The girls and I went to see Disney’s “Frozen” a few weeks ago (thanks, Memaw!).  If you plan to see it and want to be surprised, you may want to wait to read this post until after you’ve seen it.  But make sure you come back!  I have so much to say about this movie, but for today I want to point out how beautifully this film expresses the healing and joy that can occur when we embrace with love, the parts of ourselves that we view as broken, or flawed.

In my earlier series, “Grace in the Muck,” I talked about the meaning of the lotus flower in yoga.  This large, beautiful blossom emerges from stagnant, mucky waters, and then rises above its muddy origin.  The lotus flower symbolizes the beauty and wholeness that can arise out of the muck of confusion and suffering.

In “Vision,” (sorry, no link — I removed this post because I have submitted it for publication elsewhere) I asked, “Can the cracks in our moments, the things that go wrong for us, the flaws we try to hide, really be channels, through which the light of grace and beauty reach us?”

You probably get by this point that I find this answer to be yes.  When we make a conscious decision to bring compassionate presence to the difficulties in our day, we can transform our experience to one of relief and gratitude.

When we meet our own flaws with acceptance, we actually nourish our cells — we allow the body’s neuropeptides (“mood messengers”) to be expressed, communicating a message to the mind that is coherent with what the body is experiencing.  We make a mind-body match that is experienced as a feeling of release and wholeness. (The Molecules of Emotion, 1999).

It feels good, to do this.  As I mentioned in “Grace in the Muck,” Dee Gold and I are releasing our new curriculum for working with challenging feelings to nourish physical and emotional wellbeing — to use the muck to nourish the flower.  The first workshop is “I-AM On the Path to Living Fully: Employing the Intention-Awareness Method.” (Saturday, January 25th, from 1:30 pm – 4:00 pm at Opus Yoga in the Kentlands.  See Workshops on the Opus Yoga website.  The workshop is already half-full, so if you want to join us, you may want to register soon!)

So now is when the Frozen movie spoiler comes in.  Throughout the movie, Elsa cannot control this power she has, to create forms from snow and ice.  The more she tries to hide and control it (“Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know…”), the more unwieldy and dangerous this power becomes.  When she finally decides to “Let it Go,” and embrace her power as part of her authentic self, she experiences a breathtaking sense of liberation and discovers how powerful she truly is.

Elsa continues to believe, however, that she has no control over her experiences and their intensity.  Finally, in an act of “true love” toward her sister, Elsa learns that she can draw these stormy powers through her body, temper them with love, regulate their strength, and create what she intends to create.

(Photo from the work of Masaru Emoto)

These themes are just dripping with yogic beauty, and there also is so much more in this film for parents of children with special powers (or needs) and their own intense emotions.  When I talked with my daughters about playing this song when they are feeling stormy as a way to celebrate all of their feelings, they ended up playing this song about 16 times in a row.  They made paper snowflakes and threw them around their rooms while belting out “Let it Go.” Sixteen times, or so.  Lots of good medicine in here.  This may warrant another post.

For now, I leave you with the clip that shows us Elsa’s moment of transformation, as she allows  and honors the fullness of who she is.  Also, I have to express my gratitude to Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez for delicious song lyrics like “My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around”….

Enjoy!

Love,
Shannon

Last week I wrote about gratitude as an attitude that we choose to bring to a situation, rather than a feeling that we have to try to feel (see Pearls of Glass: warmed by gratitude). In that particular moment, I found myself able to shift into feeling grateful when I went outside and looked, listened, and felt for the beauty around me.

I think this is the key. We are so often told, “you should be grateful” for the food you have, your health, your relationships. And of course on one level we recognize that we have so much in our lives to be grateful for, despite our struggles. But even though we recognize this abundance, it can be hard to feel truly grateful when we see it as an obligation, or when we are worried or upset, or sick.

If we approach gratitude as a state that we choose to move into, not because we “should be grateful,” but because it opens us to the magic of what is happening in this moment, we can get there from any feeling state. The trick is to get there through the body, through the senses.

In a yoga class at Inner Reaches last week, my teacher Dee said that “in each pose, there is something nourishing for you. You may or may not be doing the full pose, but you find what holds nourishment for you and you milk it.”

Finding gratitude in the moment is like that. You may not be in the “full pose,” of what you feel you could be doing with your moment, with your life. But you can be fully present, and open to the fullness of life in the one moment you have, which is all there ever is.

