Wild Yoga Tribe Podcast Episode #14 – Surrender: Giving Up The How – Yoga in Bahrain with Weam Zabar

Welcome to Episode #14 of the Wild Yoga Tribe Podcast! This week, I welcome Weam Zabar onto the show. She is a yoga studio owner and yoga teacher from Bahrain. Now, when I think of yoga in Bahrain, I immediately will think of Weam! Not only is she a studio owner, her yoga studio was the first registered yoga school opened in Bahrain. She opened her yoga studio in 2011, Namaste, and has been integral to the yoga scene in Bahrain ever since.

As a psychotherapist, Weam is passionate about listening and is a firm advocate of surrender. Weam defines surrender as “Being clear about the why of the what and then giving up the how.” Surrender is not about giving up the external action, giving up your dreams, or about standing idly by. What does surrender mean to you? Learn more about surrender, about yoga in Bahrain and about how psychotherapy influences yoga teaching and practice in this episode of the Wild Yoga Tribe podcast!

Tell me more about Weam Zabar

Weam Zabar is a yoga teacher from Bahrain. She is a ERYT-500hr yoga teacher, a phsychotherapist, a hypnotherapist, and a Reiki Healer, and is the founder of Namaste— Bahrain’s first internationally recognized yoga school, located in Budaiya. Her Yoga journey started in 2007 and nothing remained the same. Seeing how Yoga nurtured her life, she left behind a demanding corporate job to dedicate her to guiding others and sharing their journey home. Weam has held workshops, teacher trainings and retreats in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bali, India, Morocco and Thailand. Moreover, Weam teaches vinyassa, hatha, aerial, self enquiry, philosophy, pranayama, and meditation. 

What to expect in the Yoga In Bahrain episode of the Wild Yoga Tribe Podcast

Weam Zabar had a bright future in business and was leading a fast-paced life, until she started seeking something more. While yoga in Bahrain was almost nonexistent at the time, there was no yoga studios, and very, very few people even knew what yoga was! Luckily, Weam’s aunt was one of them. After just one practice, Weam knew that yoga was meant to change her life.

She left her job in business, got trained as a yoga teacher, and opened Namaste, Bahrain’s first registered yoga studio in 2011. Ever since then, she has trained hundreds of students in yoga, and has guided them on their path to become yoga teachers as well.

As a psychotherapist, Weam’s approach to teaching yoga is grounded in true listening and as well as helping students on their path of self-enquiry, When I asked her how pschotherapy has influenced her practice of teaching yoga, Weam responded, “What psychotherapy has taught me is that you have no idea what is going on in someone’s heart and in someone’s head. It’s allowed me to be more of a witness and to hold the space in a way that interferes less than I was before.”

We talk about big lessons, difficulties in yoga circles, and even about her recently published book— Living in the Grey. Get ready for a conversation packed with vulnerability that illuminates a compassionated, mindful approach to the practice of surrender and bringing your yoga practice off the mat and into your life.

Tune into the full Yoga in Bahrain episode to find out more!

For the Skimmers – What’s in the Yoga in Bahrain episode?

• Surrender – Giving Up The How
• The Lesson of Listening
• What Does Weam NOT Like About Yoga
• How Psychotherapy Compliments Teaching Yoga
• Does Your Yoga Practice Work For You? Or Do You Work For It?
• The Importance of Vulnerable Conversations

Favorite Quote From Weam Zabar

“Yoga is when your outside matches your inside. Yoga is when you are, the way you live, and the way you interact with people reflects your inner world— how you speak to yourself and how you feel on the inside.”

Connect with Weam Zabar

https://www.instagram.com/namastebh/

https://www.instagram.com/wanderwonderweam/

https://namastebh.com/

Book: Living In The Grey 

Want more?

https://wildyogatribe.com/thepodcast/

Everything you need is just one click away! Check out all the resources here: https://linktr.ee/wildyogatribe

Wild Yoga Tribe Podcast Episode #14 – Surrender: Giving Up The How – Yoga in Bahrain with Weam Zabar

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:00:04

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Wild Yoga Tribe Podcast. I’m your host, Lily Allen Duenas. Together we’ll talk about the world of yoga and we’ll talk to people from around the world. Join us for authentic conversations about the global yoga ecosystem, and we’ll cover yoga philosophies and methodologies along the way. Inhale, exhale, we’re about to dive in.

