Perhaps the biggest challenge in today’s world is to experience all of life: the joy, ecstasy, and bliss, along with the disappointment, heartbreak, and pain, and still keep an open heart—to remain fully awake, aware, and alive. But without this conscious intention, many of us will shut down and become guarded, reactive, and defensive. Yoga is a powerful tool to help us not only release tension in the body and quiet the mind, but to also soften and open the heart.
We’ve all been hurt before and have experienced disappointment, heartbreak, and loss. Without the knowledge and awareness of how important it is to let this energy move through us, rather than shutting down around it, we begin to let past hurts dictate our future. Physically, this shows up with a slouched posture and rounded shoulders as we collapse in on ourselves in an attempt to protect our hearts from future wounds.
From the earliest age, most of us have been receiving messages that it is not okay to feel anger, sadness, insecurity, fear, or any other emotion that is deemed negative. For many, this showed up in statements like “Stop crying or I’ll give you a reason to cry” or “Boys don’t cry,” or even “Stop being so emotional.” With these words and others, we were taught that anything other than happiness and joy is not valid, and so begins the guilt and shame that surrounds so many of our lives.
Now as adults, and after a lifetime of stuffing our emotions deep inside, many of us are brimming over with that which has remained not dealt with. Yet it still keeps calling to us, stalking our every move and nipping at our heels, waiting for us to stop long enough to allow all that we have been running from to catch up with us.
This would explain why one of my new yoga clients expressed confusion as to why she couldn’t seem to relax in the evening until she had downed a bottle or more of wine. So resistant was she, like most of us, to being in the moment and risk feeling what rose to the surface that she chose to numb out instead, and this became her nightly ritual, and the only way she could reach a pseudo-relaxed, peaceful state. And she’s not alone in her journey, as is indicated by the fact that there are fourteen million alcoholics in America today.
This isn’t the only compulsive behavior we engage in, which is why over 64 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Even with these coping mechanisms, insomnia affects more than half of the U.S. population, with as many as 58 percent of adults complaining of sleepless nights at least a few times a week.
But perhaps the most alarming statistic of all is that anti-depressant usage is up 800 percent in the last ten years. This trend toward disowning what’s coming up inside is affecting us at younger and younger ages, and sadly, it is preschoolers who are the fastest growing market.
All of this points to the fact that it’s time for us to stop running away from ourselves. True emotional resiliency means giving ourselves enough credit to know we can allow ourselves to feel what we need to feel, confident that once we do, and come out on the other side of it, we will be lighter and stronger and more at ease than ever before, perhaps since we were children.
There has developed such a disconnection between our minds and our bodies that many of us have become lost in an endless stream of mental chatter that is so busy, we have become like heads walking around without bodies. We become so lost in the thoughts, the story, the illusion, that we no longer have a relationship with, or even feel, our bodies. Yet it is a connection to what is happening inside our bodies that connects us to our center and grounds us.
