Up Up and Away

by Bari Kriependorf

Let’s face it-the world is upside down. All generations are processing the changes in different ways but there is one commonality. Gen X, Z, millennials and boomers have never experienced this type of calamity and many are beginning to lose it. 

It’s interesting to watch it all from afar, how people are dealing, how negative social media posts are becoming, the blame game- China, Trump, the Dems-it just goes on and on, negative comments whirling, gaining traction and spiraling through the collective consciousness. The constant news reporting all of the updates might be the worst part of it all.  I’ve had enough. The energy has to change; thoughts have to change.  Humanity can overcome this. There is a way to find positive in all of the negative and eventually this will end.

We need yoga now more than ever…. yoga in the broadest sense.  A specific path and lifestyle, discipline, awareness, concentration- overall freedom from suffering. Yogic and other philosophies are rooted in suffering thought to be caused from ignorance. Ignorance here is a loaded word related to the metaphysical parts of yoga.  We can get into that a later but the fact is the world is suffering. 

 At the same time however, there is also a swelling of positive collective consciousness. There is a movement under foot that has been and is continuing to gain traction. People are changing and humanity is moving to an elevated state of awareness.

There are many discussions about the cycles of culture and consciousness which brings huge energy changes to life on earth and greatly affects the human mind and body.  There is a school of thought that we are now in a bronze age or Dwapara Yuga which demonstrates a rise in widespread spiritual advancement.  There are many signs that we are in this era and advancing towards silver, but most notable is that over 35M Americans are meditating and those numbers continue to rise +10% since 2012. (LA Times 11/8/18, Karen Kaplan). It is becoming such common place that even children are learning meditation skills early on in their education.  Yoga asana is no longer unconventional. The yoga industry is big business generating over $12B per year and growing almost 5% each year since 2015. (ibisworld 2020)

So back to the point, we are in an enlightened age of cosmic consciousness! The time to change the course of negative discussion and spreading of fear starts now. Let’s take a minute to find some joy in this misfortune and the joy in opportunities.  Staying inside with family or close friends, reading more, getting outside, creating, gardening, writing songs, TV bingeing, cooking, meditating, and omg devouring Easter Cadbury Mini Eggs- the best chocolate seasonal candy ever! 

I am writing daily, running, practicing asana, pranayama, meditation, working from home, slowing down, loving on my dog, purging my home, doing crafts, doing whatever I want. It sucks out there, it’s scary, but let’s not panic. Post images of spring time. NC is starting to bloom and grass is green. Stay inside and if you must go out, stay at a safe distance from others- yes a full six feet away. Be kind to one another. Meditate on peace with others through digital. Consider mantra. Write happy posts about funny things going on with your family. Dress your pets up!  Pray for and thank publically the people on the front line-caregivers, drivers, medical, police, manufacturing, supply chain workers and grocery clerks.   They will be happy that you care.

As these posts flow through in mass, moods will be lifted, positive energy will start moving, and the earth will be charged again. Maybe this virus will die from love.  And if it doesn’t, stay inside and be happy so that other don’t catch this damn thing. 

Take Back Your Mind

By Alexander Japit

At first glance, it’s very easy to write off mindfulness practices; such as meditation, of having real tangible value.

After all, the only thing that it really involves when you look at it from the outside is sitting. In the modern world, where everyone is so busy and involved in several different activities and has a to-do list that just never seems to shrink, it’s really easy to just write off the practice of sitting there for some amount of time to do NOTHING. When you’re busy, it’s easy to resist the thought that settling down and not working towards your ambitions will lead to LESS stress.

The truth, however, is more complicated than that, and meditation has an impossibly long list of potential benefits including, but not limited to better stress reduction, sleep, focus, and awareness, among many other things.

While these benefits are wonderful, where meditation practice really shines, in my opinion, is the development of the ability to affect and change the brain’s default behavior.

