How Yoga Can Help You Heal and Recover with Donny Starkins
We all feel the pressure of social expectations. Leading a life pleasing other people can lead to losing our identity and sense of self. Thus, it is important to make time for recovery and healing so that we can accept ourselves fully and extend the same love and compassion to others.
In today’s episode, yoga Instructor Donny Starkins shares how yoga helped him towards self-actualization and personal development. He also gives some insights and tools on how you can start on your journey to recovery and how yoga can bring healing to our body, mind, and soul.
About Our Guest
Donny Starkins is a yoga instructor and personal development coach. He is a former Division I baseball player, and pain and medication were constant in his life. In search of physical and spiritual relief, he embarked on his yoga journey in 2005. He now leads transformational classes with a focus on mindfulness.
Healing the Body and the Soul Through Yoga
Yoga for Self Development
- During his athletic career, Donny underwent seven operations on his left knee. Because he was in constant pain, he became addicted to pain killers.
- Yoga saved his life and healed his mind and soul.
Journey Toward Embracing Yoga
- When Donny started teaching yoga, he feared people’s judgments.
- He teaches some classes in upper-class areas in Phoenix and Scottsdale. He observed that though people live fancy lives on the outside, they are dying on the inside. So, he asked himself the question, “How dare I not teach the soul?”
- Seane Corn’s Off The Mat, Into The World leadership training inspired him to pursue teaching yoga.
- At the end of the five-day training, he created a monthly community yoga class called “Sunday Yoga Service.”
Going Beyond the Struggles
- Donny goes to an all men’s meeting once a week for accountability and to be of service.
- He also continues to share the message he learned from Seane Corn’s training.
- Little by little, he let go of other people's opinions and learned not to give them power over him.
- Now he is on a lifelong journey of personal development.
Being a Yoga Teacher
- He started as a teacher who was stuck to his small self and believed that he needed to be perfect.
- As a yoga teacher, he doesn't want to be put on the pedestal. He wants to be human and be one with his students and help them heal.
- He realized his mission—to teach a message to the soul in a language that everybody can understand.
Who Is a Soulful Teacher?
- A soulful teacher is vulnerable and full of humanity.
- A soulful teacher channels something from the middle of the heart.
What Holds People Back?
- What holds them back is their growth or transformation.
- People fear what others think of them. They are caught in the limitations of the mind or the story that they're telling themselves.
Social Media as a Tool
- He has a love–hate relationship with social media.
- Although social media stresses him out, he uses it as leverage. He holds on to his mission to share the message of healing through yoga to as many people as possible.
- You should be able to self-regulate on social media.
The World of Recovery and Helpful Tools
- First is the tool of breath and meditation. The Muse meditation headband, which gives biofeedback of the brain's activity, is a great example.
- The 90-day workbook in his coaching program is also useful for journaling.
- You should have the ability to surrender. Go to any lengths to get sober and break free of your addiction.
- You should have the HOW: honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness.
5 Powerful Quotes from This Episode
- “The more I started to chip away at the things that were getting in the way of me showing up as the best, the most authentic version of myself, the more just all the other opinions of other people don't even matter anymore.”
- “It's again that vulnerability and that humility that someone who you can tell is just channeling something. It's not scripted, and it's just right from the middle of the heart.”
- “In [the] recovery world, there has to be a willingness—like if you are struggling with an addiction, whether it's a substance or its sex or shopping, whatever it is—the ability to surrender.”
- “I use the equation ‘willingness equals freedom.’ If I am willing to go to any lengths, I can be as free as I want to be.”
- “So we can only love as far as we're willing to love ourselves. And when we can do that and we can truly love us, our flawed works in progress that we are, we will then not have to look outside of ourselves to try to fill a void that we can't fill ourselves.”
Resources
To know more about yoga and check some upcoming events and retreats, you may visit Donny’s website.
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