Food For Life is a weekly class that teaches shelter residents the self-care skills to maintain healthy minds, bodies, and hearts. Samantha Feinerman is one of our two instructors who guides participants through gentle yoga, meditation, breathing exercises, and discussions on holistic wellness. Hosted in our native plants garden, residents learn how to practice mindfulness and meditation in order to best support anxiety, chronic stress and trauma.
In our conversation with Samantha Feinerman, you’ll learn more about the program and how beneficial it is to practice meditation.
What do you think we can learn or gain from practicing meditation or yoga?
Samantha: When we think of yoga, we tend to think of the physical practice of yoga, which is called Asana. The physical practice tunes us into our body, the way that our body works or even to what exists in our body. We can learn a lot from our body because our body is by design a part of Nature. So when we practice moving with our breath and we remember that we are breathing beings on this planet, we remember that we're part of something bigger than what we often think we're part of. We tend to forget that there's so much more than what goes on in our heads.
Yoga helps us expand our understanding of being limited and it reminds us of our true nature, which is that we're part of this greater world.
Meditation is a part of the yoga practice. The whole practice is about becoming more aware and heightening our sense of connection. It's a practice of liberating. Yoga is a practice of Liberation.
Liberation from what?
Samantha: Liberation from the limitations that are placed on us or that we think we have, whether those be in our minds, our bodies from a past experience, from a traumatic event, from society, oppression, systemic or otherwise.
When we practice meditating, there's this really beautiful thing that's happening—we have the potential to get in touch with this very pure version of our energy. In the process of meditating, our mind and our body—and the way that they connect with each other—get a chance to rest from all the things that they usually think they need to be doing. That rest is very healing and powerful because it allows us to gain more potential from our own energy, brain, and body. It's a higher, clearer sense of connection that we can gain with our world. Clarity is a big word in the yoga practices.
When you practice yoga, it opens up how you connect with your outer worlds. All of a sudden, what you thought was impossible in one place becomes not so impossible.
That wasn't the simplest answer! Talking about yoga, it's pretty big.
You hear yoga and meditation is for your mind, your body, your soul, your spirit...it's all of the dimensions of being, it's all the layers of existence.
But what that means is we get a clear mind, we can heal internally, we can heal our relationships with the world and our society. And that helps us find other ways to contribute and connect and be of service to others. Those are the things we remember when we practice.
That reminds me of something Rob said in his class: That one of the values of practicing yoga and mindfulness is not just the benefits it gives you in the moment of doing it, but what it gives you off the mat too. So, how do you experience that in your life? You have a daily ritual you’ve practiced for years. How does it influence your self out in the world when you're not necessarily practicing yoga, as we understand it? How does it impact you in other ways?
Samantha: It impacts me all the time! Yoga is a practice that is more important off of the mat. It's meant to go with you beyond the figurative mat, chair, or wherever you're creating a container for practice. It transcends that.
You're stuck in traffic and you really want to get to where you're going...but instead, you're not pissed off about the traffic the way that you may be used to be. You are able to regain a sense of calm or connectto your breath.
It shows up in your interactions with other people. You're having a conversation that's not going well, but instead of blowing up on the person, you're letting them talk and allowing yourself to respond instead of react to everything that they're saying.
You remember things like that. There are so many ways that it shows up off the mat.
When I first started doing yoga, I entered into the physical practice asana first. I remember I was walking up a hill when, all of a sudden, I realized that I noticed that I was walking. I had not paid attention to the fact of my walking before. It felt so crazy, like, Oh my God, I can feel my feet in my shoes and I’m walking!
We don't notice these things. We don't notice these things.
Another place that I notice it pop up for me is...growing up, I was severely arachnophobic. If there was a spider anywhere in the house, I was gonna go outside. I would have thoughts like, Well we're gonna have to burn the house down because there's a spider in the house. One spider means there's more spiders!
I noticed about a year after I started meditating that I not only didn't want them to die, but I could also save them physically. I notice the difference in how my body experiences seeing a spider. It's like a whole other person lives in my body now! It seems silly and trivial, but imagine what kind of freedom you can have if you can get rid of a phobia.
