When No One Was Looking

Yoga is frequently heralded as a modern day cure for whatever ails you. While I am generally suspicious of superlative statements like this, in my experience yoga has been an exceptionally beneficial physical and mental exercise. It has helped me gain strength, reduce back pain, and recover from emotional injuries. Yet recently I discovered that my years of practice are partly to blame for neck and shoulder pain I am experiencing. How did that happen?

My physical therapist tells me that it is very common for people to struggle with neck and shoulder pain, and it often stems from how we sit at our computers–shoulders hunched forward, chins tucked. Most people are in PT to learn how to improve their posture by drawing their shoulders back, broadening their chests, and extending their spines. Despite the fact that I also work at a computer all day long, I have the opposite problem. My upper spine is straighter than average, and with less curvature certain muscles in my back and neck are predisposed to being overworked.

When I started attending yoga classes a decade ago, I often heard instructions to "draw your shoulders down and back” and "extend your spine" to find a more upright posture. These movements were easy to feel in my body and before long I had unconsciously developed a habit of regularly making these adjustments, even when they weren't cued. While that is healthy movement to practice, there is equal–and for me, more important–work to be done in the opposite direction. Without placing my attention on how I was moving daily in my practice, I was unintentionally creating muscle imbalances.

As I thought about how my lack of attention on the mat had contributed to physical injury, I began to wonder about other areas of my life. Where else was being on autopilot causing me injury? How often did I unknowingly establish a habit without directly examining what is best for me? It wasn't hard to find examples. Like maintaining that one-sided friendship year after year. Or holding onto a job even though it doesn’t utilize the talents I am most passionate about. Or what about snacking during every waking hour of the day?

Each of these situations requires my attention so I can clearly identify what I need. Maybe I need to end the friendship or maybe I need to set firm boundaries to protect my time and energy. Maybe at work I can take on additional responsibilities in the areas of my strengths, or maybe I need to find a different position that feeds my passion. And I definitely need to stop putting things in my mouth all day long. That one should be a no-brainer!

Life is busy, we move fast, and it’s easy to unknowingly fall into routines that don’t benefit us. If we take time to examine what we are doing and what we actually need, we can start making intentional choices instead of letting our habits choose for us. We can better align how we live with how we desire to live. It is often uncomfortable work, because we are confronted with changes we need to make in our lives. Yet the result is less self-injury and more self-love. 

Running To Stand Still

The only thing that’s constant is change.  I recently heard this sentiment expressed in response to someone talking about the difficulty of dealing with change. I think it was meant to be reassuring, but it might have landed wrong. Think about it–I’m going through a hard time, I’m a ball of stress, and you say I’m always going to feel like this?

I’ve been thinking about this idea lately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m going through a few changes myself or because I’ve noticed that it’s not limited to me. It seems all my friends are experiencing change in their lives, too. And wasn’t that also the case three months ago? Six months ago?

Though perhaps so frequently used it can’t help but sound trite, the statement that change is constant seems undeniably true. In both minor and significant ways, something is always changing in our lives, year to year, day to day, moment to moment. I am just getting settled into a new daily routine with my sweet old dog, and already it’s time to send her back to her dad’s house. I was just starting to get back into a steady yoga habit when my allergies went into overdrive, eliminating downward facing dog and all other inversions from my practice. Or I can consider more meaningful examples of change in career, relationship, and sense of home. How I’d just started to pursue my own friendships and interests when my now ex-husband and I uprooted to move across the country, unconsciously reinforcing our codependent ways.

I’ve logically accepted the fact that change is constant, so I feel like I should not be threatened when I’m unable to find the ground under my feet. Yet for some reason I am always in a mad rush to get to the other side. Instinctually I cling to this notion that once I get through a particular change, I will be able to plant my feet on the ground. I’ll feel stable and all will be well and life will be easier. I just need to get through this move, this schedule change, this career transition, this relationship, this period of mourning. Yet the changes keep coming–sometimes by choice but often not.

We are quick to identify change as an agent of fear, stress, or disappointment when it creates hardship in our lives, and these are legitimate feelings. But we are not being honest with ourselves if we think we can escape them by outrunning change and somehow finding a place to stand still. In my personal experience, I have found no evidence that such a place exists.

So how can we find more ease in this constant sea of change? We can start by abandoning our struggle to swim to shore, as its solidness is an illusion. Instead we can learn to float, riding the crest and trough of each wave as it passes. If we look to the horizon, there are endless waves headed in our direction. Instead of thrashing about, fighting to maintain our course, we could relax and be carried.

This doesn’t mean that we won’t get upset or sad or feel other strong emotions, but it means we keep them in perspective. We don’t create the expectation that we’ll be happy if we can just get to where we want to go. Instead, we feel whatever we are feeling and remember that it’s transient. We look around at where we are and see what we can appreciate about the place we are in. We remind each other that change is constant.

Just Keep Swimming

One of the first entries in The Book of Awakening is titled "Life in the Tank." In it Mark Nepo writes an anecdote about the unexpected behavior of his friend’s fish. The friend put his fish in the bathtub temporarily while he scrubbed out their tank. When he was ready to put the fish back, he found that they had stayed in one small area of the tub, swimming in circles that were roughly the size of their little tank. The fish weren’t darting about–enjoying all that extra room–but had remained within the amount of space that was familiar. Observing this behavior, Mark Nepo penned some beautiful insights about how we as humans also confine ourselves to what we know, afraid to explore possibilities that may challenge our identities or expectations.

