SunnyBee Yoga with Jacquie Barbie - Changing the Face of Yoga podcast #110

                                                Major points:

1. a) Everyone in yoga classes should be doing the pose modification that is best for their body (5:49)
2. b) Representation counts, and the public should be able to see all different kinds of yogi bodies (10:10)
3. c) Thank your body at the beginning of class and accept that today may look and feel very different from yesterday (18:04

00:47                                     This is the hundred and 11th episode of Changing the Face of Yoga. And my guest today is Jackie Barbie and she's from Sunny B yoga in Florida in the US. She's a 200 hour experienced RYT and she specializes in accessible yoga for all. She's trained with Diane Bondi and Amber Karns and yoga for all. And Jivana Heyman of Accessible yoga. It is her passion and she believes her Dharma to help bring yoga to those that can benefit from the practice, but don't fit the stereotypical image of a yoga practitioner. I love this. I tell clients that call on the phone who have never seen me and are afraid of trying yoga, that I'm a fat gray haired lady with Fibromyalgia teaching the yoga class, you will be fine. It's great. She teaches a variety of classes, really impressive variety. A wheelchair yoga, Chair Yoga classes, beginner, gentle classes. She works privately with people in their homes. So she's really got the full spectrum of students who may need a little different kind of yoga. And we're going to talk about some of those different kinds right now. So welcome Jackie. I'm so glad that you're here. Is there anything that you'd like to add to that introduction?

02:24                                     Oh, that was great. Thank you. It's always kind of interesting to hear that back when I get a lot of people who call me on the phone and say, I'm too old, or I'm too fat, or I can't do yoga. I just tell them, trust me, when you see me, you will feel 0kay, you'll think, oh well she can do this, I can do this. So I think I bring a lot of people to ease just visually and then we have fun.

02:56                                     I taught seniors and they were very nervous that they would get someone very young and I'm not. So I think that helped because I knew what they were going through. I understand what you're saying. I'll give you all these contact details later to my listener, but I really want to tell them about your Instagram account because you have all these wonderful pictures of modifications of really common yoga poses. And I especially liked boat pose. I thought that was quite clever. I like to talk a little bit about how your yoga teaching, your guiding of your students includes all those modifications. When I do modifications, everybody wants to do the most intense one or the most difficult one. And sometimes it's really hard to get them to say, yeah, that's great, you can do that. We can work towards that, but why don't we think about it like this way too. Sometimes that works and a lot of times it doesn't. How do you introduce and guide people to modifications that might be a little better for their body.

04:25                                     So we start with that first and we start with the simplest and maybe even they might not even feel like they're in the yoga pose to begin with. Maybe like you said, boat pose. So maybe we'll start with the bolster popped up behind her back and just do that and then ease into something a little bit more. Or if we're in the chair, maybe we're just lifting the feet one at a time and we just ease into it slowly so that we just say, hey, if this feels good, stay here. But if you want to be a little curious,  let's try this. And if you go there and that doesn't feel good, come back to this where it did feel good and safe. Safe is always a big word for me. We throughout the practice introduce a little bit more and a little bit more and then remind them, don't forget, we have these options too. So we usually have maybe four different options of a pose that we work on in a class. And like I said, a lot of times it's very subtle. They don't realize that they're doing this, what they might look at if they were to open up an average Instagram page and say, I could never do that. But they're doing their version of the pose that fits their body, which is the most important thing to me.

05:40                                     So in a subtle way, you're really asking them to really pay attention to their body and how it feels.

05:49                                     Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't want everybody to look alike. I tell everybody in the classroom if everybody's in a different version of the pose, that makes me extremely happy. Because that means my job of making them comfortable in their own body, I was successful because that's when I'm trying to get everybody to listen to their body. I'm not trying to do what the person next to them is doing.

06:18                                     I think that's excellent. I notice that you said, I think on your Facebook page, that you're starting to create video content.

06:32                                     Yes. So I have a 15 year old daughter who was an aspiring videographer. She's taking all kinds of classes, is already accumulating certifications. in video editing, photo editing, things like that. So she is very interested in creating videos. We actually did one yesterday. She impresses me in how she can whip these together, edit them very quickly and make it look like it was the easiest thing in the world. And so we're working on that. We're trying to do that because I have people in different states, different areas who are saying, if I had you as a yoga teacher, I would go to yoga .I know that there's like hundreds of other me's out there. They're just afraid to try. So I figured I can at least get them started by practicing online with me. Maybe they can do some of the videos and, and they just need to do one video and they're officially a Yogi. Hopefully that will make them feel better. My sisters are in Pennsylvania. I really would like for them to practice chair yoga. I'm the baby of the family and I have lived over a thousand miles away from them for 30 years now. So this is a way for me to bring a practice to them and just to anybody who's just interested in trying some modified yoga, some adaptive yoga, whatever works in their body.

