Soulful Healing

I’ve been on a communication kick lately…  In both my professional and personal worlds, I’ve been observing what makes an interaction between people go smoothly and what makes those inevitable snags become waaaay bigger than necessary.  One of the most daunting challenges in communication is telling the difference between your thoughts and feelings, then sharing those with important others.  I truly believe that being aware of our thoughts and feelings is essential to effective communication, so I thought I’d go a little deeper into communication this week.  As you already know from your own experiences, communication is a tricky endeavor…  Being mindful of our own stuff, determining what is being asked of us, working through our automatic responses, and then stringing all these feeling-thought-ideas together in a cohesive sentence is difficult work!  In my experience, good communication requires that we S–L–O–W our internal reactions long enough to sort through everything.  We need to first create time-space between the internal reaction and the external response, then we are able to practice making our external responses match those of our highest Self.

This allowing for time and space in between urge and action is not easy.  First of all, feelings and psychological processes are powerful stuff…  The mind can either be a safe harbor for peaceful contentment or a mine-field of self-derision and negativity, as well as everything in between.  Our default way of responding to the world can be learned from our culture, our circumstances, and our families.  It can also be linked to our own genetic and neurological make-up.  Whatever the source of your automatic responses, the idea is to shift from automatic to conscious.  Often this process requires the help of a guide, whether that person is a friend, mentor, spiritual leader, shaman, therapist, or psychiatrist.  Regardless of your chosen guide, becoming more aware of your own internal process and communicating with others more effectively is a completely achievable goal.  As with so many things, it takes commitment and active practice.

One communication strategy that I and many therapist-types will share with others looks like this:   I feel ____________ when ____________.  You may hear this referred to as an “I statement,” because the idea is to get away from making assumptions about others in favor of discussing only your own feelings and observations.  The simplicity of this statement is deceiving.  This is because, again, you have to know what you feel before you let all the other junk racing through your mind just pour out.  Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) method, adds another step to this statement, encouraging the speaker to identify what needs/wants trigger the feelings being expressed.  I really like this extended “I statement” because I believe it helps the speaker focus in on their own needs and how those needs create emotional responses.  So instead of saying, “It hurts my feelings when you don’t want to spend time with me!!” one might instead say, “I felt hurt when you said you have other plans, because I need to know that my interests are important to you.”  Yes, I know, this latter statement is longer and perhaps more tedious.  But this longer, more conscientious statement makes it easier for the listener to truly hear the speaker.  So instead of the defensive response, “Oh, get over yourself, you’re just being sensitive!” the listener will hopefully access her/his own compassionate nature and offer an empathetic response.  This is probably because “you don’t want to spend time with me!” sounds like a judgment at best and an attack at worst.  The NVC-inspired statement is simply an expression of the speaker’s emotions and thought process.  It’s the ultimate in honestly expressing what’s going on inside, without accidentally (or on purpose) attacking others.

If you are intrigued by this brief glimpse into the possibilities of Nonviolent Communication, here are some links:
– Center for Nonviolent Communication
– Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (Book)
– Nonviolent Communication Companion Workbook

If you are just tuning in to this five part series on the different aspects of human experience, you can click accordingly to read Part One and Part Two.  We are slowly making our way from the physical realm to the spiritual realm, exploring how we bridge the disconnect between the two.

Manomayakosha

Manomayakosha (MAH-nuh-MAI-uh-KOH-shuh) is the mental or emotional body.  This layer governs consciousness, memory, ego, perception, and emotions.   It is distinct from intelligence and discernment, which is the next layer.  Have you ever observed your mind to be like a hamster running in a wheel?  Welcome to your manomayakosha.  In exploring this layer of experience, we might first look at some of its challenges.  The ego-mind is impulsive and desires immediate gratification.  It resists things that require time and effort to achieve.  This is also sometimes called the small “s” self.  By that I mean that we often identify very strongly with our thoughts and feelings.  Consider Descartes’ famous statement, “I think, therefore I am.”  Yet we are so much more than the incessant thoughts and fluctuating emotions that pass through our soul-body each day.  The self is different from the Self…  The former being more ego-driven, the latter being Spirit-driven.

