Two Years Away

Two years ago, I was in Christchurch, New Zealand on the day the city was leveled by an earthquake. It was one of the most unsettling experiences of my life. As I mentioned last year on the earthquake anniversary, it took me almost a month to realize the earthquake left me in some sort of shock. But what I did not realize then is that the shock, in many ways, remains.

Just yesterday, I was at work, and I heard a crash. I live in Tucson. There are no earthquakes here (though we did have snow yesterday, so perhaps anything is possible these days). But when I heard that crash, I jumped inside. There is a bridge in Tucson that always shakes when you drive on it, and I drive over it nearly every single day. Sometimes I still flinch when I feel it shaking. I am starting to realize that earthquake has never left me.

We live in a world where we are told to just get over it. When something does not go our way, we are expected to just move right along as though nothing happened. But our bodies respond differently. Our bodies remember. This is why yoga is such a powerful tool. It reaches into our bodies and exposes that which we have been holding for days, months, or even years at a time.

Consciously I do not live in fear of another earthquake hitting, certainly not in Tucson. But those moments when I jump from a shake are reminders of how deeply embedded memories are in our bodies. While we can consciously attempt to forget certain things that happen in our lives, we cannot escape them fully until we go into the body.

The last post talked about support. An earthquake is the antithesis of support. Earthquakes shake us to our very core. But we all get shaken like that even when we are not experiencing the Earth below us moving. And those crises, or traumas, stay with us. But something as simple as a child’s pose, as discussed in the last post, can be a start to overcoming that trauma.

And then, of course, the breath. In those moments when we are reminded of whatever shook us, we can always come back to the breath and remember that the trauma is not reoccurring. Instead, it is our memory of it. And we can breathe through those moments.

Today, my heart goes out to Christchurch. I learned so much from that city, from that experience. And if my infrequent, unconscious reactions are any indication, the city has not left me yet. The theme in Christchurch after the earthquake was, “Rise up Christchurch.” I know it still has a long way to go, but that theme is an inspiration. From the depths of destruction, the people of Christchurch decided to come together and create a new and evolved city. I am forever grateful to the lessons I learned in Christchurch, even when they take me a bit by surprise.

Have you noticed how you hold memories in your body? What do you do about them?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

One Year Later: A Lesson on Stability

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that one year ago today, I was in Christchurch New Zealand and at 12:51pm an earthquake struck that devastated the city, killed over 180 people, and from which I was evacuated to the US Ambassador’s home in Wellington aboard a New Zealand Air Force jet.

For much of my time in New Zealand, I felt a day ahead, yet somehow behind because I woke up around the time the news day ended on the east coast of the United States. Today, I feel a day behind. February 21 means nothing in New Zealand other than the day before tragedy struck. And yet it is today, the 21^st, that I must realize that one year ago I was in that earthquake.

Many people I admire and respect are writing about their memories and sharing the memories of others on that tragic day. Other than restating my immense and continuing gratitude to the people in Christchurch who helped us get out safely and quickly (with only immense guilt to follow) and the US Embassy for ensuring all of us were accounted for, and our Kiwi companions were not forgotten, I have little to add to the memories. I honestly feel like I had a different experience than most people. I was never in any physical danger, I saw no people in physical pain, or worse, and I was out of the city less than 6 hours after the earthquake struck.

But it was not until about a month after the earthquake that I realized I had been in shock for that month. When I felt normal again, I realized something had been abnormal. But looking back on that moment, day, and shared experience over time, I am reminded of the hardest realization I had about earthquakes – they are an unannounced event that literally shakes the very foundation upon which we stand and rely for support throughout our day. For that reason, they shock us to the core, and they force us to reevaluate the steadiness we thought we had.

It may seem trite to compare this to lawyering, but I have done it before in an “Expecting Disaster” context. But as a practicing lawyer, I see it happening around me all the time. I start most days having a decent idea of what I am to expect . . . or so I think. Rarely have my days ended as I expected they would at 6am in the morning. We can be prepared, but something unexpected and new sometimes pops up.

The question is how should we respond? In Christchurch, I saw the best of people. Everyone I saw, and all the stories I heard, were of people forgetting their own needs and helping each other. People in suits rescued folks from burning rubble, and a waitress told an ex-Congressman fromTucson to be sure to take his lunch with him as it might be the last meal hewould have for a wee while. People responded as they had to because their common goodness kicked in.

