Keeping what is best and throwing out the rest
I went to see my therapist, E, today to work through some of the uglies of the past six months and wala, I feel better. I haven’t seen her for a while. Probably the most important thing I got out of talking to her was permission to grieve my mother and also permission to not have to be strong all the time. Yes, okay, so you know this already and don’t need a therapist, well you know what, I know it too, but sometimes I need a therapist to give me a non-biased opinion.
After months of heightened worry when my mom went in the hospital, I actually felt at least one monkey jump off my shoulder – the one that felt like I was holding her up. The reality of her situation though is that I’ve been sitting in the middle of nowhere after more than three months in critical care because when I would cry over grief of her gone, I would realize she was still here and while I held no hope for a recovery, there were some who did. So I felt like I was living in a quagmire of emotional pulls, going downward.
As the Jewish New Year approaches I am setting the stage for how I will observe it this year. Last year, for the first time in a thousand years, I didn’t observe Yom Kippur because I was squeezed between business trips and so I was sort of observing from my hotel room, but it felt like a cheat. This year, as my usual custom, I will turn off all phones, computers, televisions, radios, etc and I will be by myself and spend the day in meditation on the year that went before and the year that is ahead. I will push out any lingering negative thoughts that are clinging for dear life and if I can’t banish them completely, I’ll write them down. I’ll also list my imaginings for the year that is ahead of me.
This is the great thing about my religion, this part, this soulful period in the fall when we ring in a New Year that is tempered by a ten day period till a fasting day – a period when we are reflecting on our actions and others and forgiveness. It’s sort of our confession only it comes once a year.
In yoga, we talked about how stress builds and builds and how the body and mind learns to deal with stress and it becomes programmed to receive stress and anticipates it. But how yoga practice helps you develop a more beneficial stress, the challenge of a pose, the push to have your mind believe you can when your tape, your stress loop, is saying you can’t. It’s very freeing to enter a pose that you know is ridiculously hard and then hold it when you feel every bit of your muscles telling you they can’t, won’t, shouldn’t – and then you take your last deep breath and you come out of the pose and your body just learned it can, it will, and why not.
All of these steps towards keeping the good and spinning off the bad is working towards a better place.