Resources

I wanted to put together a space to share some resources, specifically books, that have been a big deal to me in my mental health seeking and maintenance. There is no internet replacement for an honest relationship with a doctor and/or therapist you trust. That said, I am acutely aware of the lack of access to especially mental health care in the U.S. health care system, even with insurance. I had allegedly “good” insurance that didn’t cover my therapist unless/until I met my deductible, so for years I have paid about $160 every other month for an hour appointment to be consistent. That was through my former employer, and now I have an even shittier policy because COBRA is up, and Mississippi did not expand Medicaid under the ACA, AND there is no statewide marketplace, so I make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and too little to shop on the federal marketplace. Oh and Blue Cross Blue Shield has been given what amounts to monopoly power in this market, thanks to the state government. I have been very lucky to have had the level of access I have had to the health care and mental health care I have needed when I needed it, however shitty the entire insurance industry happens to be. I know so many more people who have delayed treatment for serious physical and mental conditions, and people who have gone through such stress and crises during job transitions. The full extent of lack of health care access is a real lack of justice in our world and in this country, and particularly in this state. (This got rantier than I initially planned, but some days, that’s me.) So understanding that we are pretty much on our own with our mental health unless we are wealthy, here are some mental/self-help and/or yoga and/or meditation books that I love!

Not long after the day I cried all day because my phone went off in class, and not long before I talked to my doctor for the first time about getting some help about the persistent, intrusive, increasingly-big-feeling malaise and despair I was having, I was staring into the middle distance in the student union coffee shop line when I saw this cheery yellow cover. I hadn’t really been feeling emotions recently, except in furious and inscrutable bursts, but the Self within managed to lurch through with hope at the idea of “feeling good,” and the book came with me to buy a bagel and a breakfast blend.

Before the juicy parts about examining my own mental habits and effectively creating better structures and spaces for them, there was good information about the fact that the most effective treatment for depression is a combination of talk therapy and some type of prescription (a highly individual process and preference to work out with a doctor, haha, see above). That the most resilient positive outcomes of depression treatment included talk therapy. I had a wonderful primary care doctor (and insurance) who I was comfortable talking to about getting a prescription to help my brain, and later to talk about tapering off of it.

I was 19 years old, trying to maintain a high level of achievement while reacting to the harmful effects of a strict religious culture in some eye-rollingly typical ways, like taking up with the shittiest possible boyfriend I could find, and shouting over classmates about literature. Most of that year there was no hot, only mess. Which is why my talk therapy experience with the only CBT certified therapist in my insurance network, a perfectly nice man in his mid-50’s, was not a great fit for me to accomplish much or even really talk about my problems in our 8 insurance-covered sessions. But I showed up, which is the most important part of therapy, and I worked through this book and all the exercises he gave me to do, in private. CBT helped me give names and frames to the kinds of runaway/intrusive thoughts I was having, and truly was a gateway to understanding myself at a time when I REALLY needed that. Not long after I was doing consistent writing exercises from this book, I found my first real live yoga class, and came to my first ever real meditative savasanas.

Many, many years later, I knew several different people in the psychology department at the University of Mississippi. I learned some basic things about this idea of “ACT” or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy pronounced as the word “act.” I had worked on so many kinds of word prisons and projections, had such a strong background in yoga and meditation at that point, and I have had in many ways a great relationship with my physical body. And my friend wrote this book, and after witnessing many fraught relationships with bodies, including anxiety about weight and appearance, in my yoga students, I bought it. I knew it would have great ways to meditate softly and kindly on body and body image, and maybe meet some needs in people. That’s when I learned the full extent of prisons and limitations I had put around myself over my problem acne as a teen and young adult.

“I can’t go to ___ without all my makeup on.” And it had to be all, in my early teen years, because the heavy foundation that covered redness and masked the uneven texture looked like vampire pallor without some eyes and lips. When I left myself without enough time, or for whatever reason had to be without my makeup, I felt constantly on the defensive. It’s hard now to relate to the experience I was having as a person at that time, but “Living” truly did crack into some spaces in my Self that needed some light. Was I actually awkward and bitchy, or was my perception of awkwardness and social difficulty a by-product of my own projections of control and invulnerability? I was frustrated by the fact that no one seemed to want to date me, or did my engagement with my own disgust at my face make me harder to reach by anyone I could have connected with? I don’t know. And I don’t know what your body image or control situation is, but it is probably a lot deeper than you even realize. Or if you do realize it and you haven’t had a good resource to dig in, seriously invite yourself.

