Introducing the Women + Well-Being Series

A conversation with yoga therapist Maryam Ovissi

Yoga therapist and studio owner Maryam Ovissi

“We all need breaks of beauty.”

~Maryam Ovissi

A new conversation about well-being

When I started this Substack, Yoga for Women’s Wellbeing, I had a few intentions. One, I wanted to continue writing the newsletter I’ve been writing since 2012 but find ways to expand its reach. Second, I wanted to integrate my yoga teaching with my writing. Writing has always been my first love and true passion and these days I feel like the best way I can teach yoga is through my writing. Third, I wanted to create more connections, collaborations, and conversations around yoga and wellness.

Those of you who have been around for awhile know my take on yoga (I hope!). I see things a little differently than your average yoga teacher. I’m always looking to the philosophy and yoga texts for inspiration. I’m always seeking different practices and ways of doing things, ultimately because what is “popular” doesn’t work for me anymore. And I want to share all these practices, tips, and inspiration with you, too.

I have met and come across a lot of amazing women in my decade plus so far in the yoga and wellness industry. But honestly, this industry is selling you a lie. What passes for health and wellness these days feels fake. The pressure to conform to a certain way of being or to buy certain products so that you can look a certain way is all too much. It’s so far from the truth of who we are as humans and it’s making us more sick.

Women are not well. In 2024 when we have access to the greatest minds, the greatest technology, the best women have ever had in the history of humankind, it seems like we’re moving backward, or at least not going forward. Perhaps the very intention of moving towards a linear goal is the absolute wrong way to think about life. Circles are more apt metaphors for women’s life cycles—and Mother Nature’s. But our society doesn’t like circles. It likes clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Straight lines. Overnight successes. Outward, subjective beauty. Black and white thinking. Thin and white humans. It doesn’t like gray or messy or incomplete. And yet, that is the essence, power, and truth of being a woman and of being well. Living with the messiness, honoring our own truths, and giving a big F*CK YOU to the patriarchal societal standards that leech into our minds and keep us stuck and sick.

I want to inspire you to find well-being in your messy, incomplete, backwards, upside-down, all-over-the-place, hot mess life. It’s time for women to own their well-being. You don’t need to go anywhere to be well. You need to be able to sit with yourself. In all your imperfections, pain, and unfulfilled desires. You need to be able to love yourself as you are. And you need to know that you are not, and have never been, alone.

May these conversations be the nourishment for that seed of wisdom that lives within you. May they inspire you to think, reflect, comment, share, practice, write, love, and be. Well.

Meet Maryam Ovissi

Maryam is one of my teachers and it felt appropriate to begin this series by honoring where I’ve come from.

Maryam Ovissi is an accredited Trauma-Informed Clinical Yoga Therapist and Yoga Teacher. Her personal mission as an educator is to provide an opportunity for her students to have access to tools that allow healing, empowerment, and self-realization. Maryam founded Beloved Yoga: A Sanctuary for All, located in Reston, VA, offering yoga therapy, trauma informed yoga and a range of accessible classes to share the indigenous teachings of Yoga and Ayurveda with reverence, integrity, and accessibility for the community at large, locally and internationally. Maryam’s teachers are the Mohans and she is honored to be a lead teacher in their Svastha Yoga Therapy Program.

Maryam published Care of the Whole Self: Yoga-Inspired Practices for Befriending the Self in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, she wrote Pilgrimage through Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: Guidebook for Yoga Travelers. Her other writing can be found in publications such as Yoga Therapy Today, World Medical & Health Policy, the American Institute for Cancer Research, and Yogi Times. She is a contributor to the ground breaking 2022 publication of Yoga Therapy Across the Cancer Care Continuum by Leigh Leibel and Anne Pitman and A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian Americans (1999).

Maryam’s commitment to service and public well-being is the guiding light in all her work. Her father Nasser Ovissi is a renowned international Iranian modern artist and she was immersed her in a sea of reverence for art and the power of creativity in her youth. Maryam makes time to explore creativity in her own life through writing poetry and art-making. As a Fairfax County appointed council member to Cathy Hudgins Southgate Community Center as well as an Advisory Member of NUFDI, she is grateful to be involved in meaningful ways to support the underserved and consider initiatives that activate collective solutions for mental health and human rights.

The interview

This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and brevity.

