Soulful Healing

I was reminded recently of the importance of stepping back and doing a little self-reflection.  Having reaped many physical and emotional benefits from the practice of yoga, I was feeling stuck in regard to one particular challenge I’ve experienced for years:  chronic tension/pain in my right shoulder.  Fluctuating from mildly bothersome to headache-inducing, this shoulder pain situation has  frustrated me for probably the past decade.  In one of my early yoga therapy courses, I was excited to learn about various ways we can use a combination of movement and stillness to help the body heal itself.  Armed with my enthusiasm for studying anatomy and biomechanics, I started trying to figure out ways to make my shoulder feel better.  Over the next few years, I found that proper posture was generally helpful to my entire upper body and I started trying all kinds of different stretches to release the tension in the complex network of muscles inside the shoulder joint.  I would find relief anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but it would never leave completely.  I was in so much pain at one point a little over a year ago,  that one of my physical therapist friends gave me an excruciating massage to help liberate the bad juju hiding under my shoulder blade.  I won’t lie, there were tears!  Despite attempts to keep my shoulder at ease, the pain still came back.  Stress made it worse and the pain led to more stress, so it was a vicious downward cycle. 

At any rate, I really was perplexed as to why whatever I was doing was NOT working.  Over the holidays, I took a complete vacation from my asana practice.   This wasn’t specifically because of the shoulder, but because I’d had a pretty stressful year and figured that some complete relaxation was in order.  Between resting, meditating, and occasionally using the back of a chair to massage under my shoulder blade, my right shoulder started to feel better.  Then I returned to regular life and wouldn’t you know it…  There was my old friend the shoulder pain  So I decided to take a restorative yoga class at a local studio as a means of re-starting my asana practice.  It was wonderful and gentle and got me thinking that maybe what was unhelpful about all the stuff I had tried before was the way I had approached my yoga.  I have a rather driven personality and enjoy being active.  Being still isn’t easy for me!  But that’s why I’ve loved yoga…  I can move, move, move, and then enjoy the peaceful inner and outer stillness that comes from that.

My experience in that restorative class prompted me to get back to basics.  I figured if what I had been doing wasn’t working, I needed to start over again.  I needed to stop pushing myself so hard and getting frustrated over my own limitations.  In other words, I needed to take the recommendations I regularly give my clients and apply them to myself.  That whole thing about walking your talk isn’t always easy!  So I pulled out my yoga therapy books and created a basic series that addresses shoulder pain.  Then I actually practiced it.  And let me tell you…  My shoulder has never felt better!  For two weeks now, I’ve been focusing on a few specific movements for shoulder issues, focusing on strengthening & lengthening the right combo of muscles to create a healthier me.  I notice how my right shoulder is very reactive to stress; it tries to jump into my ear at the slightest hint of stress!  But what’s different now is that I can breathe and move and keep the tight ball of badness from coming back.

If you’re feeling stuck, take a step back.  Do a little self-inventory and see what you find.  What are you doing that isn’t working or isn’t helpful?  What are you doing that is helpful?  How can you decrease the unhelpful and increase the helpful?  Find your way back to your Self and let that put you back on your best path.  As one of my favorite authors, Dr. Clarissa P. Estes writes in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, ‎”If you feel you have lost your mission, your oomph, if you feel confused, slightly off, then look for … the ambusher of the soul in your own psyche.”  Mine was an imbalanced approach to my life and yoga practice.  What’s yours?

Hello all!  I’m taking a break from my regular weekly blog post, as I just returned today from a three-day trip to the El Florido area of Tijuana, Mexico.  I was there as part of a home-building project funded by St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church and coordinated by Lutheran Border Concerns Ministry.  It was an amazing and often heart-breaking experience, but this is exactly the kind of heart breaking that we sometimes need to re-establish a connection to the Soul.  It is all too easy to get caught up in our day-to-day experience and we end up forgetting to think outside ourselves.  We forget that we are Divine, Light, Love, Spirit, Soul.  All the human-made barriers we create between each other can never extinguish that Divine spark and it is where we connect with one another on the deepest levels.  In yoga, this is called seva.  Whatever you call it, I believe that giving back is an important part of a soulful life.

Whether you have time or money or positive thoughts/prayers/energy to share, here are some great places to share your gifts with those in need:

– Volunteer Match
– The Corporation for National & Community Service
– Habitat for Humanity
– Heifer International
– Charity Navigator

Next week, I’ll be back with Part Four of my series on Body Meets Soul.  If you’re just now joining me here, I invite you to check out Parts One, Two, and Three.  Have a great week!

**Photo is of me helping to paint an outer wall of the home we built on 11/6/10.

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!

