My next 7-week course in therapeutic yoga and pain education will start Thursday, March 19, 2015.
This course is designed for people interested in exploring yoga as a tool to support their health and well-being.
There will be a maximum of 8 students in the course.
Keep reading to find out more…
Yoga for Pain Relief: Therapeutic Practice & Pain Education
A 7-week course with Sarah Jamieson
A growing body of scientific evidence shows that stress exacerbates pain and that practicing yoga can significantly reduce stress. This course will bring together new science in pain neurophysiology with the well-established wisdom of yoga. Understanding the neurophysiology of pain will help you explore the relationship between your body, your mind, and your pain and it will give you more control over your relationship with pain. Through a variety of yogic tools, including lecture, breath work, meditation, movement, and restorative postures, you will learn to deepen your body awareness, calm your nervous system, and improve your functional movement. This course is for anyone struggling with any type of pain – from pain conditions like fibromyalgia to “everyday” pain, like recurring headaches or hip pain – and it will empower you to address and minimize the pain in your life.
Dates & Time:
Thursday afternoons, 3:00-4:30pm
March 19 – May 7
(No class on April 16)
“Learn how to exhale, the inhale will take care of itself.” – Carla Melucci Ardito
In Breathing for Pain Relief, Part 1, I shared my opinion that there has been an over-emphasis on what the breath looks like and an under-emphasis on what the breath feels like in the prescription of breath work as a tool to reduce pain. This post offers guidelines for working with the breath in a more experiential way.
Meet your breath
Before you explore shifting your breath, learn more about your breath. Understand where you are starting from. Many people have developed chest breathing patterns (hence, the emphasis on abdominal breathing in treating pain, stress, and illness), but after years of chronic pain in my upper torso, I had the opposite. It took me years of practicing breath work to find an easy breath in my chest. Try to let go of preconceived ideas about how you should or shouldn’t breathe. If I had considered abdominal movement to be the gold star of breathing, I would have unwittingly continued to breathe in a very restricted way.
When you begin to meet and observe your breath, here are some things you might pay attention to:
Where is the movement in your torso when you inhale and when you exhale? Is it consistent from breath to breath?
How long is your inhalation and how long is your exhalation? Are they equal, or is one longer than the other? Is the length of your breath consistent from breath to breath?
What words would you use to describe your breath? Some sample words are short, long, shallow, deep, free, or constricted, but the words don’t need to make sense. There may be a colour or an emotion that describes your breath.
Notice your breath in different contexts. How do you breathe laying down versus standing up? How do you tend to breathe when you are in a lot of pain versus when you are feeling better? How do you breathe when you are with other people or when you are watching TV?
The more you understand about how your breath is naturally responding to things, the more empowered you will be to intentionally use your breath to influence how you respond to things.
Dance with your breath
Picture two eloquent ballroom dancers circling around the dance floor. One partner is leading, but to the untrained eye, it is virtually impossible to see anything but unison. I want you to cultivate the quality of this dancing when you work with your breath. You are leading your breath, but there is no force, there is no strain. You can feel your breath willingly follow your lead.
Here are some ways you may explore leading your breath:
Bring the length of the inhalation and the exhalation into balance. Find a length that feels accessible and sustainable, and maintain this balance for ten or more breaths.
Breathe with a longer exhalation. Again, find a sustainable count, and maintain the extended exhalation pattern for ten or more breaths.
Visualize different areas of your torso moving in response to your breath. Don’t worry about whether or not they actually move – just stick with the visualization of a particular area for ten or more breaths.
After you lead your breath in a particular way, pause and notice the effect. If you are wanting to use breath work to reduce pain, pay particular attention to how relaxed you feel. When you find ways of breathing that help you feel more relaxed, actively start to weave those breath practices into your day. Less is often more, but in the face of persistent chronic pain, when it comes to breathing in ways that calm your nervous system and help you feel more relaxed, more is most often more.
“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” – Ram Dass
Every month I write a piece for the YYoga blog. A member of the marketing team sends me a list of topic ideas, and I pick one. The topic I picked for March was: Deal with that difficult personality gracefully – and it was initially a difficult one to write about. After thinking about it for a few days and trying a number of different approaches, I woke up this morning with the clear sense that the best way to write this piece was to simply share ideas.
