Saturday, December 20, 2014

It happened to me: I was in an abusive relationship during my Peace Corps service, and I want to help people love themselves through yoga like it helped me

Give $8 to Help Me Teach Free Yoga Classes in Domestic Violence Shelters!!
Or,
It happened to me: I was in an abusive relationship during my Peace Corps service, and I want to help people love themselves through yoga like it helped me


Hey populace!

It’s been real quiet on my end, and I acknowledge that fully.  I’ve almost been a total recluse since June, 2012, when I got to my second Peace Corps site in Botswana.  A lot has happened.  I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my birthday this year, and I realized: I want to tell people what’s happened, where I am, and where I would like to go. 

Why do you wanna do that?
Because I woke up since June, 2012.  And when I say I “woke up,” I mean that I became aware of how much I have been hurt and hurt myself, and how much love I wish to give.  And I discovered that sharing what has happened to me is an amazing way of making what happened help others.  I was ashamed of my story over the past 2.5 years for so long, and now that I love myself for all of my herstory, including the tough, nasty, horrible-feeling parts that I wanted to push down and out of my heart space for so long, I want to share it so that more people know that the kinds of things I went through are nothing to be ashamed of.  To the contrary, they are things I can celebrate, and try to celebrate every moment I remember that I am alive.

So, what happened?
The short version is this: after experiencing the 2012 Malian coup d’état as a Peace Corps volunteer in the capitol of Mali, and then being the victim of a violent crime as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, I got medically evacuated out of my Peace Corps post, diagnosed with PTSD, discovered I was an emotional eater, and isolated out of shame to tell anyone that I was back home, let alone why.  When I say “victim of a violent crime,” I mean that I was sexually assaulted and in a domestically violent relationship with an abusive partner in Botswana, and finally reported it to Peace Corps.  They got me out of my post and back home, where I realized that I needed to feel grounded again.  I chose to stay in Washington, DC with my dad, get my emotional eating under control (I frequently ate because of how I felt instead of how hungry I was, and it caused me great distress), started a daily yoga practice, cultivated an amazing relationship with the partner of my dreams, and found an amazing trauma therapist.  All of these pieces together have brought me to want to help others in domestically violent relationships feel grounded through yoga. 

Whoa.  How can I help?
By reading what you just read, you’re already making my birthday dream come true.  Read, let it marinate, and share something you learn from it, or the post itself, with others you know, love, talk to, etc.!  If you wanna read more, I have this blog post.  It is far longer than my description of my project on Gofundme, and really goes indepth as to what I've been through, and how I got to the beautiful place where I am today.  So, keep reading for the full story!

Can I help more?
The title says the next step of a birthday gift to me: donate $8 to my Gofundme campaign page here!.  Donate more if you can and want to, of course!  I am trying to make $2,870 to take a 200-hour yoga teacher training (the most basic, beginning teacher training one needs in order to learn how to teach well and not get people injured, get necessary yoga teacher insurance, and get certified to be a teacher who people will let teach at their studio or in their business or organization) and teach 52 free classes to domestic violence shelters over a year (the idea being, 1 class per week). 

Why donate? 
It’s expensive to get trained to be a yoga teacher! It’s not just the fee for the training, which is $2500-$3000; it’s also the books (including ones I bought for a teacher training that I did not obtain a scholarship through), the transportation costs, a nonrefundable deposit from a teacher training I could not obtain a scholarship through, fundraising fees, and the insurance so that you can handle getting sued if somebody gets hurt during a class, which hopefully, they don’t.  But better to be safe than sorry!

Why $8 specifically?
My journey over the past 2.5 years has also been my journey to getting into a daily practice with yoga, which I believe is the most grounding, beautiful part of my life today.  And my journey off of my mat these past 2.5 years aligns itself perfectly with 8 yoga poses, or asana in Sanskrit, that compose the first parts of a sun salutation, or surya namaskar.  A sun salutation is a frequently practiced set of poses in yoga that enable one to bow to the sun, ideally done in the morning. Not only does my name, Akinyi, mean “born in the morning,” but I also have come to salute the light inside of me every day.  So I think it’d be beautiful if enough people could give a minimum of $1 for each “pose,” or part of my story of coming to salute my inner light.  $8 from about 360 people would allow me to go through a teacher training, get insured for a year, and teach free classes at domestic violence shelters. 