A tattered sticky note is hanging off that page, where years ago I enthusiastically scribbled my initial reaction to the passage:

Fearing life outside the tank makes your world small. Be open to the world around you and the possibilities it may present, even when it pushes you out of your comfort zone.

Reading these words again this past week, I felt a sweet sense of nostalgia for all the times in my life when I have been faced with the choice to remain comfortable in my small world or challenge my assumptions about myself. It was rarely ever an easy decision, but in hindsight it has always been worth it.

In my adolescent years, how I viewed myself was largely shaped by what my family, friends, and teachers thought of me. I unconsciously developed a particular identity and set of expectations about how I was supposed to act based on this input. I was smart. I was not an athlete. I was quiet. I was not a leader. I followed the rules. I was not a risk taker. I sulked instead of standing up for myself. I felt an obligation to meet the expectations of the adults in my life, not to follow my own desires. Whether or not these statements were true, I had come to believe them as facts about my teenage self.

Then I moved away from home to attend college. Suddenly I was dumped out of my little tank and into the bathtub. I left a town with a population of 11,000 to live in a city with 200,000 people. Instead of fifteen classes to choose from there were fifteen hundred. I was enrolled at a university with a diverse range of students from all over the world as opposed to my homogeneous high school. 

Feeling uncertain about my new surroundings and how I fit into them, I kept my head down and stuck to the facts. I was smart, I was quiet, and I followed the rules. I clung to my older brother and the friends from high school who were also attending the university. I quickly made a routine of class and studying, eating at the same cafeteria next to my dorm each day. I was swimming in little circles, even though there was so much space to explore.

I could have stayed in that small world until I graduated, but fortunately it didn’t take long for my curiosity to get the better of me. Feeling stunted by the small, predictable world I had organized, I was forced to consider that I might have my facts wrong. I started to notice interesting people and events on campus. I stopped trying to be invisible and made small talk with my classmates. I began to find opportunities to try new things that appealed to me at a deeper level than the “facts” I knew about myself. And as I did, the identity I had constructed for myself started to shift.

Maybe I wasn’t athletic, but I loved watching hockey and had always wished I had learned to play. So I joined a recreational ice hockey team. Maybe I wasn’t the type to break the rules, but I started going to parties and drinking with my new friends. Maybe the adults in my life thought I should be an engineer, but I applied for admittance to the elementary education program. Maybe the old labels didn't quite fit anymore, and it was time to listen to my own heart. It wasn't long before I was swimming laps around the whole bathtub.

And so it has happened time and time again in my life. Just when I start to get cozy with my ideas about who I am and how I engage with the world, I make a decision that throws me into a bigger tank. Whether it was moving across the country on my own, getting married, taking a new job, or living alone for the first time in my life, I can look back at each transition and see the opportunities it provided for me to question my assumptions about who I am and to explore who I want to be.

Along with a host of other things, I have realized that I am smart and moderately athletic. I am a quiet leader. I am the kind of person who speaks up when she or someone else is treated unfairly–most of the time. I make decisions based on what I want, not what others want for me.

I am both grateful and excited that who I am will constantly evolve, so long as I am willing to push myself to keep swimming.

The Space Between

In the last few weeks, it has become evident that the season is changing. The sun is setting earlier, there is a distinct chill in the morning air, and my neighborhood walks are punctuated by the sound of crunching leaves. With the arrival of fall, friends and family are inquiring about my Christmas plans and I am reminded that the holidays are just around the corner. I've seen several festive displays in stores and I'm already getting email alerts promoting holiday deals. It's as if summer ended and someone hit the fast forward button, skipping over fall in its entirety. 

This made me think about transitions, which happen so frequently in life and also on our yoga mats. Consider a typical vinyasa class. Students may transition from one pose to another dozens of times in one hour. Yet our focus tends to be on the actual poses. We are in a forward fold, then a low lunge, and then a plank. Once we get into a pose, we adjust ourselves according to the teacher's cues so we can perform the pose to our best ability. We hold the pose and breathe, bringing exquisite awareness to our bodies in that moment as we continue to fine tune our position.

Yet in the moments when we move from one pose to another, do we keep this same level of attention or do we shift to autopilot? We are still doing yoga–still breathing and moving with our breath. But we seem to lose our focused awareness in the transitions. We put all our concentration and energy into perfecting a posture and then we just let everything go, including our attention. This might be why it is common for yoga injuries to happen as we exit a pose. 

Off the mat we jump from pose to pose on autopilot, too. When we become dissatisfied with a job we grab for the next opportunity, assuming it will make us happier than our current one. When a relationship starts to have problems, we begin to look for other possibilities. And while there is nothing wrong with changing jobs or wanting to improve our situation, I think we can "injure" ourselves by trying to speed through these transitions without giving them the attention they deserve.

If we are dissatisfied with something in our life, do we listen closely to what we are feeling and explore why we feel that way? Or do we simply dive into the next thing, effectively distracting ourselves from our dissatisfaction? When we reach an edge and feel that change is necessary in our life, we are given a juicy opportunity to learn about ourselves. We have an opening to discover what we are afraid of and how we have been conditioned to respond to that fear. If we bring our attention to these internal struggles, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and can make an informed choice about the change we want to make. We can act instead of react.

The space between two poses is a pose in itself, and each one is equally deserving of our attention.