From the same psych department, came a workbook for examining one’s relationship with whatever psychoactive substance. The world of law practice, where I spent a decade of work/career, is filled with stories of attorneys appearing to be doing great while actually coping very poorly with exceptionally high-stress work, who drastically overwork themselves, and drink absolutely heavily for years before the problem becomes very obvious to others. A disturbing number die while in this pattern. Meanwhile, a lot of folks come to yoga from a past experience or experiences with chronic pain or some persistent pain condition, and an abuse pattern with a pain drug that they never intended to develop in the first place. Most people who develop any kind of substance abuse pattern got there from a place of intending to do right. Most do not have the luxury of going into a full rehabilitation program 24/7 for the month that insurance covers, nevermind the 2-3 months that sustained brain/behavior change requires. So most people who are doing work to change their relationship with their substance of choice are doing it on their own, continuing to go to work and be in their families, and trying to cope somehow.

The barriers to consistent, professional substance abuse treatment are many. A workbook cannot fulfill the medical needs of a person who is actively physically addicted and needs a supervised detox, and it cannot give a medical consultation about whether a dosage-regulated maintenance drug is appropriate. But for a person who is maybe aware that they are engaged in a substance abuse/misuse/dependence pattern, who has noticed themselves drinking excessively to hide anxiety in socially stressful situations (even ones they enjoy), who has noticed a substance taking up a lot of space in their mind and time, who has noticed a pattern of distracting themselves from seeing their own bad behavior or feeling their own bad feelings by using a substance, who has ever noticed their substance use or abuse creating distance between themselves and their goals, their relationships, or the person they want to be–for a person who is ready to notice and look–this is a very good resource.

I also have a tight translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, but this is a “rendition,” a la Ursula K. LeGuin’s interpretation of the Tao Te Ching (also highly recommend). The intent with this book was not to express the most perfect linguistic interpretation of the original Sanskrit, but to bring into the translation the “spirit” or “feeling” of the verses. In yoga, as in several other Eastern spiritual traditions, the internal/energetic sense of the words are a critical part of understanding. I love that explanation from the writer, who has studied the original Sanskrit deeply through yoga, but is not a language scholar. The meditations offered at the end of each Sutra are really lovely. This book is a great place to find an interesting variety of themed mindfulness meditations.

Finally, my current read, which came very enthusiastically recommended by a source with impeccable taste and ample self-care commitment. It is very My Demographic in its cultural references, which is to say “white younger Gen-X to Older Millennial age,” which is exactly what two white podcast hosts that age would produce. It’s glib and forceful and incisive, a sharing of personal stories that range from personal failures to agonizing life Stuff to insights from therapy. They are beating the “Go To Therapy!” drum here in the best way. This is actually the thing to start with for the person who is not ready to dig deep with the real clinical approaches in several of the other books. For the person who already beats the “Go To Therapy!” drum, these are affirming accounts of exactly what there is to get out of therapy, self-honesty, accountability, and appropriate personal boundaries. It’s deep, and it’s also great fun.

When yoga is first revealed to the warrior Arjuna in “The Bhagavad Gita,” Krishna says “No effort is wasted. Even a little of this practice will shelter you.” Yoga is the original self-care practice, and I consider all my time with these resources to be part of, and contributing to, my yoga practice. Whatever little bit of inner work you work on, it’s worth your time and effort. And that effort is never wasted, no matter how not-perfect you turn out to be.

My Mindful Week: At The Core

This week, I stole several aspects of the physical yoga practice from Southern Star Yoga Center’s Mary Solomon, who once taught a class all about “hugging the midline” of the body. There are a few different ways to incorporate a block into any of several yoga poses that help teach the body to draw its two sides together toward the midline, the center line between right and left. Place a block between the knees for bridge pose, and for chair pose. Hold a block length-wise between the forearms for chair pose. Hell, get two blocks and do both–go crazy! Having something to squeeze against, in the knees and/or the arms, helps me to lengthen my spine from the center and out through the tailbone and crown of the head.

To encourage a three-dimensional “hug to the center” muscular engagement, I invited students to visualize their spine as sitting very deep inside the body, and to imagine it as the strong, central structure around which the rest of the body is constructed. This is true–although the spine is closer to the back side of the body, the part we can feel is a bony protrusion of certain vertebrae that extend out significantly from the central part of the vertebrae and the spinal cord. When you feel the back side of the body engage, imagine that the center of the back, between the shoulders, lumbar spinal muscles, between the hips, is wrapping in and through that seam, deep to the center of the body. On the front side of the body, imagine a line from the notch of the collarbones down the chest and abdomen, through the bellybutton. Feeling the abs and front body engage, imagine those muscles wrapping in and through the body, to hug against the spine. From the side, imagine the shoulders hugging in to the center of the heart and lung space, the hips hugging in to the central base of the spine, the waist and ribs hugging against that same central column that is the spine.

Beyond the physical body, I invited students to consider the idea of their “core” or “central” or “authentic” Self. What I mean by this is the Self of the individual’s own internal experience. For most of us, a lot of our time and energy goes into generating language, expressions, and behaviors to connect and communicate with others. Connection is crucial to our survival, and this time and energy is spent for very good reasons. However, most of us do not spend sufficient time in solitude, in connection to our inner experience and Self. How is there any difference? I want to ask when I think about this. Is the Self of the behavior and language not the same? I think the true answer is both yes and no. I think of my Self as containing different aspects that are all genuine, but none can exist without the others. To steal a very ancient way of conceptualizing this, an individual Self is like a lotus–made of many connected petals, a stem, a root–all the same plant. If the root and stem systems don’t feed all of the leaves and petals, the plant will be in poor health. This practice of observing the mental/emotional/spiritual core Self, is about feeding the innermost petals of the flower, not just the largest ones on the outside.