We often hear the phrase “time out” in reference to the well-known parenting technique.  But here, I’d like to explore the use of time out for ourselves.  In the midst of our busy lives, we go from task to thought to conversation to activity…  lather, rinse, repeat.  This leaves us with little time to reflect on our experiences.  And aren’t we grateful for that much of the time?  Keeping ourselves busy can in fact serve some short-term purposes, such as avoiding attending to the  constant chatter in our minds, dealing with unpleasant feelings, or even simply staying entertained.  Yet we humans are not the best judges of what will make us feel truly better in the long term (I confess that I had the TV on when I first started to write this, but had to turn it off because it was distracting me!).  Our first instinct is often to cover over the challenging stuff, hoping that it will go away if we ignore it long enough.  Not so.

We are so used to perpetual distraction that when we sit down and get quiet, the noise inside the mind is deafening and completely overwhelming.  It’s enough to scare you right back into the land of incessant movement!!  I often hear people say, “But I can’t sit still/meditate/do yoga because it makes me feel more anxious.”  That statement resonates with many people’s experiences in beginning a contemplative practice, including my own.  Taking time out for yourself can be challenging at first, especially if you are accustomed to the constant twirling & spinning of modern life.  Our culture says more is better and we often unwittingly buy in to that notion.  But as you gain skill and experience in tolerating, accepting, and letting go of your bustling and buzzing, it does get easier.  And at some point in that journey, you find the calm, quiet center of your Soul.  Like any skill, it takes time to develop.

Let me be clear, I am not recommending that you leave your life and responsibilities to go live in a hillside monastery (oh, but that idea is tempting sometimes, right?!).  Quite the opposite in fact, I believe there is so much for all of us to gain by taking some time out and then continuing with our daily tasks more in touch with our bright, shiny Soul.   This could be five minutes of stillness in the middle of a busy day, writing your intentions for the day or week in a journal, taking time to pray, or observing and mentally describing your thoughts and sensations during a typical daily task.  Anything that prompts you to reflect on your Self and your surroundings can be considered a contemplative practice and will guide you in knowing your Self more deeply.  Years ago, I participated in AmeriCorps and from that I have my first conscious memory of being taught how reflection is key to learning & growing.  When we do not take time to reflect, we risk doing things the way we’ve always done them, effective or not.

If you are just beginning your journey into self-contemplation and have been discouraged by the crushing chatter of your own mind, fear not.  Stick with it, as the only way to grow is to keep at it.  Our children are not the only ones that benefit from a time out now and then!  Give yourself a chance to turn your attention inside for a moment and reflect on what you find there.  You will no doubt wade into all kinds of wild and interesting things inside that mind of yours.  Shine a loving light among the darkness and the cobwebs.  You just might stumble upon a real treasure.

I went to sing kirtan with a friend recently at Yoga Desa in Topanga Canyon.  Led by teachers from the Art of Living Foundation, this experience of singing/chanting along with a few dozen other people reminded me how good it feels to connect with myself and a community of like-minded people.  Kirtan is something I’ve only experienced a few times, yet each time I have walked away feeling calm, joyful, and grounded.  Music in general is a wonderful way to get connected (whether kirtan, hymn, classical, pop, jazz, bluegrass…).  It brings us back from all the journeys our minds take every day.  Back to the present moment.  Back to our feelings.  Back to our deeper meaning.  Whether instrumental or lyrical, music can help to release emotions, create relaxation, inspire, rebuild, uplift.

This last time, I was particularly moved by our leaders’ reminder to “sing with the innocence of a child”.  We spend so much time thinking about how we are being perceived that we forget to just sing/speak/share from that shiny, unbroken part of our Self.  When all alone in the car or the shower, we might actually allow ourselves to sing out.  But the second we realize someone is watching…  slam!… we shut ourselves back down.  This literal description of how we silence ourselves and each other also carries figurative meaning.  Granted, some of our destructive characteristics may need silencing, but certainly we have many gifts we do not share with the world due to that ugliest of four-letter-words:  fear.

While fear is a subject for another blog, this did set me to thinking about other ways we might use Soul-connecting practices to counteract fear.  Musical experience (whether you prefer to sing or listen) is one way to remember who we really are underneath all the noise and confusion of our daily lives.  Physical exercise, knitting groups, walking clubs, sewing circles, prayer, meditation, laughing with your children, sharing a meal with friends…  I suppose the list really is endless!  Is it possible to take a moment each day to reconnect with either yourself, a friend, or family member? There are so many demands on our time each day, it’s easy to take ourselves and one another for granted.  I invite you this week to slow down and take a moment to reconnect.  You’ll be glad you did!