As previously mentioned, we all lead very busy lives in today’s world, and as part of these busy lives, we are subject to a lot of stimulants such as social media, the news, and our general activities that we have to constantly juggle. We live in a world where we are always connected, and that is exactly why we must unplug from time to time.

Physiologically, there exists a neurotransmitter that affects our brain called dopamine. Dopamine can be considered the “pleasure” or “happiness” hormone, and it’s noted that abnormally high or low levels of dopamine are the cause of many behavioral disorders.

I think it’s easy to understand why LOW levels of the “happiness” hormone can lead to behavioral change, but how can HIGH levels have the same effect? This is because the body eventually becomes desensitized to abnormally high levels of a hormone, which means that the same dose of that hormone will not induce the same effect. Therefore, the body will continue to require more and more of the “happiness” hormone to produce the same level of happiness for your mind. This is very dangerous, as it makes other activities that are less interesting or produce less of a dopamine response no longer attractive to perform.

Take for example, wanting to exercise. Exercising is a very healthy behavior that is undeniably good for us, but it’s an extremely difficult habit for many people to begin. One potential explanation for this is that the dopamine response from an exercise session simply cannot match the dopamine response from doing anything else that is immediately mentally stimulating such as social media and browsing the internet, thus, the mind physiologically does not want to exercise or partake in activities that are less rewarding.

Meditation is one of many ways to combat this. In a world that always requires our attention and has an unlimited number of ways to get it, meditation helps our minds detach and make sense of what’s important and not important. Meditation and mindfulness practices then, are ways to help us manage what is perhaps the most important resource in the developed world: Our attention.

Short and helpful meditation links for quieting the mind

YFR is happy to offer these short meditations that will bring some joy and ease during these unsettling times

Please watch this short 2 min video if you are new to meditation before you begin practice

https://youtu.be/aOoC3Wtw1C4

Day 1. Audio Meditation- Gratitude

Day 2. Audio Meditation centering on Patience

Day 3. Audio Meditation on Effort

Deep Calls to Deep: Processing Trauma through Deep Stretch Yoga

by Brook Blaylock

The sound of my membership card being scanned failed to signal transformation. I walked into that—and my deep stretch class—unsuspectingly. In class after class instructors talked about the potential of certain poses to rinse my body of toxins and negative energy, but I’d never really paid it much, if any, heed. I found such phrasing a humorous nod to the copious amounts of sweat hot yoga produced in practitioners. I kept “rinsing” myself right along with those numbers because yoga was the only exercise that slowed down my mind. Tormented by a constant barrage of often unwelcome thoughts and images, no other exercise inspired the mental calm of yoga. While this should have been enough on its own, I also appreciated the feeling of physical exhaustion a good vinyasa class engendered, sure evidence I was molding my body into better shape. 

Both motivations were counter-intuitive to the tenets of a sound yoga practice I heard about on my mat. I liked yoga because of the potential to “master” my mind and body, not my breath. It afforded me the feeling of control I desperately sought in every area of my life. By practicing, I tamed a mind whose chaos I longed to temper, and a body I longed to master with my mind.  Everything about my practice was about me controlling the parts of my physical and psychological being I feared would betray me—that I knew had betrayed me and would do so again. As someone suffering from PTSD and at times crippling anxiety, the only thing I wanted out of any kind of exercise was control.

Luckily, yoga forgave these motivations. It waited patiently while I forced myself into pigeon and crow poses, full wheels and triangles, all while ignoring the more “spiritual” facets of its flow. Before that fateful deep stretch class, my most spiritual experience had been falling out of crow pose and onto the top of my water bottle. In spite of the black eye my landing gave me, and the blood that preceded it, I finished the class. In my eyes that experience epitomized exactly what I wanted out of life and yoga: the strength to overcome bad circumstances, the perseverance to keep moving forward, to continue through both my yoga class and my future. Strength didn’t look like letting my body speak to me on my mat. It didn’t look like calming my mind so I could listen to its voice. Strength looked like forcing my body and mind to conform to both my will and the various contortions each yoga pose required.

