Kandice Shaw shares her powerful journey of navigating the complexities of caregiving and personal growth through yoga. As a yoga teacher and trainer, she reflects on the emotional challenges of caring for her grandparents while striving to pursue her passion for yoga. The conversation delves into the messy middle of life, highlighting the struggle of balancing different identities and responsibilities, especially during times of grief and loss. Kandice also emphasizes the importance of asking for help and the relief that can come when support is offered by loved ones. Through her experiences, she illustrates how the lows of life can lead to deeper understanding and connection, ultimately paving the way for new opportunities and personal freedom.

Takeaways:

• Kandice Shaw emphasizes the importance of yoga as a means of personal transformation beyond just teaching.
• The emotional journey of caregiving can deeply impact one's personal identity and mental health.
• Grief is a complex experience that can coexist with feelings of relief after losing a loved one.
• Asking for help is often difficult, but it is essential for maintaining well-being during tough times.
• The balance between personal growth and caregiving can create a challenging emotional landscape.
• Finding supportive relationships can significantly ease the burden during life transitions and losses.

Our Guest - Kandice Shaw

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Welcome to sharing the middle, where we share our stories of the messy middles of life. I'm Lacy, your friend and guide in the middle. This week I am talking to Candice Shaw. Candice is a yoga teacher and trainer.

Her story was really powerful for me. I think you'll understand why very quickly, and I get quite emotional in this particular episode. I loved this conversation with Candace.

I think you're gonna love it. And let's jump right in.

Welcome, Candice. I'm so excited to be talking to you. You rescheduled with me, which always makes people just my favorite, being flexible, because I need that in life.

Why don't you take a moment to introduce yourself to our listeners?

Hi, my name is Candice Shaw. I am a trainer of yoga teachers. I host beautiful retreats where we gather in community and connection and leave feeling transformed.

I have a studio where we hold many beautiful community gatherings in southeastern Minnesota. I'm a northern girl at heart, and I'm super happy to be here today.

Yoga. So you're like a yoga teacher's teacher?

I'm a yoga teacher's teacher. I'm a Reiki practitioners teacher, too, which is something a little bit newer to me.

One of the things we talk about a lot is that yoga teacher training, these 200 hours are great if you want to teach yoga. They're also incredible if you're looking to deepen your practice or even if you're just like, I just want to know myself better. Right.

Because yoga in its entirety and its true form is a full system. It's not just our yoga practice where we get hot and sweaty or relaxed.

It's an entire system to help us live life authentically, gracefully, with acceptance and perseverance.

What brought you to yoga? I love hearing everybody's story, especially when they go into practicing it as a teacher.

One of my dearest friends went through yoga teacher training to do exactly what you're saying. Not necessarily be a yoga teacher, but to have that deeper experience, experience the community, that is yoga teacher training.

I'm always interested in hearing what brought people to the practice of yoga in the first place. Then it was like, I want to dig in deeper. I want to know more. I want to do it more.

What brought me in the first place was interesting because I was an athlete in high school, so I was not unfamiliar with sweating. But in my twenties, I had acquired a family. I started dating a man. He had three children. They were with us all the time.

Their mother struggled with her own issues. I had put on what I lovingly refer to as baby weight, which was essentially like, I was eating their macaroni and cheese when they were done.

Eat those leftovers. There's no shame for that.

Yeah. Like, when I look back on that young girl, I was like, what do you mean? Of course I sweat yoga and sweaty no matter what.

It started with tapes from my local target. I went down and I was like, oh, this feels nice. I feel really blessed. I picked up a vhs tape, I want to be real clear, that made.

Me smile so big.

I feel like sometimes people go like, oh, how old can you be? And I'm like, old enough that my first yoga practice was on VHS.

I bought a replacement tape, also on VHS with Ganga White, who is a gentleman located in California in the nineties. I feel blessed. That was my introduction because I feel like it really primed me to be part of a lineage, which is something really special.

I studied independently for many years, and then in my area, there started to be studios that popped up, and I would go to studio whenever I could. I wanted to teach from the day I started attending studio classes, but I worked in hospitality. I worked weekends, especially as a manager.

Yoga teacher trainings are usually held in big chunks or on weekends. I just couldn't make that work. It wasn't until I switched industries into large scale event planning.

One of the first things I did was using my spare time. I'd be like, yoga teacher trainings? What's available? But then I was traveling. A lot of studios don't have backup plans. I had to make it.

