My Mindful Week: Bearing Witness

Writing this entry begins with acknowledging my own hesitancy to write or say anything too honest. See, we are living in a “worst fears” kind of scenario for me. When I left my former job, I knew there were financial risks associated with leaving a predictable salary with (shitty) insurance and paid leave. There is a widespread non-acknowledgement of the risks of staying in (under-supported, underpaid, no-path-forward) salaried jobs past the point one’s personal health can support it. It seems widely understood that splitting time between part-time and self-employed work is more precarious. There is a widespread non-acknowledgement that the expansion of the part-time and self-employed segment of the economy (the alleged “recovery” from the 2008 financial collapse I graduated law school into) was a dangerous expansion of precarity in the overall economy. It reflects more hesitant business investment in payrolls, which is BAD for working people. But “unemployment was at record lows.” (DEAR GOD DO I ROLL MY EYES AT THIS.) During the time I came to the decision to teach yoga and figure out make ends meet, I fretted over the possibilities of my own injury or illness bringing everything down that I was working for. And I worried that, having barely treaded water through one major recession, I might weather a “next time” even more poorly. So here we are with world economies in a freefall, and I am worried that I shouldn’t say those parts out loud, because people come to yoga to feel better. And who’s gonna buy my yoga if I am a huge downer? (Oh hey, depression thoughts–still here, I see.)

What I think I am experiencing is some emotional avoidance and denial, in the form of feeling pressure to choose a “more marketable” perspective to share. And so I have to look hard, here, and decide whether I am offering yoga and mindfulness, or the “more marketable” inspiration-sounding fluff that dominates the health and wellness industry. Don’t get me wrong, I want everyone leaving a yoga class with a fresh perspective, maybe even inspiration, and feeling better. I just know from my own use of these practices that I don’t have to get high on empty affirmations or “forget about my problems” for yoga and meditation to make positive changes. Mindfulness practices aren’t intoxicants, and they don’t remove us from perceiving our harsh experiences. To the contrary, in my practice, bringing full presence of mind into my frequently harsh inner experiences helps me to overcome outward inertia, helps me be proactive, helps me forgive myself for a depressed day spent almost totally still on the couch, and helps me keep an open mind for new opportunities. Maybe everything will fall apart, even with my best efforts. And if it does, I must hope that I have built enough strength around my belief in my fundamental Worth and Worthiness as a being, to withstand the future.

This week in yoga, I offered exploration of a couple of different sequences with the suggestion to intentionally move the gaze through a movement. Where we place our physical sight affects our posture and balance, whether or not we are paying attention to where we are looking. Keeping the gaze on the floor out ahead of the body makes balancing on one foot easier. Looking up higher requires more effort to maintain the balance. Gazing up at the top palm in Peaceful Warrior or Extended Side angle can make those poses more challenging to maintain, maybe also bring awareness to new spaces in the shoulder and chest. Within a few simple physical movements is a powerful experience of being in charge of our own attention. In the mind, this means examining all the things that come into our awareness, without judgment or assessment. What am I witnessing in myself in this moment? How am I interacting with the world and with others? Can I see somewhere in my life that I have been thoughtless and reactive? Can I see what “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” I have unconsciously imposed on myself? We each have a role as a witness to our own experience, and to the world around us. A witness capable of communicating truth is someone whose view is not obstructed, who understands the limitations on his or her own perspective, who observes and speaks from a place of remove. The Witness is not a Judge. The Witness doesn’t delve into the Why. So as The Witness who seeks to share truth, what is passing through my attention? Where can I choose to aim my attention to serve my highest good?

In the world, I witness people who have little or no control over the constant new demands on their efforts. Teachers are learning how to get half a semester’s worth of class content onto online platforms, and participating in discussions about how to do grades this year. Parents are learning and connecting to ten different online tools to support their kids’ education during school closures. Those “lucky” enough to still have identical and consistent income are making a change to remote work with ever-shifting expectations, and learning to share 24/7 space with partners and kids. Those who have lost jobs due to the closures–especially those fully or partly self-employed–are struggling to understand where they fit within their state’s unemployment benefits structure, and whether it will even help. Or help in time. Some people are relishing full solitude, while others find it very unsettling. Some people seem to avoid all credible information about the risks associated with uncontrolled spread of COVID-19. Some people compulsively refresh page after page of charts and numbers and rates and share upbeat captions of pictures of themselves in masks. Most everyone is learning how much they rely on food and toilet paper outside their own house, and how many trips to the grocery store they really make in a week. We are helpless to support front line health care workers whose pay and job dignity are toilet paper on the ass of their corporate overlords. In myself, I witness a feeling of desperation for those who deliver health services to be supported, the terms of their jobs created with their human dignity in mind. All of this is a LOT of new engagement of our attention, and a LOT of stress. It is exhausting. I honestly hope everyone adds an hour of sleep to every day. And I hope everyone is finding space outside the Cult of Productivity to give themselves kind attention. It matters.