In the midst of a particularly long pigeon, however, my body betrayed me. Somewhere in my piriformis muscle a memory I always kept contained unloosed alongside my hip flexor. There I was, three years old and trapped in the bathtub. Here I was, 42 years old and trapped on my mat. There I was, scared and breathing rapidly, praying he wouldn’t get in. Here I was, scarred and breathing rapidly, praying the power of this memory would subside. How could I possibly relive this in the middle of a deep stretch class for God’s sake? For the past year, I had been going to weekly therapy sessions employing EMDR, or eye movement desensitizing and reprocessing, in the hopes of moving the trauma of early sexual abuse from where it was stored in my amygdala, an area of the brain primarily associated with emotional processing, to an area of my brain in which I could safely interpret this experience.

In spite of all my therapy, and week after week of my counselor encouraging me to speak about what had happened so as to dissipate the trauma’s power, I remained unable to verbalize my abuse. The closest I had come had been to write out on paper a brief synopsis of what had transpired. Somehow, I couldn’t say the words aloud because I felt that if I said them the beliefs that went with them—I’m disgusting, shameful, bad—would immediately infect the listener with the same distorted view. They would immediately see me as the awful person I saw myself as in that moment. At this moment I felt those words un-stretching in the muscles of my hips and I felt myself sinking not deeper into my pose, but deeper into the corresponding despair.

It was at that point I remembered ujjayi breathing. I began to fill my lungs and breathe through my nose, praying for the memory to go away just like I sometimes prayed ujjayi breath might take away muscle pain. Amazingly, my body and mind calmed and there, in the most unlikely of places, sweating in a pigeon pose in the middle of a crowded room of yogis, I processed my trauma. God met me in between my ujjayi breathing and for the first time, I saw the scene of my abuse differently. I was not alone in that bathroom with my abuser. God stepped between us and lifted me out of the tub. He wrapped me in a hot white towel and carried me to safety. As I felt the heat of the towel enveloping my body, I felt the power of the words I associated with the abuse burning away. I was no longer disgusting, shameful, or bad. I no longer had to carry those words in my mind or in my body. Somehow, they had been trapped in both places, but the time I spent in pigeon pose enabled my body to drive them out, allowing a new narrative to replace them.

Turns out, it was entirely for my sake that God let me relive that memory in the middle of that deep stretch. During therapy, my body never relaxed. I went into every EMDR session tense and afraid of what might ensue. During deep stretch, the time I spent in poses afforded my body a level of openness I could never attain in a therapy session. While the idea of trauma actually being physically stored in one’s body is controversial and as yet unproved, I am convinced that yoga, in conjunction with traditional therapy, enabled me to process a traumatic event in a way that counseling alone never could.  According to Shaili Jain, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, “when…traumatic thoughts and memories remain unspeakable or unthinkable for too long, they impede our brain’s natural process of recovery after trauma. They become stuck points that inhibit the mental reintegration that is needed for healing to occur.”  Deep stretch yoga empowered my body to release this unspeakable memory and my mind to visualize the means by which I could begin a process of mental reintegration.

 Just like I had when I fell on my water bottle, I kept practicing until the end of class. However, I didn’t maintain the same definition of strength. I was only able to have an experience of healing, to reimagine the circumstances of my trauma and redefine its impact on my psyche, because the deep stretch class pushed my mind and body to a place beyond that of my control. When I accidentally stopped trying to control the effects of my practice, my practice began to positively affect me. My body found a space in which it could safely release trauma I had stored for decades and my voice soon followed. At the end of that class I found the strength to tell a friend who had been practicing beside me what had happened. What I had thought had been a betrayal was, in fact, a transformation. My body had a voice and by enabling it to “speak” in the midst of that stretch, I found the power to speak about my trauma and the strength to overcome it. I had an entirely new understanding of what it meant to find release through a yoga pose.