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:00:33

Namaste and welcome to the Wild Yoga Tribe Podcast. Today, I am so excited to welcome on to the show, Weam Zabar. Weam Zabar is from Bahrain and she’s a registered yoga teacher of 500 hours. She is a psychotherapist, a hypnotherapist and a Reiki healer, and she is the founder of Namaste— which is Bahrain’s first internationally recognized yoga school. Her yoga journey started in 2007 and ever since then, she really feels like nothing has remained the same. She has held workshops and teacher trainings and retreats in Bahrain, as well as in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bali, India, Morocco, and Thailand. Amazing places to be teaching yoga and welcoming people to workshops and other yoga retreats. So she teaches Vinyasa, hatha, aerial, self enquiry, philosophy, pranayama and meditation. So thank you Weam for being here today.

Weam Zabar: 00:01:42

Thank you so much. I’m very excited to have this conversation with you this morning.

 

Tell me about yourself and how yoga came into your life

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:01:46

So to dive in, just let’s start with your story. I would love to hear more about who you are and how yoga came into your life.

Weam Zabar: 00:01:55

Okay, so I’ll start from the beginning. I suppose, which is a good place to start from. So when I was a child, when I was about five years old, if you asked me what I wanted to be, I would say I want to be a psychotherapist. And when I was about 10 years old, I was fascinated by gymnastics. I didn’t practice it, I wasn’t good at it, but I was very fascinated by the human body and what it’s capable of doing. But as you do, and then you grow up, you kind of forget about your childhood dreams, and so I went into IT, I studied that at university. I came top of my class, a big nerd here. And then I moved on to a corporate job where I started off as a Techie and then I became an Account Manager, and that job very quickly lost its appeal. Although I was traveling business class and staying in five star hotels everywhere and my career was growing very quickly. It felt empty, it felt like it didn’t speak, it didn’t speak of my truth, it didn’t speak of who I was as a person and so I very quickly tired and got bored of it. And that’s when, that kind of was in parallel with the time that I started discovering meditation and energy healing and yoga, and I thought, “You know what, I’d rather do that for a living”. You know, to me, doing yoga was the break in my day that I was looking forward to, it’s like the sanctuary that I was looking forward to throughout my day and I thought, I do really like to share that with people. And so, becoming a yoga teacher was a dream come true because it combines working with the mind that I was dreaming of and wanting to be a psychotherapist and working with the body that I was dreaming of when I was dreaming about being a gymnast. So to me, it was just the perfect fit. And that basically was the start of it.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:04:09

Oh, that’s so cool, that you just walked away from this amazing corporate job and you said, “Okay, let’s reground, let’s reconsider what am I really looking for”. Do you feel like you felt pulled to yoga, or were you just looking for a spiritual or physical? Like, what was the actual gateway? How did you even hear of yoga?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:04:32

The funny thing is, when I started practicing yoga, it was very limited and unpopular in Bahrain. And the only group of people that I knew of that practiced yoga here was a group of an older generation, so my parents’ generation. And I actually heard about yoga from my Auntie. She’s a bit of a hippie and a bit of a forward thinker and nonconformist. And she said, “You’d love yoga, you know. You should try it”, and she was talking to different people about it. And for years, I’m just like, “Uhh, here she is”, one of her other, you know, kind of trends. And years and years later, after I had delivered my daughter, she wasn’t born naturally. I went through a C section, and everything was too intense for my body at that stage, everything was just too difficult for the kind of surgery that I had. So I thought, “Okay, maybe I’ll try yoga”, and I walked in, and I remember walking out and calling all my friends and saying, “You guys are missing out, the stuff is great”. You know, so it slowly became kind of my me time. It became the time that was literally just about me and to all the mothers out there, they know it’s like when you first have a baby, nothing becomes about you anymore. Everything in your life becomes centered around your baby and yoga was the time that was about me. And I just fell in love with it, but I never imagined that it would also become my career.

 

Why is yoga in Bahrain the most popular with the older generation?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:06:11

I’m so surprised that yoga in Bahrain was most popular with the older generation. Like, I haven’t heard anybody say that yet. What do you attribute to, or is it also the same now, or?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:06:27

No, it’s not the same anymore but I feel like at the time when it started, there was a group of friends, basically. And that’s the only group that I knew of that practice at that time. You’re talking about 2007. And they had this little gathering that they would do and they had an Indian teacher who would teach them once or twice a week, and they would rent out different venues to do it. But there was no yoga school, yoga classes were not popular. So it was delayed, the time that we got into yoga and when I opened my yoga studio, a lot of people said, “Are you insane? Who wants yoga in Bahrain, like nobody knows about it, nobody’s interested in it. So, what are you doing giving up a job for this?”. But I had a vision in my head, I just knew that it would come to its tipping point with time. 