Writing and sharing this was my way of straightening my back out before coming down once more into myself, full of love for myself in a forward bend, or uttanasana.  Getting to this monetary goal would allow me to come to the last pose in a sun salutation: to rise, strong as a mountain, back into “prayer hands,” or Namaste hands.  It will help me rise and give gratitude through the gift of yoga. 

Give me the longer version of what’s happened to you.  I wanna know more.
Happy to give details, especially if it might help people understand how difficult it can be to be in an abusive relationship, how difficult it can be to leave one, how hard it is to feel like your emotional eating might be out of control, how intense it can feel to be depressed and/or have PTSD, and/or how difficult it can be to reach out for help:

Mountain Pose, Disempowered: Feeling like the silver lining must be real, denying PTSD, and the beginning of a practice
The first pose in a sun salutation is mountain pose.  You relax your shoulders down your back and open your palms forward, calm, still and strong, like a mountain.  It feels empowering--if you connect with the pose in an empowering way.  This is just like life: it feels great, if you connect with it in an empowering way.  I didn’t.

I started out my Peace Corps service in Mali, and was there only 5 months before the 2012 Malian coup d’état happened.  A close friend of mine and fellow volunteer was stuck with me in the regional Peace Corps house in the capitol of Mali during the coup.  She was also a regular yoga practitioner, and led me through a yoga sequence (set of poses) that changed my life.  I had only done yoga once before, but yoga was literally the only thing that helped me feel better during lockdown during the coup. 

I was then evacuated out with the rest of the Peace Corps volunteers there, and abruptly found I couldn’t sleep more than 2-3 hours per night, even while taking the equivalent of 4-8 Benadryl per night.   I also was intensely afraid of tasks that required any amount of responsibility or potential risk.  I found that I was ordering boxes of “healthy binge-worthy foods” (i.e., “nutritional bars” that I would eat by the 5s, dark chocolate-covered dried fruit, cashew nut butter alone by the ½ cup, etc.) through Amazon and having my dad send them to me in regular care packages.  I felt like I couldn’t stop eating my feelings, and hadn’t been able to since the coup had started, except when I restricted what I ate to try to lose weight. I felt like many of my thoughts were about food, working out, my body and what it looked like, or how afraid I was of people hurting me or me getting “fat.”  It didn’t help that I used to be heavier--when I was 15, I was 228 lbs, and am now about 100 lbs lighter.  I was just fixated on this anxiety loop that began and ended with me hating living.  I mean, how hard is it to love being alive when all you feel you can do is focus on how much you hate being you?

I got to my new Peace Corps site in Botswana and started seeing a therapist and doing yoga more regularly to try and at least sleep better.  It helped.  I started to smile more.  I felt less intense anxiety speaking to people at my site and walking to my volunteering work.  I even started emotionally eating less.  What used to be a minimum of a bi-weekly ritual of eating my feelings, became a once-every-three-weeks occurrence. 

But this funny thing started happening where I started not to give myself space to focus on the negative.  I felt like feeling “bad” was indeed “bad” (I use quotation marks because I no longer spiritually believe in “good” or “bad”--everything simply exists, without judgment until we make judgments, which are not facts and just make me suffer more).  So I put a silver lining on everything and justified everything: “Things happen for a reason”; “At least you still have ____!”; and “What a first-world problem!” became my catchphrases. I denied my anxiety as if that would help it go away.  And it did get better, but it didn’t change what I didn’t yet understand: that I had post-traumatic stress disorder.

Uttanasana: Being assaulted and going inward to a false “me”
The second pose in a sun salutation, after raising one’s hands above one’s head and stretching up toward the sky, is coming down into a full-frontal bend, or uttanasana.  Palms toward the floor and back as straight as possible, we fold into ourselves, thank ourselves, and embrace ourselves before moving any further.  My problem was that I didn’t accept myself as something deserving of love. I told myself that an abusive relationship was what I deserved, and isolated from people I loved out of intense anxiety.  I came inward, but to a “me” I hated, a false “me.”

