sign up. And one of the requirements the reason
I tell the story this way. Let me just back
up a little bit. The reason I tell the story
is this way is so that you can see that
by the time I had signed up for teacher training,
I was not convinced that I had the time for
it or the space for it. I knew that leaving
(11:26):
my kids for eight days was going to be just
wildly difficult. I had never been away from them for
more than like forty eight hours. The other requirements that
came along with it, like the we were required to
go to classes six days a week starting in January
and February, and then we had weekend long trainings where
we would be in training all day Saturday and all
day Sunday for several weekends in a row. So that requirement,
(11:50):
just the physical requirement, even of that came on the
heels of me not practicing yoga consistently or not even
really working out consistently for a couple of years through
second half of my pregnancy with Nella. Most of my
pregnancy with Charlie, I walked, but I really didn't do
any other exercising than that. And I had done like,
you know, little exercise workout groups with some friends and stuff,
(12:13):
but it wasn't a consistent practice. And so I came
into this yoga practice with the requirement of six days
a week at the yoga studio in the hot room,
doing these intense powerflow classes without a base to support that.
So I really just kind of threw myself in the
deep end, which you'll see when I start to talk
about what I want to talk about today why this
background is important. But essentially I want you to get
(12:34):
the picture that I come into this training in January
completely out of shape, or maybe not completely out of shape,
that's not really fair to say, but pretty out of
shape with the requirement that I'm supposed to do six
hot power flow classes a week and the type of
logistical planning that came into getting my kids covered for
those six days a week, getting myself to the studio
six days a week. Just physically getting on the mat
(12:57):
and doing our class six days a week was way
past my boundary for or I'll use that term kind
of loosely, but like way past what I assumed I
could do physically, way past what I assumed I could
do emotionally, way past what I assumed I could do mentally,
way past my boundary for what I assumed that I
had the space and the capacity for. And yet there
(13:17):
was this quiet knowing, this like gnawing at my soul
that this was where I was supposed to be and
what I was supposed to be doing, and a sense
like all you have to do is just show up
on the mat and do the next thing. You know,
if you show up to a class and you're feeling
exhausted and your body is totally spent, it's your practice
and it's your class, and you can lay on the
mat the whole time if you need to. You can
(13:38):
sit in child's pos you can lay on your back
in Shabbasna, And so just a willingness to show up
and do the thing and have the practice even if
it wasn't optimized, even if it wasn't perfect, especially if
it wasn't perfect. And this is one of the things
I think a yoga practice teaches us is that this
idea that there's no such thing as optimization. There's no
such thing as optimization. You will never reach a point
(14:00):
in your yoga practice where the practice is perfect and
there's nothing else to learn. There's always deeper to go,
there's always more to learn, there's always more strength to gain,
and there's always more presence. There's always you know, we
talked about a lot. One of the teachers who came
with us on this trip to Montana is my teacher
whose name is Missy, and Missy talked a lot about
(14:20):
the outer yoga versus the inner yoga. And I think
this is such an important point. That you have the
outer yoga, which is the postures, the asanas, the poses
that you move through, and the physical practice of it.
You know, that's a necessary part of yoga, that you're
moving through these physical astinas. And if you never move
through the physical postures, you're not really doing yoga. And
(14:41):
if you never moved through the breath, you're also not
doing yoga. And if you never do what she calls
the inner yoga, you're also not doing yoga. So each
of us came to this Montana retreat over the weekend
with requirements for outer yoga. We had to do a
practice every morning, We had to do you know, other
physical practices. We went hiking, we went walking, we did
(15:01):
cold plunges, we were in the sana, we did breath work,
we did all these different physical practices. But all of
us also came to the table with the inner yoga,
which is the interior work that is trying to be
done in us and through us through this experience. So
the outer yoga is only as important as it moves
(15:22):
us into the inner yoga. Both matter, both need to exist.
Without the outer yoga, there could be no inner yoga.
And yet the inner yoga is where all the goodnesses,
It's where all the juicinesses, It's where what really matters
takes place. And if all we're ever doing is optimizing
our lives, I just don't think we ever get to
(15:42):
the inner yoga. We don't ever get to the outer yoga.
Because if you're focused and obsessed with optimizing your habits,
optimizing your health, optimizing your life, only feeling good all
of the time, then you never have to move into
the growth of feeling bad, the growth of feeling angry,
the growth of feeling sad, the growth of feeling loss,
(16:04):
the growth of feeling trauma, the growth of feeling PTSD,
the growth of feeling whatever it is that comes up
for you when you're doing the awestiness, the postures, the practice.
So one of the things that was required of us
in the week that we were in Montana was to
do this thirteen mile hike that you could feel from
the beginning, from even the moment that we received the
(16:26):
itinerary and we knew that this thirteen mile hike was
on the itinerary. All of us have been training since
January to do this yoga program. We've been doing yoga
six days a week. We're all in decent shape. But
when you think about a thirteen mile hike that has
a three thousand foot elevation gain, people start to go like,
oh gosh, I don't know if I can do that,
And so there was grumblings among the group. As we
(16:46):
were talking to each other. People were saying like, I
probably am gonna skip the hike, you know, or oh gosh,
I'm nervous about that weld. Maybe we should train for
the hike. Should we do a practice hike here in
Nashville before we go to Montana? And even up until
the day before we went on the hike, there were
people asking is this required? Do we have to go?
Can we stay back and practice our yoga flows instead
of going on the hike, And the answer that came
(17:09):
back was very clearly no, this is part of the requirement.
We're going on this thirteen mile hike. And so we're
six days into the trip. It's day number seven. We're
required to do this thirteen mile hike where our bodies
are already exhausted, We're already tired. And on the one hand,
you might say, from an optimization standpoint, it's like, no,
(17:30):
this is my boundary. I'm tired, my body's spent, I'm
not doing this thirteen mile hike. And yet here it is.
It's part of the requirement. We're having to move through
this thirteen mile hike in order to achieve the thing
that we came to achieve. And this is how stories operate, right.