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:07:26

That’s a lot of faith. I love it. You could feel it. So what is yoga in Bahrain like now? I know that you do have the yoga studio, the first registered one, congratulations for that. That’s just the coolest, and I’d love to hear more about how yoga has shifted in Bahrain since you got started.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:07:48

A few yoga studios opened up after I had. So after the first, I would say five years. It took me two years to succeed, it took me two years of patiently waiting in educating and advocating yoga to have a real client base that would sustain my business. And after a few people saw that I had succeeded, then they decided to open their own yoga studio. So there are a few yoga studios around the island. But at the same time, Bahrain is a very small country. So we’re a total population of 1.5 million people, of which only half a million are locals. So, just by the lack of population, it makes doing business on this island a bit trickier. And to have a business that is a bit more niche, it limits the kind of the demographic of the clientele that you could potentially have, if you see what I mean. So, I would say it’s still small, it’s still a small market, but the effect it has had on people’s lives has made it worth it over the years.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:09:09

And are your students becoming younger and younger?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:09:13

I have a combination. I have all sorts of age groups, backgrounds, and experiences with yoga. So I have some serious students and they go on to do their teacher training with me and I have some newer students, I have older students, and we cater to a lot of different people. I do still love teaching older people though, I gotta say. There’s something so gratifying about teaching the older group of people because the difference it makes to them is bigger, and so their appreciation for the practice of what it means is greater, and they tend to be more consistent and more serious students than younger students, believe it or not.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:10:06

Yeah, I’ve had some students as well over the years who are, you know, 55 plus, and come in with various accidents or injuries or hip replacements and I also find it’s really rewarding as a yoga teacher to kind of figure out how to modify and cater a class to their needs. I like that creative element as well. 

 

Weam Zabar: 00:10:27

Yeah. 

 

How would you describe Bahrain?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:10:28

So, you mentioned a little bit about Bahrain, but I would love to just for one minute, just pretend to be somebody who’s never heard of your country before. How would you describe it?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:10:33

So, Bahrain is small, it’s a series of islands, they’re 30 something islands, and most people live on the mainland and Muharraq which is the second largest island. It’s in the middle of the Arabian Sea, so we are East of Saudi Arabia, and it’s pretty chill, it’s a cosmopolitan country. It’s a very tolerant country, and I know that if people don’t really live in the Middle East, they have the idea that it might be limited or restricted. But Bahrain is one of those countries that is very open, and tolerant, welcoming, and diverse. It’s very laid back. Everything is at a slower speed than your average speed, you know. Although it is filled with cities and, you know, skyscrapers and it is very modern, it’s still laid back. It was actually voted the best country by experts in the world, because of how safe it is and how easy it is to raise a family here. So often people will come in and say, “I’m just going to stay for a year or two, save some money and leave”, and then 15, 20 years later, they’re still here. So it’s one of those countries that really captures you and entices you and makes you fall in love with it.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:12:20

Oh, you described that so beautifully. I definitely think that our listeners will now have Bahrain on their radars. 

 

Weam Zabar: 00:12:27

I hope so. 

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:12:28

Me too. So, there is a large community of experts, I mean if you were voted that way, congratulations to Bahrain. Is there a large community?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:12:38

Yeah so out of the 1.5 million, 1 million are experts.

 

How do hypnotherapy and psychotherapy complement your yoga teaching and yoga practice?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:12:42

Wow, okay. Let’s dive into yoga. I am so excited to talk to you more about even how hypnotherapy and psychotherapy complement your yoga teaching and yoga practice. I’m really curious about how those two integral parts of your life and your being, how that influences your yoga teaching and yoga self practice too.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:13:07

I think one of the biggest takeaways I have taken from my psychotherapy training and practice, is that you don’t know what someone is going through. Also you don’t know what they’re thinking, and what they’re feeling, and why they’re thinking, what they’re thinking, and why they’re feeling, what they’re feeling, and you don’t know what’s best for anybody. I think that was the biggest takeaway for me, is to take a further step back from what I was already doing and really become a witness in the process of watching my students practice. There was a level of being opinionated that I had in me for many years where I thought, “Okay, I’ve done enough self enquiry, I’ve done enough teaching, I’ve done enough speaking to people that I can guess what they’re thinking, or what they’re feeling, or how they’re experiencing something”. And what psychotherapy has taught me is you have no idea. You’d be surprised at what’s going on in someone’s heart and what’s going on in someone’s head, you know. So it has allowed me to become more of an enabler, I would say, or more of a witness, more of somebody that is there to really hold the space in a way that interferes less than I was before.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:14:35

