Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘New Jersey’

…Just as soon as you decide to try something new, you begin to see all of the things you liked about it to begin with. 

 

I remember when I moved away from Fort Collins, Colorado in 2003 everything was more beautiful every day I got closer to leaving.  The sky was an ever-increasing vibrant royal blue and the rockies jutted up out of the fields of golden grass higher than ever and with a regal importance.  I couldn’t imagine why I had ever wanted to leave it behind; but in the end I left nonetheless. 

 

As I say goodbye to New Jersey, one day at a time, I keep finding nuggets of beauty I had forgotten were there.  I notice the kindnesses I had ignored amid the sea of chaos, pollution-muddied skies, and aggressiveness.  I  smiled with appreciation the other evening when a lady held the door for me, grinning, and making eye contact without a semblance of haried roughness. 

 

In the last week or so it seems like the roads don’t seem quite as crowded or angry, the landscape has suddenly revealed pockets of grassy loveliness in places I had never noticed, and the 3 month rainy season that was our summer finally departed leaving sunny days and warmth in its stead. 

 

And–like the haircut I just had to change and then realize I love an hour before my salon appointment–I find myself ambivilent over leaving my homestate. 

 

But, like a haircut that can grow back, I know I can always return and there is a comfort in that–New Jersey’s constancy and predictability. 

 

Erich Fromm, the renound social psychologist, said this [of new adventures]:

Let your mind start ajourney thru a strange new world.  Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before.  Let your soul take you where you long to be…Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.

 

Every experience, every journey, every state of being, state of mind, and state of the nation has its own uniqueness.  To explore the new, to some extent, we have to let go of the old.  As I stand in limbo between two worlds I find myself torn.  Hanging on, nostalgically, to the last morsels of “old”, not yet ready to embrace “new”.  I am contemplating the necessary freefall, but I am not ready to let go of the cliff’s edge from which I dangle.

 

Fromm’s words above strike me as very meditative, very spiritual.  The more internal “work” that yoga asks of us is to be able to be in the moment, with our body, with our souls and just be; not ask questions or think about yesterday or tomorrow and just exist in the present.  That is what Fromm illustrates poetically above: just be where you are and live in that experience, letting go of whatever came before the now. 

 

This is an essential piece of meditative practice and the yogic mindset that I grapple with.  I have trouble letting go.  Whether it is worry about the future or dwelling on the past, I have trouble being present-centered.  I need to work towards a “present-centered life” and letting go of New Jersey is part of that process. 

 

And in that effort I am sincerely considering a new haircut.  Seriously.  I am thinking of taking it all off.  Starting from scalp and working my way back from there to hair.  We’ll see.

I am breaking up with New Jersey and it is really hard to do.

  I am sorry New Jersey, I know this is going to be hard for you but it is harder for me…I swear.  It’s not you, you did nothing wrong (besides that funky smell by the landfills, the angry traffic-mongers, and the general grumpiness and crowdedness).  Really, it’s me, not you.  I just have to go.  Please, don’t say a word…I know, I know.  We will both be better off in the long run.  We will grow and learn and be better for it.  Shhh, don’t speak…let’s just leave the rest unsaid.

So, as I begin to pack up the last of the boxes and having the final dinners and night’s out with friends and family it is beginning to really sink in: I am leaving New Jersey, I am leaving this life behind, I am beginning yoga school (soon), I am starting a new job (even though it is a transfer), I am starting over.  Now of course these are all things I knew in some conscious/unconscious way the last month or so but the entire decision to execution of this move has only been since July 4th weekend and so everything since then has been sort of a blur of “to-do’s” and denial. 

I am desperately excited and invigorated by this new start; my husband and I beginning our own adventures and experiences that are those of this new family unit of two (+ 2 dogs) we have created.  At the same time I am nostalgic and melancholy over the life I am leaving behind.  It was a perfectly good life: one full of friends, coworkers, a career that I loved, and work I was passionate for. 

I have never left something behind before when it was good, there is a risk and a gamble I suppose in doing so but it also feels like the timing is right.  Like that moment in a movie or a book where you know an exit is necessary even if you are not exactly sure why. 

As I have told my clients before, “We are all the authors of our own lives,” and so I guess this is a chapter I have begun without much of an inkling of how it will wrap itself up.  That would probably be considered poor form and bad storytelling as a novel writer but as I am working within the genre of creative non-fiction I guess I have the leeway to let life become whatever it is meant to be and not try to carve some clever plot point into it. 