There's a hero in the story who wants something. They
want to become certified as a yoga instructor. And in
order to get that something, they have to move through pain,
(17:53):
move through problems, move through gravity, move through pushing against
an obstacle, something that's against them, a villain in the story.
They have to move through these things in order to
achieve the thing that they want. And if they don't
move through these things, they never achieve the thing that
they want. And also they never transform, they never become different,
they never change. And so, yes, you can optimize your life.
(18:16):
You can set a boundary. You can say, like, you know,
that's too much for me, I'm not going to do that.
There's nothing wrong with any of those things. I think
there's definitely a place in a moment to say this
is too much for me. I've reached my end. You know,
I don't have anything more to give. And at the
same time, this is the piece that I want to add,
just add some nuance to this conversation. That also, when
you push yourself past your limit, when you, with agency
(18:40):
and with willingness and with openness, say this does feel
like too much for me, but I'm choosing to move
through it anyway, you also open a portal to a
transformation into a new person, into a different version of you,
a braver, a more confident version of you, a happier
version of you, a more optimized version of you, without optimizing,
(19:03):
without needing to hit the dials and get it all
perfect so that you only feel good all the time.
So we all go on this thirteen mile hike, many
of us go with a sort of grumbling. We're like,
oh my god, how are we going to make it
to the top. And you can witness on the hike
each of us reach our endpoint. And you know, we're
all on kind of different we're all different ages, we're
(19:25):
all different physical body types. We're all different, like you know,
even though we're all in decent yoga shape, all kind
of in different cardiovascular shape. And so you have Brooke
who's leading the program, who just like can power up
the mountain no problem. And then you have others on
the hike, like me, for example, who are recognizing and
realizing that this thirteen mile hike is going to push
(19:45):
me past my limit. It's going to push me past
where I would optimally go. And one of the things
Missy shared when we were on the hike is that
Baptiste Baron Baptiste, who was the yoga teacher who trained her,
I used to say, or still does say that the
posture begins the minute you want to come out of it.
(20:06):
In other words, the yoga posture, the awesina, the moving
physical practice begins the moment you don't want to do it.
And when you think about it that way, you think
back to me in my living room doing the yoga
postures alone during the pandemic, feeling lost, feeling scared, feeling terrified,
feeling you know, sad, feeling the loss of my community,
(20:29):
the loss of my practice, the loss of my rhythms,
the loss of my optimization. I picture myself in my
living room alone doing those yoga postures, and that is
really the beginning of my inner yoga. The inner yoga
began the moment I stopped wanting to do the astinas,
the moment I stopped wanting to do the postures. And
I have so much compassion and so much grace for
(20:51):
that version of myself that let my physical practice drop
off at that point. And I can even look back
and say, the inner yoga was still happening, you know,
and has happened at a much more accelerated rate as
soon as I've rediscovered the physical postures and come back
to my physical practice. But the inner yoga didn't stop
happening just because I chose to opt out of that practice.
(21:15):
The inner yoga was still taking place, still inviting me
back into the practice, still inviting me to become a teacher,
still inviting me through this training program, still inviting me
to show up at a studio or for a little bit.
I hired my friend Rachel, who came and did private
lessons for me when I was pregnant with Charlie. So
my yoga practice became very sporadic, but the inner yoga
was still taking place, and it's the awesome as it's
(21:35):
the outer yoga that pushes us deeper into that inner yoga.
I had a teacher back in twenty fifteen through I
don't know twenty sixteen seventeen who used to say that
we stopped coming to yoga when we stopped wanting to change.
And I think that there's a lot of truth to
that now that I think back on my journey, I
stopped going to yoga. I'll edit her statement a little
(21:56):
bit and say I stopped going to yoga when I
stopped feeling safe to change. When the pandemic happened, when
I went into fight or flight survival mode, I was
five months pregnant. I was trying to figure out, you know,
my husband had just shut down his business. I had
become the breadwinner. I was trying to figure out how
we were going to support our family. I was scared
about the birth process. I didn't know how that was
going to go. I was completely overwhelmed and flooded. It
(22:19):
was not optimal at all. It was extremely suboptimal. And
yet moving through that dark time in my life became
the inner yoga. It became the breeding ground, the training
for all of the growth that's happening in my life
right now. And do I wish I would have stayed
in the Austina Practice. Yes, I think if I could
(22:39):
have stayed in the Austina Practice, I would have felt
more supported to move through that dark time. And yet
it was all perfect. It was all part of the
journey that I was on, and I'm so grateful to
be back in the practice now. So we all do
(23:01):
this thirteen mile hike. We all come to the bottom
of the mountain and are reflecting on our experience of
pushing ourselves way past our limits and just feeling the
most insane feeling of accomplishment. I don't know if you've
had an experience like this, but if you've ever hiked
to the top of a mountain that you didn't think
you could, you know, done something you felt like you
(23:21):
couldn't do, hike to the top of a mountain, or
run a marathon, or you know, finished a ten k
or anything like that. If you've ever done something physically
that you didn't think you could do, or if you
have given birth to a child and you thought, God,
there's no way that I'm going to be able to
do this, it's just too much. It's way too much pain.
And you've moved through the pain and you've achieved the thing,
(23:42):
you know, the feeling of absolute elation that comes after
where you realize, oh my gosh, I am capable of
so much more than I thought I was. I just
did that, I just conquered that mountain. I just achieved
that thing. And in order to have that sense of
I'm capable of more than I thought I was, we
have to come into touch with the edge, come into
(24:04):
touch with the boundary. We have to push past the
place where we think is the farthest that we could
possibly go. And I think this is a little counter
cultural and maybe even a tiny bit counterintuitive because we're
so focused rightfully so for a lot of good reasons.
We're so focused on boundaries and an optimization like I've
been talking about, and just sort of like finding the
sweet spot, feeling happy all the time, feeling good all
(24:25):
the time, only doing things that make us really, you know,
come alive, or only doing things that we really enjoy doing,
and saying no to things we don't enjoy and no
to things that push us. I think there's a place
for that, and I guess what I'm getting at is
bringing nuance to the conversation and coming in on the
other side of it. There's also a place for going way,
way past your limits and just seeing how far you're
(24:48):
capable of going, testing challenging your capacity and realizing, oh
my god, I did that. I went to yoga six
days a week for all of January and all February,
and five days a week for most of the rest
of the year. Then I go to Montana. I do
this thirteen mile hike that I don't think I can do.
