Why yoga matters now: emotional regulation and resilience. Big picture, and two tools to use today.

The emotional landscape is harsh.

In our fatigue, depression, anxiety, resentment, burn out and insecurity, yoga is more important than ever.

In the upcoming three day workshop, I both want to provide solace and support, and I want to kick some butts (hearts) into gear. We know enough, we’ve got tools, or at least we have suspicions and questions and a longing.

It’s important that we get clear on what we’re doing, what yoga is (and isn’t), so that we can navigate our way through this positively. It’s important that we navigate our way through: our doing so is how we most effectively support others, change the world, make a difference.

And we can make a difference.

One of the key understandings here is that yoga is a toolbox of emotional regulation and personal resilience.

Let’s define those terms. It’s important to know what it is we’re doing.

Emotional regulation, at first blush and in common parlance, is something like ‘calm down’ or ‘feel better’. But that’s not what it really is. Emotional regulation is about connection.

Resilience does not mean unflappability. It is not a holy aloofness or a pasted on smile. It isn’t a Nietzchean what doesn’t kill you or a grin and go on. It is a vivid capacity to do hard things.

Emotional regulation

We have all been socialized to ‘regulate’ in terms of hiding our emotions, staying calm for others, or behaving in accepted or rewarded ways. Some emotions are valued and other’s aren’t. In psychobabble, the emotional toolbox we’ve been given often involves masking, repressing, ableism, and code shifting. In extremis, this might come down to internalized oppression and abuse.

True regulation, though, means:

• feeling your body, including a capacity to navigate unpleasant sensation or discomfort, find resources for pain management, and accurately assess threat and dysmorphia. This gives us compassion and understanding of things like dissociation, numbing, projection, compulsivity. Both acceptance and new choices abound. We can stop hating or trying to control ourselves all the time.

• feeling safe in your body - in at least some aspect of your body. This is something that often has to be learned, and compassionately learned, especially as regards trauma, pain, gender dysmorphia, ablism and ageism, etc.

• emotional literacy: being able to name what’s happening inside

• emotional discovery: human body brains are hardwired to experience an incredible array of emotions. Discovering our emotional capacity opens our world, reveals depths and possibilities we weren’t aware of, and has a real tone of befriending yourself.

• reaching for support instead of shutting down. or running away

• an evolutionary and expansive flexibility to our responses, in an upward and outward spiraling way

• this both implies a reclamation of things that have been neglected, denied, or stuffed so far down they’ve become hell monsters of the truly mythic deeps and darks, AND it means we are able to express the appropriate things at the appropriate times. We know the antisocial edge of expressing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. But we also have beaucoup ness: physical, artistic, meditative, spiritual and social ways of expressing what needs to be expressed without inflicting harm or building up consequences.

The Yoga tradition is rich with tools for mitigating challenge and resourcing the good, beginning with our sense of agency and capacity.

For the sake of brevity and utility here, it’s most important to say

-emotional regulation is learned. Our plastic brains have a capacity to relearn, and our tissues adapt to input.

-Yoga has a unique understanding of suffering, and an ultimately positivistic and humanistic orientation in the face of suffering. We’re not aiming at neutral, nor a return to before we were broken, but at something good out of intrinsic challenge. There is a yes and an affirmation of will at its source. This doesn’t deny or suppress difficult things. We can feel seen and acknowledged. Painful, ugly, and sad things are validated and realized. But they are not only validated: they are seen as potentially and positively transformative. Healing means moving beyond coping to integration; resolution means uplifting; regulation means hope.

Resilience

I think I was given an image of resilience as grit. As taking another hit. As being like one of those inflatable punching bags, generally posing as a clown and weighted at the bottom such that it kept bouncing back no matter what. Problem with this was, such an idea is secretly resentful and dependent on the damage. It’s a negative definition, and a pretty rough way to relate to either yourself or the world. I thought of resilience as toughness. I’ve always been tough. I’ve been praised for it. But sometimes that toughness was causing harm. I identified with my brokenness.

Yoga insists that people aren’t broken.

Through practice and a lot of training, I’ve come to understand that resilance is

adaptive:

which isn’t the same thing as taking another punch. Resilent folks adjust to difficulty and stressors, finding ways to grow and discover. Their well-being is enhanced. I think ‘wellness’ is a shit word, we should start replacing it with ‘welfare’. I’m going to start a whole holy campaign, a marketing blitz, in which we take on the wellness industry with welfare. It isn’t individual. Health markers are more determined by public health than personal choice; at the same time it is true that exercising choice where we’ve got it makes the difference. We all do better when we all do better (Paul Wellstone).

