I, along with everyone else on the planet, am dealing with how this pandemic affects me personally. Each one of us has different coping styles and different ways of handling things from one day to the next, depending on what is going on in our lives. I find it interesting to observe my personality at work due to my yoga training, self study and self reflective nature. I have been performing some type of daily meditation practice, such as Yoga Nidra (guided meditation), chanting or yoga for over 25 years, which I find useful to weather emotional storms.
However, this week things finally got to me when I got the news that I might not be able to finish the final massage class I need to be able to sit for my licensing and state board exams. I let myself vent a little about my dissatisfaction of how things are going, my feelings about how this crisis has been handled by our leader and the uncertainty I am feeling because of the unknown nature of how long it might take for things to regain some sense of normal. Now to be clear, I have had feelings about this for some time now and I have been handling the isolation quite well, but I was anticipating that there will be an ending in sight and we should be able to return to some sense of a new normal. I have been fine with the break from things, I have been enjoying time to do what I want when I want, I am happy cooking my meals at home and being with my husband and our 4 cats, but…. I was expecting to someday get back to school and finish up my degree and I was expecting that to happen before the fall!
It was the expectation, that things were going to be different than they now are, that was making me unhappy, not the actual present moment. Being in the present and realizing there is nothing we can do to make it different or better is actually all that we have. Thinking about how we could have done things different in the past or worrying about what the future holds and how things will look then does not help to make THIS moment any different. It just takes us out of the present situation and reality. Our body is made up of energy (along with a lot of other concrete materials) and we have a choice to either conserve and revitalize our energy or to waste it. We have a choice over how we utilize our prana (life force); we can either increase it or we can deplete it. Always, but especially in these times where the health of our immune systems is so critical, the decision to conserve and revitalize our life force is the correct choice. Our habits, the food we eat, the thoughts we think, the company we keep, whether we exercise or we don’t, the practice of having a regular meditation and relaxation practice, are all vitally important.
Another very important point is that we need to let ourselves feel and express the feelings we have in a safe way. This means to let ourselves vent in a way that doesn’t hurt others, so that we feel our feelings without “stuffing them down” which is not a good thing. Energy needs to move through us so it does not get trapped in the body. To go back to the earlier example of this would be, I was very frustrated by my situation and could have let myself just keep quiet about it and not express my frustration or I could have been ruminating over it and watching a lot of the news that would scare me and make me fearful that things will never change. Either action would have kept that energy trapped in my body and actually get my mind to project further into the future and create elaborate scenarios (which I am very good at doing), which destroys even more prana.
Try this instead!
Focus on the physical sensation in your body that the thoughts are creating, and then direct your attention to your breath. Direct the breath to the place you feel the physical sensation and stay there with your attention. Remain with the physical sensations and the breath until you notice something changing. This will probably take several minutes to a half hour. You need to stay present with the sensations and allow them to change. Staying focused and centered with attention on the breath will ALWAYS create a change in how you feel. It is okay if the feeling is not gone, but it will most certainly become lighter and different. It is important not to TRY to make anything change or to make things be different but the result will certainly be a shift in the energy.
Till next time