Standing Still To Find The Authentic Self
Maya Rasak
“Can you ever just stop?” Maya Rasak says one of her meditation teachers asked her this question before giving her the following advice: Stop, stop running, stop being busy and just breathe and feel.
She didn’t take this advice to stop easily; it took an illness that landed her flat on her back to shift her life course, and today Maya gently nudges people with the same words her meditation teacher spoke to her.
Always a very physical person, Maya was athletic and always on the go. Unsurprisingly, her first experiences with asana were through intense Power Yoga classes. As Yoga for many people has a transformational effect, her practice began to initiate deeper emotional releases. During Yoga teacher training, Max Strom placed a block under her chest in savasana and the experience was so deep she could only lay on the mat with tears streaming down her face. It’s ironic that savasana is the resting pose, and for most of her life, Maya had not allowed herself much rest.
There are those moments when rest takes us. Maya came down with pneumonia twice, and it was serious enough that she felt as though an elephant was sitting on her chest, she couldn’t breathe and she thought she would die. This profound experience triggered a childhood memory from when she was three and her mother had to perform CPR after rescuing her from drowning. Decades later, all the emotions she had been literally running from her entire life flooded her awareness. Pneumonia is called the grieving disease for good reason. Maya saw that she kept herself so busy because she was terrified of experiencing her own feelings; she realized she was afraid that if she felt them they would swallow her up into a dark depression.
The flash-back to her childhood trauma allowed her to make the profound connection that now as she began facing her fears she was performing CPR on herself. When she surrendered to spirit and allowed herself to just be with what she had hidden deep inside her, her terror would melt. This experience inspired her decision to become a therapist and share with others to path to freedom from pain and suffering.
Maya earned her master’s degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University and became a licensed clinician. Her training to become a Yoga teacher helped her understand the importance of the mind-body connection. Although she does not teach Yoga classes, she uses tools from Yoga as part of her therapeutic process. She also draws from her meditation practice and teaches mindfulness to help people connect to their core, the center of their consciousness. The place that as she says, “Buddhists refer to as one of perfect peace, joy and freedom.”
Anxiety, depression and relationship dynamics are the surface issues that motivate people to come for therapy. She says that on a deeper level, they feel a loss of self and don’t know how to access their own authentic self. Maya sees her work as helping people align with their core self and their life’s purpose by helping them identify and remove negative core beliefs that keep them from their sense of peace and purpose.
She calls the process she uses Transformational CPR, evoking her own experiences. Maya feels this process is more powerful than talk therapy alone because it addresses emotions through the body in addition to verbally. “A lot of trauma can happen before we have language, before we can speak. The only way to access preverbal information is through the body. The body never lies, whereas the mind has all kinds of defenses built up. We can talk about our experiences all day long but unless someone has a body experience it remains conceptual, which is why I work with the body and the breath so much.”
One technique she uses is to place a person in bridge pose with a block under their hips and a strap around their thighs. While in this shape, she asks people to focus on their breath. “It is amazing what comes up,” she says. After a cathartic, emotional release, she helps her clients become focused again. “It is important to keep people grounded and present, even when past events or future fears erupt in the room…and important that someone who has a cathartic release doesn’t stay stuck in the past event. I teach them how to quickly get out of fragmentation and come back to wholeness so experiencing suppressed feelings feels like a relief.” Throughout this, she emphasizes seeing the undamaged part of the self. Maya utilizes a combination of tools, striving to teach people to use them to empower themselves and become their own therapist because self-empowerment is key to doing CPR on oneself.
Maya teaches that the outside world is constantly changing; people and situations are fluctuating, but the love inside us never changes, never dies and is always available to us. “We have a choice,” Maya says. “Every moment is a new opportunity to choose love and freedom, instead of pain and suffering.”
For more information about Maya Rasak, visit: soulintegration.biz.
Psalm Isadora is a tantrika and Yoga teacher based out of Venice, CA. Her thirst for firsthand experience of traditional practices has led her to travel and study with Yoga, Tantra and Sufi masters in India and Turkey. She will be bringing a group of students to learn Tantra Yoga at her guru’s ashram in India this January and February. She will also be leading an Ancestral Healing Yoga retreat and traditional Lakota sweat lodge with Andrew Soliz this Dec 11 – 13 at the Ojai Foundation: psalmisadorayoga.com.
By Psalm Isadora
