17th-23rd February 2025: Mental resilience and transformation

Listen and often the universe delivers.

For personal reasons I'm not teaching some of my classes occasionally (I am sorry for this as I don't take covers lightly) and my own practise has looked different recently. It's at these times I find refuge in reading (often poetry and philosophy) and listening to podcasts. I was listening to an episode of Keen on Yoga (Ep: 212 Adam Keen) aptly called When life disrupts your yoga practise. 

Adam talks about various reasons life may halt or affect our ability to get on the mat. Injury affects or even "prevents" what we might term a "normal" asana practise (my experience is there is no normal), low energy, winter or the general state of the world. I was recently asked about what to do when we plateau, my answer, keep going however you can and what ever that looks like. Then there are life circumstances: taking care of someone else, travel or work commitments and then for the big ones, a break up, illness or a death - something we will all face. 

There is always SOMETHING we can do, even if that means two minutes with our eyes closed and watching our thoughts and the breath. But my main takeaway and inspiration from the podcast was this: these periods are the times we transform.

IT SEEMS THE MORE WE BREAK DOWN, THE MORE WE BUILD UP. 

This is resilience. The American Psychological Association describes this as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences. And it's useful to remember in your darkest hour, these experiences can be and often are transformational.

In her essay Balance and Lever,  thinker and activist Simone Weil says it is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom. Only the contemplation of our limitations and our misery puts us on a higher plane. The upward movement in us is vain if it does not come from downward movement. Imagine the cross as a balance, as a lever. A going down, the condition of rising up. Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven. A lever. We lower when we want to lift. (Kind of like our movements in asana.)

This is not to wish any of this disruption and pain on anyone, or to even say it isn't profoundly difficult at times, but it is unavoidably life. American activist and writer Rebecca Solnit encourages hope at these times, and is clear on what hope is not: 

Hope is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.

Poet Mary Oliver invokes gratitude (from the biggest to the smallest of things) and hope after facing her own battle with cancer to help us to live our lives fully appreciative in the face of these interruptions. In her poem The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac she asks us "Do you need a little darkness to get you going?" 

Other pieces I read this week on this theme are Maria Popova's essay "The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength", and could anyone describe it so accurately: "The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble."​​​

Reading from Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami,

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore