- Meditation (brief, long, guided visualisation, breath - any and all work extremely well for me)
- Creativity (crocheting, drawing, writing, etc.)
- Being out in the garden or park or along the canal
- Reading email and surfing the web in small, restricted bites
- Music, laughter, silliness
- Being kind to myself and starting where I'm at instead of flogging myself for not doing everything perfectly
- Planning tasks that bother me so that they're in easy, manageable chunks (hard-to-impossible when exhausted and brain-fogged; easy to do when not, so setting up greater ease for when I'm more unwell)
- Avoiding "normal" news and focusing on (mostly new) media that provide suggested solutions, actions for change, and support empowerment rather than passive consumption of news and learned helplessness
- Yoga
- Remembering Spirit
- Embracing the concept of recovery, which means building a life around these Self-supporting behaviours
Resistance comes in many forms, with many excuses. It is, though, simply a reaction to the fact that these things work. Any spiritual practice brings these issues up. As
yoga teacher Karin L Burke saysof the desire to not show up:
"But yoga will also show us exactly how badly we feel. Usually, when honest emotion starts to come up, students leave. They skip class or decide yoga wasn't what they wanted. They say "it's not working any longer". The emotion itself keeps them away; they're "not in the mood" or "too depressed to mov"; or will - trust me, this is real - feel guilty for feeling so crummy when others are just trying to get their savasana on.
This doesn't indicate that the yoga isn't working, but that it IS. The end isn't this negativity, this disappointment. But negativity is part of the path, and it has to be gone through if you want to understand it, to understand yourself, at all. If you don't, you'll be shutting down half of your experience of life, and probably the best strengths you'll ever find. If you don't, you'll continue to skip, overcompensate, repeat, and lull. You'll segway irritation into nicety, stuff it, and it will erupt later as rage toward an intimate or yourself.
Most of us have spent the majority of our lives stuffing and repressing our feelings, rationalizing them, avoiding them, or sublimating them into exercise, food, cigarettes, television, shallow relationships. Women are taught not to feel anger because it's not nice, not feminine (or too feminine and bitchy, emotional, hormonal and out of control). Men are supposed to feel competence, all the time. In our efforts to feel better, many of us start shutting it off, wholesale, in favor of pop psychology or easy spirituality. It's called spiritual bypass. It's an attempt to avoid painful feelings, unresolved issues, or developmental needs with such words as "everything happens for a reason", or "god's ways are not our ways", or "choose happiness". ...
... Yoga is not about bliss, but about honesty. Spirituality is not certainty, but the longing of the heart. Enlightenment is not "letting go" of bad feelings, but understanding them, what they're doing to us, and how they are expressed in the body. Non-harming and forgiveness are not about feeling generous or big enough (bigger than and condescending), but knowing the difficulty of right actions and assuming responsibility for the difficult. Forgiveness often comes directly out of acknowledging how bloody bitter we are. Love is not joy, all the time. Sometimes, love hurts. Love is raw.
Yoga is a love story. Not the fluffy, romanticized love story, but the real one. The kind that leaves you changed."
Note to self from Self: Keep remembering this. You keep forgetting it; just keep remembering it for longer and forgetting it less. Practice.