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Naked Yoga expert Doria Gani recounts her own transformational journey to help you challenge your hang ups, combat shame and develop new body positive attitudes.
In this inspirational story, discover how Doria overcame critical illness, learned to deal with unexpected
consequences for her life as a woman, and set out on a new path to reconnect with her soul.
Enjoy the benefits and freedom that practising Naked Yoga can bring and discover your true self – with no barriers, limitations or social constraints. With Naked Yoga, you really can learn to love your body and heal your mind.
Includes photographs and easy instructions for practising Naked Yoga either at home or in a group.
DORIA GANI
Doria Gani is a Naked Yoga teacher and an ambassador for body positivity. She started practicing yoga in 2010, as a form of rehabilitation after fighting cervical cancer. From that beginners class, she found that the clear, mindful asana instructions improved her memory, spatial relations, focus, and sense of connectedness with her mind and body. On a greater scale, the daily practice showed her the value of acting deliberately. Yoga was the key to her recovery and transformation, and now she lives her life with a greater sense of purpose and intention.
Eventually, her expanding yoga path led her to India and Bali to train as a professional teacher – she is now qualified in Ashtanga Vinyasa, Rocket Yoga, Yin, Mandala, and principles of Ayurveda and Shamanism. But it was after a liberating experience at Burning Man festival that she decided to start practicing and teaching Naked Yoga. There were no barriers, no inhibitions, and no restrictions – just like with yoga practice. Naked yoga finally taught her to accept her body and accept herself exactly how she is today, with all her imperfections. She now wants to share this feeling of calm acceptance with others.
Doria has been featured on the BBC and in many press articles including in Cosmopolitan, H&E Naturist, The Sun, Unreported London, The Londonist, the i and Dojo.
STEVE ROBSON
Steve is a successful entrepreneur who came to naked yoga as a means of release from the stresses of business life. He has found that it enables him to be very present in his body, and allows him to develop a way of moving meditation and a way to slow down and notice the here and now. Steve worked with Doria to write the book and felt strongly that her story should be told.
REVIEW:
«Doria’s inspiring story is the pathway for anyone wishing to explore the freedom of naked yoga. It’s a story of huge courage, of overcoming pain and hurt, and o f finding hope through the healing power of nature and the purity of self expression!» – Russell Amerasekera, life coach & stylist
Watch the booktrailer here
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Seitenzahl: 177
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Doria Gani
Doria Gani is a Naked Yoga teacher and an ambassador for body positivity. She started practising yoga in 2010, as a form of rehabilitation after fighting cervical cancer. From that beginners’ class, she found that the clear, mindful asana instructions improved her memory, spatial relations, focus, and sense of connectedness with her mind and body. On a greater scale, the daily practice showed her the value of acting deliberately. Yoga was the key to her recovery and transformation, and now she lives her life with a greater sense of purpose and intention.
Now qualified as a yoga teacher in Ashtanga Vinyasa, Rocket Yoga, Yin, Mandala, and principles of Ayurveda and Shamanism, Doria teaches Naked Yoga classes online as well as all around the world.
Doria has been featured on the BBC, East London Film Festival and in many press articles including in Cosmopolitan, H&E Naturist, The Sun, Unreported London, The Londonist, the i and OM Yoga Magazine.
www.doriayoga.com
Steve Robson
Steve is a successful entrepreneur who joined Doria Gani’s Naked Yoga classes two years ago and found it helpful to reconnect with his body, improve his energy and enhance his spirituality.
www.brumbymediagroup.com
First published in the UK in 2021 by SUPERNOVA BOOKS
67 Grove Avenue, Twickenham, TW1 4HX
Supernova Books is an imprint of Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.
www.aurorametro.com @aurorametro FB/AuroraMetroBooks
Instagram @aurora_metro
The Naked Yoga Effect: From Cancer Survivor To Naked Yoga Teacher text copyright © 2021
Doria Gani & Steve Robson
Images: Lorenzo Lessi, Roberto Nencini, Ranger Ric, Maurizio Cecchini, Pink Agency, Alessandro Sigismondi, www.vallejoopenstudios.com
Sun Salutations graphic courtesy of Souvik Maity
Artwork R-evolution by Marco Cochrane www.marcocochranesculpture.net/r-evolution Editor: Cheryl Robson
All rights are strictly reserved. For rights enquiries contact the publisher:
We have made every effort to trace all copyright holders of photographs included in this publication. If you have any information relating to this, please contact: [email protected]
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed in the UK by Short Run Press, Exeter, UK.
