Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘balance’

“Tomorrow’s another day. And I’m thirsty anyway. So bring on the rain.” “Bring On the Rain”  as sung by Jo Dee Messina

As Jo Dee says, “A single battle lost but not the war, cause’ tomorrow’s another day, and I’m thirsty anyway, so bring on the rain.”  That song came on the other day as I was driving home, coming to a place where I realized that feeling lost is also a place.  In that place there is something to learn.  And when you learn it you are given the secret to not only learn to withstand but embrace the rain that life brings.  To know that tomorrow is another day and I was made, with resilience, and perseverance, to deal with the storms and learn the lessons in the torrent.

So, bring on the rain.  Timely, it seems, as the tropics are headed into what is estimated to be one of the worst hurricane seasons in a while and sitting on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean I am going to have to learn to weather the literal storms as well as the metaphoric.  And the cosmos seem primed to pummel me with a little of both.

What are we meant to learn from the rain and storms of life?  Almost everything.  We can enjoy calm seas, clear skies, and find gratitude in sunlight but we learn our greatest lessons about ourselves, our own capacity to be resilient and change, and our strengths/weaknesses and “stuck points” in the storms.  The storms of life tell us everything about who we are and where we are in our lives.

Faith and having a spiritually centered core is our own belief that we will persevere and our ability to be open to learn what we need to from the storms–even, and especially, when it is what we least want to learn.

My largest growing pains through my current uncertainty has been learning my own lessons despite my resistance to what I have learned.  Despite not wanting to hear, and in some ways not wanting to grow, the way I need to grow.  To know that “not now” doesn’t mean “not ever” and learning that I don’t have to live life at a sprint to get where I am going.  To learn that as much as I remind others to breathe in life I need to balance that with equal time for my own room to breathe.

What have you been avoiding in your own life {if anything}?  What storms have you had?  What did you learn from the rain?  Can you find a way to embrace the rain rather than flee from the stormy weather?  Consider dancing in the rain and finding yourself pulling yourself into the moment during life’s growing pains?  There is so much we can learn from the storms and we learn it faster when we embrace rather than struggle amid the drops falling down on our head.  It often seems that when we struggle to get out of the storm before it’s over we miss the lesson we need to learn and it just comes back two times stronger and more ferocious.  God, the cosmos, or whatever you call the nature of existence, seems bent on us learning and growing; it becomes more insistent the more we ignore.  The storms become more ferocious the more we run.

I think I shall take a breath.  I think I will stand in the rain.  I think I will stop living life at a sprint and see what happens when I stand still and embrace the warm drops of a summer storm.

Et tu?

“Fear less, hope more; Eat less, chew more; Whine less, breathe more; Talk less, say more; Love more, and all good things will be yours”

SWEDISH PROVERB

Everything in life lately seems to be both sped up and slowed down simultaneously;  it seems that way when we are on the precipice of the new and the verge of jumping out of the old.  When things shift in our world they can appear seismic and one shift can propel multiple shifts–with the change of pace to our life steps we can, in the process, leave people, lose people, separate from what doesn’t work from what was and finding what could work in the new.  What an exhilarating thing–the possibility of possibilities!  And how frightening as well.

As I launch of the edge in my present life and change the pace of my step I am both these things–exhilarated and frightened.  I think about my clients, coming into a therapy office is often the precipice of life–wanting something new, something else than what we have created in our world but so afraid of what that change could mean.  For a trauma survivor change means opening up the wounds of old ghosts and the things that haunt us, having to look them head on, and find a way to move beyond survival living and finding a way to thrive in existence.  For persons suffering from the disease of addiction coming into therapy or treatment means owning up to the first STEP in the recovery process: Admitting that my life has become unmanageable and I have no control over my addiction.  But isn’t that the way with all of us when we have to own up to what is not working in our life–admit that there is a problem and that life has become unmanageable as is.  What a brave thing to do!…And how frightening.