I might notice that I have a very social Self, who craves to be around other humans, is effusive, and dances shamelessly during daylight hours, even. I have a work Self, who when I’m healthy is productive, efficient, and tries not to be too worried about being wrong, brash, or overly assertive. I have dysfunctional outward-facing Selves of a few sorts–crying after too much to drink, being pushy, not listening (or failing to understand) because it wasn’t convenient for my ego–in addition to my dysfunctional inward-facing Selves. As ever, there isn’t a right or wrong thought to have about what is “at the core” and authentic for you, in a given day, at a given moment. The point is to practice reaching inward. This is grounded in the Yoga Sutras as swadyaya, “self study,” a way of increasing knowledge. We try to observe our physical body, our mind, and our emotions and our spirits in ways that make them more perfectly aligned. Ideally, we align the aspects of our being in a way that helps us turn our behaviors toward our highest values. Effective self-study requires self-honesty and humility–the willingness to see aspects of yourself that might not look ideal to you, willingness to be silly or to not have a goal or an agenda. It might be willingness to be compassionate toward a Self you find who has done damage to yourself or to someone else. It might be willingness to truly enjoy what you enjoy, for its own sake and not for how it makes you look to someone else.

For a very, very long time, I have had a Self who, in private, or with trusted people, loves to make up interpretive dances just to be pretty. Today, after I had worked on some personal time in my yoga, I put on a song I have been loving all weekend, and made a little loose flow with it. I’m not good at making videos, so this is probably a highly inconvenient way to share it. I’m kind of tired and sweaty, and I could come up with a million things to say about alignment and what’s not perfect. But none of that is the point. I think “Easy Silence” is a song to sing into the core of your Self, or to your yoga mat, or as gratitude to every Self who has ever stepped onto the mat seeking ease, quiet, peace.

Easy Silence Flow Rough Download

If you would like to watch something that actually looks and sounds good, and was made by professionals, this is a seriously beautiful live performance. I do also think this song has mantra-esque qualities.

I breathe.

Doom And Gratitude, With Jackson Browne

“This song has two of my favorite ingredients for a song–doom and gratitude.” Jackson Browne introduces Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick,” after “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” also by Zevon. He sees these as two “polar opposite” Zevon songs, and says he likes to play them back to back. The crowd has been screaming for their own favorites, including multiple pleas to “Play Warren Zevon!!!” Browne is generous and flexible with his set list, his fans over the decades having become accustomed to him taking at least some requests. This is the second time I have had the pleasure of seeing him perform at Memphis, TN’s historic and beautiful Orpheum Theater. Judging by the ages of the people in the crowd, many are asking for the songs from their own youths, in the late 1960’s and 70’s. Some of them sound like they would rather he pretend he never wrote another song after about 1985. There’s an element of possessiveness, entitlement in some of the requests. They seem to say “Play MY song, the way I want to hear it.” The way that would make them feel 20 again? Are these the ones who traded in their tired wings, or who believe not in true love, but in those things that money can buy? It kind of seems like it.

He does a wonderful job of balancing his need and desire as an artist to share his body of work, with kindness toward a nostalgic, demanding, and loving audience. During intermission, I overhear, “He’s playing all new stuff! WHY???” And after the show, “I really wish he would have rocked a little harder.” I almost feel like those people went to a different show. This was a small setup–Jackson, two backup singers, a lead/slide guitar player. The performance that was actually happening on the stage was enthralling for me. This is an intimate songwriter intentionally creating a very personal, immersive concert experience, and I am here for that all day every day. My friends–all of us among the youngest in attendance–loved it as much as I did.

I first became a Jackson Browne fan around the age of 15 or 16. My English teacher (now one of my yoga students!) gave us an assignment to bring a poem to class to read aloud. At the time, all the poetry we were exposed to at school was of historical/literary “value.” I really liked poetry, and wrote plenty, but I don’t know that I had read much, if any, by living poets at that point in time. I don’t know why, but I had in my head that I wanted to read a living poet, and I didn’t have any kind of plan for how to identify, narrow down, choose. Luckily, I lived in a musical household, where there were plenty of song books. I don’t know what I had already thumbed through when I picked up “Jackson Browne: 21 Songs For Guitar and Piano.” This really is poetry, I thought as I looked through various lyrics, many from his “Late For The Sky” album. Maybe technically all songs are poetry, but not like this. Jackson Browne is fundamentally a poet whose medium is song, I think because music has a more powerful depth and reach than the words alone on the page. With songs, the artist gets to be with the audience for the art, to connect in a way I think he needs, that print-only publication would cut off. I still love “Farther On,” the song I chose for my assignment, that led me to “Late For The Sky,” and one of my favorite musical artists of all time. Here is gratitude.

