iv: Our Editor in the Field
Kyra Pollitt meets Mel Skinner It’s hard to talk to Mel Skinner on Zoom— and this time it’s not the technology’s fault. I blame Pavlov and his dog. She is Pavlov, I’m the dog. After attending Mel’s classes, I associate her voice with a state of deep and nourishing relaxation. Mel has been teaching since 2014, developing an early specialism in restorative yoga and yoga nidra— both are practices that focus on rest. Perhaps, she says, this is because she is not naturally very good at rest herself. Spending her twenties in a whorl of activity, work and travel, happily addicted to the instant feel-good buzz of stress hormone and adrenalin, she gradually became aware that her ‘outwardly-focussed lifestyle’ was likely only to lead her body into burnout, chronic stress and anxiety. In fact, she realised, she was spending most of her time in an agitated state, finding it difficult to slow down, say ‘no’, and break the busy habit. If that sounds like a familiar behavioural pattern, that’s because these behaviours are everywhere validated by our society, even in lockdown: If you’ve had the sort of lockdown experience where you’ve lost your job and been incredibly stressed about how to support your family, then you’re going to be desperate to do as much work as possible, as soon as you can…but one of the reasons some people have struggled with lockdown— beyond the obvious health or financial worries that may have been created —is actually this idea of having not very much to do; not running around all over the place and being busy, and being seen. Actually, this idea of being an ordinary person, not really achieving very much, is something that most of us have been taught is not particularly desirable. It’s much more desirable if you can be seen to be highly successful which, in our culture, basically means being seen to be busy a lot of the time. As Mel points out, any given workload can be enjoyable and nourishing, or it can leave you
desperately grasping towards adequacy. The difference can be, in some measure, attitudinal. ‘Ever since the Enlightenment, Western societies have been rationalising the observable, but emotions don’t work like that’, Mel says. Our culture teaches us to look outside for validation whilst inside we are beset by feelings of ‘not being enough’; our low selfesteem and insecure egos craving approval. We are not encouraged to look inward, to know who we are, to notice how we feel; rather we are trained to ‘push through it’. And this can be particularly damaging when we are trying to push through profound emotional states, like grief. This is something with which Mel is familiar. What I discovered over the years of taking that much softer and kinder approach with yoga was that it actually was helping me to resolve a lot of the emotional tension I was carrying, particularly the emotion of grief— something which, I think, I had kind of avoided. Mainly because I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I kept busy and didn’t give myself time to feel the grief. But when I actually slowed down and held my body in these very compassionate and nourishing postures, then these emotions would come to the surface. But because I was in a state of ‘rest and digest’, it was much easier to deal with the emotion; it wasn’t necessarily as overwhelming as I’d thought it would be…It’s a practice that builds emotional strength and resilience; a person who can be with their emotions and vulnerability actually has far greater strength. It’s not just the grieving who are prone to the physiological side-effects of our go-getting zeitgeist. In her teaching, Mel commonly sees cumulative exhaustion manifesting in menstrual pain, compromised immune and endocrine functions that prolong the healing response, the chronic fatigue of autoimmune reactions, and imbalances that leave people
