Are you man enough for yoga? Interview with Peter Snyder
MINDFULNESS CREATES YOUR OWN UNIVERSE
By Val Schoger Photography by Michael Booini
Peter Snyder with the disposition of an amateur MMA fighter (he won regional titles until he broke his hand for the third time) and as proud owner of a Prius, Peter Snyder is a man of contrasts.
With a military father, his family moved a lot when he was a child. As a teenager, Peter was a troublemaker. The man he has become is balanced, has a soothing voice, is a successful entrepreneur, and a yoga teacher. He earned a master’s degree in Clinical Social Work from Florida State University, owns a private therapy practice and offers stress reduction classes at FSU Panama City and in private studios.
Peter has been practicing “mindfulness” for 10 years. He dedicates much of his spare time to volunteer work.
You teach others to be mindful. What’s your understanding of mindfulness?
Openness. That’s the quickest way to put it. It’s openness and it is the opening and the closing of your awareness. The shifts inside, the thoughts and how the mind directs that shift. For me, at least while I’m at my practice, … I am aware I still have a long way to go in my own mindfulness. In that sense, I’m just a kid–in kindergarten.
Can you put one of your own practices into words?
My practice of mindfulness is sacred to me. It means so much to take that time. Mindfulness is not about always feeling good or always being happy. That’s not reality. So, just being open to what is there is hard. I’m not resisting when I’m feeling sad, or when I am feeling lonely. By not resisting I mean I am not condemning myself and am not getting lost in that storyline. I just accept how I feel–dropping inward.
I was getting to the point where I was sitting for two hours and it felt like two minutes went by. The practice was so deep.
What was the ultimate motivation for you to start yoga?
I was a very different person and went through a rough time. I was very tense and easily aggravated. My teacher was a Zen Buddhist. I learned about the four noble truths from the teachings of the Buddha. “All life is suffering” and “Our suffering comes from our attachments and desires.” It just rang true with me. I thought I would soon be able to levitate and do all these crazy things, but I just started sitting. At that time, I rarely had quiet time. But I learned to sit, even if there was chaos around me. At first, I would only be able to sit for maybe five minutes. I just kept at it twice a day, every day, and then it built.
I started reading more, researching more and, learning about Ashtanga yoga, I started practicing it. I listened to a cassette tape about Kripalu yoga. There were no visuals to go along with the instructions. This type of yoga is focused on breath and body awareness and that’s what the audio cassette guided me through. I started practicing four times a week. It all progressed from there. I stayed at a residential Zen center to meditate and begin my practice. I stayed for about a year and then moved to Panama City to be close to family.
How many men do you have in your classes?
It depends. It fluctuates for my public classes. I have classes with all men when I volunteer at Holmes Correctional facility and give a class on mindfulness… this is usually every Friday.
How many students do you have at the correctional facility?
It depends. Thirty, sometimes 40.
What is their feedback?
They love it. Most are good guys … I think I’ve been teaching going on four years or five years. Many of them are still there, sadly. But the mindfulness training creates some solace. They have lost a lot. Their environment is very chaotic. From my experience, and I’ve worked with many different personalities, the inmates are often the most receptive, wanting to find something to help them change.
“THE MIND IS LIKE A JEALOUS LOVER.
IT’S GOING TO DO ANYTHING
TO GET YOUR ATTENTION”
Describe your teaching schedule and classes.
I teach Hatha Ashtanga yoga and give hot yoga and Vinyasa classes at the studio. I volunteer with Second Chance of North Florida, an organization that helps brain injury patients and I work at the correctional facility. I only teach one public class right now. And I have my therapy practice. I had to scale back a bit to be able to do the volunteer work. The mindfulness classes at Second Chance are Wednesdays. The prison on Fridays takes all day because it is an hour drive and I am there for a couple of hours. I teach a hot yoga class on Saturdays.
What are the challenges for the inmates? Do the other inmates give them a hard time when they sign up for yoga?
It’s hard in a prison setting … it’s a man’s world. They have to be committed and stand their ground. There was a riot at the facility a few months ago. Most of my guys are in one dorm and apparently that was the only dorm that didn’t participate in the riot.
How much time do your students have to dedicate in the beginning?
For mindfulness practice, five minutes. Start with five minutes each day but then eventually work your way up to 20 or 30.
Based on my own experience, the longer you try to sit still, the more thoughts and distractions are going to come up. And this is what I tell my guys, if you learn to sit still for an hour, you’re going to be able to deal with anything. Sometime in the timeframe of sitting still you will experience uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. You will learn to self-regulate. Instead of reacting to anxiety, or fear, or restlessness and you want to move, if you stay and don’t react to that, guess what? You’re building a fortitude where you will not react to stress.
Most crimes stem from stressful situations, addictions, and the inability to deal with painful uncomfortable emotions. I tell my students they are changing themselves. When they go out there and start to deal with the public again, how not to fall into the same patterns of behavior that caused them to be imprisoned. How to have the resilience not to succumb to those urges, because you’ve been able to sit still, without moving. I remember listening to a talk by the Dalai Lama. He said, “We all create our own universes.”
Does this happen to you? When you meditate and sit still, suddenly you think about something that happened 20 years ago and you have not thought of it in all these years?
Yes, you have to just sit through it… don’t react to it. I tell people, the mind is like a jealous lover. It’s going to do anything to get your attention. It wants to pull you back in. As soon as you stop giving it that love or attention you are just you… not feeding into negative thoughts is your foundation, it will be your anchor. Come back to your breath and keep practicing.
Whether you are in pain or get ideas in your head and think that your mind needs to be quiet, or you need to feel calm when you really feel restless or jittery. Just accept what’s there and see if there’s anything else available. Stretching your limits of what you are aware of, you just keep doing that. It’s like opening and closing your awareness.
People will tell me, “I tried to sit for meditation but my mind is just not quiet … I can’t control it.” I tell them it is a misconception. You don’t need to control it. I teach my students that every time they notice that their mind is busy, just bring it back to one point. Sometimes the point will be the breathing. It’s a good point of reference, it is the foundation. And then, we will do the same with the body. Just feeling the body, feeling the bottom of the feet, feeling the fi tips, feeling the heart rate. These are points of reference.
What changes do you see in people who take your class?
In my eight-week program of mindfulness practice at the correction facility, I can start to see changes immediately. Just the way they look and the kinds of questions they are asking, or the way their faces have softened. For me, teaching inmates is one of the hardest things and one of the most rewarding things I do. They are so grateful and eager for the practice and for changing.
Peter Snyder’s teaching schedule can be found online at
www.oneheartyogapanamacity.com