ISBNs:
978-1-913641-11-5 (print version)
978-1-913641-12-2 (ebook version)
The Naked Yoga Effect
From Cancer Survivor To Naked Yoga Teacher
by
Doria Gani
& Steve Robson
“I feel my purpose in this life is to free the world from body shame, and my contribution is my naked yoga.”
“Naked yoga finally helped me to accept the person that I became today embracing all my imperfections.”
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part One: My Journey
1 Life Before Cancer
2 Facing The Big ‘C’
3 A Life-Changing Decision
4 Finding Doria
5 Discovering Yoga
6 Journey To India
7 Teaching Yoga
8 Yoga In The Desert
9 Becoming A Naked Yoga Teacher
10 Fighting Body Shame With Naked Yoga
11 Taking Naked Yoga Online
Part Two: Connect With Your Body
12 How To Get Confident Naked
13 How To Love Yourself
14 Benefits Of Being Naked
15 How To Reconnect With Yourself
Part Three: Beginners’ Yoga Guide
16 Sun Salutations A & B
Part Four: What They Say
17 Student Feedback
18 Endnote
19 Index
INTRODUCTION
“Nothing is more beautiful than a naked body.”
– Yves Saint-Laurent
Every day that I teach yoga, I feel honoured to be in this profession and to have the pleasure to share with my students something that has been so life-changing and empowering for me.
My experience of working in this field for several years has led me to realise the need for advocates of body positivity and for more people generally to challenge outdated notions of shame and embarrassment about the human body.
This book is aimed at those who want to improve their health and fitness in mind, body and spirit. Although some readers will be comfortable with nudity or be practising naturists already, others may have negative attitudes towards their bodies which they wish to overcome, or they may be seeking to achieve a particular physical shape or look. Naked Yoga can free you from the shame and embarrassment of feeling that your body is not good enough, and help you to feel good about being nude in front of others.
Naked Yoga has also helped people suffering from unachievable ideals of bodily perfection, and it can help those suffering from eating disorders or obesity to learn to love their bodies and care for them.
By making a deep and lasting connection with your body, you can learn to listen to its needs and take pleasure in exercising, feeling that you belong in your own skin and that you have a bond with your fellow humans.
In a world where we increasingly spend too much time looking at screens, the simple joy of stretching and bending your body to feel your muscles working, to breathe slowly and calmly, and to set time aside each day for self-care, is more important than ever before.
In this book, I share my own story of rehabilitation from a life-threatening illness and my journey of self-discovery, first of all in taking up yoga and then why I finally decided to teach Naked Yoga.
In Part Two, I aim to build your confidence and fitness through practising yoga naked. By getting used to doing things in the nude, it normalises being naked – by yourself and around others. You will find that many of the ways in which you now judge others no longer seem necessary, and you will start to appreciate new qualities in yourself and other people. By stepping out of your comfort zone you challenge yourself to grow. This leads to greater self-confidence in other areas of your life too, as you are more willing to take on new challenges.
In Part Three, we offer a Beginners’ Yoga Guide with advice on how to do simple exercises to get you started with your naked yoga practice in your own home. You will soon find that the idea of wearing yoga pants seems unnatural. Your mind will also grow accustomed to the idea of loving and caring for the body you inhabit and you’ll find a new appreciation for walking barefoot. Whether you go on to join a naked yoga class either online or in person, is for you to decide.
Nevertheless, the practice of naked yoga will change your life for the better and help you to understand and appreciate not only your naked body but also your naked self. In Part Four, we hear how it has positively helped some of my students.
Learning yoga is a lifelong journey. I am both a student and a teacher at the same time. I invite you to come on a journey of discovery by reading and following the Beginners’ Naked Yoga Guide we have included in this book and realising that, whatever stage in life you are at, naked yoga can only enrich it.
CHAPTER 1
Life Before Cancer
“In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.”
– Andrea Dykstra
Once upon a time, in a small village in Tuscany, Italy, there lived a lost soul who had no idea what to do with her life or what direction to take. My mother did her best to raise me, but my father was the controlling type. I had a very intense love-hate relationship with him which shaped my life.
I had my first taste of body shaming when I was six years old. One morning I woke up and my mother looked at me and began screaming. I was suddenly affected by strabismus, abnormal alignment of the eyes, characterized by a turning inwards or outwards from the nose. This squint was caused officially by paralysis of an eye muscle, and unofficially by a slap in the face.
To correct my squint, I was forced to wear an eye patch and glasses, which inevitably led to my being called “four eyes” at school. Although I was dying of shame and embarrassment, I learned to laugh off those stupid jokes and to redirect the bullies’ attention to something else so that they’d leave me in peace. It was two years before I had the necessary eye surgery.