Everything that’s certain (Shelter In Place orders) is unfamiliar, and very, very few things about our futures seem certain anymore. Not that the future WAS certain before this pandemic, but at least the way I lived, the day-to-day grind made it feel like there was certainty about the future. I have not seen a yoga student in 3D in a month. A month ago, I would have scoffed at the idea that we would not be back in class by now. In myself, I witness my stress at sorting out my work life, shame at having human needs I struggle to meet, guilt over the resources and security I am privileged to have, hope and pride when I send out applications and cover letters for freelance work, frustration at what I lack in yoga video self-production, joy at the amount of baking I get to do, and relief that I’m not daily packing up 12+ hours of my life to drive all over multiple counties for too little money. What I notice, in addition to the very obvious anxiety and depression, is dissonance.

Dissonance, this simultaneous experience of seemingly conflicting feelings, makes a lot of people (It’s me, I’m a lot of people) deeply uncomfortable. I think in the past, I have experienced cognitive and emotional dissonance as unpleasant “noise.” In an environment of physical noise that reaches a certain volume or convolution, my first impulse is to avoid it or try to reduce ALL of it. It’s much the same in the environment of my mental and emotional noise. What I know now is, the only true relief from the tension and stress of mental and emotional noise, is to stay within the experience, listen over time, and sort out the different tones. If I can use my attention to notice and separate my conflicting thoughts and emotions, maybe I then have opportunity to think about where each piece could fit in a more harmonious way. Maybe I’m more likely to notice where I have an opportunity to act in a positive way. Maybe I can see a place where I am wasting energy, or recognize how much rest I need. Maybe I can release anything that was rigid in my view of my future. Maybe I can shrink down the scope of what I think I can control to its true size. Maybe I can acknowledge the burden of coping with all this change and uncertainty. If it all falls apart, it was honestly going to do that anyway. Maybe I can still breathe in a post-fell-apart world.

My Mindful Week: Appreciating Breath During a Lung Disease Pandemic

So much is different now, it’s hard for me to decide whether to try to condense it into a quick sum-up or not mention anything at all. I’ll land in the middle, maybe. This entry assumes that you know that April 8, 2020, occurs in the midst of a pandemic level of a highly infectious, novel virus called SARS-COV-2, which causes a respiratory illness in humans called COVID-19. Anywhere that justice exists, people are working remotely from home with their incomes maintained, moving around as minimally as possible. Justice exists almost nowhere. There are deep currents of stress about an illness that, when severe, drowns people in their body’s own immune response the infection, and everywhere, people whose jobs are refusing to treat their lives and exposure levels with dignity. There are deeper, long-established currents of economic stress in the millions of people who have lost their already-insufficiently paying work, had no paid leave, and are living on the edge of the next month, during which we will probably still need to minimize our contact with other humans, and during which businesses will not be rehiring or ramping up production.

In this context, my only yoga teaching opportunities are online, where I am a non-expert at creating virtual content, and without the funding to invest in better tools like microphones and camera/laptop upgrades. I’m using Zoom right now, but am doing my best to learn what safe options there are in the settings and in the video streaming platform world, given security concerns.

I started a weekly 30-minute community yoga, Wednesdays at 6 pm CDT, and it is truly a joy to see familiar faces of former students, and people new to yoga, on the screen. I’ve done my best to let go of what all is lost from being able to see people in 3D in class, and offer them care and adjustments in that way. It’s a loss I feel every time I teach, so I get this cycle of joy at doing what I love, and a poignant sense of my desire to be with my students in person.

This week, it was a real struggle to come up with a mindfulness exercise. Yoga teachers are just like everybody else, we feel the lows, we struggle to organize our own minds and emotions. Wisdom is giving ourselves a personal practice and a way to offer ourselves clarity. Hopefully we then bring to our classes a practice that is clarifying for the body, and for the mind. I struggled this week with calling my every idea a “downer,” feeling low and lethargic, feeling plodding and clouded on the mat. I feel a type of pressure about “staying positive” or “offering inspiration,” which absolutely do not feel True. Yoga is not about avoiding or looking away from the ugly. I have cleaned and scrubbed and dusted and laundered my home. I have baked cinnamon rolls and puff pastry that delight the senses and nourish the body, and I barely even like them. The clouds still didn’t lift after a 5-mile walk (in the rain, no less) yesterday. My cat will never not be sick again, and I worry for him daily. Oh hey depression symptoms, you WOULD show up now.

As often happens, over the course of allowing myself to Be in whatever state, but still Behave in the best interest of my health and self, I found a little grain of gratitude to cling to. I’ve suggested that my students “appreciate” their breath or offer gratitude for its presence in classes before. It carries us through our lives every day, and it’s a simple thing, but I feel the nature of my gratitude for my breath has changed, or intensified.

