At a class recently I indulged in some chatter with students about mundane frustrations in daily life. Mainly, I was on the expressing end and students on the receiving side of things.
On occasion I have shared in this way before. It is a risky endeavor. Generally people’s lives are challenging and the last thing they want to hear is about the yoga “teacher’s” stress.
But on I went. I told class how I had known that a certain day was going to test my limits. It was so tightly scheduled that I called it a house of cards; if one card fell, the whole thing was going to come down. And then, when the day was on my doorstep, I actually had to add something into the middle of it which precipitated a whole ripple of changes I had to make. In the process I missed seeing that I had a work session early in the morning and was entirely absent for it. Then, the person whom I was to see for the last-minute added appointment was over an hour late and I had to leave without seeing her to get to my next meeting. 
I absolutely was beside myself. I had an image in my mind of how the day was supposed to unfold and it wasn’t happening at all as I had planned. I had certain intentions for the day’s scheduled events. The most incredible irony was that the way I reacted to the unraveling plans was in complete contradiction of my intentions. In my rigid desire for control over the situation I actually worked against the very basis of what I wanted to achieve.
I remembered how it felt being forgotten while waiting on an appointment over thirty years ago. Also recalling an event from about a long time back, I still could feel the sting of the injustice of someone cancelling an appointment I had with them and rescheduling it for a month later. The nerve! When I cancelled meetings, in an effort to be fair, I went to the trouble of calling every single person to reschedule every single appointment.
I also anticipated all the ways I was going to suffer later on in the day. I worried about the person who I had missed seeing in the overlooked work session. Catastrophes loomed up from the depths of my imagination. At some point, I planned how to get even with the offending parties. I thought about the ridiculous unfairness of it all.
While I realized that none of what happened was the proverbial end of the world or unfixable, I could feel that emotion and physical sensation were eating me up inside. Instead of allowing myself to experience those in the moment, I succumbed to the overwhelming desire to indulge in justifying my emotional state.
So back to the yoga class in which I was relaying this to participants. I will admit that part of it was my personality needing to express. For any of you familiar with the Enneagram, I am a “six” – Don Riso and Russ Hudson, authors of The Wisdom of the Enneagram say:
As a Six, you tend to cope with problems by being emotionally intense and expressing your feelings. Your message to others is: “I feel really pressured and I’ve got to let off some steam!” (pg 68)
Some students could really relate to parts of what I was saying and sympathized with my feelings of being unfairly treated. Others looked like they just wanted me to keep it to myself. Others simply listened, feeling what, I don’t know . . .
On a personal level, I didn’t really want sympathy. I didn’t really want to keep it to myself, either. I deeply appreciated feeling like I had been heard.
But there were some professional reasons for my sharing. That is why I didn’t resist the impulse to go on about a day gone awry. Firstly, a daily yoga practice is very important even if it is short; this particular day I had not bothered with my practice because I fell victim to the notion that the day was too busy and I couldn’t afford the time. Second and probably more importantly, I wanted to show how insidious and tricky our thinking mind and our habits are when we are under stress, or when we try to control or ignore our bodily feelings and emotions.
Further on the second point, had I stopped, felt what was going on in my body, and noticed my emotional state and NOT fed the intensity with memories, plans, worries, and relative merits of various belief systems, research shows I would have been the roughest part in less than two minutes. But instead, I was “wound up like a spring” for at least two hours.
That was two hours where my sympathetic nervous system was prepared to deal with a life-threatening situation that didn’t exist. Research shows that when we mistakenly are prepared to fight or flee from a tiger or lion several times a day, not only do we suffer from a myriad of uncomfortable health complaints like headaches and acid reflux, but also our immune systems are severely compromised and our life expectancies are noticeably shortened. See Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers for more information about this.
Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge would call much of my reaction that day as looking to false refuge: the habitual ways we try to control in order to feel safe.
As opposed to false refuge, true refuge is “a profound stillness, a silent awareness capable of limitless love.” Beneath the turbulence of our thoughts and emotions it is available to every one of us, at any moment. We have an inner sanctuary of peace and wisdom in the midst of difficulty.
One way to find true refuge in any situation is outlined by Tara in an article called “Rain: Working with Difficulties”
- R Recognize what is happening
- A Allow life to be just as it is
- I Investigate inner experience with kindness
- N Non-Identification.
RAIN directly de-conditions the habitual ways in which you resist your moment-to-moment experience. It doesn’t matter whether you resist “what is” by lashing out in anger, by having a cigarette, or by getting immersed in obsessive thinking. Your attempt to control the life within and around you actually cuts you off from your own heart and from this living world. RAIN begins to undo these unconscious patterns as soon as we take the first step.
Find out more about the RAIN practice here.
Practicing RAIN in our regular yoga practice (while we are doing poses, working with the breath, meditating) makes us more likely to use it when daily life challenges us.
Practicing RAIN as we move through our day brings us into a place of true refuge. You will know that you are there because, regardless what the situation, you will feel at peace with it, totally OKAY with where you are.
Reviewing the day to reveal where we were caught up in a quest for false refuge is highly helpful in motivating us to develop an intention to be present and seek out true refuge. I very much like practicing Awareness Examen, a Jesuit (Catholic Christian) form of reflective prayer. This type of prayer relies on finding God in all things, which really is another way of saying seeking true refuge at all times. If you are not of the Christian faith or are not comfortable to the frequent references to God you can do the practice by rewording parts of the prayer. If you’d like help in working with this, please let me know. I love to share this anyone who is interested!
And thank you to any brave and patient soul who made it to the end of the blog post. Please leave me a comment to let me know you made it here!