Or that was it. I couldn't make all the weekends many times, so it took a couple years. But eventually I had hounded my teacher enough.

She messaged me before we started and invited me. When we met up, all the dates matched, except she had forgotten to put the January date in. She said, this is the January date.

And I was like, okay.

She was like, wait, does that not work for you? And I said, I'm out of town that week, but I could figure something out. She said, listen, you're the only.

We have one other person, and she doesn't know the January dates yet. What would work for you? I just remember I was shocked. Yeah. Was like, I'm sorry, what? And she's like, what would work for you?

I was like, let me get my calendar. So I pull out my calendar and I. And I told her, and she's great. That's what we'll do. I cried.

It's a 45 minutes drive to the studio from where I lived at the time.

And back.

I cried all the way back like ugly tears of joy that started my 200 hours training sweet kindness. I ended up studying with Adi Shakti, who is a beautiful, powerful woman. She's really starting to build an empire.

Having the Akanda Shakti lineage behind me has been deeply supportive and really helpful as I journey into teaching.

I think that is so cool how you didn't stop because I could see how something like that would be like, at least I thought that was cool and then did it first anymore.

I fought for it for years. When I first started entertaining the idea, which now has been like almost 20 years, I was at the bank with a girlfriend.

A woman walked in and walked out very pleased with herself. I looked at my girlfriend and I said, she seems very happy. And my girlfriend was like, oh, she just got her business loan.

She's opening a yoga studio in town. I remember being like, shoot, we're under 20,000. I was like, there's only room for one yoga studio.

Interestingly, I ended up my studio took in all of those people. I taught for that studio.

After I changed hands several times, I taught for that studio, and when the owner was ready to be done, I was ready to start. So it's a beautiful turn of death events.

I love when you can look back and see the plot points like that. I love that so much. Let's dive into your messy middle.

Interestingly, my messy middle is involved with the studio. I started taking care of my grandparents. It was a slow boil. I started probably before I even hit 30. I was over helping them and assisting them.

But slowly they needed more and more assistance.

I know exactly what you mean.

As my grandparents grew older and became less available to do the things they needed to stay in their home, I became more available for them. My life changed each time it needed to so that I could continue. There was a time being the assistant manager of a restaurant.

Our general manager was a regional manager, so he was gone quite a bit, which means I pulled that role often. It's really a full time job. Thank you, hospitality people, for giving us wonderful things.

When I left the business, my grandparents really started to need more assistance. I fell into a beautiful job that was perfectly suited to that. I was gone for a couple weeks a year, and that's coverable.

I know exactly when I knew I was going to be gone. The older they got and the more they needed, the more it became apparent that my family wasn't stepping up for that. I am an over.

I will step up to expectations. You give me them and I will break my own neck to step up to those expectations.

They cared for me as a child, and so it was a deep honor to be able to do that. But I also desperately was clinging to my own identity. I was working a full time job and pursuing this dream of becoming a yoga teacher.

But more importantly, having the tools to facilitate for people so that they could find that space in their lives, so they could really turn inward and outward at the same time so that we could connect. I really wanted this, and I was working towards it.

I was holding down my full time job, helping my grandparents, and still working as a server because I loved it so much. Everything was great for a couple years. Everything was fantastic. There's so much money coming in. I'm training. This is working out.

This is really good. In the middle of a 200 hours training, my grandpa passed. I was so grateful for my community. They really held me.

And I have other dear friends, beautiful friends. There was something about these women who I was seeing monthly and sometimes more because we would study together.

There was something really beautiful about how they held me. When my grandpa passed, you might think that things got easier, but it got really hard. My grandpa was my grandma's buffer.

My grandma was the salty, crotchety one. My grandpa was like, oh, dear, it will be fine. And so it got really hard. We started to have a lot of trouble in my workplace.

Anytime I had somebody above me who was, like, afraid, I think afraid that I was vying for her position, which I wasn't. But she really did not like anything that I did. People around me liked what I did.

They would tell us publicly, and then she would find private ways to tear me down and poke at me. For a long time, I accommodated her. Then I became so stressed out, I couldn't accommodate her.

I was changing diapers, running home on lunch to make sure that everything was going all right. I was working really hard outside of work. I'm doing my job, so when she would poke, I wouldn't have time to be extra nice.

