Direct to Source

6 minute read

India. That’s where you go, isn’t it? Best to go direct to source if you want to become a yoga teacher and that’s what I decided I wanted to be, so I booked an eco-ashram in Mysore for a one-month yoga immersion in 200 hrs teacher training. I’d rise each day at 5.30 for an hour of meditation and have a fairly strict and disciplined schedule ahead involving theory, philosophy, anatomy as well as practice. This would continue 6 days a week for the month I was there. I was all booked to go but two months before, London stepped in and called me back for an exciting role I simply couldn’t pass up. That role didn’t amount to much when the startup ran out of momentum and so my teacher training was parked for another couple of years as I progressed into various other creative direction roles.

The opportunity presented itself once again two summers ago, right after I’d shot a documentary short about inner-city horse culture. This time things felt different. I felt different. India didn’t feel right. Earlier that year I’d been diagnosed with PTSD. I was exhausted, physically and mentally fatigued after a pretty intensive learning curve as a self-taught film-maker. So I stopped the running and I listened, I listened to what my European body needed and that body didn’t need extremities and punishingly early meditations. I adore India and plan to go back soon but it’s full-on, the poverty is intense, the sounds, the noise, the colours, the energy – it’s a spicy place and my body needed noodle soup. If I was to teach yoga to help ease overwhelmed Europeans and their complicated lives, I wanted that sense of ease to be a common thread from training right through to teaching.

Having spent the previous few years in a battle against my diagnosis, it just didn’t feel right punishing myself with more discipline and deprivation when my body needed softness and support.

France. I love France. I love it’s sophistication, simplicity, laissez fair and je ne give pas de fucks essence. I mean….” surely there’s somewhere you can train as a teacher that wine and cheese aren’t considered a sin”. So I googled “yoga teacher training France” and made my decision based primarily on aesthetics – I’m a creative so things need to look nice for me to engage and I make zero apologies about that. I landed on a 17th-century farmhouse in the middle of Landes, an agricultural area in South West France. The farmhouse was in the middle of nowhere right opposite a huge field of sunflowers, beside an orchard of apples and pears. Next door was a big, ploddy horse called Nougat and a scraggy donkey. It was run by “Sunshine” a wonderful mother of two and, like me, she was in her early forties. She just had a nice vibe in the video I watched. Done. Booked. The daily schedule started at 8 with a half-hour meditation, followed by breakfast. The food was perfect, super healthy vegetarian, each meal followed by a big chunk of French cheese and French bread. Yum. Mornings we studied anatomy, afternoons we practiced on the balmy lawn or discussed the texts in the shala. At the weekend we had a glass of wine and chocolate treats, even visiting a vineyard. It was very human and very celebratory. It was perfect, and something in my mind and energy changed during that training – the perpetual panic stopped - it hadn’t in a very, very long time.

Sunshine, with her extensive inter-faith knowledge, passed on information without indoctrination - as a catholic, I’d already had enough of that – and the learnings just settled gently. This was part of a homecoming that was deeply connected to the land. Previous years had seen me running to India and Sri Lanka in search of those faraway green hills but I started listening to my European body and what it needed to really ‘connect’ and it was becoming apparent that it was green hills but they were much closer than I thought.

I have a really inquisitive mind and a tendency to question before I accept. One of the scriptures that is part of the yoga alliance curriculum is the Bhagavad Gita. It’s considered one of the main holy scriptures for Hinduism and it didn’t sit with me at all. The text was written by men and the universe or God is repeatedly referred to as “Lord’ or ‘HIM’ – literally in capitals in the text I read. “Why is HE shouting?” - I cast my mind over my visits to India where woman existed in the kitchens and shadows of places I had visited and that didn’t sit with me. I just hadn’t really considered this before my teacher training, and I had thought my Yoga Teacher Training would provide all my answers because otherwise why was everyone so obsessed with it? It provided nourishment and knowledge in equal amounts and I could feel my connection with the natural world of my ancestry cosying into the space I’d created BUT, I came back to Ireland with even more questions, and I wasn’t quite sure where the answers would show up.

What did show up was at a Repeal March in the form of a wild, redhead with a thick Dublin accent – Kitty Maguire. I think she was holding a placard with a Sile na Gig (Celtic fertility deity) on it. She was wild and energetic and looked like a Celt, whatever that was. She was also a yoga teacher. We connected over a love of vaginas. I was consulting at a women’s health brand, Elvie, at the time so there was quite a lot of this coming through in my work. She was shaping her own voice which has become a very powerful one in women’s bodies, periods, hormones and health.

Kitty spoke highly of another amazing woman, Mari Kennedy, and I won a scholarship on her Celtic Wheel program. This is a year-long program informed by Celtic spirituality and the knowledge of the ancestors that we’ve come to overlook in the last few hundred years. The course is deeply connected with inner knowing and the movements on the land, a more natural way of being or existing. I liked that Mari was older than me – I’ve never really had good mentors – and she was also bringing her own personal life experience to the space.

I think intergenerational wisdom shared is SO important in supporting other women. This course took me down another level and it started to feel like home. I wondered why we think we have to go away. Ireland is amazing. The seasons are clearly delineated and so, so visible, and as cyclical beings, we have an opportunity to connect to that if we allow ourselves to listen.

There’s a catholicism sized hole left in this country, and I believe we need faith in something other than ourselves however that shows up - in the Celtic wheel I’ve found that. I’m still working on the answers but increasingly finding them in the natural world. I’m interested in faith but I’m not down for punishment. Life is a joy, and spirituality should support the blessing of existence.

Yoga provided me a route but not a location, and that route is still being shaped, it’s doing a U-turn and driving me back to what’s here, what’s inside. Through Mari, I’ve learned more about feminine and masculine, and how to balance and accept opposing energies. I’m living a more natural life, swayed by seasonality. This feels practical and tangible. It’s what’s here, it’s what’s in front of my eyes. I can see it living and breathing in those around me, because like I can’t worship a white man nailed to a cross; I also can’t gel with an elephant with six arms. What I can gel with is my feet on grass, the energy in the ocean. A sunrise, a life force that permeates all things, an energy that’s ours to celebrate, share and harness. Now I don’t know if that’s Wicca or Paganism or Humanism - a bit, or none, of all three; but right now I’m happy to keep labels away because I’m enjoying the simplicity of a knowing without having to give it a language or a vessel.

Marion Bergin, March 2021