I am so excited to have another dear friend share her wisdom with us this week. I met Jenni Derryberry Mann almost 10 years ago when we were in the same prenatal yoga class. We were both pregnant with our first children, and our daughters ended up being born just five days apart! It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Jenni has been teaching yoga since 2003, and she is now the owner of Blooma Nashville, a yoga studio that focuses on pre- and post-natal yoga, childbirth education, and family wellness. Jenni teaches at the studio, and also facilitates women’s circles. In both practices, the element of community is important to her. Her yoga practice focuses on the connection between body and breath, and how that leads to a deeper state of ease.
Here is my interview with Jenni, plus some yoga practice for you!
What changes in your life have you noticed since you started your yoga practice?
While completing my month-long yoga teacher training intensive, the changes were profound. My physical and emotional stamina grew. I became more adept at sitting with my own shadowy stuff and gaining real insight into it. My body changed; it felt like I’d fortified each muscle from within. In the years since, yoga has been a safe harbor in stressful times and a joyful expression of movement and breath in happy times. Yoga helps me bend time by nurturing my body, my mind, my emotions, and my spirit all at once. Yoga transformed my relationship with myself – what I can feel within, and what I can do about that.
How does yoga help us…
*connect to the body?
The asanas – poses, shapes we make with our bodies – immediately connect you to the most obvious expression of self. An achy back, a tender knee, a tight spot at the shoulder blade, the numb feeling in your belly, the crazy list-making mentality in your mind. A light in your eye, a floating feeling in your heart, joy welling up through your whole being. Those are all body connections, and they are all part of waking up to what is expressing through you.
*reduce stress?
Pose after pose, we move from the breath. That is the ritual of yoga practice. Breathe and move, breathe and feel. Ritual, something you do again and again, creates a rhythm. And rhythm leads to relaxation. The mindful ebb and flow of breath resets the nervous system, dialing down fight or flight signals, so you can rest easy in your body.
*improve health or produce other benefits?
A stressed you is a sick you, or at least a depleted you. Of course, our amazing human bodies are built to handle quite a lot of stress for quite a long time. But most of us live in a hyper-stressed state, with that flight or fight switch flipped to On nearly ALL the time. Even if the ringer is turned way down on your inner alarm system, it’s a bit like our mobile devices: When was the last time you actually turned that thing off? Chances are, you only power down your device when it starts to act glitchy. The memory is maxed. The system freezes up. The battery drains super-fast, even after a whole night of recharging. See how that metaphor plays out? Yoga—like all the mindfulness practices: meditation, yoga nidra, women’s circles, and so on—takes your body offline from the stresses of daily life. Your inner self guides the outer you to enjoy a deep breath. Your cells exhale a soft sigh of relief. And the message gets through to all of you: there is no emergency here. There is an opportunity to connect to a deepening sense of peace. And in that space, we’re better able to make the decisions that deeply support our well-being.
What have you learned about yourself and/or your body through practicing yoga?
One surprising lesson learned from the strenuous experience of my yoga teacher training, and in my continued practice since then: my relationship to food. Before training, I hadn’t identified myself as an emotional eater. I’d always been healthy and fairly fit. But I quickly realized that when I was working deeply in both the physical and the emotional realms together, my mind would check out of my body and right into a fast food drive-thru! I’d be 6 breaths into a Warrior pose, fantasizing about burgers and slushies. I can’t say my yoga practice freed me from that entirely, but I can say that my practice has helped me cultivate more mindfulness around the triggers, their significance, and what action I choose when that fantasy shows up in stressful times.
What is your favorite, go-to form of self-care?
Yoga nidra. It’s a sleep-based meditation. My favorite is Rod Stryker’s Relax into Greatness guided meditation. I like the short version (it can often be sampled at the Yoga International website, or you can buy the CD from Rod Stryker’s site). I pair 10 to 15 minutes of asana with that 25-minute meditation, and feel refreshed beyond expectation.
Can you give us an example of a time when you were really stressed, and you turned to your mind-body practice for relief?
Definitely! Almost daily during the year leading up to the launch of my yoga studio, Blooma Nashville, I practiced yoga nidra. I wasn’t always finding the time to get to a full yoga practice, but I could usually find 30 minutes to blend a few minutes of asana with this deep guided meditation. Yoga nidra incorporates a visualized intention into the meditation, so it felt very supportive of bringing my studio into being. Yoga nidra helps slow the brain so that you feel incredibly refreshed—as though you’d slept for hours—in a relatively short time. [See the links in the paragraph above for yoga nidra practices].
What advice would you give to someone who has never tried yoga, or tries it and thinks they’re “doing it wrong”?
I’ve been practicing and teaching for more than a decade, and I still get a kick out of hearing yoga teachers say, ‘It’s not called Yoga Perfect. It’s Yoga Practice.’ I encourage my classes like this: We’re going to make a bunch of shapes with our bodies today. Some of them are going to feel great. You might want to stay in those shapes awhile longer. And some of those shapes are going to feel physically uncomfortable or make you cranky. You get to decide whether and how long to stay in those shapes. Your body is different every day, every moment, every breath. Some days, things work well. Others, not so much. But know this: The big work is already done. You’ve arrived on the mat. Everything else is a bonus.
What practices would you recommend we try if we want to incorporate yoga into our stress reduction strategies?
As a mom and an entrepreneur, it’s been important to me to have simple ways to bring me back to a mindful place for body and breath. Yoga and breathing practices are perfect for this. On the yoga front, I recommend finding the shortest, simplest class on Yoga Journal, YogaGlo, or similar, and do that online or from memory as often as you can. And for breathing, I’m really loving an app called BreatheAware. A friend of mine developed it, very thoughtfully creating 2 to 3 minute breathing trainings that are perfect medicine for your well-being. I appreciate that the app emails and texts me reminders to breathe. Yep, even yoga teachers —well, at least me!— need to be reminded to breathe.
Jennifer Derryberry Mann is a prenatal/postnatal yoga teacher; the Studio Director of Blooma Nashville, which she opened in 2014; author/editor of Belly Button Bliss: A Collection of Happy Birth Stories; and mother to two daughters.
Instagram: @Blooma.Nashville and @JenniDbM
Facebook: @BloomaNashvilleYoga and @JenniferDerryberryMann