I continued to feel that feeling of, you don't belong here. And when we feel that, we start to internalize it. Suddenly my life was like three different people. I was living three different lives.

I was living the life of trying to realize dreams, right? And that felt really good. When I was in it, I was caretaking my grandmother, which felt so sad and full of grief, watching how hurt she was.

Then I was living this life of trying to be extra small so that I wouldn't step on anybody's feet at work. It was a hot mess.

I was trying to be extra small at work.

That hit me so hard, thinking about how, if we think of it in physical terms, when you're a caregiver, you're trying to become bigger, to surround someone.

When you're in this space of growth and learning and excitement, you're getting bigger as far as your ideas and your optimism, and then to have another place where you have to get smaller. The visual of that hit me really hard. You can only be so flexible in way. I really appreciated the way you worded that.

I feel like you really hit that on the head. You can only be so flexible. That was part of the stress. I was expanding and contracting, which is hard. It's possible.

But I'll tell you that what started to really win was the small. My grandmother was so hurt and broken, and I was her only outlet for it.

I think, although she would tell other people how amazing I was, she was full of criticism for me, and that really hurt at work. I feel like I don't belong. My grandma passed, and I felt stuck in work. We were too small for family medical leave act.

Minnesota just enacted their own, and now size doesn't matter, which I think is so beautiful.

I agree, because I'll tell you, my.

Company, we absolutely had the space to give me space. They refused to. There was no working with me in any way, and they could do that legally because they were so small.

So my grandma passed, and that was its own special battle. It was the start of coming out of that messiness. My partner stepped up in such a beautiful way before she passed.

I think I made it more difficult for myself by not asking for help. I continued to be like, it's okay, I got it. I desperately just needed somebody else to make my grandma dinner.

And he was so happy when I finally did invite him to step in. He did it so beautifully. I never would have made it without him.

Can I just. You couldn't ask for help.

When you look at what you're going through, you have one place where you can't be vulnerable because you're providing care to your grandma, another place you're being attacked from all sides, and then another place where you're trying to learn, and you already are in such a place of growth that opening it up more can upset the balance. So I want to normalize and.

Okay.

It's hard to ask for help faces, and especially when it's a partner that you love so much, you respect so much that they would want to help. But you also know that they are your only anchor. You know what I mean? And so you cannot disrupt that, because what if it got worse?

I totally validate that feeling and understand.

It, and I think that's so important for us to remember, right? So when we see the people around us, they're struggling, and you're like, what can I do? And they're like, I'm okay. I'm good.

We're just working through it. There's a power in. Hey, I'm not busy Thursday night. I will come make dinner. That's a different way of offering help. It's incredibly appreciated.

Sometimes it doesn't feel appreciated in the moment, but in the end, it's so much better when we're healthy and see our friends or our people struggling. If we step in that way, it's actually much more helpful. Right. With love and with kindness and without judgment. Let me bring you a casserole.

If you refuse it, I understand. We give people so many. Made this whole series about giving and receiving support.

One of my biggest pieces of advice is one space for them to opt out and not in the beginning, do work ahead of time. Give them a place to opt out and then keep moving.

Because the more times you give them the opportunity to opt out, they're seeing it as you wanting opt out. And while that's not your goal, you think you're being accommodating. They're in survival mode, and your opt out looks like a closed door.

And I think that's key. Is that survival mode? Right. We're tight when we're in survival mode and we're perceiving things, threatening, even when we know here, it's helpful.

We just don't really know. We might know in our highest mind, oh, she's just trying to help. But that doesn't matter, because what matters is how it feels. Yes.

And so I had a few people who were smart that way, who are very emotionally intelligent that way, and they really stepped in. My partner stepped in finally, when I was like, listen, I think that this is it. I think I've hit my limit. He stepped in beautifully.

When grandma passed, I felt really held and surrounded by my dearest and closest friends. My family made it, and it was good to have that added support, but also there was a sense of relief.

I think that this is something that we don't talk about enough. I had a dear friend who said, if you're feeling relief right now, I don't want you to feel guilty. I thought, thank you so much. And I do.

He had said when his father passed, he felt deep relief.

And I think that's important to just acknowledge that when somebody has been in pain or when it's time for somebody to pass, especially as a caregiver, it is normal to feel both sorrow that they are gone and relief that they have moved on. That doesn't make us bad people. That makes us human.