08:03                                     How do you do that? Because I've always been concerned that if people are just watching me, I can't really tell what's going on with them. Or is it kind of a two way thing, like on zoom or something like that?

08:17                                     That would be a great long term. That is something I hope to work towards in the future. I've seen that there are platforms where you can practice, where you can see people and do that. Right now we're just doing very basic, simple, beginner chair yoga type things. I really feel like anybody can really easily follow along. We're not doing anything complicated that they need someone quite there. It's not much different from anybody getting a yoga DVD or going on Youtube, we posted our first Youtube video today. And it's on SunnyBee Yoga on Youtube. You can look that up and we'll plan on adding more as we go along.

09:05                                     I did see some videos, I don't know if your daughter had anything to do with them, but I was so tickled at them because they were at a very fast pace. People are going up and down and round and it was kind of fun. It really was and I thought, you know that that's very clever to say Yoga can be fun. It's not always terribly, terribly serious.

09:31                                     A lot of times we do our family yoga videos where I actually get a lot of people requesting, I haven't seen a Barbie family high speed yoga video lately. We like to go hiking a lot or camping and we'll put up the iPhone and put it on high speed, videotaping it at high speed and just so that they can just see like this is our real life. This is actually what we do this is just for Instagram and we don't always videotape it obviously, but people will say, oh, I need a Barbie family video. So up sometimes just for fun, if anybody really ever wants to practice the yoga that we're doing in the high speed, I'll be happy to write down the poses for them.

                                                But I did start them at high-speed because I was always so nervous about posting pictures and posting videos of myself doing yoga. Just very self- conscious of the way I looked. But representation matters. And if people don't see me in a bigger body, in an older body, in a body with chronic illness doing yoga, then they're never going to think that they can do yoga. So representation matters. We have to all be posting these pictures and posting these videos so that they don't only see white 24 year old women standing on a rock off a cliff doing yoga, you know, like that's not all that it is. It's being silly. So someone had told me do your first videos at high speed because nobody will see the mistakes or nobody will see the things like that and you won't be as self-conscious and it will just be creating the practice for yourself. So now I can do it slower, but it's really just for fun.

11:17                                     I think that the representation sometimes kind of gets lost in yoga that it's very, very serious and it's a practice. It has a philosophy and all that is true and it's great, but it also can be very enjoyable.

11:34                                     Laughter is a huge part of my teaching. I think. I like to try to keep things light and humorous. I think laughter helps people relax. You come into a beginner's class or it's their first time in their wheelchair class or something. Then if I can make them laugh, they just relax just a little bit. It's a stress reliever. They laughing with the people around them, so it immediately starts to build community. Someone once told me laughter's a breath practice too. So I think laughter in Yoga is really, really important. So sometimes I call myself a yogamedian. I honor the practice. It is really mostly just to make people more relaxed with them when with themselves.

12:24                                     Let's segue into the wheelchair yoga class that you teach. I think you said it was your most favourite class. I have tried it and I found it quite difficult. what would an average, normal class look like in a wheelchair class?

12:46                                     So I teach wheelchair in a nursing facility in the nursing home. Most of these are long-term residents. So there's strict rules, no touching, no standing. They can't get out of their wheelchairs for safety reasons obviously. So at first I thought, what am I going to do? Like we can only do so much for their arms and I'm supposed to be there for an entire hour. So how am I going to do this? And then the average age is probably 85 to 90. So what in the world am I going to do?

                                                Well, let me tell you, I run out of time in that hour because we have so much fun. We have so much to do. We do move our feet and move our toes. You might lift our legs. Maybe we're lifting them independently. Maybe we're lifting them, using our hands. We use our props in our practice. We use straps, we use blocks, sometimes we'll use the therapy bands. We might do a little bit of practice with using our arms and we let them rest. And then we will focus on our feet and our ankle;, spending time pointing and flexing the toes a work, the calf muscles, because the calf muscles, the second most important muscle for good heart health. And they're sitting in their chairs all day long so that they need to get this blood pumping. They need to get this movement. Their posture becomes not really good because there's sinking back into the chair. So we remind them, I remind them throughout the practice, straighten the spine, ground your feet into the floor, pull the shoulders back. And even they just say, just doing that alone just helps them with their breath.

                                                And we try to speed things up a little bit, get a little bit more active. It may not look like a traditional yoga practice. Probably 80% of the class might just look like exercise or movement. we spend a lot of time stopping and then take some deep and open up, open up the airways, lift the chest, lift the heart, do a little introspection, what's happening in the body, how does this feel from when you came into the class?