Oh that’s beautiful. That is a powerful lesson to learn as well, that we are a lot, we like to think we know it all. I think every human is that way. We’re like, “Oh no, I know best”. I guess it’s just, it seems like it’s human nature. So that unlearning kind of saying, “Hey, check in with yourself”. We all have such unique experiences and histories and biographies and biologies, that it is impossible. I mean, you just can’t guess.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:15:05

Absolutely, and that is more empowering to our students, is when we allow their answers to come from them, is when you guide the process of the questioning and the digging and the inquiring. But in the end, there is no interference. It’s more of a curiosity and innocence that you bring into the conversation that allows the person to find out their own truths and their own answers because that’s the only thing that is going to stick. Even if you convince someone to think a certain way or do something, they might do it for a little while to, you know, to be a good student or whatever, right. But in the long term, the answers that will stick with them are the ones that they came up with themselves. 

 

How are you actually conducting self enquiry as a class?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:15:55

So, I also wanted to ask you about the types of yoga you teach— vinyasa, and hatha, and aerial, you also listed self enquiry and you just mentioned that too. How are you actually conducting self enquiry as a class?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:16:12

So I have been running teacher training for the past eight years. So a big part of the training is self enquiry. To me, to be able to hold the space to someone else as a yoga teacher, you need to be able to find out what your stuff is, to find out what your blind spots are. And so there’s a lot of drilling that happens on our teacher trainings and they’re segmented in 10 day chunks, and even in 10 days, one of my favorite things that I hear students say is they come out of the 10 days and say, “I just don’t know anymore”. And I love it when I hear that because to me, that’s the starting point, is when you have dropped all your rigid ideas about yourself and life and the world and people around you. This is when you’re really open to unlimited possibilities. So to create a level of doubt and confusion is very useful in that sense and when you go, “I just don’t know anymore”. You know, I find that to be one of my favorite things to hear students say. The other way that I integrate self enquiry is I run courses that combine yoga and breathing and meditation and support groups and discussions and journaling and exercises like that. So usually those are themed courses that run over a few weeks with people having certain goals in mind. So that opens up the door for conversation also. Often we go in, and we teach a class and we leave and we hardly ever get to really know our students on a deep level and this gives a platform for that, for the conversation to be two sided

 

What has been your biggest lesson recently?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:18:04

That beginner’s mind is where things kind of start to get really juicy, really surprising. So Weam, what has been your biggest lesson recently?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:18:17

So as I said, a part of it is learning to listen. I feel like often communication is happening where we’re trying to fit what the other person is saying into something that we already know or we already believe in. And to really listen with the intention of listening and understanding, rather than with the intention of responding, or even fixing and repairing. And what I have learned a lot of time in the therapy room is that, a lot of time people don’t want a solution. And as yoga teachers were often in the kind of savior mentality, where we’re trying to save the world from its suffering. And sometimes that’s not what people need, they just need somebody to listen, and to understand, and to validate, and that’s it, is to say, okay what I hear is that you’re feeling sad or that you’re feeling lonely or that you’re feeling disappointed or frustrated or something like that, and to just hold the space empathically for the other person without trying to come up with solutions. And most of the time when I catch myself trying to give a solution. It’s because I’m uncomfortable with the way I’m feeling about the conversation rather than the way the person is feeling about their feelings. 

So I’m learning more and more to take myself out of the picture, not to bring myself and my baggage and my stuff into the conversation. So that the person has the space and the safety to express themselves fully. And if you think about it, if you think about all the people in your life, how many people in your life are good listeners. Not people that will give you advice, not people that will try to force their ideas on you, but people that are just willing to listen. And a lot of people have gone through grief of COVID, right, they’re grieving different things. And this act of holding the space and listening is such a big one and such a missing one that we’re never taught how to do. So even though I felt like I knew how to do that for years, it’s just, it’s peeling off different layers of it as time goes by, yeah. 

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:21:05

That is a very important lesson. I thank you for sharing it, because I remember reading in someone’s book, it was, you know, ‘Brene Brown’ or some one of those books that was written by a psychologist or social worker and they said they were holding workshops called ‘The Art of Listening’, and they almost always had to cancel the workshops because only two people would sign up, and then when they would hold a workshop on like, ‘How to be Heard’, or, you know, ‘The power of…’, you know, ‘conscious speaking’, it would just be wait lists and 100 people would show and she’s like, “Everyone wants to speak these days and nobody wants to listen”.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:21:48

Yeah, true. Isn’t it?