I had lost my grandmother, who really was my rock for many years, but we had started to lose that even before because there's a deterioration process that happens as people get ready to pass. It doesn't happen to everybody, but it definitely was happening to her. I had lost a lot of that caring that I had felt from her previously.

I felt deep relief knowing that she had found her peace, knowing that she was with my grandpa, which is really what she wanted, really offered me this beautiful sense of peace, which made it a little easier to take care of all the crazy things that happen as we move through taking care of somebody's estate.

I acknowledge that you're tearing up, but I also love. So my grandmother passed last year. I describe grief as an unending middle because you're never over.

Grief is so messy, because all of these things you just explained, right. There are so many aspects, and they sneak up on you and show up in so many different ways. We don't talk about grief very much. Right.

Because it's scary. Yeah. And we don't talk about sad things. And if we do talk about grief, we talk about grief in the sense of, okay, you're done. Right?

You were sad, and now you're done. And it's just not like that. It's messy and tied up with all of these different things. My grandmother was the pillar.

She was for the structure of our family. And there's so many times now where you look around and you're like, okay, things are changing. It's okay that they're changing.

I can still miss how they were and really just recognize it. Grief can be mixed up in so many little things. Both of my children, my grandmother loved her great grandchildren.

I had this moment where I was like, oh, they're not gonna get to meet Grandma Ludwig. It was a really hard moment for me. I didn't have to think about telling her, and that was really, oh, goodness.

I want to hate my neck so bad. Like, I just unhug you.

It's just so surprising how something so joyful, like pregnancy and I wanted this other baby could have thread in it that is also so hard and sad that grief is there no matter what.

Yes. I love that. I heard somebody say once grief is love without a place to go.

And I feel like what you just spoke to really is that you just wished she were there to see them and love on them. And you can see there's that love, and it has no place to go. Yeah. I love.

It's this moment of celebration of how much she loved my children that is so awesome and so confusing that there can be so many things that seem. Seem contradictory that are happening at the same time. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that something that I think about a lot, especially now that my grandparents, who are my most direct link to ancestral, I think about how our ancestors, our loved ones, and even the ones we don't know are with us. I just have to firmly believe that she is still there, loving on them through you. Right.

There's something about you that carries her, and she's still there, and she's maybe even more so because of your memory of her. I think that our relationship with our ancestors who have passed can be such a beautiful, enriching thing in our lives.

It is very important to me that we get to you coming out of this messiness.

So let's get there. Just before grandma passed, I had come into having the studio, set the studio up for maximum return on minimum time.

At the time, it was just a necessary situation, but now, several years out, I reap the benefits of that. My studio, my business allows me a lot of freedom. We're past all of that messy middle for now.

Like we said at the beginning, there's always going to be some new hot mess at some point. That's what life is about. That those lows allow us to more beautifully experience the highs and the steadfast things if we use them properly.

Now I'm in a place where, because of all those things, I have a deeper understanding. For most of my life, I thought I was pretty great. I thought everyone was pretty great.

I had only a mild understanding of what it was like to not feel like everyone was pretty great. My time, having my previous employment really taught me how it feels to be in a group that intentionally.

Like, there are people intentionally pressing on you. Like, intentionally trying to make things harder. Yeah, right. Or not intentionally, but definitely trying to make things harder.

That is a very special gift. It allows me to hold things for people in a way that I wasn't able to do before.

It allows me to hold space for myself in a way that I wasn't able to do before. We're a few years out now, and I think that we see my grandma is. I still don't understand what she's doing.

And my grandpa was like, it doesn't matter.

It's amazing.

I think that they're here all the time with me. I have this beautiful freedom where I get to travel to Peru to deepen my studies, where I get to move.

I was able to make the space just a few weeks ago to go to Costa Rica to take advantage of a training with sacred plant medicines to really understand them more deeply. And signed up to head to Guatemala with my mentor. And we're going to spend a few weeks together there while she runs her 200 hours. And I just watch.

I'm just going to watch with big eye and learn. And so now I have this space and it gave me confidence so I can take care of myself.

My grandma's passing freed me up where I was able to then say, I can leave this employer. And part of that is because of the gift that my grandparents left me. Yeah, they left me a beautiful gift. They left me their home, they left me money.

Right. And that really allowed me to step into this new, much smoother place.

Yeah.

It feels right now.