You can open to what is nourishing for you in this moment and “milk it.” Receive this nourishment through your senses and feel yourself shift into gratitude.

Listen to the low hum of the furnace that warms your home and your family, to the musical cadence of a friend’s laughter, to the hush of the life-giving rain.  Look at the beauty in the curve of a wooden chair; see kindness between a couple at the coffee shop. Notice the sheltering nooks in the trees, and the rainbows in the sunrays.

Feel the sensation of aliveness in your face, in your fingers. Feel the solidity of the ground underneath you. Notice that when you breathe deeply, it tastes good.

Find that nourishment, and milk it. The healing magic of gratitude is yours.

(Loving gratitude to Dee Gold for the inspiration!)

This rain is so cold… I wonder how it can be so cold and not be snow. I don’t like to be cold, and I feel like I can’t quite get warm.  I look out my window, and see dark and almost bare limbs reaching into a gray sky, which is dripping icewater into my veins.

This being Thanksgiving week, I sit down to write about gratitude. I remember the choice I have in every moment to “flip the switch” for how I experience the world.  Robert Emmons, known as the world’s leading expert on gratitude, tells us “it is vital to make a distinction between feeling grateful and being grateful.”  While we may not easily will our emotions to change, “being grateful is a choice, a prevailing attitude that endures and is relatively immune to the gains and losses that flow in and out of our lives.”  (This article is from a wonderful website called Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Live by UC Berkeley).

I look out the window again. I breathe slowly, and notice hundreds of glass pearls resting along the undersides of the branches. I try to photograph them through the window, but they disappear through the lens. I put on my coat and head outside to capture these shimmering droplets.

The sky continues to offer its icy kisses, and I try to frame the decorated branches with chilled fingers.  I bend and lean and I see the light of the silver sky through the suspended pearls.  The rain taps a gentle rhythm on my coat hood.  My camera finds the droplets, and I capture them and bring them inside with me.

I sit down again to write, but first, I slide my icy fingers under my dog’s silky scruff. I feel her breath softly sigh against her throat, and I absorb the warmth she offers.

With hands warmed, pearls of glass captured, I now can write about gratitude.  So here is what I have to say:

This Thanksgiving week and always, may we all be blessed as we drink in the nourishing water of gratitude.

Namaste, and
Happy Thanksgiving!

Wisdom from a Buddhist monk and a seven-year-old

Yesterday I came across a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, where he says that “Anger is like a howling baby, suffering and crying,” and that we need to embrace this crying baby.  My seven-year-old was by my side, and I asked her what she thought about that.

With the wisdom and clarity that children her age seem to conjure so effortlessly, she said, “We wouldn’t want to ignore our baby.”  We talked about how we could soothe our anger and take care of it, and her idea was to hug and rock her stuffed animals the next time she feels angry.

As adults, Thich Nhat Hanh advises us that we can use mindfulness to care for and transform our anger.  Acknowledging our feelings as valid, and then becoming aware of our body sensations and breath, can keep us from identifying with the emotions.  We can then recognize the choice we always have to find our way back to the peace that is our true nature.

Photo by Danny Fowler

“When we embrace our anger and take good care of our anger, we obtain relief.”
–Thich Nhat Hanh

I am washing the dishes, and I become aware of a heavy tension in my shoulders.  I remember to breathe and relax, and look out the window.  The sky!  Wow.  My face softens, and my eyes drink in this dappling of cotton and sea spray, cradled in a crispy yellow and orange leaf-frame.  I am happy for the break and change in perspective.

As we move into these chilly November days, it’s common for us to tense our shoulders and brace against the cold.  Sometimes we carry this extra tension indoors with us and, before we know it, we’re all knotted up.  And today, this is me.

Earlier this week, I was listening to a lecture by Louise Hay.  She said that it’s difficult for healing to flow throughout the body when it’s tense or frightened.  Of course this resonated with me.  In Grace in the Muck, I wrote about the strong connection between our bodies, our emotions and our immune system.

In her lecture, Louise Hay suggested to pause throughout the day and take three deep breaths.  On the third breath, she guides us to feel ourselves become very centered.  Then, she suggests we say to ourselves, “I love you.  All is well.”  I’ve been enjoying this reminder to my body and find it helpful in staying present, even through the more mundane tasks of my day.

In my classes this week, we’ve been playing with communicating the message that all is well to our bodies.  When we hold a stretch, we stay there and breathe deeply and calmly.