I met a man who worked at a UN agency operating in Botswana, and we immediately began a relationship.  He was from a radically different culture from me (and also not from Botswana), and I did what I’d begun doing: I justified his abuse by defending him and saying it was a “cultural difference.”  He thought all “really black, African” womyn were ugly?  Cultural difference in learned beauty standards!  He “hated gay people”?  Cultural difference!  He played “rough” with me and hurt me on several different occasions during play-wrestling?  He just doesn’t know his strength!  At least he’ll wrestle with me--he’s a feminist!  And when he sexually assaulted me for the second time in 6 weeks?  He had just never learned consent.  That culture, huh?!  Just not giving people what they need, so it’s not their fault they do ugly things, no matter what they are and how much we can all generally sense how to treat each other with dignity.

Over the course of the worst 6 weeks of my life in this 6 weeklong relationship, I started emotionally eating at least 3 times per week again.  I stopped practicing yoga every day, like I had started doing only 3 months prior.  My life started falling apart--I was walking on eggshells with an abusive partner who even proposed to me within a week of seeing me.  Handling the anxiety, with undiagnosed PTSD, bouts of emotional eating and crazy exercise that drove me crazy, and already feeling isolated as a Peace Corps volunteer in a new place, new country, and second site over the course of half a year?  I managed as best I could, but it was nearly impossible to keep it together.  If it had not been for the amazing people I knew and loved at my site, as well as both volunteers in-country and people I love in the US who I would call and write to, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to be as strong as I was.  A fellow volunteer helped me develop my yoga practice in such a loving direction that I learned how to sequence my own practices (line-up poses in such a way that felt good to do, on my own, using my own ideas and not hurting myself doing it).  She always stays in my heart.

After I was assaulted for the second time, I did hip opening practices in my abusive partner’s house while I debated what I should do: should I leave, or stay?  Hip openers help us open up the emotional junk drawer we stuff our 4 main emotional offenders into: guilt, shame, anger, and sadness.  So I tried and tried to open my hips.  And I finally discovered that I had the strength to act in a compassionate way toward myself for the first time in my life: I reported being sexually assaulted to Peace Corps, and they offered to medically evacuate me to the US to my dad’s place to stay with him and see all the professionals I might need in Washington, DC so that I could get the medical attention I needed to get back to service or amicably end my service.  I left on medical evacuation and came back to the US in May, 2013.
 
Third position: Medical evacuation, still down and isolating but seeing some release
The next part of a sun salutation is bringing the hands up, to the knees, the calves, or fingertips to the floor, and straightening the back, looking forward.  Medical evaluation, a 6-week long process, felt a whole lot like that, because I felt like I could see the light on horizon again, but I was still down.

I saw a therapist 2-3 times per week.  I started seeing a psychiatrist too because I kept having nightmares.  Finally, I understood my troubles sleeping, which persist to this day: I get nightmares, retraumatizations, of what I saw in Mali, once I fall asleep.  Well, the psychiatrist gave me antidepressants and benzos.  This meant that I woke up and took a pill to relax me, and before going to bed, I took a pill to help me not remember what came up at night.  After 6 weeks of seeing a therapist and not really making extensive progress in any given area of my trauma, I continued to take this medication and go to a free program for help with emotional eating while still engaging in emotionally-fueled behavior surrounding exercise and food.  At around this point, I stopped doing yoga altogether--it physically reminded my body of the actions I took in my abuser’s house and presence in general, and the last thing I wanted was to be in touch with my body after what it had gone through.

Do not misunderstand me: I was so traumatized and riddled with anxiety that I thank the Universe for these medicines during this time.  They helped me be able to literally smell flowers and smile again, like I had before Peace Corps from time to time.  But I can personally say that they were a crutch for me.  I needed to figure out what terrified me about what I had experienced and work through it to heal.  Drugging myself for several months, without a therapist to help me work through what had happened, was not a solution.  I also felt like I couldn’t stop socially isolating myself from others around me.  I didn’t want to tell many people I was around because I didn’t know what to say to anybody about why I was there. 