ASHLEY ZUBERI: All right, so the first question that I’m going to start with is what does wellness mean to you?

MARYAM OVISSI: So you asked me this before and I actually went looking up the definitions of it. I actually got more confused and I was like, you know what? I can't even look at this because it makes no sense. So then I looked at well-being. And that term is probably more resonant. I never looked it up before because I thought I understood wellness. The official name of Beloved Yoga Studio is Beloved Yoga and Wellness, that wellness is in there. So I just want you to know I've gone into a little crisis with this question.

[LAUGHS]

ASHLEY: You have to change the name. My gosh, that's so funny. But also it's affirming to me that I'm going somewhere with this. [Wellness] is confusing.

MARYAM: Yes. It is completely. And I think that's why I end up saying well-being so much more. The idea of being well is an experience. It's an experience that is multi-dimensional, not just looking at one layer. We can't define our well-being or wellness by just looking at our heart or our respiratory rate. It's really the state of integration and alignment in which there are elements of peace and joy and I would even say strength. There is a fortitude when I affirm my sense of being well, that I am here, and I deserve to be here.

ASHLEY: Yeah, it's just so big, it's so encompassing.

MARYAM: Yeah, and I think when I was thinking about the title for my book, Care of the Whole Self I went into a little bit of that inquiry. What is yoga really giving tools for or inviting contemplation for? It is these dimensions of our whole self.

ASHLEY: I want to talk to you about your book, but first, what is the difference to you between health and wellness or health and well-being?

MARYAM: I think health is very much held in the arms of medicine still. I think for your health you go to medical providers. There's something there that usually indicates that you have doctors that you go to or you've done all your screening. When we use terms like well-being it's not just about the matter and how it's functioning and who are my providers, but it's also about my relationship, the world I live in. Am I happy? Am I having anxiety? All those other layers that come into play.

ASHLEY: And are not addressed in the medical system all the time.

MARYAM: Yes. In yoga, we have the gunas, it's like the base of everything. We're always looking at this relationship to energy. And we're also looking at our relationship to the energy of nature, of the position of the sun, of the position of the moon, and how to be in relationship with that. I think that's the other piece. What do I do when I feel low energy? This is always a very interesting inquiry. Who do I go to? And then if you go to your general provider you start going down a very weird path.

ASHLEY: Like you need to diagnose it.

MARYAM: Yeah, and then you go to neurology, and then all of a sudden they just put you on an antidepressant. It gets very weird.

ASHLEY: What's striking to me in what you just said is that the question for so many people is, “I have low energy, I'm feeling weird, who do I go to?”

MARYAM: That’s right.

ASHLEY: Like you're immediately going outside of yourself.

MARYAM: That's right, that's right.

ASHLEY: To me, like I get it. But also, why can't it be I go to yoga? I go to my yoga teacher, I go to the people who actually know how to help me in that regard.

MARYAM: Right. Or you've been educated on how to look at your lifestyle and habits.

ASHLEY: So that goes right into your book Care of the Whole Self. Can you talk a little bit about what tools and practices you share in the book?

MARYAM: During the pandemic there was definitely a drive inside of me to get something out to empower people to care for themselves. And I wanted it to be very accessible for the beginner. It was such an intense time and I think people actually didn't know what to do to help themselves, to help their immune system, and it was just so much fear and overwhelm. And there was a big sense of separation. I was looking at what is most accessible and easy with movement and breath, the connection to breath, and then the mind. So I really started from the three grossest planes that are easy to access. And then I brought in layers of energy and emotion. And I didn't speak to spirituality. I think I have like two paragraphs because I've always felt that spirituality is inherent. It's how we experience it that is individual. The experience of us feeling whole and integrated and connected is a very spiritual experience. When you look at definitions of spirituality, there's a sense of connection. Not to ourselves only, but also to nature and what is greater than us. So I kind of left that piece out because I was really more interested in let's just first get to a sense of being empowered of how to care for ourselves.

I also am informed by Ayurveda. So I looked at the Ayurvedic clock, and I thought about what are easy ways to do things. I'm not a big fan of you do something one time a day. We're in a constant state of contemplation. In yoga we look at everything through the lenses of the yamas and niyamas. We are curious, we inquire, we contemplate, we start to look at our obstacles and we have some tools for doing that. The intersection points of the day to invite that kind of awareness is the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. In the evening we address the sleep imbalances and really honor rest. And then in the morning to wake up and just take a few minutes for yourself. All the practices are under 15 minutes.