Sure, our thoughts and feelings are very real to us.  Sometimes they are so real that it is hard to know what is true and what is simply the hamster running in its wheel.  Our ego-mind is frequently occupied with the pain from the past or worries about the future.  Despite our best efforts, these ramblings take us away from the present moment.  And it is in the present moment where true contentment can be found.  The beauty of this interplay between body, breath, mind, intellect, and spirit is that we get to decide which of our thoughts and feelings have merit, which to set aside, and which to act upon.  Granted, this is typically easier said than done!  In yoga, we emphasize how consistent asana practice and breathwork help us to better manage the fleeting emotions that swirl through us in each moment.  Have you ever noticed how you when you get a good workout, you breathe more fluidly and your thoughts/emotions settle down?  One of my colleagues notes that when she has particularly stressful days, she sets aside time to practice Muay Thai to help slough off the stress (momentary tanget — Interestingly enough, Wikipedia taught me that “muay thai” is called the “Art of Limbs”.  Yoga also has eight limbs, which I’ll review in future posts!).

Consider in the coming week what role your ego-mind plays in how you care for your energetic and physical body.  Are you taking good care of your body, breath/energy, and emotions?  Do you give too much of your Self?  Or perhaps too little?  And how do you know the difference?  Also, what messages is your ego-mind sending your Self?  Nurturing and gentle; or harsh and critical?  Yes, many questions and not so many clear answers.  But this is the process of personal growth and self-awareness.  One awakening, followed by trial and error with our new knowledge, then further consciousness.  One foot in front of the other…  Inhale…  Exhale…  Inhale…  Exhale…

During a recent discussion on yoga’s therapeutic benefits, one of my colleagues asked me, “What’s it like to have a stress-free life?”  I know this colleague was mostly joking, but it was a good conversation starter.  I laughed and said that I have anything but a stress-free life.   Mindfulness is not about eliminating stress from your life, it’s about changing the way you respond to that stress.  That may not be what any of us wants to hear…  I have certainly wished that mindfulness and meditation and yoga could get rid of the stressful things in my life.  But they don’t.  What they do, instead, is make it easier for us to separate ourselves from our stress.  That way, we stop being defined by our automatic reactions to events and begin to choose our thoughts/words/actions more carefully.

I know…  this may be disheartening news to some of you.  If you can’t make the stress go away, why bother practicing mindfulness at all?  Here’s the tricky thing, though:  separating your Self from your stress does make the stress go away in a manner of speaking.  For years, one of my mentors would describe to me how it was possible for me to watch the drama unfold around me without getting caught up in it.  I tried and tried and tried and had a pretty tough time of it.  I suppose it’s one of the hazards of being a professional empath, this soaking up of other people’s emotions as if they were my own.  But when I really started to delve into the breathwork and meditative practices of yoga, I started to understand what my mentor was saying.  I was slowly able to sit in the presence of people’s emotions and hold on to my sense of Self.  Sometimes it was only for a few moments, sometimes much longer, but there it was.

I won’t try to tell you that I’ve mastered this skill now.  I’m certainly better at it than I used to be and there are a variety of situations that cut through my equilibrium…  people who drive dangerously, stories about the darker sides of humanity, those that would play the shame & blame game with me…  These are just a few of my triggers.  I get flustered, I get tense, I get judgmental.  Not my best moments, by far!  Yet I imagine these triggers will always be there in one form or another, so there is always room for me to improve   I guess what I want you to know is that coping more effectively with your daily stresses is indeed possible.  Plus, it is never too late to start.  If you’ve been wanting to find some peacefulness in the chaos of your everyday experience, begin the practice today.  Know that it is not easy and takes commitment, but try to love what you find in the clutter of your thoughts.  If you would like some guidance in your journey, here are just a few of the many great resources for mindfulness, meditation, and yoga:

Yoga Therapist Finder
InsightLA
Mindful Valley
Yoga Alliance
Yoga Finder
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
Learning Meditation

