Coping Skills
Yoga is coping skills, so we can soothe ourselves
We’re here, mid August, and it’s hot and hopping times. Summer heat, summer fun, lion's gate, solar eclipse, meteor showers, lunar eclipse upcoming, people jumping ship, literally and metaphorically, and life, family, love, caretaking, loss, impending summer's end and school beginning, impending schedule changes, intensified responsibilites - if you are feeling it, you're not alone. The seasonal change has begun, plus whatever else we are experiencing can send us spinning out.
Learning to slow the spin is in our best interest. If yoga teaches us one thing, it's how to cope when śokam hits. We are all familiar with duhkham, but what’s śokham? It’s the emotional expression of duhkham, and the more noticeable of the two. Let’s say someone delivers me news that deeply lets me down, confirms a catastrophized suspicion or breaks my heart. I may freeze, śokam. I may cry, śokam. I may call a trusted friend and lament, śokam. I may scream, śokam. The visible, audible, perceivable aspect of duhkham has thus been exhibited.
The duhkham lives deeper, and it feels embedded. So embedded, that we may not even know it exists. While emotions are waves we can feel rising, falling, crashing, the duhkham is the suffering beneath them caused by the klesa-s, ignorance, misidentification, desire, aversion and fear.
Where do we begin? With śamanam, with pacification practices, and they are specific to us. A friend told me to read a fiction book about a particular topic the other day when I received some hurtful news. While that might work for her, no way for me. Although I needed pacification, it came in various other forms. On that evening, I spent some quality time with my son watching a horrible action film, the antithesis of what I love to watch, but the quality time and the battles somehow got the thing off of my mind.
Over the next few days, I also sat there. I chanted cakra bij mantra-s in succession when things started to feel stuck. I journaled. Swam. Talked to my best friends. Cut some flowers to make an arrangement. Took care of some household chores, like cleaning the bathroom. I worked. Almost downloaded a Jamaican dance class (it’s waiting to be downloaded, and I will). Listened to 90s hip hop. Somehow, I did not self medicate with chocolate, oh yes, because I didn’t have any in the house.
Now, nearly a week later, pacification is mixed in with it’s necessary partner in transformation, purification. We can not achieve lift off when we are in śokam. It’s too heavy. We have to lighten and calm it a bit before we can climb into the heart and honestly look at and begin to adjust our very behavioral tendencies, experiential traumatic residue and latent impurities.
What do purification practices look like? I did go to the library to take out a couple of books, albeit non-fiction on the sore topic. I also went to therapy. I visualized, during the eclipse, that my pain was leaving as the sun went dark, and that healing was manifesting for me as the light returned. I also went to the beach at sunset and chanted the mac daddy of mantra-s, one that I do not like, to the destroyer, the one who makes you cry, Rudra. And if that wasn’t enough, to the fire diety and the force of preservation, often chanted with the prior, for an extra transformational kick.
Continuing to do both enables us to heal on our own timeline, in our individual-specific way. Suffering is cyclical, and as such, we have to cycle through pacifying when the waves are rising and crashing, and purifying, when the waters feel a bit calmer.