I come to the bottom, I'm so exhausted. I feel
(25:08):
like I'm like completely tapped out, and I wake up
the next morning and keep on doing yoga. We did
on our final day of certification, we did twelve back
to back thirty minute yoga practices. Each of us had
to teach a yoga practice, and so there were twelve
of us in the group. Each of us taught a
flow and everyone had to take everyone's flow. So from
seven thirty in the morning until three in the afternoon,
(25:28):
three thirty we were doing NonStop yoga. After the thirteen
mile hike, so we're completely spent, we feel like we
have nothing left. We come home, we eat a meal,
we sleep, we wake up seven to thirty back at it, practicing,
and it just the experience really taught me that we're
capable of so much more than we think we are,
and that if we get obsessed with optimizing our lives,
(25:49):
if we get obsessed with only feeling happy all the time,
we miss out on all the depth and all of
the capacity, and all of the meaning and all of
the strength that each of us have. There's a time
and a place for optimizing. I think optimizing can be
extremely helpful, But I would challenge us as a culture
against getting stuck in the rut of optimization, of thinking
(26:11):
that in your story, as part of your story, that
you should feel good all the time. Because there is
no story that I've ever heard that I was interested
in where the main character feels good all the time,
where the hero is happy from start to finish. No
no frustration, sadness, anger, fear, All of those emotions are
what push us to change. They're what motivate the hero
(26:32):
to achieve, what motivate the hero toward the transformation. Without
the problem, there is no story, or the story is
meaningless and boring, And I'm not in the camp of
drumming up unnecessary problems or unnecessary drama in order to
make a good story out of our lives. But I
would say if you can open your eyes and look around,
you will see that there are problems all around you
(26:54):
that need to be fixed. That we're living in an
era where the problems are actually quite glaring, and where
there's a lot of aspiration, where there's a lot of
ways that we could aspire to be better. And that's
for us personally, and for us globally and as small
communities and as a culture. There's so much that we
(27:14):
could aspire to achieve. There's so much that we could
aspire to change. And when you aspire to change something,
when you aspire to achieve something, inevitably in your story,
immediate problems pop up. You think, well, that's impossible. No
one's ever going to change that. That's just the way
it's always been. There's no way i could make it
to yoga classes six days a week. I've got two
kids that I've got to take care of. There's no
(27:35):
way i could leave for Montana for eight days. That
would be way too much to ask of Matt. And
as we face these problems, one by one we realize
that actually the problems can be overcome, and when we
do overcome them, we feel the most amazing sense of
achievement and confidence and pride in ourselves, and it gives
(27:57):
us a hunger to want to keep going, to keep changing,
to keep overcoming. That hunger is what I would call
the human spirit. The human spirit is incredibly resilient. The
human spirit always wants to overcome. The human spirit keeps
going and going and going, and has a remarkable will
(28:17):
to heal, a remarkable will to survive, a remarkable will
to connect with others, to be in community, a remarkable
will to make things better. That is your human nature.
It's your human spirit. If you're feeling that, if you're
feeling it bubbling up inside of you, just know that
whatever you set your sights on, you think, oh, I
(28:38):
can't achieve that because of X, Y, and Z, That's
exactly those obstacles in your way are exactly what you
need in order to transform into the type of person
who can achieve exactly that. Does that make sense? You're
the hero in the story. You want something aspirational, You say, oh,
(29:01):
I could never have that because of all these problems
that are in my way. Those problems are the recipe.
They are the exact recipe for the perfect amount of change.
They are the recipe for your transformation. They are the
(29:22):
recipe for the person who you want to become. Those
problems are exactly what you need. So instead of optimizing
those problems, instead of optimizing your life so that you
never have to face a problem like that, why not
come at the problems head on. Why not just say,
you know what, these problems are going to push me
past my limit. I'm going to see the worst side
of myself. I'm going to see parts of myself come
out that I didn't know were there. I'm going to
(29:43):
have to face my shadow. The best example I can
think of for this is becoming a mother. For me,
the transition into motherhood for me has been quite bumpy,
and I've seen sides of myself come out that I
would like to wish weren't there. I would like to
assume that I just, you know, a nice, happy person
all the time. And when people talk about mom rage,
(30:04):
they talk about it for a reason Because there is
the perfect set of circumstances when you have little people
depending on you for absolutely every need and when the
level of overstimulation is the way that it is in parenting,
it's the perfect recipe to bring out the worst parts
of you, to bring out your rage, to bring out
your selfishness, to bring out and I say that, I
(30:28):
don't mean selfishness, like it's not selfish to want to
sit in peace and eat a meal alone, but to
bring out like the very human parts of us, like
we are not above this, None of us are above this.
Given the right set of circumstances and given the right pressures,
your own rage will also come out. Your own you know,
(30:51):
self centeredness, your own ego, your own focus on what's
good for you, your own competitive edge, all of these qualities
will come out of you under the right circumstances. Your
willingness to steal or lie or cheat or break the
rules like you know, those when we're put under pressure
are when those elements come out of us. And it's
so good for us to face our own shadow, to
(31:13):
just be humbled and realize I'm also human. You know,
I'm only a human and I can only handle so much.
And to have grace for ourselves in those moments. And
I think we miss out on those moments of learning
when our life is perfectly optimized and we only feel
good all the time. I think this is not only
an impossible goal to achieve the idea that we could
optimize our lives, but it's also something that is getting
(31:34):
in the way of our own growth. It's getting in
the way of you becoming the person that you know
you can be. And so maybe we don't optimize our lives.
Maybe we instead embrace the problems. Maybe we embrace the conflict.
Maybe we embrace the shortcomings, the downfalls of our own personality,
the dark side of who we are as a person.