Enjoy the rest of your weekend and have a mindful week!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on this three-part series on self-reflection.  In Self-Reflection, Part 1, I go over the various benefits of engaging in a self-reflective practice.  In Self-Reflection, Part 2, I share some ideas for bringing more reflective experiences into your life.  Here, in the third and final installment, I’d like to discuss some of the signs that one might be doing too much self-reflection.  It’s all about balance, as we are forever dancing between seemingly opposing concepts.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Like so many helpful practices we can use to further our personal growth, self-reflection has many benefits.  There does come a time, though, when it may be too much.  Remember the myth of Narcissus?  He fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away.  This kind of self-obsession is possible for us, with the symbolic shriveling of our other relationships.  Remember in all of this that your relationship with yourself is not the only relationship you have.  Relationships must be nurtured in order to thrive.  Be careful to balance your self-relationship with those social connections that help you to be a whole person, giving to each relationship what it needs to be sustained.

When utilizing self-reflection as a strategy for personal development, an important distinction to make is between the little “s” self and the big “S” Self.  By little “s” self, I mean the ego, while the big “S” Self represents the Soul. The ego is a tricky character.  Its voice can be whiny and entitled and demanding.  The ego wants what it wants and wants it NOW!  And when the ego’s demands on the rest of your psyche don’t work, it can resort subtle, insidious messages of maintaining the status quo.  It can be challenging to differentiate the voice of the ego from the other aspects of your Self.  Usually, the ego wants anything that is immediately pleasurable and rejects that which requires any effort to achieve.  So as you embark on your chosen self-reflective practices, watch out for a few ego reactions, such as tantrum-like thoughts & emotions, as well as prideful, entitled ones.  The ego may try to trick you into self-obsession, as well.  Anything to keep things exactly as they are!  But the whole idea of self-reflection is to grow and learn, not maintain the status quo, right?

Soulful Self-Reflection

Obsessing over your thoughts, feelings, and actions will not be helpful for you or anyone else in your life.  The idea behind soulful self-reflection is to set aside a specific time to make your observations, then let… them… go…  Release your judgments, worries, and plans over the things you have noticed and allow your Soul to do the rest.  There is so very much about your experience that your mind cannot figure out.  This is where the Soul/Source/God/Higher Power/Great Spirit/I AM comes in.  Trust that just engaging in the process of reflection has done what it is supposed to do:  slow you down, clear out the clutter, and make room in your psyche for your Soul to do its mysterious work.  There’s a reason why some of the best advice we can get is to “sleep on it”.

If you do the best work you can do on the conscious level to sort through the gobbledy-gook of your thoughts and feelings, well, that just needs to be good enough, doesn’t it?  The rest can be sorted out on deeper levels that take time and mystery and the willingness to embrace the unknowable.  And I am certain that there is a hefty part of all of us that is not fully knowable by anyone, at least not by the small percentage of our brains that we are typically using.  A good friend of mine once told me (and I have since shared this with many more friends and colleagues), “Some things you can’t know until you know them.”  Have faith, dear ones.  I believe you will one day have the answers you are looking for.  As for the questions that can’t be answered…  I hope you will learn to trust your Soul.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with a quote that gives me encouragement when my mind is working overtime to understand the magical mystery of this life.  Thanks for reading and enjoy…

“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~~ Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903, in Letters to a Young Poet

I’m not talking about the kind of self-reflection you see in the mirror every morning     Self-reflection is really just about taking the time to reflect on you…  your actions, your thoughts, your feelings, your experiences.  Our minds are always working as we sort through all the things we experience each day.  We tend to focus most on our interactions with others; thinking, feeling, and doing in reaction to something someone else has said or done.  It is equally, if not more, important to spend time reflecting on our interactions with our Self.  Here is my first entry in a three-part series on why self-reflecting is good for the soul and how to achieve the most from whatever self-reflective practice you choose.