In this context of every outing possibly risking a disease that can crush the breath, in this context where we have little, if any, control over fundamental components of our lives, gratitude for the gift of breath is gratitude for one of the only things truly our own. I found myself considering and appreciating the breath’s power and presence in our individual lives. In each person, the breath is our own. To lose the ability to breathe, or to breathe effectively, is crippling. To require medical machines to breathe for us is to hang over the very edge of Alive. Our body practices at breathing, and then the day we are born, our body clears the lungs to make space. Thus begins our lifelong relationship with the elements, air and breath being the most primary. Our breath is with us from that instant of birth, before our conscious awareness develops the cohesion to communicate or create memories. If we lose our memories and cognition during our life, our breath will still be with us. It is with us while we sleep. The action of breath is not given to us, it simply is part of us. No matter what is spinning out in the world around us. A yoga practice offers an opportunity to notice this gift, and to build the parts of the body that support the breath and keep it healthy.

In these days where there is nothing to be done about so many circumstances, where it feels like there may soon be little else, I breathe.

My Mindful Week: The Strength To Bend

The phrase “backward bending” can inspire or intimidate both new and experienced yoga students. The internet is full of beautiful images of very dancerly yogis performing advanced asanas with lots of bend in the back. On the one hand, the beauty of an image like that can make people think they “should go to yoga.” On the other hand, people who think a yoga class requires extreme strength and extension, or who feel negatively about their inability to reproduce the picture, are more likely to avoid going to a class, or might preemptively limit their work while in a class. Properly aligned and modified backward bending is actually safe for most people’s backs, and is very soothing and helpful for low back pain. For me, a person who has an occasionally troublesome lower back, it was extremely helpful to hear yoga teachers begin to refer to “heart-opening” poses over “backward bending.”

A correctly aligned backward bend of any intensity begins with drawing the bellybutton in toward the spine, and aiming the tailbone firmly toward the heels. The “tuck” is fundamental to a lot of yoga poses, and it’s important to remember it and maintain it consciously in heart openers/backward bends. It almost feels counter-intuitive to do because it can feel like moving the spine in the wrong way. It’s important to consider that the purpose of these poses is to lengthen the spine in three dimensions, not simply to crunch the backs of the vertebrae together or “arch”.

As a mindfulness exercise, this practice is about developing physical awareness, and being patient with limitations and/or distress in order to fully engage heart-opening poses. For me, the most intense heart-openers my body can access involve a lot of sensations of tightness through the front of my body, mostly through the abdomen. They also involve–especially in the learning process of a new/bigger pose–feelings of fear and uncertainty, which I just hate. But they also make me feel big, strong, and released or relieved by the end of a practice. Part of what is available to learn through heart-opening poses is the relationship between freedom, fear, and struggle. By remaining patient, present, and breathing in the tension and struggle to fully extend the deep abdominal muscles and the psoas, we can find the most open posture we are capable of, and ultimately the most free body we are capable of creating. As always, this practice extends beyond the body as well. In every area of life, we may find ourselves caught trying to grow within any number of tensions and struggles that limit us. We may have no power over the limitations we run up against. It takes strength to open the heart, physically, emotionally, and every which way. All we have is our breath, patience, presence.

Heart-opening or backward bending can be practiced in a huge variety of ways. A few very grounded, stable suggestions are listed here, and I highly recommend a light twist after any heart-opening posture.

From The Floor:

Lying on the back, plant the feet near the glutes, press hands and arms down, and lift the hips, tucking the tailbone out past the legs in Bridge Pose. For extra support, place a block under the sacrum and relax in Supported Bridge.

Place a block between the shoulders/behind the rib cage to lift the heart as you lie back and breathe. If it’s better for the neck, place an extra block under the head.

Lying on the stomach, place the hands under the shoulders and plant the tops of the feet down onto the mat. Aim the tailbone past the heels, pull the bellybutton to the spine, squeeze the elbows and shoulders back and the shoulders down away from the ears as you lift the crown of the head for Cobra Pose.

Lying on the stomach, place the elbows under the shoulders with palms down and fingers wide, plant tops of the feet into the mat, pull the bellybutton to the spine, aim the tailbone back and the crown of the head up as you gaze down the bridge of the nose.

Lying on the stomach, take the arms along the sides and place the hands palms down next to the hips. Pressing the tailbone back, pulling the bellybutton to the spine, lift the crown of the head and open the heart, squeezing shoulders back and lifting the arms. Options: Also lift the legs, or interlace fingers together behind the back, keeping the heels of the hands close. This is Locust Pose.

Lying on the stomach, aim the tailbone back, pull the bellybutton to the spine, squeeze the shoulders back as you reach for the feet or ankles or a strap. Press the feet into the hands to open the chest, lift the crown of the head, and extend the legs upward. This is Bow Pose.

All of the above poses are very connected to the ground, which for me means they minimize my experience of fear, while still offering plenty of challenge and stretch on the front of the body. There are days when a full wheel sounds excellent, and days when my back is just tight or sensitive and isn’t gonna go there. Both of those kinds of days are great days to do heart openers and backward bending! In fact, the intense abdominal draw-in and tailbone tucking usually soothe and align my low back, and relieve any pain or tension I feel. Reminding myself to be patient with the state my body is in, to breathe, to be present, are healing exercises for my mind. It’s okay to feel tension and notice struggle. Struggle is never disconnected from freedom, in my observation.