                                                They really love it. A lot of them begged their physical therapists to not make them go to therapy that day so that they can just come to yoga. I've had occupational therapists bring their patients into the yoga class. One occupational therapist said one day, I want you to be in here every Wednesday because you're going to get more out of this class that I can do for you. And I thought that was just an amazing compliment because I'm not a therapist. I don't pretend to be a therapist. I don't have a medical background. We just have some fun and we just try to move the body and, and if it's not comfortable for them in that position or that pose, they can just sit there and be in the group. That's perfectly fine because community is yoga also. And I just love being in the room with them because they're so happy there. Your spirits lifts so much after they've had that movement, that interaction with everyone in the room. And if somebody who the nursing home scheduled gets cancelled, the activities director has been told by the patients there to call Jackie so she can come in and do yoga with us. We want an extra yoga class. So that's exciting.

                                                There was a patient who started coming and she had had stroke years ago, wasn't really recovering from anything. She had a difficult time speaking because she just couldn't get her breath. She started doing yoga and she's practicing things outside of our yoga class. And so at the end of yoga she would grab my hands and not let me leave because she could talk, somebody could hear her because her breath had picked up and it's stimulated her vocal chords. I don't know anything about this physically or medically, but she wouldn't let me leave. She'd hold onto me because she had a lot to say and she could say it at that time. And that was totally fine with me. She's come a long way. She's been doing all kinds of things. One of the ladies who comes every Wednesday, that's when we have our class. She had me write down some sequences for her and so she gets up every morning and does yoga in her room before she get dressed and does her activities. I'm really proud of those students there.

17:18                                     That's a great testimonial to your teaching. That's wonderful.

17:22                                     I've learned so much from them. I just walk out every day going Oh my gosh. I just can't believe I got to do that.

17:32                                     When you're teaching these types of classes, do you have them set goals for themselves, either physically, mentally, emotionally. Or are you guiding them through the practice given the experience that you have?

18:04                                     We come in and the very first thing we always do is we just tell our body: thank you for showing up for us today. Whatever it looks like today, whatever is going to happen in our bodies today, they might be feeling more pain. They might have a little bit more limitation. Maybe they're having a good day and they can move a little bit more, but just to thank their body for showing up and that we honour it wherever it is. If I say now, lift your arms up as high as they can go. If it's just two inches off your lap and the person next to you can put their fingertips towards the ceiling, perfectly fine. That's where you're supposed to be today. And I just try to show them different modifications and variations that they can move their arms. Opening their arms out to the side is painful on their shoulders. And it is for a lot of people with shoulder replacements. Bring the fingertips out in front. It's okay to do it your way, to customize your practice. I want you to feel good. I want you to come because it feels good, not because you do it and then at the end of the day you can't do anything else.

19:12                                     You said on your introduction that you have fibromyalgia and there's been some research that yoga helps fibromyalgia. And so I thought we could talk about that for people that may either be working with students who have that or they themselves have that. How yoga has affected that in your body, if you feel comfortable.

19:50                                     Fibromyalgia is one of the big reasons why my practice became so important to me because I was working and if I wasn't working, I was in bed because my pain was so bad. I couldn't move. My quality of life was not that great because I was 40 years old or 45 years old and I could only work and stay in bed. I wanted to do more things. I wanted to have more of a life and have more fun and someone has suggested to try yoga for the fibromyalgia pain. And I went and just a little bit of movement was incredible because I would have small moments of not being in so much pain and it would get longer and I might sleep better and if I slept better than my pain levels were down. It was really nice that it just gradually helps; little by little for me to recover after I might've been working a full day. I worked retail at the time and I was the manager of a clothing store and I ran all the time for 10 hours a day. it helped me be able to keep up the pace and then be able to do things, not stay in bed so long.

                                                And it, it helped me to get a lot of peace with my body too because being young at that time and I was saying what is it going to be like, in 20 years? I'm not going to be able to move at all, not going to be able to do anything. I have a young child who wants to enjoy life and being able to make that peace with my body and say it's okay.

                                                Whatever it is, we're going to be fine. We're going to move a little bit today and then we're going to move a little bit more. Between Yoga and doing some swimming, I really got my quality of life back, got to have a lot more freedom to go places and do things, was able to come off other medications. And I'm not saying that that's going to be the case for every single person, but it's worth a try. I've seen people come in, with fibromyalgia, to a chair class and say from the beginning to the end of the class, well this part of me doesn't hurt anymore. Just from making the moments, cause that's the cycle, with fibromyalgia that I was in where if I was active, the pain wasn't so bad, but the pain was too bad to be active. So it was just the cycle of I hurt too much and I'm too tired to do anything. So once I started moving, then I could move more and then even more. So it's, it's been a plus for me. I don't have perfect days every day, but I know what I need to do. I know what will help. Even the smallest movements make big differences in your body.

23:02                                     You might modify for yourself when you're doing this. I mean, what kinds of things do you do that helps?