But at the end of the day, I wasn’t at my Peace Corps site anymore.  I wasn’t in the house where my ex-partner had abused me.  I was in my dad’s place, around friends and family from home, and had a team of professionals dedicated to helping me heal.  Some friends I opened up to about what had happened even traveled hours to visit me.  Many people came to my house to keep me company when I just didn’t want to be alone in my head.  I cannot emphasize how amazing it is to have love in your life when you go through hard times.  We all know it, but I feel like I forget how much I matter, even when I’m not consciously helping somebody.  Just a voice on the phone telling me things would get better, could make my month back then.  Heck, at a minimum, it still makes my day!

Forward Fold, Palms Flat: Flat feelings and antidepressants
Next in a sun salutation comes folding forward again in uttanasana, with palms coming flat down on the ground to prepare for push-up pose, or chaturanga Dandasana.  At this point in my herstory, I folded back into myself and my emotions flattened. 

I realized that my medication wasn’t helping when I switched medications and started feeling really emotionally detached.  Nothing felt really good or really bad anymore--it all felt flat, without purpose.  Nothing felt intentional.  Everything was frightening.  I gave my testimony of being assaulted to diplomatic lawyers, and it never became a court case: the police department in Botswana, which had to be addressed in the town he had lived in for 2 years prior, found that there was “insufficient evidence.”  I also got diagnosed with PTSD by the end of my medical evacuation. 

So, after 3 months of not emotionally eating but still exercising constantly, I emotionally ate again.  And then, I decided I didn’t want to feel flat anymore.  I wanted to feel everything that was happening and just see how I did.  So I spoke to my psychiatrist and went off of my medication with her guidance on how to do so safely.

Chaturanga Dandasana: Allowing myself to emotionally eat and almost hitting rock bottom with my PTSD, mixed in with the LSAT
With your palms down on the ground, you either walk back, one leg at a time, or jump back, into push-up pose, or chaturanga dandasana.  If you are able to, you hold yourself 4 inches or so off the ground with your elbows squeezing in to your midline, looking forward.  Well, at this point, I was 4 inches from rock bottom.  I was sleeping patterns mixed with nightmares, and emotionally).  And I was now worried about gaining weight again.

I stayed in my emotional eating program even while I started emotionally eating again.  I wanted to avoid total relapse, without realizing that I was still engaging in emotionally-fueled behavior with exercise even though I wasn’t eating my feelings anymore.  But the more scared and angry I felt, about losing the court case opportunity or my sense of self, the more I emotionally ate. 

I also started seeing a free trauma therapist at the DC Rape Crisis Center, who helped me accept what having PTSD meant in my life.  I didn’t know that people who get PTSD actually suffer on a physical level: you can see the difference in their brains vs. the brains of people without PTSD (check out a great picture of those differences here: http://www.u1077.caen.inserm.fr/files/2013/07/SEME_2_EN.jpg).  And when people get a “trigger,” or a reminder of a traumatic event, two different parts of their brain actually get activated.  It suddenly wasn’t just something I believed on some core level that I was making up: I finally felt like what I was experiencing sucked and made sense.  I had a condition.  It wasn’t my fault that I was so anxious, depressed, moody, and strange around food.  I emotionally ate, cried, shook, slept, didn’t sleep, was paralyzed by fear, had nightmares, all when I had triggers.  And triggers could be anything for me, including high stress situations and loud noises like sudden cars honking, which made me shake because they reminded my brain of the atmosphere during the coup and/or the sounds of gunshots in Mali.

The court case not going through actually further cemented a dream I had always had: to use my people skills and become a lawyer who could help further sexual and reproductive rights.  Cool, right?  But, not-so-cool to study for the LSAT (the examination you must take to apply to law school in the US) while you’re 4 inches from rock bottom.  It was hard to study for and take repeated practice tests that were timed while seemingly constantly getting triggers I could finally identify as legitimate triggers.  The test timing would make me anxious, which would make me dissociate, or intensely checkout, from reality to feel safer.  And then I’d come back, only to have less time to finish a section on the test.  I was constantly getting retriggered, and it sucked.  I left the emotional eating program, and tried to go it on my own, as more of a diet and goal of not eating too much anymore instead of an effort to meet my feelings head-on instead of eating them and stuffing them down, or exercising them away to hidden corners of my body I couldn’t access as easily.