My father’s authoritarian behaviour meant that he liked to give orders and expected obedience. Whatever I asked for, the answer was always “No” or “Because I said so”. I never had a good relationship with my dad and as much as my mother tried to get us closer she failed in every single attempt. I was 2 years old but her words still run through my head at times: “She’s here, happily playing by herself and you come home and make her cry in a matter of seconds.” But my father didn’t listen. As I grew older, my seething anger made me disruptive at school where I’d often get caught smoking in the toilets or be reprimanded for swearing at the teachers which led to me failing 7th Grade. This behaviour incensed my father, who would often lash out when he got home from work while my mother tried in vain to intervene. I was 12 years old when I exhausted my emotional reserve and attempted suicide.
My brother is ten years older than me, and he still lives at home. He has always needed looking after, and my parents did a great job at making his life much easier. He would often gang up with my father to take his side in family arguments, but if he ever got into trouble, I would go to his defence. Eventually, it got to the point where I often physically fought with my father; he would slap me and push me around. I felt unseen, unheard, and like I wasn’t part of the family. An outsider. It wasn’t until my teenage years when I would discover physical strength of my own and learn to defend myself, fuelled by the rage I felt towards my father and the unfairness of my situation.
Nothing interested me. I had no passion for anything. There was no debate about my career, as my father and brother both worked for the family real estate business and I was expected to join them. Every detail of my life was arranged by my father. He even insisted on choosing the college where I trained as a structural engineer, ensuring it was local (literally a few hundred metres from where I lived) so he could keep tabs on my movements. After I qualified, I worked for my father for three tiresome years in the hope that I’d get used to the job, maybe even enjoy it one day. Of course, he paid me far less than the going rate.
Next, I trained for the estate agent diploma to be able to sell property, but my father only saw this as another way to exploit me. Instead of paying me the proper commission on my first sale, he gave me only a fraction: 500 euros instead of 5,000. That was the final straw which drove me to leave the family business and take a job working in a shop as a sales assistant. My father went crazy, complaining, “I can’t believe my daughter wants to work in a shop handling clothes, when she has such a good career with me! It’s a disgrace!” It was time to stop submitting to his tyranny.
I worked as a retail assistant for six months, then I moved to another women’s clothes shop where I met the owner who later became my life-long best friend, Antonella. In those two years, I became financially independent of my father. Antonella was a breath of fresh air. She was like the sister I had never had, and we became very close.
Around this time, I met Massimo (not his real name), an attractive older man who was kind and a good listener. I began to feel as though I had a voice and could be heard. The only problem was that he was in a long-standing relationship with another woman. He actually helped me to understand a little bit more about my relationship with my father and we became close friends. This intimacy progressed into a sexual relationship which was exciting, partially because it was conducted in secret behind the back of his long-term partner, heightened by the sense of it being forbidden.
While I was working with Antonella, I had the time to reflect on my life and I decided to quit my job and go back to university. I asked my father for financial support but, unsurprisingly, he refused to help. “I don’t understand why you should go back to study, or why you want to go to university? It’s pointless,” he said.
I decided to study Spanish and English to become a translator and interpreter and follow my dream of travelling. I juggled working part-time in three different jobs to support my studies. It was an expensive course, and I had to travel by train to the university about 40 miles away. The summer before graduating, I decided to move to Spain for a few months to gain a deeper understanding of the Spanish language. My father thought this was a ridiculous idea, but I went anyway as I was determined to learn as much Spanish as I could.
I moved to Santander, and it was wonderful to learn a new culture and be free to meet new people and try new experiences. One day, Massimo surprised me with an unexpected visit. I don’t know how he found me as I hadn’t given him my address, but I was pleased to see him and we spent a fun week together, travelling around. We drank cañas, ate paella and pinchos and had the most wonderful time. Being so far away from everybody we knew back home, we could relax and enjoy each other’s company. After that, we spent two hours talking every day on the phone and so I went back to Italy at the end of the summer before the start of my last year at the university expecting our relationship to blossom.
When Massimo put a ring on my finger, I was thrilled, believing he was serious about our future together, but after several months he still couldn’t bring himself to leave his long-term partner. He wouldn’t let me tell my best friend Antonella about our relationship either and after three years of being controlled by him, I had to face the truth that this relationship was going nowhere. It seemed to be an echo of my father’s behaviour, leaving me with feelings of being used and unloved. My friend, Antonella, supported me through the whole sorry saga. With the help of a psychotherapist, and a lot of soul-searching, I eventually broke up with Massimo. I finally understood that being controlled and manipulated by a man wasn’t the same as being loved.
Right after graduating, one of my university tutors offered me a job. The work involved being a guide and interpreter for Spanish tourists on cruises around the Mediterranean visiting Pisa and Florence on day trips. It was a very exciting opportunity, and I accepted this new challenge.
