MyLifeYoga

Tree pose is a pose that most yogis can do some variation of, and it seems to be such a simple pose that we do often in our practice. I had a beautiful revelation during my practice one day that made me think of this simple balancing posture as a complex reflection of our own inner strength that we sometimes forget is inside of us.

This revelation actually came to me over a year ago at a time when my mother’s cancer advanced to multiple places on her body. A month after I had just started a grad program and was adjusting to life in a new city, my mom told me that she had gone to the doctor and that there were three tumors on her brain. She had been on treatment for four years already, and for the most part her cancer had been manageable, although we knew that without a miracle the cancer would eventually take over her body.

My mother moved on to the next life last summer. It has been hard for me to accept that reality and I am still struggling to understand why the universe would take someone who had such a good heart and loved life. Additionally, I have found myself in a deep depression that has become largely debilitating. I am however, still able to continue my yoga practice. Yoga is one of the few spaces that makes me feel like I can have respite, if only for an hour, from the stresses of grieving, worrying about bills, planning my future.

I have been practicing yoga for about six or seven years. For many yogis, it is so fulfilling to go deeper in a pose than we ever have before, or to suddenly do a pose that we have been working toward for years. There is also the experience where the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual all come together and a great revelation comes through our practice. This might only last a moment, but the feeling of that connection to the universe is indescribable. I had a teacher call this a “glimpse” of the larger life force that sustains and supports us.
Continue reading →

To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student, heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world. Then one day as she was leaving a seminar she heard a voice in her head for the first time. “She’s leaving!” It said. The voice had arrived and her nightmare began. Soon she was diagnosed with Schizophrenia, hospitalized, drugged, and discarded. She began to believe that the voice in her head was the problem and she began to fight them. The problem only grew worse and the number of voices multiplied.

It was only with the support of her mother and a few supportive doctors who expressed confidence in her ability to recover that Eleanor began her journey to recovery. A key insight was accepting that the voices were a meaningful response to traumatic life events. The voices were not her enemies, but a source of insight into solvable emotional problems. Soon she was able to get off medication and complete her college education. She has now gone on to complete her Masters in psychology and is working towards her PhD.

In many ways Eleanor is the face of the over-medicalization of mental illness. Psychiatry in recent decades increasingly views mental illness through the lens of brain chemistry. Consequently most treatment is reduced to pushing medication. Eleanor on the other hand is advocating a new approach that goes from asking, “What’s wrong with you?” to “What’s happened to you?”

She is now advocating for people who hear voices in their head and directs them to intevoices.org where they can find help and support. Please pass this along as there are millions of people who suffer from this.

Related:
Intervoice: The International Community for Hearing Vocies
Hearing voices: Coping Strategies
Treating the diagnosis rather than the individual
Concern against DSM-5

Yoga is about reaching a conscious state where the ego-self is dissolved and a union with a deeper state of oneness is achieved. This is supposed to lead us to the Truth with the capital “T”. Millions of yogis spend their lives in pursuit of this Truth. Even those who are not yogis spend obsessive amount of time in search of truth with a smaller “t”. We gossip endlessly to find out who is saying what about whom. We fixate on the news to find out what is happening where. Scientists and academics write papers proclaiming new truths in their field. Companies spend millions trying to find out more truths about their customers and products. Religious wars are fought to stake ownership on Truth.

It seems our societies and our lives are shaped by the churning caused by our obsession with truth. So here are four pitfalls to avoid:

1. Do not use truth as a weapon

Ahimsa (non-violence) and Satya (truth/honesty) are two values that are highly regarded in Yoga. However Ahimsa is higher than Satya. This means that if by speaking the truth you are likely to cause harm, then you should stay silent. Under no circumstance must you use truth as a cudgel to beat someone with. Unnecessarily speaking ill of someone behind their back, even if true, is to be avoided. The value of truth and honesty is really meant to be applied to oneself rather than others:

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

2. Do not think of truth as something definitive

The remarkable thing is that two different observers of the same event will usually have widely different accounts of what happened. This is because of the following reasons:

• Our perception is colored by our biases.
• In addition we may have errors in perception.
• And finally our memory may trick us and we may have errors in recalling what we saw.

This means that what we think of as truth is an interpretation that exists in our head. It is just a story we believe in. Others may believe something entirely different to be true.

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Continue reading →