Happy friggin Valentines Day. Stupidest holiday ever invented. And I swear, I'd feel this way even if I wasn't currently nursing a fresh wound to the heart.
There is perhaps nothing that has the potential to bring us closer or farther away from our yoga practice and spiritual journey more than good old fashioned heartbreak.
The days following a breakup, each breath teeters precariously on the edge on a sob, while the heaviness in your chest makes deep breathing feel like an Olympic sport. On a good day, the runny mascara under your eyes makes you look like Tammy Faye Baker on a bad day. Wine for breakfast starts to sound good. A vat of Ben & Jerry's for dinner sounds even better. And cigarettes, those evil little embers glowing in the night that you swore off ages ago, even they, amid the raw wreckage in your heart, feel like they could offer you some shred of relief from the shock, confusion, and bewilderment of an aprupt end to a burgeoning romance. Sure, yoga still seems like an inviting place of refuge, if only your mat wasn't downstairs and the 7 o'clock class didn't feel like continents away.
It can be frightenly easy to crumble, feel week, tired and uninspired under the crushing weight of a loss of intimacy, no matter what was shared or for how long. There are, however, some humans walking about who seem to be inately equipped with a robotic resistance to falling to pieces. Perhaps they have managed to encase their egos and hearts in shatterproof glass (which ultimately can't be good for the internal systems, if you ask me). But for the rest of us, the hopeless romantics who went against our better judgement, ignored all the warning signs and gave the sonofabitchbastard the time of day and then some, well, I'm afraid there's simply no cure for the ache.
There are of course plenty of band-aids but to be ultimately free from the poison of resentment and anger that so often follows failed relationships, we have to grieve and grieve well.
We must bravely greet our suffering and allow the pain to surface and rear its ugly head.And then we learn to stay with the ugliness, the rage, and the tears in all their dramatic glory, lest they take root somewhere in the body and manifest as pain or sickness or addiction. "All disease comes from bad grieving" -- I wish I knew who said that but just take my word for it that it was someone very old and very wise .
It's best to just drag yourself to your yoga mat during these times, even if you just sit there and wail in child's pose. Yoga facilitates the grieving process by keeping you close to who you are, by reminding you what you are capable of, and requiring a presence of mind and body that offers a quiet from the storm of our self-sabotaging scripts. Often when relationships end, we are rarely given closure and are cut off from the explanations we think we need in order to move on and let go.There's a yearning to have questions answered and to make sense of actions and events-- anything to solve the mystery, to figure out what happened.
As a spiritual practice, yoga asks us to relinquish the ego clinging of needing those answers, right here, right now . When you arrive on your mat, downtrodden and depressed, there is always the breath to reconnect you to your existence, to your oneness with the universe, however new-agey that sounds. Someone somewhere is feeling what you feel. And no matter how much disillusionment or sadness you are carrying with you, the simplicity of stillness and breath brings healing-- not overnight and perhaps not without intermittent glasses of wine, bags of cookies, crying fits, or hours under the covers, but it comes.
Even if you're only interested in yoga to help you touch your toes, just by creating more space and flexibility in the body you are cultivating the same qualities in the mind. The body is so much easier to work with and change , so why not start there.
But where does the rage go, the human urge to exact revenge fueled by powerlessness you feel when someone has caused you pain?
Nowhere. It sticks around and can easily eat away at you unless you aggressively work with h your mind to shift your focus back to your own strength, your own warmth and compassion towards yourself and others.
The challenge then, in the immediate wake of a breakup, is to not let the agony of the unknown (why did he do this? why won't he call?) and self-blame eat away at your self-worth,draining you of your joy, your power, your energy, and spirit . The next step then is to accept that everything is just as it should be, that things happen for you, not to you. Remove yourself from the role of victim and get on with creating your rich and inspired life. Be Buddha-like and put an end to your suffering by loosening your grip on your need to know, to understand, and to make sense out of someone else's nonsense.
Meantime, not all of you are heartbroken and today is Valentine's Day and there should certainly always be room in one's life for flowers, cheap chocolate, and silly cards.
There is perhaps nothing that has the potential to bring us closer or farther away from our yoga practice and spiritual journey more than good old fashioned heartbreak.
The days following a breakup, each breath teeters precariously on the edge on a sob, while the heaviness in your chest makes deep breathing feel like an Olympic sport. On a good day, the runny mascara under your eyes makes you look like Tammy Faye Baker on a bad day. Wine for breakfast starts to sound good. A vat of Ben & Jerry's for dinner sounds even better. And cigarettes, those evil little embers glowing in the night that you swore off ages ago, even they, amid the raw wreckage in your heart, feel like they could offer you some shred of relief from the shock, confusion, and bewilderment of an aprupt end to a burgeoning romance. Sure, yoga still seems like an inviting place of refuge, if only your mat wasn't downstairs and the 7 o'clock class didn't feel like continents away.
It can be frightenly easy to crumble, feel week, tired and uninspired under the crushing weight of a loss of intimacy, no matter what was shared or for how long. There are, however, some humans walking about who seem to be inately equipped with a robotic resistance to falling to pieces. Perhaps they have managed to encase their egos and hearts in shatterproof glass (which ultimately can't be good for the internal systems, if you ask me). But for the rest of us, the hopeless romantics who went against our better judgement, ignored all the warning signs and gave the sonofabitchbastard the time of day and then some, well, I'm afraid there's simply no cure for the ache.
There are of course plenty of band-aids but to be ultimately free from the poison of resentment and anger that so often follows failed relationships, we have to grieve and grieve well.
We must bravely greet our suffering and allow the pain to surface and rear its ugly head.And then we learn to stay with the ugliness, the rage, and the tears in all their dramatic glory, lest they take root somewhere in the body and manifest as pain or sickness or addiction. "All disease comes from bad grieving" -- I wish I knew who said that but just take my word for it that it was someone very old and very wise .
It's best to just drag yourself to your yoga mat during these times, even if you just sit there and wail in child's pose. Yoga facilitates the grieving process by keeping you close to who you are, by reminding you what you are capable of, and requiring a presence of mind and body that offers a quiet from the storm of our self-sabotaging scripts. Often when relationships end, we are rarely given closure and are cut off from the explanations we think we need in order to move on and let go.There's a yearning to have questions answered and to make sense of actions and events-- anything to solve the mystery, to figure out what happened.
As a spiritual practice, yoga asks us to relinquish the ego clinging of needing those answers, right here, right now . When you arrive on your mat, downtrodden and depressed, there is always the breath to reconnect you to your existence, to your oneness with the universe, however new-agey that sounds. Someone somewhere is feeling what you feel. And no matter how much disillusionment or sadness you are carrying with you, the simplicity of stillness and breath brings healing-- not overnight and perhaps not without intermittent glasses of wine, bags of cookies, crying fits, or hours under the covers, but it comes.
Even if you're only interested in yoga to help you touch your toes, just by creating more space and flexibility in the body you are cultivating the same qualities in the mind. The body is so much easier to work with and change , so why not start there.
But where does the rage go, the human urge to exact revenge fueled by powerlessness you feel when someone has caused you pain?
Nowhere. It sticks around and can easily eat away at you unless you aggressively work with h your mind to shift your focus back to your own strength, your own warmth and compassion towards yourself and others.
The challenge then, in the immediate wake of a breakup, is to not let the agony of the unknown (why did he do this? why won't he call?) and self-blame eat away at your self-worth,draining you of your joy, your power, your energy, and spirit . The next step then is to accept that everything is just as it should be, that things happen for you, not to you. Remove yourself from the role of victim and get on with creating your rich and inspired life. Be Buddha-like and put an end to your suffering by loosening your grip on your need to know, to understand, and to make sense out of someone else's nonsense.
Meantime, not all of you are heartbroken and today is Valentine's Day and there should certainly always be room in one's life for flowers, cheap chocolate, and silly cards.
Actually, I imagine Buddha would be down with Valentines Day, just so long as BE MINE was shortened to BE on every pastel conversation heart in the cosmos.It seems Lama Surya Das would agree, judging from this sugar-free excerpt from " A Buddhist Valentine" .
This is how we love, Buddha-style: impartial to all, free from excessive attachment or false hope and expectation; accepting, tolerant, and forgiving. Buddhist nonattachment doesn't imply complacence or indifference, or not having committed relationships or being passionately engaged with society, but rather has to do with our effort to defy change and resist the fact of impermanence and our mortality. By holding on to that which in any case is forever slipping through our fingers, we just get rope burn.
Chew on that when your ready to sober up from your sugar high.
So, back to business: this prescription for giving and receiving love must extend to how we manage breakups, too. The name of the game is not to resist change, but to continue to live in the flow of whatever is happening, and to do so lovingly and without judgement of yourself or of that sonofabitchbas--- I mean, other human beings.
As for all you warbling lovebirds out there, just keep it down tonight , will ya? I need some peace and quiet.
Breaking up (especially Buddha-style) is hard to do.