(31:56):
Maybe we discover as we face these problems with courage
that we actually are so much stronger than we thought
we were, and that we don't have to be perfect.
There's no such thing as being perfect or optimal. That
we can just be perfectly ourselves and that that can
be enough. I hope that helps you. I hope that
it gives you some food for thought and just something
to think about in your own life. I also would
(32:18):
love to see you at the yoga studio if you're
in Nashville, if you live here, or if you're visiting,
I would love to see you at the studio. My
teaching schedule is changing from week to week, so check
out my instagram at Ali Fallon. Find me there and
I will post real time updates of when I'm teaching
because I'm teaching sometimes on Fridays and sometimes on Thursday mornings.
But I would love to see you in a class.
I would love to have you come practice with me.
If you're new to yoga, great, come on down. It's
(32:41):
a great time to get started. It's a really great workout.
It's fun, it's a really cool way to move your body.
It brings you into more alignment and attunement with yourself.
There's so much that yoga has to offer, and I'm
so grateful that I get to share this practice with others.
That has been such a massive support and encouragement to me.
I would love to share it with you too, So
come on down and see me at Hayoab Snashville again.
(33:03):
Check out my instagram at Ali Fallon and you can
get links and real time updates for when I'm teaching
until next time. I will see you back next week
on the Write Your Story podcast.
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold it's all about and write,
(00:24):
write your story. Write you write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and I'm so excited
to be here today to record this episode, in part
because i have a really fun update to share with you,
and in part because I'm excited to talk about the
topic that i want to talk about today. And these
two things correlate and coincide. But first I'll start with
the update, which is that I just made it back
(00:51):
from a week long trip in Montana where I was
certified to become a yoga teacher. I have been working
towards the certification for six months now, I guess in
January of twenty twenty five, and have been working so hard,
putting in so much physical effort, so much emotional effort,
so much mental spiritual effort. And I'm so proud of
(01:11):
myself and so thrilled to finally have completed this program.
It's a two hundred hour teacher training program, and it's
just the beginning. There's so much more left to learn.
But I really do feel so excited and proud of
myself that I did this. I set off to achieve
this certification at the beginning of the year and it
felt so daunting at the time, you know, putting in
(01:31):
two hundred hours of training. And here I am. I'm
standing at the end of the program and I'm finished,
and I had the most amazing week in Montana. I
feel like I came home stronger and with so much
to share, and so I'm just really thrilled to be
able to be here and share some of that with you.
The topic I want to talk about today is related
to what I learned when I was in Montana, and
the topic has to do with this idea that we
(01:53):
have in our culture right now of optimizing our lives.
This is a topic that's been around for a long time,
but I feel like it's all so become somewhat of
an obsession in our culture lately. This obsession we have
with optimizing our lives and optimizing our habits and optimizing
our eating and optimizing our health. And while I don't
think there's anything wrong with trying to get a set
of habits in place or putting certain things in our
(02:14):
life on autopilots so that we don't have to think
about them, in fact, some of that can be great
and really helpful and extremely supportive and provide the needed
scaffolding so that we can achieve the things that we
want to achieve in our life and also just feel
good all the way around. So I'm not saying that
no to that or that this is a problem. What
I am suggesting and what I want to unpack today
(02:35):
on today's episode, is this idea that we have that
once we optimize our lives, once we optimize our habits,
once we optimize our health, that then the expectations should
be that we feel good all the time, that we
never really have any issues or problems, we never feel insecure,
we never feel devastated, we're never really heartbroken, we always
(02:57):
have good boundaries, we're always just sort of on top
of everything, we always feel in control of our lives,
we're always you know, in touch with our agency. And
not only is this just unrealistic, but also one of
the big takeaways for me from this experience becoming a
yoga teacher is that these feelings that we have, these
experiences that we have that really challenge us, that push
(03:19):
us outside of our comfort zone, that bump up against
our boundaries. That you know, these moments that we have
of even like having bad boundaries, or having a moment
of heartbreak or losing something we love, or feeling sad
or being frustrated, or having a bad attitude or whatever,
like all these things that we would consider quote unquote
(03:39):
bad are actually the agents of change. They're actually our
agents of growth. And so we're trying to clear out,
to almost rainbow wash our lives or clear out anything
that we would consider negative, trying to optimize and make
it perfect. And this obsession with perfecting and optimizing our
(03:59):
lives actually keeping us from our greatest growth. So what
I am saying is that optimization, optimizing habits, optimizing health
can provide the necessary scaffolding in order to grow, But
we actually don't grow until we touch the suboptimal, until
we touch problems in our lives or negative emotions what
(04:20):
we would call negative emotions, or until we bump up
against our own boundary and push ourselves even past that boundary.
So optimizing can actually become a sort of obstacle to
our own growth. And that's what I want to talk
about today, about how some of us might be avoiding
the very thing that could invite us into a deeper growth.
If you think about how stories operate, and if we're
(04:42):
looking at our lives through the lens of storytelling, a
narrative arc is built through the tension of problems. And
I've talked about this many times before, so I'll just
kind of blow past this quickly. But I've talked about
before how problems are the fuel of stories. Problems fuel stories.
Without problems, there is no story. So I say, in
the book and write your story. I talk about how
(05:03):
a push up without gravity isn't meaningful. It's just kind
of a meaningless motion. It's not going to make you
any stronger. Gravity is the agent of change inside of
a push up that makes you stronger. You have something
that you have to push against. It is, in one view,
the problem. It's the energy that you're pushing against. It's
the obstacle that's in the way of making the motion
(05:26):
that you're trying to make. And yet that very obstacle
is what generates the strength, it's what builds the muscle.
And so without these obstacles inside of our story, there
is no story. A story without problems is a meaningless story.
It's pointless, it's purposeless. And yet so many of us
are trying to clean out our lives of these problems
by optimizing every aspect of our lives. And while I
(05:49):
think optimization can provide some support for us, I also
think that an obsession with optimization might be keeping you
from your growth. So let me start by saying, I've
wanted to become a yoga teacher for a really long time.