Can you explain for us what was really happening behind that change in your reaction? How does the practice of meditation calm your nervous system down?
Samantha: :Something that has forever made us afraid, such as a severe fear or phobia, doesn’t leave us a lot of space to work with in our perception of that fear because our nervous system is already in overdrive about it. For me, it was in overdrive for spiders.
You're working against a sympathetic nervous system that's been taught to fear something because of its experiences, both inherited and from your own lived life. The system hasn't had enough direct experience with the opposite. We talk about calm and peace and letting go and relaxing and going with the flow...all of which sound nice and they're wonderful to say and have an idea of. The difference is when your body actually understands it.
Practicing breath work in a certain way allows us to calm down the nervous system and give the mind and the body direct experience with calm. It can be very magical!
Yoga is a practice that supports the mind and the body, the heart and every system within the body, in having these kinds of experiences. Yoga keeps things more open and provides a sense of balance through connecting to your breath.
Our version of traditional therapy involves talking about our problems. But by practicing yoga, I don't have to talk about my fears of spiders! I'm just sitting in a space and taking time to bring this experience of safety to my body. And so my body is in turn understanding calm in a visceral way. It gives the whole being space. The way that the body then reacts to stimuli starts to lower.
So the flip is the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s nicknamed "the rest and digest." We can think of it as being part of the understanding inside of our body, on a visceral level, that understands what peace is.
The parasympathetic nervous system is part of the balance of life, but so much stimulation outside of the body can often make it hard for us to understand that.
But that's where I went. I started to have more experience in a parasympathetic state, down-regulating the sympathetic nervous system. That process is not linear. But it is global inside of us. As we become more balanced or connected to a sense of inner peace, that starts to impact all the different things that we have a relationship with.
Cuz our relationship with a fear is really just our perception of it.
What you said earlier about the difference between reacting and responding to somebody in an interaction. It's also your interaction with the external world or stimulus is because you've done all of this work with relaxing. Now, it's more of a response and it's more conscious.
Samantha: It's less about your predetermined, preconceived, and preconditioned connection or relationship to those fears or those people. Yoga is this practice that gives us the space to see that our relationship to people is just one relationship and we are in relationship with everything.
We put a lot of weight on the relationships that we have with people because those are the ones that tend to feel like they are the most immediate. They’re what we relate to on the highest level, because that's what we are.
But it's beautiful that this practice gives us a way of going deeper and further than that. It can provide us with a way of expanding our relationships with people as well as realizing that we're in relationship with everything else. So I'm not bound to the way of being that I thought would be me forever. That's not freedom. We don't do it to ourselves on purpose, most of the time. Sometimes we get stuck. Sometimes we forget to move. We forget to breathe. We forget to zoom out. And yoga teaches us to zoom out. It's a matter of keeping things moving inside.
I know that you incorporate everything that you just spoke about in your classes here. Tell me what your students in Food For Life have taught you about life or about furthering your own understanding of yoga.
Samantha: Getting to teach these classes has been really special. The students in these classes are so open. I keep learning from them to remain open. That's a lesson I've learned in the yoga practice, but it’s one of the harder ones to really embody. But seeing my students every week trying new things for the first time—moving or taking time to practice breathing in ways that are so outside of their normal—teaches me to be open to things.
They continue to remind me that love is maybe the most powerful tool that we have. We can heal each other when we connect.
What I give to them is reciprocated by them; I can feel them giving energy to the class, to our little circle outside. Their willingness, their care, and their gratitude is really inspiring.
Thank you, Sam. That was beautiful.
A conversation with Samantha Feinerman, April 2021. Interview and transcript by Sara Alura Rupp (GrowGood Programs Manager).
Samantha Feinerman has been teaching yoga for ten years. Her teaching style uses a balance of embodiment, somatic experience, and intellect. She teaches yoga to uplift and support her students mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, especially in underserved communities with less accessibility to yoga. In her free time, Sam loves to rock climb, hike, and write. To learn more about Sam or to take a class, please visit sunandmoonasana.com.