23:10                                     When I started yoga, of course I come in with this, painful body and a bigger body and a lot of times teachers just didn't know what to do with me. They would just say take child's pose or use some props. And she didn't really tell me how to use props and I wanted to do yoga. I didn't want to, I mean, I know child's pose is yoga, but I didn't want to just stay there. I wanted to do some other things. I came here to move. So eventually I started just learning different ways, modify my practice. I was grateful that through these other amazing teachers that I've been able to work with have shown me more modifications for my practice.

                                                 And so now it just becomes like a little game when you asked me about modifications earlier. It's like, give me a pose and we'll figure out a way to do it in a chair or we'll figure out a different way to do it. Like, it's almost a game. Let's have fun. How can we get the same effects from this pose and what feels good in our body today? So maybe today I do it this way and tomorrow my body might feel differently and I can do it this way. So that's another reason why I like to show maybe four different ways. If I'm lucky, if I can come up with four different ways to do a pose because our bodies feel differently from one day to the next, from morning to evening. And um, you know, it might feel one day and just might not. Lots of modifications. There are lots of props. I'm a prop goddess. That's what the props are. We use blocks, straps, bolsters, walls, chairs, you name it, it's a prop. we will do yoga with it. So when people come into my class, they always look at me, go grab everything, right? Yes. Just get all the props, have everything, have as much of it as you want.

25:06                                     I think I saw a picture of you with a large stick.

25:09                                     So we may fun sticks. My husband and I got creative one day and they’re push broom handles and we sawed off one end and we put these furniture stoppers on each end.  We're in the chair and we use the stick just to lean forward a little bit deeper and let's find a down dog with the hands on a stick. Tt opens up the shoulders a little bit more. I have a student who almost always grabs one because if we're doing balancing poses, she used to always have to stand against the wall, but now she can using the stick stand freely on her mat but just still hold onto the stick for balance and stability and I mean anything can be a prop. Anything can be your prop I'm telling you. So that was a lot of fun. There's all kinds of fun things to do with, I need to do more videos using that.

26:14                                     I just was very fascinated by that. I hadn't ever heard of that as being a prop before, but I thought I can see where that would work. I did think it would be really good for balance, especially if someone's unstable, I think that would be very helpful for them mentally as well as physically to have that as a help there.

26:38                                     Yes. And it was fun trying to come up with like what is going to be the right thing. So we played with different wooden dowels and it was my husband who said, let's try a push broomstick we were there at Lowes, the home labyrinth kind of stores and you buy the stick for the push broom, you buy them separately. And he said, look at that. Like look at the grip in the hand, it's the right width and we've found the furniture stoppers that were the right size. And we just put them on and we said, there we go, there's our Prop and it was all for under $10 and it was just easy.

27:24                                     I like to end the podcast with an invitation to you to either discuss something we've discussed in more depth or bring in a brand new topic that you would like anyone who's listening to know about.

27:42                                     All right. So I always just like to explain the Bee part of Sonny Bee Yoga. Obviously it goes with my last name, Bardie But love bees. I love honeybees. Bumblebees, all bees. The one thing that I love about the Bumblebee is that bees, if you look at the way that their shaped and their weight and then their wing size, it is supposed to be impossible for them to fly, right? They fly anyway. Right.

28:23                                     And I feel that way about our yoga is that you can do this; if the bumblebee can fly, you can do yoga. I also love about the bees is that their hive, they have this amazing sense of community and that every bee in the hive has a purpose and that purpose is to serve the greater good of the community. So each bee has one job, it's their Dharma, what they're supposed to do, their focus, and they all do that. And it makes the hire successful and happy. And I feel that way about yoga. This is what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to help bring yoga to people who don't think they're supposed to be flying. And I'm going to let them know that they're just a bumblebee and they can fly too.

29:17                                     Thank you. You've talked about some really interesting topics that will, make a great podcast, You really explained it well and I think I've got a really good handle on your philosophy of teaching, which is always fun. because I think we're all different. We all have our different reasons, but you and I are probably close in how we would teach.  I want to give your contact details in case people would like to see those lovely videos, which are really fun guys. The website is sunny and it's s u, n n y Bee yoga.net.

30:06                                     And it's Bee not the letter B, but it's like, the Bumblebee,.

30:10                                     The same kind of spelling for sunny Bee Yoga on Facebook and Sunny Bee yoga on Instagram. And there's some really incredible photos of Jackie doing some modifications on the Instagram account that I think if you're interested in that kind of thing, they'd be a great resource for you. So if you are interested in this topic , those are the contacts for Sonny Bee Yoga for Jackie. Thank you. Jackie. You did a great job. I really commend you for the service that you're providing people who may not think of themselves as Yogis, but you're proving to them that they can be. So thank you.

31:11                                     Thank you. Thank you so much.