Here are some thoughts I have about how to be more graceful when you find someone difficult to deal with:
See the bigger picture
Last October, I wrote a piece about why it is challenging for us to focus on the things we are grateful for. Simply, it is because we are programmed to hone in on the things that are potentially threatening to us. Scientists refer to it as a negativity bias.
If you have ever been in front of room full of people for any reason, you can likely relate to the tendency to fixate on the one person who doesn’t seem happy with what you are doing. The room might be full of ninety-nine happy and encouraging people, but if one person is scowling and crossing their arms, that one person has a way of capturing 99% of your energy. This is the negativity bias in action.
A first step in dealing with difficult people more gracefully is to stay present with the reality that this difficult person is only one of many people in your life. It is easy to let difficult people become “energy vampires”. Train yourself to focus more on the supportive people in your life and be mindful about how much energy you give to the people you find difficult.
Acknowledge your role
We are inside our own heads. We have access to our own thoughts and intentions. With this insider scoop, it can be easy to side with ourselves in a difficult interpersonal situation and blame the other person for the difficultly. But, it takes two people to create an easy or difficult interaction, and, in any given interaction, we are only ever going to understand half of what happened.
Because we don’t have access to the other person’s thoughts, we might not be able to see or understand how we are contributing to the situation, but we increase our capacity for grace when we hold space for the possibility that we are doing things to make the interaction more difficult for the other person.
Find the good
If our interactions with another person are difficult, we can easily fall into the trap of seeing them as a difficult person. We even speak about difficult people like there are people out there that are universally difficult. It may be true; it may not. But, we don’t increase our own capacity for acting with grace when we fail to see what lies beyond the difficultly.
The next time you find yourself labelling a person as difficult, take some time to consider what else you know about this person. Maybe they are exceptionally creative? Do they have a knack for making other people laugh? Paint a bigger picture so that you can more easily honour them as another human being when you interact with them.
Own your behaviour
When we feel like other people are being difficult, it can be very easy to be difficult back. Instead of making a concerted effort to behave in a way that aligns with our values, we might revert to more passive aggressive behaviour, like making snide remarks. It is also easy to feel justified in our reactive behaviour when we only know our side of the story.
One way to manage this tendency to be difficult back is to commit to holding yourself accountable for your behaviour. Other people can make us feel things, but they can’t control our actions. You might feel justifiably angry in response to someone else’s behaviour, but anger is an emotion and you are responsible for how you respond to both the emotion and to the person who provoked it.
Be emotionally curious
Difficult behaviour often stems from unexpressed emotions like failing to tell someone we are angry or that our feelings have been hurt. Our emotions have a way of creeping to the surface, and they can be quite dangerous when they aren’t acknowledged.
If you are able to be in a difficult interaction without taking things personally, you might also start to consider the possible unmet emotional needs of this person. You might have more success finding ease in the interaction if you address their emotions before their words.
Talk about the difficultly
If you are comfortable being vulnerable in the relationship, talking about the difficulty you are experiencing can be a giant step in the direction of finding more ease. Things are often much easier to handle when they are acknowledged.
Accept the challenge
“But some people are just difficult!”
I don’t know if it is true, but it can feel like it! Sometimes I try everything I have outlined above and more, and the interactions are still challenging. What I am trying to learn in these circumstances is how to accept and appreciate that some people will be more challenging to me. It doesn’t mean that there is a problem with these people; it doesn’t mean that I am not evolved enough to find ease with this person. It also doesn’t mean that the relationship is not worthwhile.
Sometimes we just love people who are harder for us to relate to. Sometimes the fatigue and the frustration that can come along with more difficult relationships are more than worth it in the end.
Stay grounded in your intention
Why are you persisting in this difficult relationship? Work? Family? There are lots of reasons why you might persist in difficult relationships, but take the time to clarify why you are sticking with the difficult ones in your life.
Some people fall into the trap of wanting everyone to like them, and they will persist relentlessly to make relationships work for the sake of their own ego or their own sense of ease. Make sure that continuing a difficult interpersonal relationship is a wise use of your energy.
Difficult interactions can be great learning opportunities. They challenge us to look at things differently and to think more about how we come across. They test our courage and our compassion. Difficult and challenging experiences of human interaction also help us to see the beauty and magic in moments of deep human connection.
And sometimes the difficult interactions turn into the beautiful ones.