Upward-Facing Dog: Recovery from emotional eating, loving myself, being able to love others, and appreciating my heart opening
From push-up pose, we move into upward-facing dog, where, the tops of the toes on the floor, knees off the ground, palms by your hips and chest proudly opening up, gaze toward the sky, we open our hearts through a backbend to the sun.  My herstory filled with light I could see once I opened my heart through recovery in every sense of the word.

First, I stumbled onto a partner who I’ve fallen deeply, deeply in love with.  I fell in love for the first time, and let myself trust someone for the first time.  He loved me fiercely enough to try to tell me when I was being hateful toward myself, which helped me see which anxiety loops I was enacting that weren’t serving me.
Then, I got a new therapist at the DC Rape Crisis Center whom I was far more honest with than my first one.

Then, I felt strong enough to check myself into another free program to stop emotionally eating, and not only stopped eating my feelings and constantly exercising, but also started following a nutritionally-sound meal plan to regularize my eating patterns (i.e., the times I ate so I didn’t get too hungry, what I ate so my blood sugar didn’t do crazy things and I didn’t get ravenous at random times, the amount I ate so I had a steady source of fuel to live throughout the day, etc.; stopping frequent emotional eating is a long, hard road, and if you wanna hear more about it and where to possibly get help for either yourself or someone you love, please let me know, and I’d be more than happy to help).  Lastly, and most importantly, I started building my self-esteem and truly loving myself for who I was, regardless of my weight. 

I would be lying to you if I said this was not still a daily task.  My default, as I found out with my current therapist and the program I got involved in, was always to mask my feelings with food or exercise.  And to hate myself for bad things that happened to me so that I felt like it was my fault, so that maybe I could control bad things and stop them from happening.  But I can tell you now, I love myself.  I have opened my heart.  This is why some of you have started hearing from me more regularly, instead of a random message or phone call, never to hear back for months, for many of you, most likely, until this blogpost. 

And, the funniest thing happened! I started practicing yoga again once I got into recovery.  And at first, my body recoiled somewhat frequently or I dissociated during poses I had practiced during my abusive relationship in Botswana.  But then, I started to breath.  And my body relaxed.  And my poses got deeper.  It was happening: I could practice yoga every day, and was getting stronger and stronger.  And it wasn’t about working out.  It became a practice in connecting to myself.  And once I connected with myself regularly, I started to breath when I got a trigger.  And then, I could do a grounding exercise.  In other words, I will always be triggered as long as I live.  PTSD does not go away.  But a trigger doesn’t need to be scary.  I can manage them and live a happy, full life with the condition I now have.  And yoga helped me begin to do just that.  Finally, I felt happy to be alive.  It took 2 years, but I arrived. 

So, I decided, I want to teach yoga!  I’d tried it a couple of times in Botswana, and absolutely loved it.  With hardly any experience aside from yoga DVDs I had sent to me during my Peace Corps service (remember those binge-worthy care packages from my dad I told you about?), I led people through poses that helped them feel peaceful, in front of my own eyes and heart.  And I loved it.  And after recovering my sense of happiness in being alive, I had 7 months of daily yoga practice under my metaphorical belt and I wanted to give back to people in domestically violent situations, for free.  I wanted to spread the gift of yoga.  I found a yoga studio with a full-ride scholarship possibility for those interested in instructing survivors of trauma (perfect, right?!?) and immediately started interning there in June of this year.  I then got trained for and started volunteering as a doula in August in Northern Virginia, to help womyn through their birthing processes.  I even started a part-time job in November of this year, my first paying job since my medical evacuation: essentially serving as a receptionist for my local yoga studio, for small monies and free classes.

Then, in the past 2 weeks, after going through the craziness of taking the LSAT in June and applying to schools from September through to early November, as well as deciding to disclose to the schools I applied to that I had a disability (PTSD), I got accepted into 4 of the 9 law schools I applied to!!  Life felt grand.  More on that soon, and where I want to go, but, in short, what a victory!  I got a fairly low score for what I felt I could have achieved prior to manifesting severe PTSD symptoms, and had a reasonable, but not stellar, GPA, and still got accepted into amazing programs.

Downward-Facing Dog: Losing the scholarship
We shift our toes underneath our feet and reach our hips up and back into downward-facing dog, weight in the thumbs and pointer fingers to open the shoulders, looking down and letting the neck release, lengthening through the back and tucking the belly button in toward the lower back.  Usually a pose of incredible lengthening and strength, for me, it was seeing the ground again.