In a way, the breath is the language of the nervous system.  When we breathe with ease, we are telling the nervous system that we are safe.  Our nervous system then tells our muscles “all is well.”  The muscles can release into a deeper stretch than they would if we were communicating fear or stress.

As deep breathing communicates wellbeing to the body and mind, shallow breathing can communicate a sense of fear.  We can use breathing and centering breaks as an easy but significant boost to our health and wellbeing throughout the day.

Another form of “language” we can use to send messages of wellbeing to the body may surprise you.  Our posture itself can cause our cells to produce hormones that either increase our stress or build our confidence.

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy and her research team have shown that body posture can communicate messages of power and authenticity to the mind and secondarily, to others, with life-changing results.  In her TEDTalk, “Your body language shapes who you are,” which received over 7 million views, Dr. Cuddy explained her findings on the effects of “power posing.”

In her studies, people who posed in “high power,” expansive poses for two minutes before a job interview were more assertive, calm and comfortable, with higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of stress hormones.  Those who posed in the “low power,” collapsed poses prior to the interview were more stress-reactive, with higher levels of cortisol.  The power posers were far more positively evaluated during the interview.  Both participants and evaluators were blind to what the study was about.

Dr. Cuddy talks about this work in the video below, which is 20 minutes very well-spent.  She notes that “It’s not about the content of the speech; it’s about the presence that they’re bringing to the speech.”  In other words, using the language of their body to communicate confidence to the mind allowed these participants to bring their true selves to the interview.

In Grace in the Muck, part 4, I talked about how, at times, the path to how we want to feel, from how we do feel, seems too far to travel.  Sometimes, it feels too difficult to send the message we want, because we just don’t feel good, either emotionally or physically.  In that case, instead of “faking it ’til you make it,”  we can use strategies from yoga and related disciplines to help our bodies feel better, so that it will be easier to come into resonance with the emotions we desire.

Power posing appears to work this way too.  Amy Cuddy says, rather than fake it ’til you make it, “fake it ’til you become it.”  Instead of acting happy or calm, or confident or even powerful, when we’re not, we build a pathway to that emotion, via the body.  Then, our authentic power naturally comes through.

This research so elegantly shows us that, when you feel better in your body, the good-feeling emotions are not just easier to access, they are actually produced in the cells.  The body speaks, and the mind listens.

Yesterday I walked with a friend in her wooded “back yard.”  She’s the kind of friend who will listen to the crunch of the leaves with you and point out the crumbling lichen on fallen stumps, and remind you to stop to listen to that place on the trail where you can hear the stream bubbling.

We talked about the emergence of Life and about giving space for people to connect to their sense of reverence, in whatever way resonates with them.  I was reminded of this poem by Mary Oliver, which I think is about this way of seeing the world.

So, although we are far from a summer day this crisp November morning, I share this photo from the back yard of a dear friend, and the poem, nestled in the roots of a moment of reverence.

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at
change.”
— Wayne Dyer

Yesterday I took these two pictures of the same tree, within the same minute of the day.

This morning I was reminded again how what we put our attention on can shape our experience.  I got to attend a wonderful class led by Sharon at Opus Yoga.  Sharon began the class with a quote by Thich Naht Hanh:

“If you love someone, the greatest gift you can give them is your presence.”

We practiced yoga with deep attention to our joints and muscles.  At one point, Sharon suggested we “let the breath carry care” into these places in our bodies.  This practice felt so very strengthening and nourishing.

What an empowering perspective. We have the ability to truly nourish our bodies with care and attention.  I wonder if we can all allow this notion to frame our day, and our week ahead.  That we have the power to gift our bodies, our relationships, and our lives with deep, caring presence.

We can breathe with care.  We can engage our eye contact a few moments longer with our loved ones, and listen deeply.  We can be still, and be present with compassion for our own needs and desires.

Looking at things with care, we infuse them with our presence.  The things we look at change.

Namaste

Since I have been working with this method of allowing my challenging feelings, rather than fighting or discrediting them, I can tell you a few things about it.  First, this process is not necessarily a magic wand that makes all bad things good.  Well, not immediately, anyway.  But when I use it for headaches, for example, and really breathe while focusing my awareness in the areas of the pain, the pain moves.  Sometimes it moves to another part of my body, then lifts and the headache lessens or goes away for a while.  For emotional states, I have found that when I get myself feeling better in my body, I have easier access to better-feeling emotions.