ASHLEY: I love that approach. I'm also curious. You call the book Care of the Whole Self. And what you're offering is exactly that, teaching people how to care for themselves. But then at the same time, there's the word self-care. That is a buzzword. And it's what you're offering, but it's so different than what people might expect when they hear that word. Do you have any thoughts on the word self-care and how it's understood?

MARYAM: I think it's overused. It was this idea of how do we have a title that has care and self in it but not use the word? At the beginning of the book I wrote about what I was seeing as far as trends. There is this trend of detox to retox. There were these weird things of caring for yourself to be able to maintain your dysfunctional habits. It was never getting to your need to fundamentally change things.

ASHLEY: Right. Because it's hard.

MARYAM: It's hard to talk about things because then you have to consider your relationship to addiction or procrastination and all these things that we do with ourselves.

The other piece that I put in the book was poetry and little drawings. And that was just this little nod to yoga and to the Sutras. We glean so much wisdom on this path mainly through poetic aphorisms. But you still need more discourse and inquiry and study to really understand it. The poetry was my way of digging into some of these concepts. Those are these little breaks that we all need. We all need breaks of beauty. We all need to be able to abstract things once in a while to get to the essence from another way. Otherwise, we become so linear. We become so didactic and we lose the art—the art of yoga, of our care, of everything. I think there's an art to this experience that we're having in life.

ASHLEY: That to me really speaks to the spirituality. That's the spirituality that you put in the book in a roundabout way. What have you seen has worked well or best? I mean, it's kind of a weird question because things work differently for each individual. But is there something that you presented in the book, a tool or a practice, that really resonates with a lot of people?

MARYAM: It's definitely the morning practice. I mean, I'm astounded that I hear how just seven movements of the spine, just taking the time to affirm our state of mind for the day, to just get back to the breath—it's so simple and yet it's impactful. And we've heard this, right? You change your morning, you change your life. I've definitely seen that the morning is the one that really makes a big difference.

Although I feel the evening is really important and people really skip that over due to exhaustion and life and all these layers. I wish they wouldn’t. The afternoon is definitely a hard one to invite rest. But it's possible.

ASHLEY: What are some of your practices that you can share that you find most useful in your own personal practice?

MARYAM: For me, it's hands down pranayam. It’s also pranayam with pelvic floor, with the mahamudras. Those are incredibly fortifying for my my body. The other piece is the Ayurvedic lens, which is really looking at my habits around my sleep, around meal time. I really want to sit and enjoy my meal. And when I can't do that, I long for it, but it helps me at least a few times a week to set that up to have that intentionality around my food.

And then the other piece is I am a very visual person. In the Sutras it talks about the best ways to get yourself back to single-pointed focus. And then there's a list of all these things that you can do. The last one is “or whatever helps you.” That whatever helps you is my art making. Next to my bed I've set up an art area and I have all my paints and everything out so that I can just take that little time, even if it's just a couple of things. I just find that to be so medicinal to make space for me to be in a creative space. Those are the three big ones.

ASHLEY: Thanks for sharing. Why is it so hard for women to be well?

MARYAM: So that's a big question. I'm going to put it in the context of my upbringing. I was brought up in an Iranian household with lots of women around me. My parents are divorced. I grew up with my dad, but my mom and my aunts and my grandmother, they were always around each other and I was always with them. And what I found myself reflecting about in my adult life was all the expectations that were placed, what I saw of women. I know there was never talk about how to care for yourself, it was very superficial. It was all the responsibilities a woman has, how you dress, and how you look to the outside world.

I remember when I was young I would want to talk about religion and debate and politics. I loved really good, meaty conversations. I was at a dinner party, I was probably 16, and I was in a conversation with this woman’s son and she came around and she says, “I think you should put some walnuts in your mouth.” And in that moment, I was like, oh, my gosh, she's telling me to not talk anymore.

We have these jokes in Iranian culture about when a woman is going to go see a future husband she shouldn't open her mouth wide when she speaks. There is a vocabulary list she's given of words and what she can ask for. I mean, it's so bad. I had to unpack that. When I was in a marriage I was like, why am I so unhappy? I was fulfilling some weird idea of what it means to be a good wife and what it means to be a woman and what my obligations are. So I think it's very contextualized by culture, by family systems, by what we see. And I was never, at least in my education at that point, invited into a women's class or there wasn't ever a conversation about the plight of the woman. And so there were a lot of cultural frameworks from my family and my culture that imprinted that for me.

