“Or this could be Hell.”

I attended a yoga class 10-or-so-years ago that was themed around this line from the Eagles’ Hotel California:

“This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.”

The intention behind the theme was to emphasize the idea that we can influence our experience of things. An experience, in this case, a set of challenging asana (yoga postures), could be heaven or hell depending on how we respond to it.

Wisdom has a way of weaving itself through our lives, and I recently had this lesson come back to me in a powerful way. I was sitting in my meditation practice, and I was feeling strong urges to get things done. My mind kept wandering to things I wanted to get done, and physically, I felt like my body was a firework about to explode. Sitting still felt out of line with everything my body wanted to do in that moment.

About midway through my practice, the lyrics popped into my head:

“This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.”

And with that thought, my body softened and my mind settled. I wasn’t going to cut my practice short to try and get more things done, so I could either sit and agonize over not being able to do other things in this moment or I could meet myself where I had committed to be.

Recalling the song lyrics reminded me that there was choice in this moment. There are many things that I can’t control, but my thoughts are not one of those things. It was completely within my power to engage differently with this experience, and so I did.

I accepted that I wasn’t going anywhere until my practice was complete. And, in accepting where I was, I found significantly more ease and even some enjoyment in the moment. I reconnected with my commitment to the practice and the powerful change it has facilitated in my life. I remembered that – for better or for worse – I chose this.

But life can throw things at us that are much more challenging than yoga. Things we didn’t choose. Things no one would choose. Things that are hard and heartbreaking.

It is still worth considering that there is wisdom in reflecting upon how we respond to things, but perhaps it might be better to say something along the lines of:

“This could be [hard and heartbreaking] or this could be Hell.”

This experience could be a challenging one that pushes me beyond what I thought were my limits, or it could be a horrible catastrophe that I can’t see myself moving through. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. We can improve our ability to cope. The ego may not love the idea that we could make changes to bring more ease into our challenging experiences, but paradoxically, we tend to feel rather proud of ourselves when we do.

Accepting Life’s Limitations

by Sarah Awareness Living Yoga Pain Relief Svadhyaya

When people are living with persistent chronic pain, they very naturally become focused on reducing that pain. In my work with people in chronic pain, I generally encourage people to change this focus. Specifically, I suggest that people focus on being able to do more (which, in pain management jargon, is referred to as increasing function) and improving their quality of life.

If you are interested in learning more about the rationale behind this suggestion, you may enjoy listening to this webinar on Functional Measures for Assessing and Managing People with Chronic Pain with Dr. Jane Ballantyne (1hr).

I invite people to consider that chronic pain is largely a function issue. Every human body has a maximum amount of activity that they can engage in before they end up in an incredible amount of pain. For some human bodies, that amount of activity can be as much as doing a marathon or an Ironman triathlon. For other human bodies, that amount of activity might be simply washing the breakfast dishes or taking a shower.

For people who end up in incredible amounts of pain after something like washing dishes, we want to coach them to slowly increase the amount of activity they are able to perform before their pain flares up.

This podcast with world-renowned pain researcher, Lorimer Moseley, offers insight into this process of slowly changing what the body can tolerate (45min).

For many people, an important part of the healing process is reducing expectations around how much they will be able to do. To clarify what I mean, I ask the people in my programs: what are the things you give up in an effort to get more done?

Here is a list of the most popular answers:

Sleep
Eating well
Self-care
Spending time with family and friends

It’s a short list, but I would argue that everything on that list is essential to being a healthy human being.

The research supporting links between sleep and our overall well-being continues to get stronger, and there are incredible links between a lack of sleep and pain. We are only ever going to feel as well as we eat, and caring for ourselves is an essential foundation of being able to meet the demands of life, long-term. We are social creatures. We need human connection, but many of us forgo opportunities to spend time with others in exchange for getting more done.

While many of us are already doing more than is sustainable, we also feel like we like we still have way too much to do, like we are just constantly trying to keep up. We want to take care of ourselves, eat well, rest well, and see our loved ones, but we also want to get sh*t done. How do we do both? How do we find balance?

I have gotten a lot better at finding balance over the years, and for me, the answers have largely come in the form of practicing yoga, mindfulness, and meditation. (Though a husband who has a very low tolerance for “all business Sarah”, as he calls it, has also played a role.) If I were to summarize the way that my yoga practice has helped me to decrease my expectations around function, I’d say:

Practicing yoga has chipped away at an ingrained belief that we are what we do, that my productivity is my worth. Yoga has a way of teaching us that we are who we are; we are kind, compassionate, wise, and generous beings who are inherently worthy of love and belonging.
The tools of yoga have deepened my body awareness and allowed me to become much more aware of how I am being impacted by the choices I make. I notice that crappy food makes me feel crappy. I notice that upsetting movies really upset me. I notice the moments where I can choose to feel more ease. I notice that I am happier when life is slower.

I continue to work on being at peace with my sense that there is too much to do. Quite likely, I will feel this way for the rest of my life. I can choose to respond with urgency and try to get more and more done, or I can choose to respond with playful laughter and focus on enjoying whatever thing I am actually doing right now.

Whenever I die, there will be things left undone. I can resist that or I can accept it. The challenge of my practice is to continue to choose the path of acceptance because it brings me infinitely more joy.

Parenthood, Bathrooms & Flying Monkeys

by Sarah Living Yoga Parenthood Svadhyaya

Parenthood has been like playing in the gold medal game of a high-level sport. But the sport isn’t hockey or soccer, it is patience. It is emotional awareness and emotional resilience. It is presence and mindfulness. It is empathy and compassion. And the game isn’t a few hours, it is all the time. You might get a timeout to go to the bathroom, but before you know it, a little fist is pounding on the door and you’re hearing, “Mommy!”

Back to the game.

And I’m in it. I get exhausted and frustrated and discouraged, but when it comes down to it, I eat this stuff up. I love being challenged to become more patient, more compassionate, more empathetic, more mindful, more present, more aware, and more resilient. I live for this stuff. When I rock this stuff, I feel like I am rocking life.

When I don’t, I usually need a timeout in the bathroom.

Time in the bathroom became sacred in our house. Until we read a book on potty training that said we should let our daughter watch us go to normalize the behaviour. But, what about timeouts?!

Anyway, I digress. There is an aspect of the yoga practice called Svadhyaya, and it is often translated into English as “self-study”. When I think about practicing yoga in the midst of parenthood, Svadhyaya is the aspect of the practice that feels most prominent to me, and I had an interesting revelation about myself in the context of putting my daughter to bed.

We have a very consistent routine before putting our daughter down to sleep. It has evolved as she has grown older to include flying her stuffed monkey around her room to her and then both she and the monkey “blast off to the sky” (we pick her up and raise her so she can touch her monkey to the ceiling). My husband developed this part of the routine, and the first few times I was putting my daughter down after this evolution of the routine, I avoided the blast off because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get her high enough for the monkey to touch the ceiling.

Eventually, I gave in to requests for the blast off, and as predicted, the monkey fell short of touching the ceiling. But here is the part I didn’t predict: she didn’t care at all. She was excited, and she had a huge smile on her face. She didn’t care about touching the ceiling. It was my story that the point was to touch the ceiling.

I learned something about the stories that I tend to tell myself about what matters, and I am trying to change those stories. I now do regular blast offs, always fall short of getting the monkey to the ceiling, and share lots of laughs and smiles with my daughter as I do. She taught me to tell a different story: that the point is to be playful.