Let the Water Flow Down in Everyday Ramblings

This is the mental health plot in the community garden this week.

I had a realization when I was listening to Thursday’s January 6 hearing. It is something I have known on some level hovering under my awareness…

One of the things I do in my classes is help people let go and relax. This is much easier to do after movement. The movement prepares the body to release. I have seen the astonishing transformation in as little as 20 minutes when a yoga nidra practice lands and a person’s brain waves change and there is a sense of renewal and restoration as useful as a full third of a night’s sleep.

The physiology changes. The breathing slows, the mind quiets, the voice deepens.

A gift, we can give ourselves by unhooking our grip on all that has ahold of us for a short time and resting.

I had planned to watch the hearing, I knew pretty much what it was going to be about, I had seen most of the rest of the hearings. I felt it was important as a citizen to pay attention, to know what is going on.

So, there I am, watching, and I start to feel discomfort in my heart. (Luckily, this time not my jaw.) I am thinking oh, maybe I am having some mild upper GI distress from something I ate too fast or… and then it becomes apparent, that no, I am having angina. And then the question is, am I having a heart attack? I went and got my nitroglycerin and took it and drank a glass of water and the discomfort began to resolve.

And I am like, I am not upset, I am managing this, there is no surprise here, I am calm, my breathing is good, I am not exerting myself in anyway. All my chores are done, nothing is hanging over me, the cats are fine…

I started to think then, that this is when I get the angina, remembering the 10 or so times it has happened before starting with the first time on the bus coming home from the grocery having gone during my lunch break when I was still working in 2019.

I was deeply, foundation-ally upset about what was happening at work and all attempts at doing something about it had failed. I had no agency, I had no power, other than moving towards the exit. Talking about it to anyone who would listen (including a therapist), the unfairness, the discrimination, the dysfunction was not helping me manage it in any skillful, helpful way.

When I think back about the times, I have experienced the angina since it has been for different reasons, but they all have one thing in common. I feel like I can’t do anything about them, and they are deeply, foundation-ally upsetting.

That is what happened during the hearing.

I need to learn to surface these feelings and manage them with rest, distraction, action, and amazingly tears, before my heart takes matters into its own hands.

Yesterday, all alone, I was watching a show with a character that I was attached to over 4 seasons say goodbye and I started to cry. If I can’t cry over the dismantling of our democracy and known way of life by selfish smug grifters (that also suffer, I know that) then I will take a fictional character get onto an airplane and stories of comfort dogs or whatever it takes…

Wash is all away…

My yoga buddies have been raving about this specific podcast below for a couple of weeks. If you have a little time and are inclined to listen to a beautifully produced lamentation of all that is troubling about our current world, without mention of politics in anything other than a broad general way, I can’t recommend it highly enough…

I Wish it Could Have Been Different

Last updated July 23, 2022