Yoga as a lifestyle with Patty Townsend

Women + Wellbeing interview #5

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“…the continuity of practice was in the intensity of the inquiry and the willingness to go deeper. I consider raising children to be an extremely advanced yoga practice. It's so hard. That was the toughest part of my life's practice—the endeavor to stay present and to not just fall apart.”

~Patty Townsend

This is the fifth installment of the Women + Wellbeing interview series. Today’s interview is with Patty Townsend, mother of four, veteran yoga teacher, and author of

Patty Townsend | Embodyoga

. We are so lucky to to learn from Patty on Substack as she so graciously shares decades of wisdom gained from practice and life (they’re the same thing, really).

Meet Patty Townsend

With a life-long dedication to yoga Patty brings joy, wisdom, and passion to her teaching. Among the first wave of teacher-trainers in the U.S., she has taught thousands of practitioners over the last 40 years. Patty embodies a strong understanding of all aspects of yoga and her approach has evolved into a decidedly inward journey over the last several decades.

Be sure to subscribe to Patty's Substack

Patty Townsend | Embodyoga

. I hope this interview helps you feel better about your own individual journey on the yoga path!

The Interview

This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and brevity.

ASHLEY ZUBERI: What does wellbeing mean to you?

PATTY TOWNSEND: The first thing that comes to mind is honesty. Wellbeing is a state of knowing who you are, what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how one treats oneself as the vehicle for doing that and meeting relationships.

The primary principle that will lead to that is honesty. In other words, cut the bullshit.

ASHLEY: That reminds me of satya. An embodiment of the practice of truth.

PATTY: Exactly.

ASHLEY: How do you personally embody that?

PATTY: Well, that has been the work of all of these years of practice for me. In the beginning, I would read the Yamas and the Niyamas (ethical codes for living) and skip to the good part—postures, breathing, meditation. At this point in my life as I'm studying the Yamas and the Niyamas I’m saying, “Oh, my God, are you kidding me? It's so freaking deep.” If you don't really take these to heart you might as well just give up yoga right now because what's the point?

It was a long process of figuring out what wasn't honest for me. And that was a big part of those early years in yoga. Who was I in this really? I took on the entire patriarchal model of hierarchy. I wanted to win and that was my goal. At that point there weren't all that many women. I thought, “I can be as good as them—the men—and I can beat them at their own game.” What I didn't realize for many years was that that was not honest. That was not who I was. It had been taught to me in our culture, but it wasn't honest. Honesty is that I am a woman. I'm a white woman. I'm a western woman. I'm a mother. I'm a person who has dealt with depression, an eating disorder. I wanted to make sense of that. I wanted to understand, was there another way?

You look at nature and you walk in the forest, look down at the ground. It is a complete mess. And beautiful. And rich with life and movement. I would look at that and think there’s a disconnect here.

That process took a long time. It took a lot of beating up of my own egoic sense of self, having to let it all go. There I was being a mother of four children in a place where I knew nobody. My husband was very much with me but was also working full-time. Every day I'd go and fold the laundry and every day I would say, “How did this happen to me? I had so much going for me.” And then I remembered that it may be true that every action is as important as any other action. And I took that as a meditation for a few years. I don't have an answer about that, but it was very helpful for me to hone in on being present.

It really wasn't until I met someone who embodied womanhood, the feminine aspect, and also happened to have a woman's body, and also happened to have children, and a messy life, and was very, very far from perfect, and loved her imperfections, that everything changed for me. She had a deep embodied knowledge of self, not just the physical but the consciousness of it, and I thought that's going to be a good direction. And that was Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

Bonnie has never aspired to be a guru to anybody. And yet she is a brilliant seer and teacher of the path of embodiment. One of the things that I learned in this more human, inclusive, messy process was that the podium, the hierarchy, the teacher on top is a patriarchal concept that is not very healthy for anybody. There's always a winner and there are always a million losers.

ASHLEY: Everybody loses.

PATTY: Instead, there is the idea of the circle as the method for teaching—the mutuality of respect. What I found for myself in my own practice was that shifting to a mutuality of respect, an actual genuine non-judgment, was a huge shift.

ASHLEY: What I hear you saying is that the embodiment of wellbeing for you came through living your life.

PATTY: Absolutely. It came from living my life with the constancy of what I call deep practice. Forget the mat. When you've got young children, you may as well throw it out. It’s just in the way. But the continuity of practice was in the intensity of the inquiry and the willingness to go deeper. I consider raising children to be an extremely advanced yoga practice. It's so hard. That was the toughest part of my life's practice—the endeavor to stay present and to not just fall apart.

I remember when the kids were all little. There were two car seats in the car, the two other boys were in the back of the station wagon screaming and banging. Two babies crying, two five and six-year-olds hitting each other. And I'm trying to get groceries. One of them starts yelling, “I want to go to McDonald’s." I run a red light because he's screaming. A cop pulls me over, and I said, “I didn't even see the light.” And he just looked in the car and he said, “Okay, well pay more attention.”

I arrive home and I can't even bear it. I put the groceries and all the kids down on the kitchen floor. I sit down with them and just cry because there's nothing that you can do. That's parenting 101. That's just what happens. And then you have choices about what you do about it.