That song book, and various Jackson Browne albums were in the house in the first place because my father was a fan. He was pretty excited that I had independently come to this interest, listening and poring over lyrics. It can be hard for teenage girls and their fathers to find common ground, for a lot of reasons. We found it in this music, shared what different lyrics meant to us, and knew each other a little bit better because of it. I went away to school for the last two years of high school, and met a guy who really (REALLY) knew how to play the piano and sing. And he understood Jackson Browne, he knew the songs, would play and we would sing together. To this day, he is one of my dearest and most cherished friends, and we still play the songs. We played them with both of our families. When I was 18, my parents and their friends had tickets to see Jackson Browne at the Orpheum, and I was going too. One of their friends backed out. Did my friend want to drive up from South Mississippi and see the show? YES. This was the first phone call I ever received on a cell phone. We all went together, and it is one of my favorite memories. It was just Jackson, in a black t-shirt and jeans, with a bunch of guitars and a keyboard. He might have played three songs before he opened it up to the crowd, kind and full of humor. “Oh I was gonna play another song about death, but yeah let’s do that one.” He played “A Song For Adam.” And I heard “Sky Blue And Black” for the first time, and bought the CD as soon as I could get my hands on it. He was still growing, still so open and feeling. You didn’t have to go backward in his career to get to his best work because it’s such high quality, ongoing. Here is gratitude.

Dad would almost certainly have joined us at the show last night (his older brother, my uncle was in the audience), but going on ten years ago, a lifetime of untreated/unacknowledged depression and anxiety caused him to take his own life. It was really hard when that happened, for all the reasons, and also because for a few years there–on top of everything else–it took the songs away too. I couldn’t bear to listen, and for even longer, I couldn’t bear to sing them. Knowing my own relationship to this music, and the way a different song will stand out, or how a lyric can transform as life transforms, it still hurts to wonder what Dad would have heard, to feel the empty space where his experience and reflection should be. Here is doom.

I have the most years with “Late For The Sky,” because it came to me first and because it is so resonant with the dissonance that is the late-teens/early 20’s life experience. I love rockin’ Jackson of “Somebody’s Baby” and “Runnin’ On Empty,” and his work with The Eagles (who should thank him daily for his songwriting on the “Desperado” album which I like primarily because of his capable storytelling), but my favorite Jackson by miles is the poet who doesn’t need a drum kit. Last night, he played one of the family favorites, “For A Dancer.” It’s one of the songs about death, but it is one of the most life-affirming songs I know. Yes, there is doom. “In the end there is one dance you’ll do alone.” My Mom finds this a limited perspective–perhaps due to Browne’s youth when he wrote it. And she’s right. We are in many ways alone, especially in tragedy when our internal experience can very fully separate us from a room full of people. We do a lot of dances alone. But in the same song, “Go on and make a joyful sound/ Into a dancer you have grown/ From a seed somebody else has thrown/ Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own.” Put yourself out there. “And somewhere between the time you arrive/ And the time you go/ May lie a reason you were alive/ But you’ll never know.” I have come to read this lyric as referring to freedom. Do your dance. You’re not supposed to know the reasons or to have a destination in mind. In the words of Pina Bausch, “Dance, dance–otherwise, we are lost.” Here is gratitude.

Recently, my original Jackson Browne friend has been going through some very trying times in his family. I adore his family, and have been affected by these circumstances, wishing I could lift the burden or make it better. He told me he had found himself drawn more to “The Pretender,” an album I had not paid much attention to in full, although I love the title song (as did many of the people in the audience last night, and Jackson kindly obliged them and played it beautifully for us). It turns out that album was written through deep pain and loss, and I think it takes the transforming experience of loss to open up some of the doors to those songs. He has been playing “Only Child” (Take good care of your mother) on a loop. I am fixed on “The Fuse.” I listened to “The Pretender” in full several times before a very special, though difficult visit with my friends in South Mississippi. Later, as I was driving with the album playing “Linda Paloma” (which I used to always skip), a group of birds crossing the sky over the road danced through a small version of a murmuration, perfectly in time with the guitar’s phrases. It was like hearing the song for the first time all of a sudden, all beauty for beauty’s sake. These songs are due to transform yet again, as this dear family’s pain and perseverance continue, and eventually transform as well. Here are doom and gratitude bound up together.