Secondly, this process of allowing seems to have brought about a greater general feeling of self-acceptance.  When I become upset with my girls’ fighting, for instance, I have more empathy for myself.  This feels so much better than getting upset at myself for getting upset!

And the third observation I will note is that this practice has made it possible for me to allow my kids’ more difficult emotions, as well.  I hope that this allowing, and my modeling self-acceptance, will help my girls to understand the validity of their emotions too.  Instead of jumping into fix-it mode, I try to remember to first establish a connection through empathy.  Child development experts tell us that this process helps kids’ brains go from alarm to reasoning, just as when we acknowledge and connect with our own feelings.  Then, with the “thinking brain” online, kids are better able to learn and problem-solve.  All parents know that tantrums are not teachable moments!  This is probably a whole other blog post, but I wanted to touch on it here to illustrate how powerful allowing and acceptance can be.

Reaching out

Over the past year, I have been collaborating with my teacher, colleague and dear friend, Dee Gold, of Inner Reaches Yoga and Health.  We’ve been working to structure and refine this process for using the mud to nourish the flower… using our challenging feelings to nourish our physical and emotional wellbeing.  Dee and I have developed a curriculum we’re calling “Nourishing the Soul: Employing the Intention-Awareness Method (I-AM).”  We have been offering some pilot test classes this summer and will launch the official curriculum in a half-day workshop in January 2014.  I’ll announce details here on this blog when the date and time are finalized.  (In the meantime, if you are ready to dive into some mindfulness training, Tara Brach is offering some day-long retreats in Rockville, MD this fall: True Refuge, and Pathways to Sacred Presence).

I’m wondering what questions you have, and whether you’ve tried any of this.  Do you have any reflections of your own to share?  If so, please click on “Leave a comment” above and we can keep the conversation going.

Finding the “yes’s”

Yes, when I am actively present, I can draw my murkier feelings through my body, bless them, and allow this process to feed the places that want to bloom.  Noticing and allowing what is holds us in the current moment, opening us to both healing and joy.

In writing, as in yoga, I find that I need to be in a state of noticing, and to stay in touch with my emotions, to express what is true and to connect with you as a reader.  Both yoga and writing are about paying attention and finding the yes’s we can open to in every moment.

It is in this spirit that I offer my first blog series… if you found some inspiration in here somewhere, please share this and help me to get the word out.  (I promise they won’t all be this long!)  And if you can, please come to one of my yoga classes or workshops.  At the end of class, we’ll rise after deep relaxation, nourished by the practice, and we’ll say to each other with our eyes, “Is it nice?”

Tools for your lotus garden

So how do we get from the muck to the lotus flower?  How can we combine what we’ve learned from brain research with experience and intuition, to transform our difficult feelings?  From studies on mindfulness, we know that focusing on bodily sensations can help ease pain and depression.

When difficult feeling states arise, rather than escaping them, we want to notice, to really focus on and allow the feelings that come up.  Yoga has taught us that breathing slowly and deeply, while observing what is, gives us strength.

With the allowing, we can also name the feeling to calm the brain’s alarm system.  Now our reasoning centers of the brain can be called upon and we can ask ourselves, “How do I want to feel?”  I think it’s important to be specific here and find the words that really express the quality of your desired feelings.  The more we breathe gently and deeply, the better we will be able to access the areas in the brain that facilitate thinking in words.

With this acceptance and expressed intention, we can build a pathway in our bodies from the current feeling state to how we really want to feel.  Rather than react as victims of circumstances, we can respond with wisdom.

How do we build this pathway?  When I first started this practice, I found that I could calm myself enough to set an intention for how I wanted to feel, but sometimes the distance between how I felt and how I wanted to feel seemed too far.  I could just “fake it ‘till you make it,” and act cheerful, but that didn’t feel authentic.  And I suspect it didn’t help my body to process those neuropeptides or nourish my cells with new ones.  So I started experimenting with tools from yoga and related traditions to get me in resonance with how I wanted to feel.

For all challenging feeling states, begin with the above practice of allowing, focusing, breathing, naming, and setting an intention for how you want to feel.  Then, choose something physical to give you a feeling of release.  Activities like stretching, running, singing, and shaking out your hands can help.  Or you could choose from yoga poses, breathing practices, meditation, hand mudras, or mantra (chanting). These are not hard-and-fast prescriptions, rather, tools that have helped me (and my students) to get to a point of feeling better in the body.  When we create a resonance of feeling better in the body, we lay a path from how we currently feel to how we want to feel.