ASHLEY: That leads me into my next question. Why is it so hard, in your opinion, for women to be well?

PATTY: I think we bought into the hierarchical model. That's why we might not be well. But I do think that times are really changing. I would have thought they had changed 20 or 30 years ago. And when I started thinking about this lately, I thought, I must just be really out of touch. I was born in 1952, so you might have some idea of what I was inculcated into culturally. I thought everything's different now. And I started looking around and I realized it's not different.

ASHLEY: It's not.

PATTY: Women are still trying to win at a hierarchical game. That is a problem. In my understanding now, it’s a good idea to change the game. Embody the richness and the fullness of being a human. Get in there with it, recognize it to be every level of existence—the elements, yoga, the earth, water, fire, air, space. And then the biggest thing, consciousness.

What my practice of the last 20 years has been is to actually see that. See, touch, feel, recognize right at the level of the cell, not just the mind. I know the philosophy. I've known that for a long time. But recognizing the intelligence of this body-mind system and the life force that inhabits it and the creative intelligence that is inherent everywhere? It’s different. It's a different experience from what I learned as an early yoga practitioner.

I’m really encouraged when I see you, Ashley, and I see people are thinking, they're questioning this, and you're a beacon for that. I am very grateful for the fact that we all together are moving from a top-down way of looking at life. And it’s not a bottom-up either, but a whole thing out.

ASHLEY: Yeah, circular, expanding outward. I wanted to expand a little bit on some of what you wrote in your piece, In Honor of Women in Yoga. You talk about this idea of the hierarchical systems. What are the practical things that you can do as a teacher to help dismantle this idea of the hierarchical system? How can you teach without being above the student? You mentioned the circle, but I'm curious if you can expand on that.

PATTY: Start with anything you can start with. Talk to people about a different definition of practice. Hatha Yoga is a very rigid practice. Find a different way to practice that honors one's self. I don't really think you can teach that unless you own it. I would say to teachers, do the work. Continue to inquire. Every time you think you know something, say, “Yes, and?”

Keep questioning. I'm not some realized being. Thank God, because that would be so boring. For me, it’s still, “Yes, wow.” And the process continues.

As we mature as teachers, if we're following a path of inquiry, we can develop a quality of self-acceptance. This is very important for women. This quality of self-acceptance is seen by the student. You embody it and the student is stunned.

ASHLEY: I love that. I was just having an exchange with someone on Substack in the comments section. They wrote a piece about balance and they were talking about how they were unable to achieve—they used the word achieve—a tree pose because of particular issues in their body. It just wasn't an accessible pose to them. That doesn't make any sense to me because one, there's nothing to achieve. You may have an idea in your mind of what it should look like and you're trying to achieve a perfect representation of that, but that doesn't exist. So what are we trying to achieve? And two, when you look at how balance actually works, if you stand on one leg, there is no stillness. There’s constant moving at the foot. It's just constantly compensating and moving. The idea that you're still is a complete fallacy. That is not the point of balance. For so many of us, we're trying to achieve something and work towards something in that linear fashion.

So much of what you're saying is that deeper inquiry isn't about achieving in that hierarchical setting, but inquiring outward and expanding the idea of what could be possible, what could be true and what works for you. For women in particular, in some ways it's instinctive and intuitive, but then in other ways it's been so ground out of us by society that we’re just scrambling back to the top to try to get there.

PATTY: That's the way I see it also. It's a scrambling. I have a lot of compassion for it because it was me. It is part of me. I ask myself, “Am I scrambling to be young?” Embracing the phases of life are important. Allow yourself to come into the wisdom years. If you want to stay young, you're never going to get the wisdom years. You’ve got to go with the flow. In terms of the achieving thing, that really marked my early years in yoga. When students used to say to me, “I really want to do a handstand, and I need to straighten my arms in wheel, and how come I can't yada yada,” I would say to them, “I did all that so that you don't have to.”

I found out that it doesn't do anything. Please don't reinvent the wheel. Use these postures and these movements for the container of the inquiry. I still do asana, but it is really, really different.

ASHLEY: Is there anything else that you wanted to add to the conversation about wellbeing, yoga, and/or women?

PATTY: I'm just so happy to have made it to this phase of life and to have studied the whole time. There is beauty in the continuity of study for building a profound state of wellness that isn't disturbed by the fact that you get sick and you die.

There’s no perfect. There's never been any perfect. The continuity of practice, especially for women's wellness, is to understand that practice doesn't have to be daily. Practice is the consistency of inquiry over a long and persistent time. You may have some years where you feel like you’re barely practicing. Are you sure you're barely practicing? If you're not inquiring, then you could say that. Let's say you forget to inquire because you have a mental breakdown. You pick it up again. The whole time counts. For me, that's wellness.

Please subscribe to Patty at

Patty Townsend | Embodyoga

to learn more from her!

If you enjoyed this interview, please forward it to a friend, share it as a note, or share on social media. And be sure to subscribe to Yoga for Women’s Wellbeing for monthly interviews with women yoga and wellbeing luminaries, plus yoga practices to support women’s wellbeing through all stages of life.