I can remember walking into my very first yoga class
in September of twenty fifteen. Months later, I filed for divorce,
(06:09):
and there's no accident there. There's definitely a correlation in
between starting my own yoga practice, coming into more contact
with myself, with my own embodiment with you know, just
paying closer attention honestly, like being in touch with my
body and how I was feeling, and also the disillusion
of my marriage. There's definitely no accident there. But during
(06:29):
my divorce, during the years after I separated and then
divorced from my ex husband. Yoga and the community there
and the teachers and the studio became an absolute support
system for me and just really carried me through a
very dark time in my life. And so I fell
in love with yoga. I fell in love with the
practice of showing up every day, the practice of hearing
(06:50):
myself more clearly, the practice of paying attention to my body,
the practice of being in contact with these other people,
the practice of learning from the teachers and the studio
and the two teachers and the people just became this
massive support system to me over the course of the
next several years. And then fast forward. I'm skipping over
a lot of the story here, but fast forward to
twenty twenty when I was living in LA and I
(07:11):
was a part of a yoga studio there. Actually, like
total side note, but one of the teachers who I
first took class from at how Yoga of East Nashville
moved to LA with his girlfriend around the same time
that I moved to LA and they opened a studio
there called Golden State Yoga. So I was taking class
from one of the same teachers that I started with,
just in a different location, which was really cool and
(07:32):
such an amazing serendipity that it worked out that way.
So I was attending yoga classes at Golden State Yoga
and then one other studio in the area when shutdown happened,
And when shutdown happened, all the yoga studios had to close,
and especially in LA it was a wild time to
be in such a densely populated area. But the restrictions
were incredibly strict, and so yoga studios were closed. There
(07:54):
wasn't any way to attend a class with a community
of people. And I did for a while keep doing
yoga in my lib room using you know, videos or
zoom or whatever. But I was pregnant at the time
and it just was really challenging for me to keep
up my practice when I didn't have the community that
I was used to. That was one of the big
draws for me was the community was just seeing people,
(08:16):
and even if these weren't people that I was like
hanging out with all the time, it was just like
coming together to do this practice together was a big
part of the draw for me. And so when I
was doing yoga alone in my living room, it just
kind of lost its luster. So when I moved back
to Nashville. I started taking a few classes here and there,
but I just didn't really get back fully into my
yoga practice, and then immediately got pregnant with Charlie and
(08:37):
just kind of a slippery slope from there, like I
just fell out of the practice of doing yoga every day.
So then fast forward again in twenty twenty four, when
I decided I wanted to do a teacher training. I
was researching all these different teacher trainings. I couldn't really
find one that worked great with my schedule. Then when
I found out that Hot Yogavas Nashville was doing a
teacher training and Brooke, who owns the studio, is a
friend of mine and I've known her forever since twenty fifteen.
(08:58):
When I started doing yoga, I reached out to her
and asked her about the dates and was like crossing
my fingers that this was going to work. So I
reached out to Brooke. I asked her about the requirements
for becoming a yoga teacher, for going through the two
hundred hour teacher training program, and when she listed out
the requirements for me, I just basically immediately was like, Okay, Well,
I guess that's not going to work for me, because
one of the requirements was to go to Montana for
(09:19):
eight days to do the second half of your certification.
And in my head, I was like, Okay, I have
a three year old and a four year old. Our
life is nuts. There's just no possible way that I
could up and leave for eight days and leave Matt
here to take the kids by himself and all that
comes along with that. And so I was like, Okay,
thanks for the info, but no thanks, I probably won't
be able to make it. But I did go into
(09:41):
my calendar and block off the Montana dates just in case,
and I wrote in there something like, where there's a will,
there's a way, Ali is in Montana for teacher training,
And just blocked off all the dates in iCal and
then shared the invite with Matt and just started kind
of thinking in that direction and hoping and putting some
plans together. If I we're going to go to Montana,
(10:01):
maybe this is what it would look like. So I
walk off these dates on my calendar. I'm feeling like
this is such a pipe dream. And then as I
moved through last fall, things just kind of started to
fall into place. Like One is, I made the decision
(10:22):
to take a step back from my coaching practice, and
that cleared a bunch of space. Two is, I lost
my dad last fall. Many of you know that, and
that experience of losing my dad just made me think
about the brevity of life. About how I mean, my
dad was sixty nine years old, he was out on
a twenty mile bike ride with a friend, he had
a cardiac arrest and was just gone in a second.
(10:44):
And so it just made me think about the brevity
of life and how you all we have is this moment.
And so I think that kind of opened up some
space for me too, And over the course of the
rest of the fall, I just started to set my
mind to this thing that I was going to do
this yoga teacher training, or at least that I was
going to stay really open to it and trust that
if it was meant for me, that it wouldn't pass
(11:05):
me by. And by December I made the decision to
officially sign up. And one of the requirements the reason
I tell the story this way. Let me just back
up a little bit. The reason I tell the story
is this way is so that you can see that
by the time I had signed up for teacher training,
I was not convinced that I had the time for
it or the space for it. I knew that leaving
(11:26):
my kids for eight days was going to be just
wildly difficult. I had never been away from them for
more than like forty eight hours. The other requirements that
came along with it, like the we were required to
go to classes six days a week starting in January
and February, and then we had weekend long trainings where
we would be in training all day Saturday and all
day Sunday for several weekends in a row. So that requirement,
(11:50):
just the physical requirement, even of that came on the
heels of me not practicing yoga consistently or not even
really working out consistently for a couple of years through
second half of my pregnancy with Nella. Most of my
pregnancy with Charlie, I walked, but I really didn't do
any other exercising than that. And I had done like,
you know, little exercise workout groups with some friends and stuff,
(12:13):
but it wasn't a consistent practice. And so I came
into this yoga practice with the requirement of six days
a week at the yoga studio in the hot room,
doing these intense powerflow classes without a base to support that.