ASHLEY: So how did you get out of that?

MARYAM: Well, I started to practice yoga. I started to have inquiry with myself. In college, I had an eating disorder and I developed panic attacks and there was no management of that except to put me on birth control, which I didn't want to do. So I ended up looking to breath work, I ended up looking to ways of regulating myself, but I still didn't do the inquiry. But I knew that there was something off. Later on I was introduced to yoga. As I kept practicing and as my body became a little more tender and I attended to myself a little bit more, this little bit of whispering started happening: Why aren't you happy? What's happening here? Certain things were starting to be revealed. The practice of yoga was very formative for me to learn how to listen to myself and to even just touch the piece of “I'm not happy.”

ASHLEY: That's so powerful. You said something the last time we talked that I thought was really interesting. You had mentioned in our conversation around this same topic, women and well-being, that as a country in the United States, we don't have any traditions to hold on to. And you just spoke of your upbringing and a culture that has a long history of tradition, maybe not always useful, but still something to hold on to. Can you speak to that a little bit? What are your observations of having come from a culture that does have deep, rich tradition to then being here in the United States and observing that Americans don't necessarily have that deep, rich tradition?

MARYAM: Habits of care are very important. They set up well-being. Our habits of care and so much of our well-being depends on what we eat. Food is very, very, very important. And the Mohans [Maryam’s teachers] always say you can do all these practices, but it's always going to come back to what you're eating. And if you're not eating well for yourself, it's just not going to work. I come from a lot of food wisdom, a lot of herbal wisdom. This is why you blend these foods. This is why you don't blend these foods. This is why when you're sick, you don't eat this because it's a cooling food, it's not a warming food. So I have a lot of that. And I think that's one of the major traditions that in America, there is no wisdom of nourishment that is indigenous. If you just start at what feeds ourselves—if that isn't taken care of from the beginning, it becomes a mess. It becomes what has happened to this country. It becomes the sugar industry, it becomes the meat industry, it becomes very government managed. It's just turned into a big mess that we don't have those traditions that we hold on to. They're regulated.

ASHLEY: It's striking to me the wording that you use that we don't have these indigenous traditions of nourishment. We do, but some people came around and completely destroyed it.

MARYAM: Yes. And there was probably no inquiry of the indigenous people of this land. Like, what are you eating? I mean I don't even want to go down that route because when I went out to Navajo country they would share how the government would give them seeds, but the seeds were GMO seeds, so their food wasn't even the same food. I mean, you just go into tears. What is wrong with us? Respect when we build fruits and vegetables that help us not use maybe as many pesticides, but I don't know, there's just something that is off about that. So that's the main thing I would talk about as far as tradition and history.

ASHLEY: I think that's an interesting perspective. It's not talked about very often.

MARYAM: With the colonies, there was a portion that France had, there was a portion that England had, there was a portion for Spain. They all have long traditions of using food as medicine that didn't come with them because there was a rejection against all things like that. They were seeking freedom of religion but I think that was the missing piece.

ASHLEY: Well, it seems like what we have today then is just a result of that. The American culture is just a culture of rejection. The sad thing to me is what an opportunity lost to be the place where you have all people from all different cultures coming in. You have this ground from which to share all of these different ideas around nourishment and wisdom and food or culture. And there was just a “no.” Either we're not going to share it or we're just going to reject all of it and find our own way. It was just such a lost opportunity to have all these cultures together in that true melting pot and it just became an empty pot.

MARYAM: Yes. This is the land of opportunity. I mean, you can create movements. You can do anything because you're never going against any long-standing tradition. Except maybe, you know, July 4th or holidays. You can be incredibly innovative. And then if you have the research that backs you, you can create new trends. That is also inherent to a people that come in and take from what's already here. They want to create something new.

ASHLEY: Okay, I want to shift to one more thing because you’re a yoga therapist and you work a lot with cancer patients. One thing that you had mentioned the last time we spoke was that you get the opportunity to do some of the most deep work and inquiry with these cancer patients that you don't necessarily get the opportunity to do in your studio or in the general population or maybe even with your private clients. Can you speak a little bit about your experience working with cancer patients and maybe even from that lens of well-being because that's such a vulnerable place to be in a diagnosis and an experience like that?