Last night, the most confounding thing to me was the number of women screaming to hear “Rosie.” He really wasn’t going to play it, but the level of insistence was pretty severe. I had to wonder whether they think the song is actually about a girl named Rosie, or if they get the euphemism. Since people still think Sprinsteen’s “Born In The USA” is a straightforward, patriotic song, and it’s a lot less subtle, I have to assume there are people who don’t realize that “Rosie” is about going home alone and masturbating. It’s unfortunate, because it’s actually a story about a man being cool with himself and responding appropriately to rejection. The girl he gets into the show goes home with the drummer instead, and he goes to bed with “Rosie Palm and the blister sisters,” among other names. “When you turn out the light, I gotta hand it to me.” The man is FUNNY, which one would have to be to survive his level of insight. Were these women signaling to their husbands that they were on their own for the night? Were they a bunch of Southern protestant/evangelicals who feel naughty rocking out to it? Is it a thrill to think about a young Jackson Browne on the rock ‘n’ road album (“Runnin’ On Empty”) getting personal with himself? Or do they hear “You wear my ring,” and assume it’s marriage and commitment, and a man who really *wants* his gal? I am fascinated and amused. I feel like missing the point of that song means they must miss a lot more, and that seems like doom. Maybe I don’t know much.

It’s always interesting to me to think of Jackson Browne fans in this area of the country, given his politics, which he has been so open about for so long. (Sidenote: If you dislike his politics, you would really hate mine.) I was moved and grateful that, in a Deep South venue, inamongst the rock and the requests, he said, “I want to play this song because I want to thank everyone who’s out there organizing and protesting for common sense gun legislation. No one is trying to take your guns.” He said a little more, before he played “The Long Way Around,” but the people behind me were apparently hard of hearing and filled my ears with their confusion. “He said a common gun registration.” Lord, what were they hearing in the songs? “The seeds of tragedy are there/ And what we feel we have the right to bear/ And watch our children come to harm there/ In the safety of our arms.” (Me: swooning, clapping wildly; Nearby: confusion, they can’t tell if they should be mad). He also played “The Dreamer,” and commented so simply and sweetly about the people who immigrate to this country. The song includes some delightful lyrics in Spanish, and the backup singers were super into it (and were amazing in every word they sang). Here is gratitude.

At the end of the show, as the audience screamed for “The Load Out/Stay,” which I had heard him play at my first show, he either felt he had indulged them enough with “Rosie” and “Take It Easy,” or he was feeling defiant about their less than eager acceptance of the newer material. To the audience’s credit, as much as they wanted THEIR songs, they generally were very very appreciative of him, and everyone was on their feet. “There’s a song I really want to play.” Play what YOU want to play! He probably didn’t hear me holler that, but I did, even if it just dampened the intensity in my section. And he did my actual favorite of his new material, which I share below.

We are doomed. The Deluge is practically here, in the most literal sense. And Jackson Browne is still writing and performing new, personal, important, critical, hopeful, and impactful music. I could go on for days and days about what this or that song or phrase means to me, or the moments I have spent in them. Instead, with love through most of my life, and the deepest gratitude for his work over his life that has been and his life to come, I leave you with last night’s parting song. “The river will open for the righteous, someday.”

I breathe.

My Mindful Week: Making Space

This week in yoga, I have invited students to think about what “making space” means to them. I say it a half-dozen different ways to refer to the physical body–“open,” “extend,” “stretch,” “reach.” And this week, I invite them and myself to get in touch with “making space” mentally, emotionally too. So what does that even mean? It might mean allowing oneself to experience the types of “negative” or “bad” states of mind we wish we didn’t experience. It might mean allowing oneself to see a difficult truth about another person. To one student, it meant looking at their anxiety/fear around a medical appointment. “Making space” meant opening to the idea that this appointment would not be a repeat of a past, very negative experience, but would be its own experience. How else might we think about this?

For me, “making space” often means noticing the feelings or thoughts I’m pushing away or avoiding, and allowing them to be present even if they are deeply unpleasant. This is actually an integral part of a yoga practice to begin with, but it tends to be a part that people think they are “doing wrong.” There’s a real stereotype out there, thanks in large part to the way yoga is marketed in the U.S., that one is to spend the entire yoga class “feeling good” in a way that refers to enjoyment, pleasure, happiness. If someone goes to a class with that impression, and finds themselves physically challenged in a way they don’t enjoy, or finds their mind stuck on something stressful, or experiences all the things they’ve been pushing away–their partner pissed them off, they forgot the pet food, their house is a mess they still haven’t gotten around to, they don’t want to cook dinner later, they hate their job, they have a terrible relationship with their body, they have painfully dysfunctional thought patterns–they can spend the whole class convinced that they can’t do yoga or they don’t get it. In my observation, this results in people avoiding yoga because they think they have to already be in some correct or ideal state of mind to do it. The fact is, the truth of our state of mind, the truth of our experience and where we are that day, in that moment, is exactly the state of mind that belongs in yoga. Whatever it is. (Keeping our external expressions within the bounds of our mats, of course.) If you will, make some space in your mind for a bigger idea about what a yoga and mindfulness practice is really for, and why all the “wrong” states of mind and body are exactly the right things to experience in yoga.

