While many of the recent posts have focused on the
similarities between yoga and the law, today’s is about one of the biggest
opposites. As I have mentioned before, lawyers live in a world defined by disaster. Whether in litigation and responding to the disaster at hand or in
transactional work preparing for or trying to avoid disasters, the legal world
moves among disasters.
Yoga, by contrast, is about simply preparing ourselves.
While disasters are about the external world, or our definition of the external
world, yoga is about preparing our internal selves for anything that happens in
the external world. This is, of course, much easier to do when the external
world in which we find ourselves is fairly simple and not one disaster after
another.
So what do we do when we find ourselves surviving in crisis
management? What do we do when we feel as though we are barely staying afloat,
and if one more event occurs that requires our attention, our entire being is
going to explode? That is when the yoga bucket is so vital. That is when the
five minutes per day of internal practice help give us the strength to respond
with our full awareness to these external forces rather than react with our
immediate reactions, unsure of whether we are actually doing what is necessary.
Living in crisis management is dangerous on many levels. We
harm ourselves because we live in a state of constant stress. The physiological
effects of long term stress are well documented and include the inability to sleep,
inability to digest, decreased immunity, etc. In addition to our own physical
health, we harm our relationships because we are less capable of interacting
with people from a place of heart. How often have you snapped at someone you
love simply because you were too tired and stressed to speak to them
differently?
Finally, living in that state of crisis management means we
can never be in control of our professional lives. The irony, of course, is
that we become less effective lawyers (or whatever) because our jobs require us
to live in that constant state of managing the crisis du jour rather than
preparing ourselves internally sufficiently to respond from a place of
compassion and understanding each time an issue arises.
I think there is more to doing this than just having the
de-stress bucket filled by doing a practice. I think it also requires a shift
in perspective. The reason so many of us believe we live in crisis management
is because we view so many parts of our lives as crises. What if we changed
that perspective? What if we saw these moments as just another step along the
path? What if we saw them as opportunities?
In my personal life, I have seen crises become the greatest
moments in peoples’ lives. In my cases, I have seen what I thought were crises
become non-issues simply by getting all the facts. And when I change my initial
perspective, I find that I have a lot more to give to the situations that truly
are crises because I have no used all my energy on the parts of my life that do
not require such an intense response.
Unlike finding five minutes a day for a practice, which is
simple but not easy, this change in perspective is not very simple either. At
some level it requires a complete reprogramming of our responses to what we see
as our external world. That takes time. But if I found one thing in New
Zealand, it is also possible. I have been back in the United States now for
just over a month, and I still find myself “looking right” half the time before
I cross the street.
We do not have to choose to be in crisis management mode at
all times. Sometimes it feels as though the world has not given us the choice
to step back and step out of it, but with each new “crisis,” stop and take a
breath. What would happen if you chose to stop and evaluate before going into
crisis management immediately? How would that look different?
Do you find yourself living in crisis management? What tools
have helped you?
Namaste!
©
Rebecca Stahl, 2012, all rights reserved.
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