 

What is the practice of surrender?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:21:50

Yeah, it’s an epidemic of its own, that we all I think are so outwardly focused if you think about what we are doing all day, what we’re posting on social media, and we’re writing our own thoughts and feelings. It’s just so outward. And so I think taking time in meditation; to go inward, is so important, and then as you just brought up, just not having to bring ourselves to every conversation, all our baggage with it, just to hold space so that other people can be seen, can be heard. Okay, so another powerful question I have for you, I hope your game is, what is the practice of surrender?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:22:28

So, surrender is one of my favorite topics that I bring up in almost every workshop, every retreat, every teacher training, because it has been such a magical part of my life. Surrender is the feeling of trust that stays with you even when things aren’t going your way. So surrender is not about giving up the external action, it’s not about giving up your dreams, it’s not about being idle. It’s about being clear on the why of the what, and then giving up the how. So allow me to explain this. Let’s say your dream is to have a family. Let’s say your dream is to have children and a husband and a household and invest your dream. What’s important is to understand that there is a yearning beneath that outer manifestation of this. So, there’s a yearning beneath the house and the children and the husband, and that yearning can be something like safety or belonging, right, or stability, can be different things for different people, the same dream. And if you’re clear on your yearning, if you say, “My heart’s yearning is to belong”. Then, surrender would be to give up the form in which you want your inner yearning to be fulfilled. To say— Hey universe, God, Love, whatever you want to call it right, you say, “I’m here, and this is my heart’s desire”. And I trust that you can fulfill it, and I’m open to ideas and listening. We suffer a lot because we get fixated and rigid on the form in which we want our yearnings to be fulfilled. And this is when we’re blind to the endless possibilities around us. There are a million ways for each yearning that we have to be fulfilled. And that to me is what surrender is.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:24:51

I love how you said, so plainly like, ‘Okay universe, Okay God, Okay love’, like I’m open to ideas, because that is where the magic happens. I think it’s when we create these boxes right, around our dreams and our and what we want and what we think should happen, it’s like trying to resist and push, but we’re just stuck in a box. It’s when you take away those constructs and walls that you’re like, “Okay, now like, show me what’s gonna happen, let’s make it happen together, let’s co create this, I’m open to ideas”. It’s when you have that flexibility and fluidity, I think that, I feel and I trust that’s when things really do happen.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:25:34

Absolutely. I met this brilliant teacher, she’s one of the Brahma Kumaris. So she follows Raja Yoga, and she recently passed, but she must have been 90 something when I met her, and the Brahma Kumaris called God ‘Baba’, as in ‘Father’. And she said, “I’m Baba’s puppets”. She said, “Sometimes I find myself in London and I don’t know what I’m doing in London and then I see somebody that I need to help, and then I understand why I’m there”. And to me, she’s like an embodiment of surrender, she’s there to do the work that needs to be done for humanity without really having personal preferences. It’s like, “Hey, I’ve showed up. My goal is to relieve the suffering of humanity, is to connect, and I don’t mind in which form that happens”. And so I loved how she said it like, “I’m Baba’s puppet”, like she’s just so open and surrendered to the idea of being moved in whichever way she needs to be moved for in each moment.

 

What is yoga to you?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:26:46

Wow, that is an absolute act of surrender, yeah. To just say I don’t even know how I got to London but I’m supposed to be here, like that isn’t, I don’t know. It almost makes me feel a little nervous like, how did you get to London, did you book a ticket, like what happened there. Not nervous for her, but just in my own body, I can feel that for myself. That’s a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing. So I always ask, or I always try to remember to ask each guest, what is your definition of yoga? So what is yoga to you?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:27:23

To me, yoga is when you’re outside matches you’re inside. Yoga is when your, the way you live and the way you interact with people, reflects your inner world, how you speak to yourself, how you feel on the inside. And it’s not about being good and I’m doing air quotes. It’s not about being right; it’s about living in a way that is truly authentic to who you are. I truly believe that each one of us is a complete gem in this world. Each one of us is so beautifully unique and if we all try to be good, it would be such a boring world to live in. So, it’s more about finding out the disconnect between your outer world and your inner world. That’s where most of our suffering comes from, is when what we are yearning from the inside doesn’t match what we’re doing on the outside. When the different parts of ourselves are fighting with each other because of a certain construct or belief or rule that we have taken on, for no good reason. 