So I really just kind of threw myself in the
deep end, which you'll see when I start to talk
about what I want to talk about today why this
background is important. But essentially I want you to get
(12:34):
the picture that I come into this training in January
completely out of shape, or maybe not completely out of shape,
that's not really fair to say, but pretty out of
shape with the requirement that I'm supposed to do six
hot power flow classes a week and the type of
logistical planning that came into getting my kids covered for
those six days a week, getting myself to the studio
six days a week. Just physically getting on the mat
(12:57):
and doing our class six days a week was way
past my boundary for or I'll use that term kind
of loosely, but like way past what I assumed I
could do physically, way past what I assumed I could
do emotionally, way past what I assumed I could do mentally,
way past my boundary for what I assumed that I
had the space and the capacity for. And yet there
(13:17):
was this quiet knowing, this like gnawing at my soul
that this was where I was supposed to be and
what I was supposed to be doing, and a sense
like all you have to do is just show up
on the mat and do the next thing. You know,
if you show up to a class and you're feeling
exhausted and your body is totally spent, it's your practice
and it's your class, and you can lay on the
mat the whole time if you need to. You can
(13:38):
sit in child's pos you can lay on your back
in Shabbasna, And so just a willingness to show up
and do the thing and have the practice even if
it wasn't optimized, even if it wasn't perfect, especially if
it wasn't perfect. And this is one of the things
I think a yoga practice teaches us is that this
idea that there's no such thing as optimization. There's no
such thing as optimization. You will never reach a point
(14:00):
in your yoga practice where the practice is perfect and
there's nothing else to learn. There's always deeper to go,
there's always more to learn, there's always more strength to gain,
and there's always more presence. There's always you know, we
talked about a lot. One of the teachers who came
with us on this trip to Montana is my teacher
whose name is Missy, and Missy talked a lot about
(14:20):
the outer yoga versus the inner yoga. And I think
this is such an important point. That you have the
outer yoga, which is the postures, the asanas, the poses
that you move through, and the physical practice of it.
You know, that's a necessary part of yoga, that you're
moving through these physical astinas. And if you never move
through the physical postures, you're not really doing yoga. And
(14:41):
if you never moved through the breath, you're also not
doing yoga. And if you never do what she calls
the inner yoga, you're also not doing yoga. So each
of us came to this Montana retreat over the weekend
with requirements for outer yoga. We had to do a
practice every morning, We had to do you know, other
physical practices. We went hiking, we went walking, we did
(15:01):
cold plunges, we were in the sana, we did breath work,
we did all these different physical practices. But all of
us also came to the table with the inner yoga,
which is the interior work that is trying to be
done in us and through us through this experience. So
the outer yoga is only as important as it moves
(15:22):
us into the inner yoga. Both matter, both need to exist.
Without the outer yoga, there could be no inner yoga.
And yet the inner yoga is where all the goodnesses,
It's where all the juicinesses, It's where what really matters
takes place. And if all we're ever doing is optimizing
our lives, I just don't think we ever get to
(15:42):
the inner yoga. We don't ever get to the outer yoga.
Because if you're focused and obsessed with optimizing your habits,
optimizing your health, optimizing your life, only feeling good all
of the time, then you never have to move into
the growth of feeling bad, the growth of feeling angry,
the growth of feeling sad, the growth of feeling loss,
(16:04):
the growth of feeling trauma, the growth of feeling PTSD,
the growth of feeling whatever it is that comes up
for you when you're doing the awestiness, the postures, the practice.
So one of the things that was required of us
in the week that we were in Montana was to
do this thirteen mile hike that you could feel from
the beginning, from even the moment that we received the
(16:26):
itinerary and we knew that this thirteen mile hike was
on the itinerary. All of us have been training since
January to do this yoga program. We've been doing yoga
six days a week. We're all in decent shape. But
when you think about a thirteen mile hike that has
a three thousand foot elevation gain, people start to go like,
oh gosh, I don't know if I can do that,
And so there was grumblings among the group. As we
(16:46):
were talking to each other. People were saying like, I
probably am gonna skip the hike, you know, or oh gosh,
I'm nervous about that weld. Maybe we should train for
the hike. Should we do a practice hike here in
Nashville before we go to Montana? And even up until
the day before we went on the hike, there were
people asking is this required? Do we have to go?
Can we stay back and practice our yoga flows instead
of going on the hike, And the answer that came
(17:09):
back was very clearly no, this is part of the requirement.
We're going on this thirteen mile hike. And so we're
six days into the trip. It's day number seven. We're
required to do this thirteen mile hike where our bodies
are already exhausted, We're already tired. And on the one hand,
you might say, from an optimization standpoint, it's like, no,
(17:30):
this is my boundary. I'm tired, my body's spent, I'm
not doing this thirteen mile hike. And yet here it is.
It's part of the requirement. We're having to move through
this thirteen mile hike in order to achieve the thing
that we came to achieve. And this is how stories operate, right.
There's a hero in the story who wants something. They
want to become certified as a yoga instructor. And in
order to get that something, they have to move through pain,
(17:53):
move through problems, move through gravity, move through pushing against
an obstacle, something that's against them, a villain in the story.
They have to move through these things in order to
achieve the thing that they want. And if they don't
move through these things, they never achieve the thing that
they want. And also they never transform, they never become different,
they never change. And so, yes, you can optimize your life.
(18:16):
You can set a boundary. You can say, like, you know,
that's too much for me, I'm not going to do that.
There's nothing wrong with any of those things. I think
there's definitely a place in a moment to say this
is too much for me. I've reached my end. You know,
I don't have anything more to give. And at the
same time, this is the piece that I want to add,
just add some nuance to this conversation. That also, when
you push yourself past your limit, when you, with agency
(18:40):
and with willingness and with openness, say this does feel
like too much for me, but I'm choosing to move
through it anyway, you also open a portal to a
transformation into a new person, into a different version of you,
a braver, a more confident version of you, a happier
version of you, a more optimized version of you, without optimizing,
(19:03):
without needing to hit the dials and get it all
perfect so that you only feel good all the time.