I want to give you kudos for not feeling like you have to fill in the time with doing more stuff because that is something that I feel like we have been trained, right as Americans, especially of, oh, freed time is unproductive time and we need to fill it with more. I think it's awesome that you're like, hey, no, this system I set up previously is still serving me. I don't need to add more to it.

I get what I need from it. Let me fill in with other things that bring me abundance and joy in a different way. Kudos to you.

Thanks.

That's really great. Not something that you hear many entrepreneurs do because we are all conditioned to do more, to be more productive.

Thank you. Maybe there will be a time when it is appropriate for me to scale in that way, but right now it's not appropriate.

What is appropriate is for me to show up for the people in my community and to enrich my life in other ways. Maybe five or six years from now, I'll be like, the simple system is not working anymore.

When we grow to that place, that's lovely and maybe we won't, but I just don't have the same. Sometimes people's goals are like, let's take over the world. That's not my goal. My goal is let me touch as many people as intimately. Right.

Like within their hearts as I can.

Yeah.

And to do that, it takes a.

Different scale and it's hard to learn.

I say this as someone who is struggling to do it because I have mantras on my phone screen and my desktop background that say things like, I don't need to work harder to get what I'm allowed to wrestle. And it's hard to learn those things. So, like I said, it's on the background of my phone, it's on the background of my laptop.

All of these things, things to be able to be like, okay, I will get the appropriate abundance for me with the appropriate amount of work for me. I don't need to do more to get that. I'm looking at you and I'm like, see, it can happen. It's true, girl.

I want you to know that there are days when I'm like, what am I doing? It's a constant wave of up and down. It is possible, but not without support. I don't want to be real.

I have the support of my grandparents, not just in spiritual form, which is lovely, but more importantly, in the physical world. Like, they left me support systems. I have the support of my partner.

For all the single ladies out there, and maybe even the committed ladies, please know that your expectation is often the driver of what you receive. And I know you're gonna be like, no, I do expect him to do the laundry.

My experience is that when I'm honest with what I need and when I found a partner who deeply appreciates that and has never not stepped up, sometimes there's friction, but there's not stepping up. And it's so beautiful. So that support really matters. Like, if you don't have it, I hope you will find it to everyone who's listening.

If you don't have it, how can you find it?

The letting go part is the first part of it, and that's hard. I always shout to the rooftops of how wonderful my husband is when it comes to being a partner for me.

But it took me getting sick to force us both into a place of being like, okay, wait, what are we both good at? Both of our strengths. Him stepping up in certain ways that he didn't expect has made our home a much better place for everyone.

I'll never forget being frustrated in a therapy session. Before I went through everything, I was complaining about something my therapist said. If he's never had to do it, why would he?

You have to be the person to actually draw the line in the sand, which is scary and hard, but when you do, it becomes better for everyone.

Yeah. And I think that's true in all of our relationships. We love to be nice. And I think, especially as women, we're conditioned.

Like, niceness is the way, because if we speak what we need, it might not be nice, but we can speak what we need with love, and that's much more kind. Kindness is so much more important than niceness.

Niceness is a reaction.

Kindness is an action. Niceness is a reaction. That's so beautiful. So that's where I am now. We're doing retreats.

We just finished a really large retreat in north central Minnesota over the summer solstice. We had 23 people there. I'm pretty proud of that. So many wonderful souls.

And then to see that progression even over just a few days as we start to decompress, and then we do a little connecting and maybe it feels a little bit weird when Candace says, make eye contact with people. And then at the end, people are like, let me just make eye contact with you, and can I hug?

It's just fascinating to watch those containers and so heartwarming to hold those spaces. I've got another retreat coming up in November, which is around ancestral healing and ancestral connections, which is going to be really beautiful.

We're starting our 200 hours in September. It's our second season. Such a blessing to be able to be doing that.

Adi, my mentor, has really helped accelerate where I can be so that I can be here in this place of. This is very abundant. This feels really lovely, right? Yeah, I'm working really hard, and it's really great.

Can people find out more about you all?

You can find me personally on Instagram, on Candiceshaw, Kana Shaw, Candace with a k on Instagram. You can find us at Sangayoga on Facebook. And then I can also give you, our website is Sanghayoga and yoga.

Yeah, I'll pull that into the show notes. Thank you so much for sharing the middle with me today. I did not expect to cry today. What's a good one? Tears have happened on both sides.

Thank you so much.

I feel like we just had a lovely connection. And thank you so much for having me. It was really special to me. Thank you.