Yesterday I attended an event for combat soldiers at a local memorial monument (current and past–although if you ask a soldier I guess there is no past when it comes to being a soldier of war).  A young Iraq veteran in fatigues stood up and thanked those men who came before him for their service and paving the way for him.  I felt myself, standing in the front of the crowd no less, beginning to well up with tears.  I surprised myself, as public displays of emotion are not really my style. 

I think I am kind of raw right now.  Full of my own nostalgia to such a point that I am ready to burst at every evocative thing I find.  Every last session with a client becomes harder to bear, every time I walk into work I think how it is closer to the last time. 

Interestingly enough I am not too worried about leaving friends and family as I am my work.  I know that those people who have been in my life personally and with whom I have deep personal relationships with will sustain: My family will visit and my friends will facebook (ha) but my work is so integral to every day, every moment, every trauma-oriented passion I have…and I only hope I can distill and translate some of what I have done here to somewhere else. 

In those hopes I continue to prepare for yoga school like a nervous child preparing for kindergarten.  Which is how I feel: not sure what to expect, not knowing how I will do, and petrified about headstands–well ok, the last one is not exactly like kindergarten.

My plan is to go home and begin, yes begin because I have yet to start it, my first assigned reading book: The Food Revolution by John Robbins. 

I feel like a delinquent already. 

 

 

This blog is meant to explore and expound on my somewhat daunting adventure of becoming a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT).  I am currently a psychotherapist working in the field of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  I came upon this personal experiment in stamina, flexibility, and emotional strength through my work in my primary career and my passion; work with acutely traumatized persons. 

I found early on in my work that although “talk therapy” provided the initial breath of relief at expelling my clients’ demons into the air of the therapy room that the effectiveness of this method in isolation soon deflated and was not enough to sustain continued growth and healing.  I began to explore in earnest other methods that might bring another dimension into treatment of people that have experienced and survived trauma.

In my professional quest for the right answers to the issue of healing I began to search through my personal catalog of things that I had always found rejuvinating, soothing, and pacifying: my dogs, a long massage, a good movie, writing and reading in equal measure, meditation, and yoga.  I’d hate to say that I had an “aha!” moment because the phrase is a bit to kitchy for me too utter but I definitely had an epiphany of sorts.  I realized that I was holding back my capacity to help by limiting myself to what I had been taught through conventional methods was the only means to therapy and treatment of my clients.  I decided to explore further and put some of my ideas to action.  What could it hurt, I thought. 

Through the course of the last year I have been able to impliment programs for my clients to include a group combining writing, reading, and film as a means of processing trauma, I began two yoga groups led by Yoga Teachers, created events and outings around all the creative programming and the response has been phenominal.  I even began researching a potential equine-assisted therapy program.  Everything I have learned and absorbed has added a multidimensional element to my study and practice of psychotherapy and social work. 

All that said I still find that what I want to know and apply, actively being participatory in both the mind and body work that my clients do, is just out of my reach.  I lack the technical and applied knowledge to bridge the gap between these two worlds: this bridge is my necessary next step in being the most adept I can to help those I encounter professionally and an experience I believe will be more difficult and profound than most before it.

Beginning on October 18th, 2009 and ending on December 13, 2009 I will be enrolling myself in an intensive two month teacher training program.  In between that time and the present I will be relocating from New Jersey to Florida with two dogs, two cars, a husband and a Uhaul (a modern day country song wagon train), beginning a new job within my same field, and trying to intensify my yoga practice to match my upcoming routine.  The program I am entering is intensive but also part time, meaning that I will be working full time as well as spending essentially the remainder of my free hours in meditation, yoga practice, and intensive educational seminars beginning before work at 6:oo am and concluding after work as late as 10:00pm.  All this is to be combined with a strict diet and lifestyle regimen of vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol, music, television, and essentially anything not beneficial to the training experience.  It is meant to mimic as strictly as possible, within the confines of a 9-5 life, the “ashram-type” learning environment that was the traditional method of teaching yoga to students. 

I am excited, intimidated, and ready for the challenge….I necessarily must be.  And cataloging and relaying this experience to begin now and continue through the end of this year of 2009 is my self-regulatory way of keeping myself “in the game” as it were.  And hopefully creating some interesting writing on this exploratory adventure in the process. 

The preliminary entries in this blog, leading up to the actual training, will be ponderings on the study, notes on the mayhem of relocation and life alterations in multiple , and just a little bit of me before the intensity of the teacher training begins.  Welcome to my experience…I hope you find some nuggets of interest in my writing and along this journey. 

 Adventures and misadventures to follow.