Resilience is recuperative

which is more than ‘bouncing back’. It is a reorienting and mastery of setbacks and challenges. Resilience demonstrates mental strength and employed emotional regulation. It is vitalizing.

Resilience is resourced

Resilient folks develop and utilize so many tools to manage stress and adversity that they reach a point of instinctive, intuitive, magic seeming knowing how to make anything work. These tools include seeking support, problem solving, maintaining positive attitudes and cognitive savvy.

Resilience is mentally well

there are so many contextual things to be said about mental health; forgive my brevity. Point here is that resilience can help protect us, and it aids in living with mental-health challenges.

Resilience promotes psychological capital/wealth

I have a teacher who frequently says ‘the only real wealth is spiritual wealth’. This involves a heck of a lot of unpacking and teaching and practice, but is ultimately true. Resilience is correlative to the positive psychological resources of hope, optimism, creativity, trust, and self-efficacy, which help in hard times. Us. And others.

Resilience is dynamic and a process. It is fluid.

Resilience is a learned capacity. It develops over time. Through experiences. It is not a flat line understanding of homeostasis, but an evocative aliveness.

Resilience is connective and social

Resilient people have strong and varied social networks and resources, a fractal like web of bonding, interrelating, learning, reflecting, responsibilities, impact and opportunity.

Two tips or tools for today: #1 resource your feels #2 take a break that isn’t social media

#1 Get down get down

There are enormous healing potentials, rivers of it, veins and jewels of it, waiting beneath the surface. I mean the surface we mostly glide over in looking away. I mean the thing we stand, sit, walk, run, dance, sleep, and eat upon. This stunning green and bluey ball hurtling at a thousand miles an hour around it’s own axis, spinning at 230 kilometers a second through a mind-boggling expanse of void, without seeming to move at all. Earth is the primordial maternal presence. She hushes and cuddles. She lullabies and washes. She feeds and she loves. Her thick web of consciousnesses has possibilities for healing that are - by definition -limitless.

The earth is a recycler. She asks that you pour out your feels to her. Next time you’re watching a sunset, passing a garden, standing by water, seeing the earth’s body from a window in a plane, or glimspe the moon, notice that pull she has. Listen to the ask she’s making of you: She hungers not so much for your guardianship, but for your emotional response. She is begging for your sorrow and rage, confusion and anxiety, darkness or hot piss. She wholly takes it off our hands. Wholly. She wants what we’ve got to offer, and will turn it to nourishment. She leaves us cleared out, like a good belly laugh, hard work out, or ugly cry does. And while those things work too, they might not be easy. It is relatively easy to get down on the ground.

Roll around.

You’ve got eyes ears nose skin and tongue. Spend a minute tapping your sensory perceptions.

Pour your feelings out.

Feel gravity, and its reciprocal support. Feel the - again, literally infinite - possibilities of letting go.

Taste stillness.

Then you can remember who you really are.

Personally, ‘grounding’ requires regular practice. It doesn’t require particular understanding or the right mood. It just takes a surrender of time. It’s less about ‘focus’ than what feels in some ways the opposite: a hugeness of letting go.

Fact: I don’t always know what’s right for myself. I certainly don’t always know what’s right for the world, or the planet. But I’m sure the earth herself does know. If I want to tap into what she knows and get out of my limited knowing, I’ve got to routinely spend time with her.

Fact: the vast healing potential she’s got is always there. It is never not there. It’s just below the surface. It’s deeper than you think. It’s waiting for you.

Advanced practice: you yourself are earth. “Under the surface” is also your innerness.

Super advanced practice: all cultures have some ‘Mother Earth’ teaching, and we can personally and emotionally access it pretty quickly. It’s harder to find that same force in relationships. Relationships feel scary and opposite of unconditional love and truth. But the force is there, too. It is love.