When the summer season was over, I decided to move to London for a couple of months to improve my English so I could work with American and English tourists as well. I wasn’t excited about starting again from scratch, having to look for a new place to live and a new job, but I knew it was the right step to take for my career. However, when I got to London, I decided to take my career in a completely different direction. I suddenly felt I was free for the first time in my life – and it felt wonderful.
I found a job in two days in a shop with a Spanish company. I met beautiful people from different walks of life. I began to have fun, and I was finally able to be fully myself. Once I had experienced this feeling of freedom, I couldn’t face going home again. One month led to another and, as I began to enjoy my independence, I had no desire to go back to live in a place where I would be forced to be home by midnight. I’d become something of a joke to my friends back in Italy. They were used to going out partying or clubbing until 6am in the morning, and slowly they had stopped inviting me out.
I soon got offered a job as a supervisor for another Spanish company. I loved the Spanish language, and I found myself being part of a nice big family. This new job gave me the knowledge and confidence to later run a flagship store in Regent Street. It was a lot of responsibility and I was sick, but I didn’t know it yet.
Each year, when I went back to Italy for a short visit, I would see my doctor to have a smear test and breast cancer check-up. They had always come back negative. I was in a relationship in London and I noticed that whenever my boyfriend and I had sex, I would bleed a little. As it wasn’t painful, it was a while before I went to see my doctor in London. Having recently started taking the pill, I thought it might have something to do with that, that maybe my body needed some more time to adapt to this new hormonal storm. My GP ran some blood tests and when the results came back with abnormal blood cells, he asked me to redo the tests for confirmation. Then I was sent to a hospital for a cervical biopsy.
Having the biopsy was a traumatic experience. The embarrassment I felt at having medical staff examining my cervix was nothing compared to the invasiveness of the procedure without even an anaesthetic. It triggered a huge panic attack and I started to hyperventilate. I went rigid with fright, my arms, hands and mouth paralysed, I thought I was going to die.
The results of the biopsy came back quickly. I didn’t know then that my life was about to change forever.
CHAPTER 2
Facing The Big ‘C’
“It takes one moment to hate who you are, and a lifetime to remember how to love yourself again. This is the most important war.”
– Erin Van Vuren
A week after the awful experience of the biopsy, I went back to the hospital and they handed me a piece of paper that told me I had stage-3 cervical cancer. I went into shock. I couldn’t feel anything. The whole world seemed to stop.
As the doctor explained to me that I would need a major operation, it seemed as though this was happening to somebody else. It didn’t seem possible that I could be suffering from such a serious illness. I had planned to go through with the surgery without telling my parents, but as the seriousness of the situation began to sink in, I felt desperately alone.
I called my brother and he started to cry. He couldn’t believe it was happening to me. He was very scared and wanted to tell my parents straight away but I said that I would tell them myself when I was ready to. What was the point of telling them? I thought that my father would only make me feel guilty about contracting such an illness, as if I deserved it for living my life as an independent woman.
Finally, I called my best friend Antonella and although she was surprised, she was very grounded and said, “We will get through this together, let’s take one step at the time” She gave me love and support unconditionally – which helped me come to terms with the diagnosis. Her friendship was invaluable.
The next time I had to go in for an internal examination, I asked the anaesthetist to give me a general anaesthetic so that I didn’t have another panic attack. As I was unconscious for the examination and test, I didn’t realise until I woke up that something had gone wrong and I found myself covered in blood. As soon as I called out for a nurse and they saw that I was haemorrhaging, it felt like panic stations and I was rushed back into the operating room. By then I was screaming at them not to touch me again without another anaesthesia, and they had to sedate me to calm me down. When I woke up the second time it was all over – for now!
Of course, when I did tell my parents, they tried to talk me into going back to Italy for medical treatment. They began asking around for recommendations of good local cancer specialists. My mother told me that one of our neighbours in Italy also had cervical cancer. She had heard of all the gruesome procedures from our neighbour and was terrified that her daughter would be going through the same things.
My father kept trying to push me to go back to Italy, but I refused. I felt safe and supported by the NHS staff in London. I had met really wonderful nurses and doctors and I trusted them to take good care of me. My main operation date was set for 14th April, and my parents arrived in London two days before the operation.
Waiting to go into the operation room, I couldn’t stop thinking about Massimo, I missed him and I missed his words. “Don’t worry, I will take care of you,” as he used to say to me. So, I had the brilliant idea to call him for some support. We hadn’t spoken for five years, so I changed my phone settings to call him with a private number.
“Hi, do you remember me?” I said.
“Of course, I do. How could I ever forget about you?”