Poses like tree pose are grounding, and child’s pose and other forward bends can be very soothing.  Both mudra (symbolic hand gestures) and mantra can be helpful with anger and sadness.  Mudras are gestures you create with your hands and fingers, and are considered in yoga as “external expression of inner resolve.”  Chanting mantras, such as OM or Sat Nam, can release feel-good hormones like endorphins and oxytocin in the brain.

I have found some Buddhist meditation practices to be powerful methods for soothing pain.  For a migraine, for example, I send an “inner smile” to the painful areas and say inwardly, “Welcome, pain. I wrap you in love.”  It’s helpful to remember that welcoming the discomfort doesn’t mean you want it to stay, but rather you are acknowledging that your body is communicating with you, and you are honoring that message.  Perhaps your body needs some deeper rest than you have been able to give it, and this is a message to stop and breathe for a while so that your immune system can be replenished.

Working with a yoga teacher can be helpful in this process, but you can do this at home by yourself as well.  As you breathe with focused awareness and name the feeling, see what kind of physical activity your body feels like it needs in that moment and experiment.  Some of these things, like breathing, mudras, and even a mini-tree pose, can be done quite discretely during a difficult conversation, or while feeling anxiety as you wait in line at the grocery store.

Time to take a break and maybe try some of this!  Later this week we will revisit this topic, with some reflections from the lakewaters of our practice.  Perhaps you will have some reflections of your own to offer…

Focus, Express, Transform

On “Conan” last month, comedian Louis C.K. spoke about the therapeutic power of feeling our sadness.  The interview, colored with Louis’ trademark earnest, expletive-packed wit, is going viral.  I think his sentiment resonated with so many because, on some level, we are all aware of the validity of these darker feelings, and of their potential transformative power.  Louis said that when he allowed himself to truly experience sadness, rather than distracting himself with his cell phone, “I was grateful to feel sad and then I met it with true, profound happiness.”

So how does this really work?  What’s behind the power of Tara Brach’s recovery methods, and Louis C.K.’s singing through tears to a Springsteen song?  What is happening in the brain and in the body when this kind of emotional nourishment occurs?

The late Dr. Candace Pert, known for discovering the cell’s opiate receptor in 1973, was a leader in new understandings of the brain and body processes surrounding our emotions.  Her research suggested that repressing emotions creates a blockage of neuropeptide signals (chemical information that communicates feeling states), and that this insufficient flow creates weakened conditions that can lead to illness.  This is because, according to Dr. Pert, our neuropeptides are in constant communication with our immune system.

In her book, The Molecules of Emotion, Dr. Pert explains, “All honest emotions are positive emotions. Health is not just a matter of thinking ‘happy thoughts.’ Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-repressed anger… The key is to express it (appropriately) and then let it go, so that it doesn’t fester, or build, or escalate out of control.”

Neuroscientist Dr. Catherine Kerr, of Brown University, has found that “mindfulness” approaches can help alleviate conditions like pain and depression. Her research reveals that people who practice mindfulness – in particular, focusing on body sensations in the present moment – gain better control of the brain’s alpha rhythms that help regulate how the brain processes feeling states.  Dr. Kerr says that this practice connects people to a kind of “volume knob” for specific sensory-related brain activity.

In addition to mindfully focusing on and allowing oneself to feel those sensations, also naming strong emotions seems to give us further ability to soothe ourselves.  Dr. Matthew Lieberman of UCLA took fMRI images of people’s brains while they looked at pictures that depicted distressing emotions.  Lieberman found that naming the emotions calmed the activity in the amygdala, where the brain is active during fear.  With the brain’s alarm system quieted, activity shifted to areas of the brain used for reasoning and communicating.  When the participants just gave names to the people in the pictures, and did not name the emotions, this calming effect did not occur.

Since I have spent so much of my academic and career life studying how people think and learn, I love to dive into this kind of research.  Then I look at it alongside my own practice, teaching experiences, and intuition.  So the logical question following all this information for me was, how do we use this knowledge to truly find nourishment from the muddier of our feelings?

In part 4 of this series, we will look at some effective methods for allowing and transforming our challenging feeling states.  This is the best part!