 

Even with my meditation practice, you know it has kind of melted over the years. I was very serious about it in the beginning and I would have to sit for this long. You know this number of times a week and that was great, I highly recommend it. But I felt like the practice integrated when my day became more like meditation, when it doesn’t matter if I’m going on the outside or the inside, it doesn’t matter if I’m dealing with somebody who is pleasant or unpleasant, it doesn’t matter if I’m doing something that is fun or serious. When it is just, it becomes more equal, everything becomes more equal. When there’s less grasping and attachment, and more being fully alive in this moment as it unfolds. To me, those are moments of yoga.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:29:38

You’re absolutely right. Those are the yoga moments, the truest, bluest, most honest realized yoga moments, are those states of kind of equanimity and not constantly feeling dissatisfied for those no good reasons, and there are a lot of those no good reasons aren’t there. 

 

 

Weam Zabar: 00:29:57

Absolutely. 

 

How do you practice meditation?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:29:58

So, how did you cultivate that practice then? It seems like you said it now your meditation has just melted into this daily you know act of kind of being more mindful and meditative as you go through your day, so how do you think you’ve gotten there, from sitting down, disciplined, certain amount of time certain days a week, to this very amazing and admirable and celebratory state of being that way throughout your day?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:30:27

I think a part of it is, I questioned at some point when I had changed my practice. So, when I started practicing yoga less and when I started meditating less and the feelings of guilt that came up and stuff like that, right. And I just pause and it’s like, “Hang on a second, the practice works for me, I don’t work for the practice”. So the practice was designed to fulfill a purpose. And if that purpose is not being fulfilled then, or if it’s not needed as much, then why am I feeling guilt about not practicing? And the other part of it is, I had the most troubled mind, you know, so from a very early age, and the first psychiatrist I had ever seen said to me that he suspects that it had started when I was five. I had a very turbulent mind, and I couldn’t get a break from it and that’s why I got into meditation. And that first moment that I got the silence that I had craved for so many years, that’s what got me hooked on it. But as I practice to still my mind, to filter my mind, to question my mind, to work with my mind, to look at my mind empathically, that’s why they call it a practice, right. You practice meditation so that you can take it into your life, so that you can be less reactive, so that you can be kinder to yourself, so that you can be nicer to other people, you know, and if you haven’t been practicing meditation for years and those things are not happening, I would say question your meditation practice, it’s not working, right. 

 

The point is not to practice, the point is how it is spilling over other areas of your life. What benefits are you seeing from it? I was just telling a friend of mine last week that my practice now is to have wonderful conversations. This is my practice right now. To me, this is the part that I had missed out on doing for many years. I had built a very strong and rigid structure around my practice to say, “I’m going to meditate, nobody’s going to stop me, I’m going to practice yoga, nobody’s going to stop me. I’m going to be strong”, right. Those are the words that I use myself. And I, for years, had suppressed a lot of feelings and pushed down a lot of feelings and built a very strong shell around myself where my boundaries were very rigid, and that created a different kind of suffering for me. 

 

So that’s another thing that I’ve learned recently, is to open up and to be more vulnerable and to take a risk. And our practice doesn’t need to be the same throughout our lives, right. Our practice is whatever is needed at the moment. And that, writing my book recently has been a big prior to spilling out a lot of the stuff that has happened in my life, a lot of the suffering that I have gone through, a lot of my journey to get where I got today. It hasn’t been easy, you know, and the feedback has been great because people then, when people see you being vulnerable, they become vulnerable with you too, right. So a lot of people wrote back saying, “You know what, my mother has the same disorder you have or I have suffered in this”, and a lot of people said, “I had no idea, you seem so calm and relaxed all the time and you’re helping people stay calm and relaxed, so we had no idea you were going through that”, and that’s the beauty of vulnerability, is that it creates intimacy and real connections.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:34:42

I couldn’t agree more. I think having vulnerable conversations is one of the most important things you know, that we can share as humans. Just kind of cutting out that small talk or all the artifice and and all the kind of the faking it that the constructs we create it’s just exhausting. And so, to be able to kind of go deeper and that’s the big purpose of this podcast too, to really dig in and see where we can go together.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:35:08

I’m so glad you’re doing it.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:35:11

Oh, thank you for being vulnerable with me, I really appreciate it.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:35:14

Thank you for holding the space. 