Yoga is about non-attachment (Vairagya, in the ancient Sanskrit of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali) and release. But this is difficult. Sometimes we have to notice what it is we are attached to, notice how hard we hold and work to keep it, maybe for a long time, before we are capable of ever resolving our problematic internal states. This might mean spending many yoga classes experiencing our painful emotions and our irrational or dysfunctional thought patterns and/or physical problems. I have gone to the mat bitter, sad, confused, resentful, depressed, distracted, limited by physical injuries, feeling ugly, feeling like a rotten pile of failure. But the point is I went to the mat. And I strengthened and stretched my angry, ugly, hurting, failure of a Self using the same movement patterns and postures I used to strengthen and stretch my joyful, beautiful, vibrant, unstoppable Self. The fact is, they are one and the same Self, separated only by my own judgments. These are distinctions and boundaries that I invent. Only by bringing the “bad” pieces to the mat over and over (and over and over) again did I come to this realization. As ever, you won’t really feel this just from reading it here or anyone telling you. You have to DO it, by and through your own whole and perfect Self.

In meditation, I often invite students to imagine their thoughts and emotional states as clouds in the sky. If we watch the sky, the clouds will change in shape, size, color, and their very nature. A clear and bright day can turn to storms very quickly. Just like weather, even though they may come in seasons and patterns, all our thoughts and emotions are passing through. Their fundamental nature is to be temporary. If we can visualize our thoughts and emotions as the weather above us, and our Selves on the ground watching, we are able to understand more clearly their true temporary nature. Seeing this, putting our Selves in the position of an observer rather than as helpless to the storms, we take away their power. We relieve our Selves of the work of constantly blowing the clouds away or running from them. Often, that discomfort we encounter about being in a yoga class, about what we “should” feel like, is us trying to control our inner weather, rather than sit with it and allow it to be temporary.

Another way to think of making space has to do with the “good” thoughts and emotions. I have mentioned my common thought pattern of minimizing, or discounting/devaluing the positives. It’s common in a lot of people (me) to have a thought like, “I look GREAT today!” or “I did an amazing job!” and instantly turn away from enjoying that feeling. “Yeah but yesterday you had that awful zit,” or “Big whoop, it’s ONE day, it’s not like you just look great.” “Not so amazing considering how you fumbled through the entire thing until the very end.” Maybe we turn toward a negative expectation of the future. “Yeah but the next project is gonna be a real shitshow, you know you’re in over your head.” For me, in all of these cases, maybe it comes from resenting the temporary nature of the good feeling so I cut its time short. Maybe I would rather pretend that feeling good doesn’t matter to me than accept the truth that feeling good will pass, just like that bright clear sky will eventually cloud over. What if making space also means opening up, softening to the full experience of our joy, beauty, happiness, power, and prosperity? Accepting it, being in those moments while they last, allowing them too to be impermanent?

I’ll part on a favorite Buddhist quote that I first saw in 2013 at the wonderful Louisiana Himalaya Association in New Orleans, LA. I loved it so much I took a picture.

I breathe.

My Mindful Week: The Inner Critic

The primary thing I try to make sure I incorporate into my yoga classes is mindful awareness. Mindfulness–defined most simply as full awareness in the present moment–means being aware of the breath and the sensations in the body as you refine and adjust your yoga pose, wait for your car to warm up, sip your morning coffee, or whatever. It can be difficult to find ease into this state of peaceful awareness. The processes of calming the body, un-busying the mind, and un-fusing from emotions is easier said than done, so in my classes, I try to offer specific ways to direct one’s focus. Hopefully, these are also broad enough that any individual can apply it to their own life in some small way.

Recently, each class was offered to consider the voice of their “inner critic,” which is often expressed in different types of negative self-talk. I have spent significant time working through my own negative self-talk, and the rest of this post is really about my process of addressing my own negative self-talk pattern. If you feel like you need specific mental health help, I urge you to seek professional advice from your primary medical provider, for a referral to counseling and/or medication.

My personal negative self-talk is often some version of “How could you have made that mistake, you are so STUPID!” Sometimes an abusive phrase comes rapidly and repetitively through my mind, and wants to shove and shoulder every other thought out of the way. It’s an emotionally painful place to be. Nothing good I have ever done could possibly be of any worth compared to the failure in front of me right now. This is a type of toxic perfectionism that has been among the roots of the major depressive episodes I have experienced. It has made me feel SO afraid to try anything I didn’t already know I could do well. Believing my inner critic’s language has poured adrenaline through my guts and triggered my “Freeze” (as opposed to “Fight” or “Flee”) response, a deep, cold body sense that survival itself is at stake unless the next thing I do is absolutely the right thing. And until I know what that absolute right thing is, I must not move a muscle.