MARYAM: Cancer is a word that inherently has trauma. And when you hear it, and I've had the experience of hearing it in my own body, there is just that visceral experience of “I want to get it out.” You want to do anything you can to get rid of it, but then there’s also this little movie that plays. We've all seen this, the person has cancer, they potentially go through chemo, lose their hair, they hopefully will survive more than before but then they can die, right? And I think we have this little movie that plays in us when we hear it. That is a traumatic story.

So when I'm working chair-side, the patient is mostly in treatment with chemo during that time. And so they’re waiting, like what's going to happen? So that chair-side is very different than bedside because when you're in the hospital and they're post-treatment or they've just gotten a diagnosis or they're in the end-of-life it's just so different and there is this sense of urgency. The fragility of life and death is so palpable that you're going to go down some deep thoughts in those hospital rooms. And so those points of inquiry are very palpable, and especially if someone is end-of-life or especially if they've just gotten the diagnosis, it puts so much into question. And that's where you have those really powerful conversations.

ASHLEY: What does some of the actual work look like? Or is it just conversation? Are you offering any specific tools?

MARYAM: Yeah, so I come in, I introduce myself, and my first point of inquiry is I want to see if they already have a relationship to mind-body practices, if they're friendly with this. I think human beings are generally pretty intelligent when it comes to themselves. So I want to know what they already do to take care of themselves. And I ask, “are you familiar with mind-body practices? Have you heard of yoga? What are some things that you do to help yourself stay calm and centered?”

And then I kind of go from there with the individual. And most of the time, I am at least going to teach them about their breath and elongated exhale or joint articulation, some type of movement and stress/tension relief. Maybe it's even massaging the hands.

Those are the categories I stay in in chair. And bedside there's only so much movement we can do but I do try to do some movement that's appropriate. And then, in bedside, if they've just had surgery I will speak about pain, and I'll usually educate to pain pathways, and I'll offer some tools for managing pain and give them the data behind the practices that have been effective.

ASHLEY: What have you noticed or observed in working with these patients and how it's helped them?

MARYAM: I work on the women's floor. There's one layer when I'm working with mothers. This kind of not knowing how to be a mother on this journey, what to share with the children, what not to share. So that is one part of supporting the person to reframe obstacles that they may have in their lives.

The second one is simply empowerment. There’s a lot we can't control. Cancer is not an easy journey, but there are some things you can do. I'm that person that's just going to help them remember some simple things they can do. And if the caregiver or their support system is there I will always include them. But I've always seen that it's just teaching them simple things. You'd be surprised how many people never learned about their breath. Just exhaling. To just say at any point, you can just exhale and take five to ten breaths and just get back into yourself so your mind doesn't swirl too much.

The other piece is I do get pushback. You know, “yoga's evil.” And so that ability to have conversations around that. I’ll ask, “what have you heard or did you have an experience? I'm so sorry.”

If there is more of a spiritual basis what has worked is to be informed about spiritual practices. It’s important that I know about Christianity, about Judaism, about Islam, about Buddhism, because when someone is on that path, we can offer some tools to support it. Like in Islam there are 99 names of God and these are very important and so sometimes I'll just ask “of those 99 names which one really inspires you? Which one can you hold on to for yourself?” So these are some things that I feel are important for yoga therapists. But we’re not always taught that. And I think we need to have what I call spiritual literacy.

ASHLEY: Is there anything else that you want to add about well-being, women, motherhood?

MARYAM: It's an exciting time. I think we can really be down on the plight of women. We can be down on what's happened to them and is happening to them in the world. It's amazing what we are capable of doing, how we're capable of co-creating, of advocating. I think right now, we're calling things out more than ever. However, collaboration is key in this field with women and well-being and I think we can't do things by ourselves.

ASHLEY: That's a tough one because there's also this cultural expectation that we undermine each other. Like the mean girls type thing, all in service of just keeping us in our place. Of putting those walnuts in our mouth.

MARYAM: Yeah. You know, we have a lot of suppression of women’s voices and education. And so those of us that can speak up, we need to. Because some cannot. Well-being was never talked about with me and so let's not let that continue with future generations.