 

What advice would you give people who feel the necessity in practice?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:35:17

What you said just really resonated with me there though, this creating this kind of strong, “I will do this and I will sit here”, and the first thing I think you said that hit me like you know like the frying pan on the head type of thing is, ‘You’re not working, or the practice works for you, you don’t work for the practice’, and I was like, “Oh man, that’s so good”. I definitely wanted to say it again, and hear it again, and feel that again because I think that’s something that we can, it’s easy to lose sight of that, because one of the Yamas you know is Tapas, which is discipline, austerity. I know it can also be translated to like, ‘burning enthusiasm’, which is much more resonant for me. But this discipline element, I think I was in Nepal when I was right in my training, and I’ve done a lot more courses and study in India, and it’s very strict. It’s about creating a daily discipline, with rules and structure. I’ve practiced Ashtanga and that certainly is very restrictive in its rules, but it just resonates. That sometimes I feel like now it’s kind of, I’m in a process of evaluating ‘okay, how can this shift, how can this kind of melt away a little bit, to have less feelings of guilt, or less feelings of necessity and shame if I don’t’, and you know bravo if I do type of thing. So I’m glad we talked about that, but what is advice you give to people or what advice would you give me or what came up when I shared that?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:36:59

I think discipline is great and so, and it’s certainly necessary, especially in the beginning. To me, Tapas is like going against your Samskara, it’s going against your habitual patterns. And if your pattern is to beat yourself up, then your Tapas is not to. If your pattern is to give up too quickly, then your Tapas, is not to. Do you see what I mean? So I don’t feel like Tapas is a one size fits all for people. If your habit is to speak to yourself in a rigid way, in a way that enforces punishment, in a way that enforces shame, then can’t the practice of being kind to yourself be your Tapas? Can’t you be disciplined and say, “You know what, I’m going to be kind to myself as often as I can and as often as I notice that I’m not being kind to myself”, that can be Tapas too. It doesn’t have to be very outward, it doesn’t have to be very masculine, right. Often we overvalue things that we can see, or ‘I’ve sat for things we can measure, I’ve sat for 30 minutes today, I sat for 60 minutes today’. But we undervalue things that are more subtle.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:38:34

I agree. Those unquantifiable elements we know we can’t just parrot them back to people or parrot them back to ourselves as little badges of honor, so those subtler, “Well, I stopped myself from saying something, or negative self-talk five times today”. We don’t usually say something like that, but I wish we did. 

 

Weam Zabar: 00:38:54

Absolutely. 

 

What do you not like about yoga?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:38:55

So, we talked about yoga, and what yoga is and what you give and how kind of beautiful yoga, the offerings, it has in our lives. So, a question on the total other end of it is, what do you not like about yoga?

 

Weam Zabar: 00:39:11

There are a few things that I don’t like about yoga, and one of which is the cult culture. And a lot of stories have come out recently about the whole Bikram saying, and I think that it’s very important for us as yoga teachers to be very conscious of when someone is trying to put us up on a pedestal. And to be very conscious of times when we’re taking someone’s power away from them by not giving them the choice to choose for themselves what’s best for them. And I think that we can’t rush the stories of molestation and manipulation that happen and they all go world and pretend like it’s not there. I think that those are important conversations to have. And it’s important that this is something that is to be taught in teacher training to yoga teachers. To say, “Hey, this, your job, is to teach yoga and nothing else”. So that we’re not crossing any lines and we’re not crossing any boundaries that creates scenarios like this

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:40:36

Yeah, that was never brought up to me in teacher training before.

 

 

Weam Zabar: 00:40:41

It’s certainly something that I’ve recently started speaking about in teacher training, and I did have someone say to me once, “Oh you can talk about this teacher this way”. And I said, “I’m speaking of their actions. And those are facts. So yeah I have every right to speak about it because I owe it to the victims, and I owe it to the future victims that would suffer from it if we don’t speak about us”. Sometimes, human beings can be so desperate for answers that they don’t care what the answer is, so long they get an answer. And I think this is when you end up in a very vulnerable position. So, my thinking is that we need to question even our teachers and to connect to the gut feeling, to connect with our intuition, to connect with our inner truths, and when something inside of us says, ‘No’, to really listen to that no, we can’t give our power to someone no matter how highly we think of that person, is that in the end, all of our choices are ours. We can’t just blindly follow somebody because we think that they’re better than us. In the end, there are very beautiful and amazing enlightened beings out there. Absolutely, 100%. But, our path is ours. Our path is ours alone.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:42:21

Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, it’s important to, as you said, never give your power to someone else and I think that’s an important thing to reflect on even in just our life currently. I get it, whether we have a guru or not or a teacher that perhaps we’re having too much faith in or whatever that is, but just, you know, evaluate your own life a little, you know how your partner, your parents, you’re just kind of that feeling of self empowerment is really important, and feeling powerless can definitely be the cause of a lot of, I don’t know, difficulties. It’s hard to even put into words for me it’s, I know it’s something we all as humans that balance of power that struggle for power. It’s just part of life and I think it’s good to think about going deeper with.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:43:15

