Kyra Pollitt meets Mel Skinner

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 unable to sleep, unable to sleep enough, or unable to achieve nourishing, delta-wave sleep. ‘Most people just don’t know how to rest’, she says: You can be lying on a beautiful desert island somewhere, with the ocean lapping at your feet, but if your mind is busy, if you’ve not got that rested mind, then it doesn’t matter where you are.

Over her years of practice, Mel has observed that many women spend much of their lives disempowered from their bodies, controlled by the conflicting cultural pressures of the sexual and the virginal: That cultural pressure is so strong, it can become very hard for women to do something that just helps them relax in their bodies. It’s very tempting to think ‘Well, I should do something that’s going to help me lose some weight’, or ‘I should be doing this thing that seems a bit more glamorous’. When you practice restorative yoga, it’s really a practice of self-acceptance. You’re not trying to get into a bendy posture, you’re not trying to be as flexible as you can be, you’re not even building strength. What you are doing is softening. You are softening the tension. And in order to do that, and let go, you have to be able to say ‘I am enough. Imperfect as I may be, I am enough. I don’t need to keep fighting my body, and I don’t need to keep busy, and I don’t need to keep stimulated because it’s ok to feel how I feel’…It’s about creating the space just to be.

Space may be less of an issue for men, but societal norms conspire to repress their emotional expression— though Mel wonders whether the increasing focus on male grooming and self-care, together with a greater recognition of fragility wrought through the pandemic, might facilitate some shift. But, even if we can recognise that we need it, how do we do this rest thing; is it just slumping on the sofa with a glass and Netflix? For Mel, the spirit and essence of genuine rest lies not in any particular activity or lack of activity, per se, but in its intention: ‘why are you doing this?’. The very word emotion comes from the Latin root ēmoveō, meaning ‘to move through’. Like the ocean, our emotions need to constantly move and flow, to be expressed, to move through the body. When we bottle them up, this leads to tension. Everything is shifting. Flexibility comes from staying with spiritual truth, not the illusion of permanence. Connecting to change helps us to ground. Mel tells of a moment, deep into a yoga nidra teacher training course on the Isle of Arran, at 10pm on the summer solstice, standing on a clifftop above crashing Atlantic waves, in an elevated state of consciousness, when she swears she tuned in to the earth talking— and it whispered ‘rest is radical’. Questioning what that insight really meant became a four-year project, resulting in her book of the same name. Describing it as a ‘handbook to avoiding life becoming an exhausting endeavour’, the book gives helpful practices for reconnecting mind and body: It's not about being relentlessly optimistic…It’s about being calmer and more compassionate to ourselves…There are lots of different techniques…something like restorative yoga is really helpful…you can just do one posture for ten minutes and you will feel the benefits. It’s effective because it creates a state of calm in our body; it works to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, so it relaxes all the muscle tension which helps us to breathe more fully and deeply. That then sends a calming message to the mind.

A calm mind, Mel says, helps to tame that critical inner voice that can render us helpless and despairing. ‘Your own body is your greatest teacher’. Self-inquiry, journaling, therapy, talking to a good friend are all good ways to reconnect, though Mel emphasises the benefits of yoga in calming both mind and body simultaneously: If, say, you observe that when you have to sit still, and you haven’t got your phone to distract you, and there’s nothing really to do, what happens? Do you start to feel anxious? Does your heart start to race? Do you get really fidgety with your hands? And that’s it— we’re really just observing. Not moving straight to action, to fixing things…It sounds simple, but it’s a powerful tool. And you can apply that to all different areas of your life.

Mel hopes that the experience of lockdown will perhaps mark a turning point in history, one that will lead to changes in societal values: Humans are social creatures, and we need that sort of tribal community around us, but…I think, as a people in general, we can’t just keep ‘pushing through’…’...I think a lot of people are getting to the point where they can’t just keep doing that, you know? … I do think, or at least I hope, that one of the positive things that’s come out of this past year is that it’s been much more possible for people to say, ‘I’m not ok’. Neither we, nor the planet, can sustain this…The planet can’t cope for much longer with us just consuming in the way that we have been doing, without that recognition that everything needs a break, everything needs the rest…Maybe we can manage with a bit less, if we have more time together. Or maybe we don’t need to go to the shops so often because we can manage with what we’ve got…If we are exhausted, so is the planet.

Images: Mel Skinner, Aeon Books

We are delighted to announce that readers of Herbology News can claim a 20% discount on Rest is Radical. Catch your copy at www.melskinneryoga.com, and enter the code RR20. The discount expires on 14th April. With thanks to Mel and Aeon Books.