Why Reflect?
I like to think of self-reflection as an exercise in “taking inventory” on oneself.   If we don’t examine our own thoughts, feelings, motivations, and subsequent actions, how do we really know what’s true and what isn’t?  We encounter so many people, events, tasks, noises, demands, and stuff in every moment that if we are not careful, we start to think we are defined by all that extraneous “junk”.  Reflecting on these things helps us to:

1)  Remember who we really are
2) Figure out our priorities
3) Determine next steps to take or actions to stop taking
4) Identify our feelings to figure out which ones have important information for us and which are just reactions to old baggage
5)  Sort through our thoughts to determine which ones are helpful to our greater purpose and which ones aren’t
6)  Clear our minds for another day full of “stuff”

These six benefits of self-reflection are important to us in that they allow us to re-connect  to our deepest sense of well-being.  We can be reminded that we are not defined by the stressors and obligations and worries and overwhelming tasks that fill our days.  I’m not saying it’s easy to remember our bright shiny undamaged soul in the midst of a stress storm, but self-reflection can make it a little easier on you the next time a storm like that hits.

Stay tuned next week for strategies for self-reflection, in Part 2 of this series.  Thanks for reading and, as always, be well!

I’ve been wanting to write about this subject for a couple of weeks now.  It seems fitting that life has had plans for me other than writing over these last few weeks, since this topic delves into being “hard on yourself”.  Like so many, I find it challenging to balance all the things that I want to do with the things I must do.  And sometimes the word “should” becomes an ever-present part of my inner monologue.  So my last blog post was nearly two weeks ago and I got the opportunity to practice being okay with not writing during that time.

Being “hard on yourself” seems to be at epidemic proportions these days.  I talk to so many people every day who have mostly negative things to say about themselves.  This includes clients, colleagues, friends, and family.  We encounter numerous “shoulds” and “shouldn’t haves” throughout every day.  It’s a wonder any of us can function at all!  The funny thing about self-blame, even when you have truly made a mistake, is that it tends to paralyze us.  Or worse, make us more likely to do the things we are trying to avoid.  Adding to our already hefty stockpile of negative self-statements only serves to keep us stuck in the same old unhealthy patterns.  While mental health therapy often explores & seeks to correct these patterns, yoga does as well.

There are two branches of yoga that speak to the ways we treat ourselves and others:  the  yamas and niyamas.  In fact, these moral and ethical concepts are intended to be studied before one ever practices their first yoga pose.  Yamas are universal guidelines for interacting with others and are sometimes referred to as the “Don’ts” of yoga, while the niyamas govern how we interact with ourselves and are seen as the “Do’s”.  There are five of each, according to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and they remind us to think, speak, and behave in ways consistent with our Highest Self.  One yama that prompts us to be kind to ourselves and others is ahimsa, or non-violence.  You might initially think of non-violence in terms of behavior, but like so many aspects of yoga, it is a concept that also extends to our more subtle sides.  We can be violent (or non-violent) in our thoughts and words, as well.  Self-blame is one such form of subtle violence toward the Self.

Self-blame is a common contributor to feelings of excessive worry and sadness, two emotions that walk hand-in-hand…  Worry may make us put more pressure on ourselves, then when that pressure can’t be sustained, we may feel overwhelmed and begin to isolate ourselves, leading to sadness & loneliness.  I see the opposite of self-blame as self-acceptance.  Opening your arms wide to embrace all your fears and foibles.  What have you said or done this week that you are “beating yourself up” for?  Try taking a more compassionate approach to your Self.  Identify whether your negative judgment of your Self is accurate or inaccurate.  If accurate, think about how you might correct the mistake or do things differently in the future.  If inaccurate, identify a self-honoring statement to replace the negative.  And remember, just because a thought is accurate does not mean it is helpful to you.  In the case of an accurate, but unhelpful judgment, consider adjusting your thoughts to ones that promote self-compassion.  This will undoubtedly advance your self-growth far more than any self-blame ever could.

Stay mindful and be well!

For this week’s blog entry, I invite you to view my guest post on yoga and emotional balance at the Breathing in This Life blog by Ginger Garner.   She is the founder of Professional Yoga Therapy™, which is the oldest program for medical yoga therapy in the U.S. and the program with which I’m studying.  Enjoy!!