Once, this process flooded my entire system in a class. I forgot to put my phone on silent. It rang. The professor, who had been dealing with this phone crap for weeks during the early days of cell phones, rolled her eyes and said, “And SOMEBODY didn’t turn off their phone.” It felt like I was boiling inside from my toes to the top of my head, but I could barely blink or move my hands to take notes for the rest of class. I have thoughts on why my fear/survival systems were on such a hair trigger at that time, but regardless of why this process started for me, the Inner Critic came right behind that adrenal/rigid/freeze period. After class, I ran to go cry, a lot. Over the phone going off, and what that meant about how inconsiderate and stupid and careless I was and how the professor must know how terrible I really am inside, and no matter how good my class work or tests are, I’ll always know that she knows how I really am. I can look at these words now, and I can tell you rationally about how that was me rejecting multiple types of assessments of me that might be positive (grades, homework). But in the saturation of the post-freeze emotional roil, the only assessment that mattered was the one where I’m a stupid, careless girl in someone else’s eyes. I can call all my big emotions “excessive” and say I overreacted to something ridiculous, but I would still be calling myself a stupid, careless girl if I did that. And what happens if every time I think I look bad to someone else, I believe that that matters more than literally everything else? It means I’ve spent significant time trying to make everything in my life be absolutely right in order to avoid my phone going off in class, or whatever seems like it might set off that Freeze and Shame process. This has meant a lot of me not doing much other than internally torturing myself (rationally!) about the many ways I’m bound to fuck up. I know people who approach this with a “make it rational” idea, and I’m all for whatever works for every person. But for me, I need more than “rational.” There’s too much mystery within the universe and within myself that I care about for “rational” to fully work for me. Today, for this “irrational” suffering I do to myself, in my own yoga and meditation practice, it has been necessary to work to understand the Inner Critic voice, and to develop a peaceful relationship with it.

The process I use to deepen understanding, release attachment, and grow out of my limiting, harmful thoughts of various sorts, is to begin opening to the idea that the negative voice or emotion or whatever it is, is present for some good reason. Anything can fall into disorder or misapplication, but everything in me exists from some place of supporting my survival, my adaptive capacities, and it all wants me to thrive. This is here for a reason. Opening to thinking about what purpose the Inner Critic might serve, I was able to notice a difference between the function of what it was doing, and the language through which that function was delivered. Avoiding mistakes, including social mistakes, is a big deal in human survival, because they can be incredibly costly to our very lives. The Inner Critic, as a function, is only trying to show me where I have room to grow, to do better, so that we can survive and thrive. For whatever variety of reasons, I have given language to the Inner Critic that is harsh and abusive, and that language unfortunately obscures the truth of the Inner Critic’s function in my mind.

“How could you miss that, you are SO STUPID!” is language. It is learned. I didn’t know how to teach the Inner Critic to say, “Hey check yourself, I wanna live!” or “That felt really dangerous, please keep us alive!” I wanted (and still want!) to avoid the feelings of fear and shame that can come with failure, I wanted (and still want!) to feel absolutely sure of myself at all times. I developed a pattern of avoidance of big effort. Other folks develop obsessive, anxious, sleep-deprived lives of trying to exert control over all results. Either way is toxic perfectionism. Now, slowly, in tiny breaths each day, I now ask my Inner Critic “What are you really trying to say?” I try to look at the space the Inner Critic sees, that evidence that I am fallible, capable of wrong, that I see through a limited human perspective. As ever, in yoga, softening and listening happens in the breath.

I breathe to release attachment to my persistent idea that I should already have grown into every observable space. I breathe to invite compassion into my view of my own shortcomings. I breathe to release my desire to avoid suffering by avoiding seeing myself. I breathe to release my desire to control how I am seen by others. I breathe love into whatever kind of stupid, careless girl doing her stupid best I have always, and ever been. I breathe. I breathe.

Sassafras: What’s In A Name?

A couple of years ago, I was in the middle of the decision to make a huge change from working full time as a practicing attorney with a couple of yoga classes per week, to teaching as much yoga as possible. I’ll talk more about that later, but this post is about my desire to treat my yoga business like a business–to make it into something adaptable and identifiable as something other than my actual Self. Like any human, I need to work on my Self without necessarily also working on my business, so creating that boundary was important to me.

Without an attachment to any one teaching space, I would be bringing “my” yoga to multiple different kinds of spaces, including private clients’ homes, dedicated studios, gyms, and a farmer’s market stall. I wanted to create some structure, some inspiration, some roots, for the yoga I would be putting out there. Eventually, I came up with Sassafras Yoga because of the Sassafras tree, native to my Mississippi. It’s a small, more brushy tree that tends to live at the edges of woods and ditches. It grows three distinct types of leaf shapes on one plant, and that represents to me the unity of mind/body/spirit. I always want that unity to be at the center of the yoga I practice, and the yoga I teach. Sassafras is very hardy and tough, and its root can be made into a tea that may have medicinal properties. It turns absolutely beautiful colors in the fall, which I just like. It’s also very fun to say.

My brainstorming and doodling came up with an image–an alchemist’s symbol for the element copper–with the three types of sassafras leaves hanging on it. I commissioned this copper wall hanging from June Caldwell Art, to put together this idea of what I want to bring to my yoga teaching.