So we all go on this thirteen mile hike, many
of us go with a sort of grumbling. We're like,
oh my god, how are we going to make it
to the top. And you can witness on the hike
each of us reach our endpoint. And you know, we're
all on kind of different we're all different ages, we're
(19:25):
all different physical body types. We're all different, like you know,
even though we're all in decent yoga shape, all kind
of in different cardiovascular shape. And so you have Brooke
who's leading the program, who just like can power up
the mountain no problem. And then you have others on
the hike, like me, for example, who are recognizing and
realizing that this thirteen mile hike is going to push
(19:45):
me past my limit. It's going to push me past
where I would optimally go. And one of the things
Missy shared when we were on the hike is that
Baptiste Baron Baptiste, who was the yoga teacher who trained her,
I used to say, or still does say that the
posture begins the minute you want to come out of it.
(20:06):
In other words, the yoga posture, the awesina, the moving
physical practice begins the moment you don't want to do it.
And when you think about it that way, you think
back to me in my living room doing the yoga
postures alone during the pandemic, feeling lost, feeling scared, feeling terrified,
feeling you know, sad, feeling the loss of my community,
(20:29):
the loss of my practice, the loss of my rhythms,
the loss of my optimization. I picture myself in my
living room alone doing those yoga postures, and that is
really the beginning of my inner yoga. The inner yoga
began the moment I stopped wanting to do the astinas,
the moment I stopped wanting to do the postures. And
I have so much compassion and so much grace for
(20:51):
that version of myself that let my physical practice drop
off at that point. And I can even look back
and say, the inner yoga was still happening, you know,
and has happened at a much more accelerated rate as
soon as I've rediscovered the physical postures and come back
to my physical practice. But the inner yoga didn't stop
happening just because I chose to opt out of that practice.
(21:15):
The inner yoga was still taking place, still inviting me
back into the practice, still inviting me to become a teacher,
still inviting me through this training program, still inviting me
to show up at a studio or for a little bit.
I hired my friend Rachel, who came and did private
lessons for me when I was pregnant with Charlie. So
my yoga practice became very sporadic, but the inner yoga
was still taking place, and it's the awesome as it's
(21:35):
the outer yoga that pushes us deeper into that inner yoga.
I had a teacher back in twenty fifteen through I
don't know twenty sixteen seventeen who used to say that
we stopped coming to yoga when we stopped wanting to change.
And I think that there's a lot of truth to
that now that I think back on my journey, I
stopped going to yoga. I'll edit her statement a little
(21:56):
bit and say I stopped going to yoga when I
stopped feeling safe to change. When the pandemic happened, when
I went into fight or flight survival mode, I was
five months pregnant. I was trying to figure out, you know,
my husband had just shut down his business. I had
become the breadwinner. I was trying to figure out how
we were going to support our family. I was scared
about the birth process. I didn't know how that was
going to go. I was completely overwhelmed and flooded. It
(22:19):
was not optimal at all. It was extremely suboptimal. And
yet moving through that dark time in my life became
the inner yoga. It became the breeding ground, the training
for all of the growth that's happening in my life
right now. And do I wish I would have stayed
in the Austina Practice. Yes, I think if I could
(22:39):
have stayed in the Austina Practice, I would have felt
more supported to move through that dark time. And yet
it was all perfect. It was all part of the
journey that I was on, and I'm so grateful to
be back in the practice now. So we all do
(23:01):
this thirteen mile hike. We all come to the bottom
of the mountain and are reflecting on our experience of
pushing ourselves way past our limits and just feeling the
most insane feeling of accomplishment. I don't know if you've
had an experience like this, but if you've ever hiked
to the top of a mountain that you didn't think
you could, you know, done something you felt like you
(23:21):
couldn't do, hike to the top of a mountain, or
run a marathon, or you know, finished a ten k
or anything like that. If you've ever done something physically
that you didn't think you could do, or if you
have given birth to a child and you thought, God,
there's no way that I'm going to be able to
do this, it's just too much. It's way too much pain.
And you've moved through the pain and you've achieved the thing,
(23:42):
you know, the feeling of absolute elation that comes after
where you realize, oh my gosh, I am capable of
so much more than I thought I was. I just
did that, I just conquered that mountain. I just achieved
that thing. And in order to have that sense of
I'm capable of more than I thought I was, we
have to come into touch with the edge, come into
(24:04):
touch with the boundary. We have to push past the
place where we think is the farthest that we could
possibly go. And I think this is a little counter
cultural and maybe even a tiny bit counterintuitive because we're
so focused rightfully so for a lot of good reasons.
We're so focused on boundaries and an optimization like I've
been talking about, and just sort of like finding the
sweet spot, feeling happy all the time, feeling good all
(24:25):
the time, only doing things that make us really, you know,
come alive, or only doing things that we really enjoy doing,
and saying no to things we don't enjoy and no
to things that push us. I think there's a place
for that, and I guess what I'm getting at is
bringing nuance to the conversation and coming in on the
other side of it. There's also a place for going way,
way past your limits and just seeing how far you're
(24:48):
capable of going, testing challenging your capacity and realizing, oh
my god, I did that. I went to yoga six
days a week for all of January and all February,
and five days a week for most of the rest
of the year. Then I go to Montana. I do
this thirteen mile hike that I don't think I can do.