I didn’t get the scholarship.  It was being reserved for students met through the scholarship program’s outreach activities, of which I had not been part.  And I felt like my dreams had fallen apart.  To me, teaching yoga to other survivors of domestic violence, several of whom get PTSD, but most of whom suffer from anxiety-related issues at a minimum, would mean that I had taken my herstory and used it to help others.  And I felt so sad about not getting the scholarship.  And my birthday was coming up.

Jumping Forward: Coming back to a self empowered, being ok with over-jumping or under-jumping and embracing the practice
From downward-facing dog, we either walk, step, or jump back to the front of our mats, feet in-between our hands.  When I jump, sometimes, I over-jump.  This leads to a hilarious situation where I stumble and fall.  Other times, I under-jump.  This means I have to adjust and get my palms in line with my footsies.  In all cases, I embrace what happens, because that’s what yoga is: embracing what is for what it is.  It doesn’t mean I love it.  It just means that it’s there and I accept that it exists.  Just like how I don’t love triggers, I can at least accept that they’re there, and that allows me to handle them in a way that best complements my recovery, right?  So I jumped forward from hearing about not getting the scholarship, to this grand idea.

What if, for my birthday (and for as long as it takes to get enough donations to do so), I got enough people to read my story and donate money to get other people in domestically violent situations free yoga that might help them heal, like yoga helped me heal?  Each donation would be someone saying, I care, and I will help.  What could be better than that for my birthday?  What material gift could give me more joy?  I love teaching, though it has always been uninsured, and, with my lack of official training, at least somewhat uninformed.  But people consistently tell me that my teaching helps them, which is more and more often. 

So, it’d be $2,870.  And 360 people giving $8 for me to teach yoga at domestic violence shelters with insurance for a year?  That’d be a huge gift, to everyone I teach and myself.  I will email each person who donates after one of the classes I teach, about how the class went, which shelter they helped me teach at, and a pose that I dedicated my intention toward in gratitude to them.   If you have anything you want me to say concerning growth during a class, I can say at least a part of that at some point either before, during, or after my classes as well.  I want to bring yoga to people who could use it, as a group project with people like you, reading this right now.

Help me do this.  Donate what you can.  If you can donate more than $8, gorgeous!  Go for it, stardust.  If you can’t donate but love what I’m trying to do, share this story!  Send it to a yoga and/or other site/organization that deals with the stuff I went through in any way, share it on your facebook page (or reddit/wherever you lurk on the interwebz :-) ), share it via e-mail with people you know and care about, share it with people struggling with anything I went through.  We can make the world a better place together. 


If I don’t raise enough money soon, I can take the training whenever.  I just want to donate my time and physical and emotional energy to helping people help themselves through yoga at some point in my life, and before I start law school is a great time to get the 200 hours of training under my belt and get started.

If you have any questions about anything I went through, or just wanna know more, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me or message me about it.  When one person goes through trauma, we are all affected.  I shared this story because it is, in this sense, our story.  Not only am I not alone: everyone who is alive, I strongly believe, is impacted in some way by the things everyone goes through.  When we share, we release the power of shame and guilt, anger and sadness.  We pool our strength and rise, strong like mountains.  We look forward.  We salute our inner lights.  Together.

Loads of love and Namaste!

Akinyi

P.s. For more on what PTSD is, here’s one of many handy sites with a load of info on it: http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/PTSD-overview/basics/index.asp
P.p.s. For more on how yoga can help survivors of trauma, here’s a site I love that explains what yoga looks like when you work with survivors of trauma: http://thebreathenetwork.org/the-journey-to-heal-understanding-trauma-sensitive-yoga
P.p.p.s. Yoga rocks.  If you gots any questions on how to start up your own practice, send ‘em my way.  I can literally geek out for hours about it with you, I promise.  Feelin’ saucy after reading this and wanna do your own sun salutation?  Here’s a step-by-step guide: http://yoga.about.com/od/yogasequences/ss/sunsalutesteps.htm
P.p.p.p.s. Here is a great explanation of emotional eating: http://www.medicinenet.com/emotional_eating/article.htm

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