#2 take a break that isn’t social media

The human nervous system toggles. We cycle through attention and distraction, sleep and wake, circadian rhythms and breathing more through the right or left nostril all day long. The most important skill - first skill - that yoga teaches is the pause. This refines forever so it becomes more skillful time management, knowing what sucks our time and being able to redirect ourselves, knowing how to state shift or reframe a thought, making our time meaningful and knowing what a lifetime is, specifically our own. But it starts with the capacity and training of pause and know you are pausing. Work and accomplishment require regular breaks. We eventually learn how to best manage ourselves, down to food and light and boundaries. Social strife and interpersonal healing.

But it starts with the pause.

Thing is, most of us only ever ‘take a break’ by checking in with an electronic screen of some sort. I know how hard this is. I know how easy. I know that every single one of the screens has some benefits to it too. I’m not a luddite. I make my living online.

But I know the difference between taking a break where I grab the phone, lean back into a slouch, munch mindlessly and punch at buttons with my thumb and a different kind of break where I stand up, move my body a little, refresh in some way, refuel in some way, and genuinely set a boundary between work/tasks/news/phone and my mind body.

For now, I’d just suggest brainstorming half a dozen break things that do not involve your phone. Then do one. This is going to take practice. It’ll be hard. At some point you might have to set some rules for yourself around the phone or tablet. But you can’t even get to that until you have some alternatives that aren’t phone based. Don’t be surprised if you go five seconds and then your busy brain says “okay, done! lemme get back to that screen”. Push back on that. Give yourself an honest five minutes to feel your feels, go for a walk around the block, eat your lunch without a screen, spend at least five minutes with a pet or plant, read or listen to a song. The breath is a classic: you can manage four breath. Do a couple yoga poses without the phone in the room. You have to curate this list yourself. It is also limitless. But you need to start with a few clearly defined ideas.

Advanced: get to 10-12 breath. Do it every day.

Super advanced: context is everything. Theoretically, based on the tradition, we’d get so bloody good at our responsible life (I mean work/resources) we have half our time back, plus honest to god retirement. Without being appropriative or exploitative. Possible? Yes. Difficult and long term, for sure.

Gratis #3 do it every day. Personal, self directed, daily practice is the real yoga. There are - ahem, limitless - possibilities for what that can be. We tend to overthink/expect/do and then procrastinate/not do anything at all. I’m saying this to validate your experience and remind you it’s human, you’re not broken. Daily requires a plan, support, and check ins. It happens in tandem with mentorship and community. I don’t recommend you try to reinvent any wheels or self help your way. You’ll just go more crazy.

In closing

Again, these are the exactly the kinda things I wanna lay out and discuss and plot into your brain over the upcoming workshop. Seriously recommended for yoga teachers. Mental health professionals and educators and caregivers can use it. This is vital for human beings. Good stuff, all round. I’ll say it for you in Sanskrit and point out the relevant sūtras if you want.

If you can’t make the workshop, join us on mighty networks for convo, accountability, good people.

I’m always available for a 1:1, if that’s what you need.

#blacklivesmatter

For the last week I've been writing an essay on privilege, identity, politics, and our own lives.  This isn't that essay. This is just saying I am angry, and terribly sad.  I've been reaching out to POC friends today.  One said, we're in a war against black bodies.  And we're losing.  I feel insane.

I'm hearing them say be safe out there to each other.  I am wildly terrified at the implications of this.

This isn't small.  It will not go away in a few days or news cycles.  It is important that we grieve, that we feel, and that we take care.  And, it's important that we do what we can.  I use my physical and meditation practice to feel and realize how I'm doing, what's happening in my life.  The anger.  The fear.  The speechless grief in my gut.  My physical and meditation practice helps me know, so that I can then stop practicing.  Then, I can be in my life without so much of my own reactivity, apathy, exhaustion, bitterness filtering my world.  I can listen.

On Saturday, 10:30 am, trainees and I will be sitting meditation.  Afterwards, we'll talk.  We'll break for lunch around 1.  I want to open that time up to everyone.  Trainee or not.  Yoga student or not.  We have to be able to sit with our anger, our fear, and our confusion.  And, we need spaces in which we can talk, that aren't facebook.

I'm also thinking we'll wash the windows of their current signage and get #blacklivesmatter, up there.  I was talking with a cop friend today, about trying to get yoga, in there.  I want to hear from my friends.  I want to hear from my students.  I want to know how I can help.  Not 'if'.  I want to know how.  I would love to hear from you.

Please consider joining us, or sharing the info with someone who might.  We have candles. We have hearts.  And we can talk.  We can also sit, quietly.

In love,

Karin