Sassafras Yoga, in short, is what you get in a class or workshop with me. It is Mississippi rooted, you find it kind of everywhere. It is strong and healing. It is concerned with bringing your mind/body/spirit together. To each class, I try to bring simple mindfulness exercises to a basic pranayama (breath), asana (posture/movement), and meditation practice. Mindfulness exercises might be a simple invitation to focus on the breath, an exercise based in cognitive and/or behavior psychology, an ancient metaphor or parable, or a quote to focus on during yoga practice. Always, the goal is to help you relate to yourself any little bit better, to make your body feel any little bit better, and to remind you that your mind and spirit matter, and deserve care.

A note of gratitude: I wouldn’t have a yoga to call my own if it were not for the many teachers I have had over the years–in yoga, in literature, in philosophy, in art, in music–and as I describe what I think of as “my” yoga, it feels ridiculous. I didn’t invent yoga, so what do I even have to talk about? (This is called minimizing, one of my common cognitive distortions, which we’ll get to. Later.) But the thing I now remind myself is, each time I come to the mat, I invent that yoga practice, right there, in that moment. I invent that process of steadying my breath, of observing my mind, of strengthening and stretching my body. And I wouldn’t have these moments now if other teachers before had not shared, if they had said “I didn’t invent yoga, so what could I possibly have to offer?” So recognizing that I often tell myself distorting, minimizing things, I offer what I have, knowing that I have received powerful insights from simple offerings. I think of “my” yoga as a twig of outgrowth from a tree of human knowledge that stretches back over millennia. The yoga that will mean the most to you, of course, is the yoga you actually DO. I encourage you to look around your community for a class, and find out what your local yoga teachers have to offer.

Background

I first started practicing yoga on and off over 20 years ago, lying down in the floor trying to do breathing exercises I had read about, with Mom’s Enya cd playing in the background. During college, the campus gym had a great yoga class that I went to every week until that teacher moved out of state. I found different classes in different gyms on and off over time, including a year or so at a great little studio called Yoga Pilates Sculpt. I bought a yoga video or two. I spent the most class time at Southern Star Yoga Center in Oxford, Mississippi. My practice became more and more consistent over time at Southern Star, and in 2017 I completed RYS 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training there.

My yoga practice, both in studio classes and at home, has seen me through half-marathon training, healing the low back injury that popped up after that race, healing my spirit over and over during an 8-year legal career, a parent’s death, a friend/mentor’s death, a divorce. I’ll talk more as I go along about the many particular instances in which yoga has gotten me through. But for now, I only want to emphasize that my relationship with yoga has been long-term, and rewarding at a depth that is hard to describe. In fact, I recommend you don’t listen to my or anyone else’s experience with yoga too closely, and instead begin your own practice and FEEL for your Self!

I teach seven regular yoga classes per week–at Goose Creek Club in Oxford, MS; Pontotoc Wellness Center in Pontotoc, MS; and The University of Mississippi Law Library in Oxford, MS. If you are interested in trying a class at any of these locations, please contact them directly, or comment for info on how to register/attend.

Welcome To The Sassafras Cottage!

I’m Forrest, a yoga instructor and market research analyst living in Northeast Mississippi. I started this blog in order to make a space to share some of the practices that are most important to my life. I have placed my yoga practice, and the sharing of yoga with others, at the front of my life, because it is the primary and most effective tool I use to maintain my health–physical, mental, and emotional. I hope to share helpful information and resources about personal health and wellness, and ways that I build sustainable nurture and care into my own daily life. I hope you find something here that nourishes you!

Shameless Self-Promotion

This is what a blog is all about, right? I love teaching yoga, so I’m excited to share this upcoming workshop I’m teaching at my favorite studio, Southern Star Yoga Center, just in time for Valentine’s Day!

http://southernstaryoga.com/workshops/

I grew up singing and around lots of really good singers and musicians, so when my yoga teacher training referred to the heart chakra as “the unstruck note,” because it sounds without being plucked or played, it made perfect sense to me. It was very natural to me to begin imagining the resounding heart as part of a chord.

The heart has its own unique vibration that plays throughout our lives. When the heart is healthy, and we listen to its genuine needs, we can notice when it encounters other hearts that bolster its sound and support it thriving. A healthy, balanced heart-note in the individual plays in harmony with the two closest chakras to it—the solar plexus, and the throat. The solar plexus is the center of our will, our personal power, our self-determination. It can be out of balance in a way that is controlling toward others, i.e abuses our connection to our power; or it can be out of balance in a way that stifles, or fails to honor our connection to our power. The throat chakra is where our expression resides. It can be out of balance in an overactive way that might drown out our heart’s ability to listen to others, or it can be out of balance in a stifled way that harms the quality of our out-going communication with others.

The asana practices and meditations in this workshop are meant to build awareness of these three critical energy centers, to stimulate and then calm these three chakras, and develop a more balanced and harmonious, loving Self. I hope you’ll join me!