And as yoga teachers to think about when we knowingly or unknowingly take away that power from our students, is to be very aware of that. Is that their own intelligence and wisdom and knowledge is as good as anybody’s. And just because we did 200 hours somewhere, you know, doesn’t make us more intelligent or wiser or more knowledgeable. We might know a little bit more about yoga, but we certainly don’t know much about a person’s decision or their lives

 

Can you tell our listeners a little more about your book?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:43:53

You’re completely correct. So I do know and I’m so excited that you are an author, you’re a published author. I would love for you to share more about your book, your newest release and if you’d like to, I’d love to hear about it.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:44:11

Yeah, I’d love to share that. So, I have recently published a book called ‘Living in the Gray’, it’s available on Amazon and Kindle. And it talks about my journey so far, it talks about, from childhood years to how I got introduced to the world of spirituality, what my relationship with religion has been, how my practice in yoga has helped, and meditation, and surrender of course, it’s in the book as well. And things that I have learned, both as a patient, and as a psychotherapist in the therapy room. So, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, just over three years ago, after being misdiagnosed, a number of times by different psychiatrists, and it has been a really eye opening experience, because I always felt like something was off, but I didn’t know what that thing was. And to have it explained to me with a borderline diagnosis and to understand that I wasn’t the only one out there, gave me so much relief and gave me direction and in how to work with it. And all the work that I have done with meditation and yoga and self enquiry, over the years have been phenomenally valuable to my recovery. Absolutely, 100%. But then came a point where I plateaued where there were blind spots in my psyche that I wouldn’t have been able to process or see without the psychotherapy and the hypnosis and the learning to reach out to communities and support groups and to be vulnerable. So that’s basically in a nutshell what my book talks about, and I’m very excited for it to be out in the world.

How can listeners get in touch with you?

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:46:14

Me, too. That is such a labor of love and act of expression. Just, I’m so excited for you that you, that you’ve gotten it all out and it’s there for everyone to read and to connect with and to benefit from your story, and just all my dear listeners, this her book will absolutely be linked in the show notes wherever you’re listening, as well as on my website, wildyogatribe.com, so you can check out Week’s book, ‘Living in the Gray’. Also Weam, I would love for you to share your socials and how people can get in touch with you and if you’re having any offerings now that people should tap into, love to hear about it.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:47:00

Thank you so my Instagram tag is wanderwonderweam, and the Yoga Studio I run is Namaste and the Instagram tag is ‘namaste bh’, or you can visit the website, namastebh.com. We do have teacher training coming up very soon in just a couple of months. So that’s the closest offering that I have, but I’d love to hear from everybody that listens to this podcast and would like to give any feedback or share any opinions or start a conversation. I would love to hear from everyone.

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:47:38

Wonderful. I will again link up everything that Weam just brought up in the show notes on my website, so tap into those links, easy as pie to get in touch with her. And as she said, I’m sure she’d love to hear from you as much as I do, so don’t hesitate to drop us notes. So thank you so much Weam for being here with me today. It’s been a true joy to be with you.

 

Weam Zabar: 00:48:02

Thank you so much for having me and I really enjoyed our conversation.

Wild Yoga Tribe Podcast Outro

 

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:48:11

Thank you so much, dear listener for tuning in today to my conversation with Weam Zabar from Bahrain. I hope you enjoyed learning more about the practice of surrender, and not only what is amazing about yoga but also what maybe is not so great about yoga as well. Learning about Week’s lesson, her biggest lessons in life, as well as her practice of psychotherapy as a compliment to her yoga teaching and her yoga practice. As well as getting to know just Bahrain better. I hope that you found this conversation to be surprising, delightful, delicious, everything great. So thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. Be well. 

 

 

Lily Allen-Duenas: 00:48:57

Feel like getting social? Connect with me on the Wild Yoga Tribe on social media, on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Head on over to the wildyogatribe.com to tap into some pretty awesome resources. Meditate with me on Insight Timer, a free app on Apple and Android devices, and join me for a yoga class on YouTube. Jazz up your week and get a bit of yoga in your life. Remember to hit subscribe so that you never miss an episode, and if you feel called please share this episode with someone that you think could benefit from it. Leaving a review would also be so appreciated. Thank you again, dear listener, for being with me. May your day be light and bright, may you be peaceful and happy, and lead on the right path, free of suffering and free of sorrow. Be Well dear one, be well.

 

 

[End Transcription 00:49:48]

 

 

 

 

 

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