And so I return to breath as I often do in times of stress and renewal.  Breath is our life source, our origin, our beginning and our end is all breath and silence.  So we can go back to the root of ourselves through breath and silence.  I teach my clients breath first to find a way to bear the daunting task ahead–change.  And I constantly remind myself to return to breath when life and those in it surprise, disappoint, injure, or exhilarate.  Yesterday I taught a workshop at THE RED TENT in Delray Beach, Florida and I told a wonderful and strong group of women the importance of breath and keeping one’s gaze on a fixed point in life and in yoga, because without it we cannot maintain balance through the chaos and storms that always, inevitably come.  I continue to remind myself, as I do my clients to do this–breathe, find inner silence, and keep my gaze on the fixed point in the distance.

What is your stability–the point you can fix your gaze on in your life?

When do you find silence and breath in your day?

20 minutes dedicated to YOU per day can make a vital shift internally to help find the resilience and resolve to deal with all the externals that life throws at us!

Give yourself some time, some care, and some room to breathe.

PLEASE TAKE SOME TIME CHECK OUT MY NEW VIRTUAL WORKSHOP now available at THE WISH STUDIO called, apropos, ROOM TO BREATHE!  I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS NEW VENTURE THAT HAS BEEN SOME MONTHS IN THE WORKS!

http://wishstudio.com/events/

And I wanted to thank Durga at YOGA OF RECOVERY for linking to the EMBODY MENTAL HEALTH TIMES PAGE!  Thank you Durga for both your thoughtful interview and your virtual “shout-out” to the mission of this blog and EMBODY MENTAL HEALTH of being able to discuss on issues of integrative and complementary mental health!  See Durga’s interview in the previous post.

“Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

While my head stand, handstand &scorpion continue to leave a lot–and I mean a lot–to be desired for the first time in the history of my yoga practice I was beginning to feel very confident and proud of my tree pose.  How I could stand, tall and unwavering, in all tree variations with my foot perched high on my opposite leg and my boughs of strength and poise unbreakable.  And then I went and got distracted.

They say, wherever they are, that how you are on the mat is how you are in the world and every time I doubt it, even for a moment it comes back taunting and laughing in my face.  I Gould know by now, a such a strong proponent of the thread of connectedness between mind and body, life and the metaphors for life we are constantly presented with, how obvious the fact would be–lose balance and focus in life and it will carry into yoga or any practice of intention or attention.

As you prepare for tree you are always direct to find a point of focus on the wall opposite you–a distant immovable spot that you can fix your eyes on and use the stability of that spot to stabilize yourself.  The same can be said for life–we must fix our gaze on the things in our lives that are stable and unchanging, something secure and outside if there day-to-day chaos of living.

You are also told before entering tree pose to root your feet into the ground, plant each toe Into the earth and plant yourself solidly in that spot.  So, too, in life we must find ways to ground ourselves, remind ourselves where we are and secure ourselves stably into the foundational earth of our existence–so we can deal with the distractions.

When you are off-balance in tree you feel it right away, you lift off the ground and immediately begin to sway. Your fixed point on the wall seems to far &your mind is unable to focus wholeheartedly on it. Every shift in the room is unbearably distracting and every sweeping wisp of air feels like tornadic winds set on toppling you over.  So goes it too in life that when we are off-balance, not grounded in our intentions and stable base, and too full of thoughts and frenzy to fix our minds on a stable place everything feels overwhelming.  Every task , new venture , old workload, and duty seems like too much and we feel ready to collapse in frustration and dizziness.

In tree and in life sometimes we have to focus harder and work more dutifully to shut or much of the self-imposed chaos and storms in our path.  We have to take a breezy wind as it comes and not deem every wisp of air to be a storm and deal with every storm as I’d it were a wisp of air (now that is the hardest!).

I know that my excitement and happiness about all the many projects upcoming and those currently in motion have been both an amazing blessing and something in which I have gotten so engrossed that I have lost my balance in the present an in my tree pose.

I noticed it first in tree and then had to take the metaphor for what it was–a signal of self-inflicted burnout off the mat.  I need to breathe, ground, and fix my gaze at my own stable point of light band let life come as it comes and adventures unfold as they will.

On that note: with all the new change and projects coming together I am going to begin a new newsletter which I will be emailing out in the next few weeks…and hopefully every other month following that! You can email me at embodymentalhealth@gmail.com to get on the mailing list now!

Thanks bloggers and blog readers alike for all of your support & I look forward to sharing all that this new life adventure has to offer with all of you–one breath at a time!