I come to the bottom, I'm so exhausted. I feel
(25:08):
like I'm like completely tapped out, and I wake up
the next morning and keep on doing yoga. We did
on our final day of certification, we did twelve back
to back thirty minute yoga practices. Each of us had
to teach a yoga practice, and so there were twelve
of us in the group. Each of us taught a
flow and everyone had to take everyone's flow. So from
seven thirty in the morning until three in the afternoon,
(25:28):
three thirty we were doing NonStop yoga. After the thirteen
mile hike, so we're completely spent, we feel like we
have nothing left. We come home, we eat a meal,
we sleep, we wake up seven to thirty back at it, practicing,
and it just the experience really taught me that we're
capable of so much more than we think we are,
and that if we get obsessed with optimizing our lives,
(25:49):
if we get obsessed with only feeling happy all the time,
we miss out on all the depth and all of
the capacity, and all of the meaning and all of
the strength that each of us have. There's a time
and a place for optimizing. I think optimizing can be
extremely helpful, But I would challenge us as a culture
against getting stuck in the rut of optimization, of thinking
(26:11):
that in your story, as part of your story, that
you should feel good all the time. Because there is
no story that I've ever heard that I was interested
in where the main character feels good all the time,
where the hero is happy from start to finish. No
no frustration, sadness, anger, fear, All of those emotions are
what push us to change. They're what motivate the hero
(26:32):
to achieve, what motivate the hero toward the transformation. Without
the problem, there is no story, or the story is
meaningless and boring, And I'm not in the camp of
drumming up unnecessary problems or unnecessary drama in order to
make a good story out of our lives. But I
would say if you can open your eyes and look around,
you will see that there are problems all around you
(26:54):
that need to be fixed. That we're living in an
era where the problems are actually quite glaring, and where
there's a lot of aspiration, where there's a lot of
ways that we could aspire to be better. And that's
for us personally, and for us globally and as small
communities and as a culture. There's so much that we
(27:14):
could aspire to achieve. There's so much that we could
aspire to change. And when you aspire to change something,
when you aspire to achieve something, inevitably in your story,
immediate problems pop up. You think, well, that's impossible. No
one's ever going to change that. That's just the way
it's always been. There's no way i could make it
to yoga classes six days a week. I've got two
kids that I've got to take care of. There's no
(27:35):
way i could leave for Montana for eight days. That
would be way too much to ask of Matt. And
as we face these problems, one by one we realize
that actually the problems can be overcome, and when we
do overcome them, we feel the most amazing sense of
achievement and confidence and pride in ourselves, and it gives
(27:57):
us a hunger to want to keep going, to keep changing,
to keep overcoming. That hunger is what I would call
the human spirit. The human spirit is incredibly resilient. The
human spirit always wants to overcome. The human spirit keeps
going and going and going, and has a remarkable will
(28:17):
to heal, a remarkable will to survive, a remarkable will
to connect with others, to be in community, a remarkable
will to make things better. That is your human nature.
It's your human spirit. If you're feeling that, if you're
feeling it bubbling up inside of you, just know that
whatever you set your sights on, you think, oh, I
(28:38):
can't achieve that because of X, Y, and Z, That's
exactly those obstacles in your way are exactly what you
need in order to transform into the type of person
who can achieve exactly that. Does that make sense? You're
the hero in the story. You want something aspirational, You say, oh,
(29:01):
I could never have that because of all these problems
that are in my way. Those problems are the recipe.
They are the exact recipe for the perfect amount of change.
They are the recipe for your transformation. They are the
(29:22):
recipe for the person who you want to become. Those
problems are exactly what you need. So instead of optimizing
those problems, instead of optimizing your life so that you
never have to face a problem like that, why not
come at the problems head on. Why not just say,
you know what, these problems are going to push me
past my limit. I'm going to see the worst side
of myself. I'm going to see parts of myself come
out that I didn't know were there. I'm going to
(29:43):
have to face my shadow. The best example I can
think of for this is becoming a mother. For me,
the transition into motherhood for me has been quite bumpy,
and I've seen sides of myself come out that I
would like to wish weren't there. I would like to
assume that I just, you know, a nice, happy person
all the time. And when people talk about mom rage,
(30:04):
they talk about it for a reason Because there is
the perfect set of circumstances when you have little people
depending on you for absolutely every need and when the
level of overstimulation is the way that it is in parenting,
it's the perfect recipe to bring out the worst parts
of you, to bring out your rage, to bring out
your selfishness, to bring out and I say that, I
(30:28):
don't mean selfishness, like it's not selfish to want to
sit in peace and eat a meal alone, but to
bring out like the very human parts of us, like
we are not above this, None of us are above this.
Given the right set of circumstances and given the right pressures,
your own rage will also come out. Your own you know,
(30:51):
self centeredness, your own ego, your own focus on what's
good for you, your own competitive edge, all of these qualities
will come out of you under the right circumstances. Your
willingness to steal or lie or cheat or break the
rules like you know, those when we're put under pressure
are when those elements come out of us. And it's
so good for us to face our own shadow, to
(31:13):
just be humbled and realize I'm also human. You know,
I'm only a human and I can only handle so much.
And to have grace for ourselves in those moments. And
I think we miss out on those moments of learning
when our life is perfectly optimized and we only feel
good all the time. I think this is not only
an impossible goal to achieve the idea that we could
optimize our lives, but it's also something that is getting
(31:34):
in the way of our own growth. It's getting in
the way of you becoming the person that you know
you can be. And so maybe we don't optimize our lives.
Maybe we instead embrace the problems. Maybe we embrace the conflict.
Maybe we embrace the shortcomings, the downfalls of our own personality,
the dark side of who we are as a person.
(31:56):
Maybe we discover as we face these problems with courage
that we actually are so much stronger than we thought
we were, and that we don't have to be perfect.
There's no such thing as being perfect or optimal. That
we can just be perfectly ourselves and that that can
be enough. I hope that helps you. I hope that
it gives you some food for thought and just something
to think about in your own life. I also would
(32:18):
love to see you at the yoga studio if you're
in Nashville, if you live here, or if you're visiting,
I would love to see you at the studio. My
teaching schedule is changing from week to week, so check
out my instagram at Ali Fallon. Find me there and
I will post real time updates of when I'm teaching
because I'm teaching sometimes on Fridays and sometimes on Thursday mornings.
But I would love to see you in a class.
I would love to have you come practice with me.
If you're new to yoga, great, come on down. It's
(32:41):
a great time to get started. It's a really great workout.
It's fun, it's a really cool way to move your body.
It brings you into more alignment and attunement with yourself.
There's so much that yoga has to offer, and I'm
so grateful that I get to share this practice with others.
That has been such a massive support and encouragement to me.
I would love to share it with you too, So
come on down and see me at Hayoab Snashville again.
(33:03):
Check out my instagram at Ali Fallon and you can
get links and real time updates for when I'm teaching
until next time. I will see you back next week
on the Write Your Story podcast.
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
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Amy Brown
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