What if we responded that way to the “crises” we face each and every day? I lamented for weeks after the earthquake, and again after the terrible tragedy in Japan, that it should not take a crisis of unspeakable tragedy to bring people together in such profound and deep ways. I still wonder what would happen if our response to each unsettling moment that we view as the crisis du jour (or worse, du moment), were seen instead as an opportunity to see the good in each other and to make the best of each and every circumstance.

There is no question that some of the unexpected moments of my first two months at a new job have thrown me for a loop . . . or several. But something interesting happened to me the other day. I was in a yoga class, and for the first time since stepping back onto American soil on December 11, I truly felt like I was back in the United States. It was as though the confusion of living in two time zones, two worlds, and two mindsets had finally lifted. I felt connected to the Earth and felt it solidly beneath me.

That was just over one week ago. The earthquake anniversary is a reminder that such a connection may not always be there. Craziness will continue to ensue in my life and at work. Unexpected moments will continue to arise, and each one will present the opportunity to respond. No matter what your life entails, I can almost guarantee you will face such moments as well. I ask us all, myself absolutely included, to respond with the same humanity, dignity, and oneness I witnessed in Christchurch.

I would like to revise my laments from last year. Perhaps it does take a crisis to bring out these moments within us, but perhaps the crisis is something we initially believe is one until we realize that we are all in this together. As we held each other through each aftershock, we knew the shaking would continue, but we also knew we were all there for each other. Some of those people I have not seen since that day, and some of them will be friends for life.

How would the world be different if we all reached out to each other in our moments of shakiness and unexpected crises?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved. 

Playing by the Rules

Rules. Law. Some people might argue they are synonymous. Lawyers, therefore, are usually really good at playing by the rules. The more attention I pay, however, the more I realize how all of us follow the rules, often without even realizing it. This unconscious affinity for the rules that run our lives interferes with our ability to connect to our fellow human beings and causes us to go down the spirals that result from believing in “the otherness” of those outside our “in” crowd.

Recently, I went on a weekend vacation. The thesis writing was getting difficult, and I just needed to get away from my desk. So, I booked a bus ticket and headed an hour north to Oamaru. This post is not about the penguins who restored my sanity; it is about the rules I noticed and what they signify to our lives.

Before I get there, though, let us travel together – in an elevator. How many times have you been in an elevator alone with just one other person? How many times have you talked to that person? Chances are, at least from my experience, that instead of talking to that person, you stand together in that awkward silence, one of you pushing the “Door Close” button hoping to end the awkwardness that much faster. Rule for elevator: no talking to those you do not know.

So what does a weekend bus trip have to do with rules of small talk in an elevator? The bus driver. I booked with one of the smaller bus companies in New Zealand, and along with that came a really chatty and friendly bus driver. As we were driving along, I noticed that there were certain people he acknowledged, those to whom he waved. I also noticed the people he seemed to ignore. So, who was in the “in” crowd? Two main groups: other buses and truckers. Cars got ignored. Rules on the road: acknowledge those whose job it is to drive but not those who are just driving to get from point A to point B.

I have noticed this phenomenon before. My first experience living abroad was in Aix-en-Provence, France. A group of 10 Americans were placed on the other side of the world together. One day, while I (the band geek) and the “other” (a sorority sister) were chatting, we joked that we were like a bunch of kids thrown into a room together; we just got along because there was more that connected us in that foreign place than made us feel different. At home, we would have ignored each other, but on the other side of the world, when we were lonely Americans, we got along great.

While living in France, if I heard anyone speaking English, I would start a conversation. It seemed like a connection, so why not? We could create our own club in an environment where we felt “outside.” Here in New Zealand, almost everyone speaks English, yet I still find myself attracted to the North American accent, or even sometimes any non-Kiwi accent. Over the weekend, I stayed at a hostel, and there I interacted with all sorts of people, including some random French people. Everyone can talk together in a hostel; everyone is officially an outsider in the country. Rule in a foreign country: find other foreigners with whom you can connect, regardless of their home.

After the February earthquake in Christchurch, I was hugging people I had never met. With each aftershock, we held each other closer. Disaster was at hand, and we had little to make us feel steady. Just yesterday, Christchurch suffered another terrible jolt (another 6.3, the same magnitude as the one in February), which I felt over 200 miles away in Dunedin. I was in a room full of people. We all looked at each other, discovered there had been another terrible blow to Christchurch . . . and then went back to our desks, to our work. Rule for non-disaster situation: get back to business as usual.

So, what are the rules? Where can we engage people and where can we not? Where can we look to each other for stability, and where do we push people away? Where do you let yourself interact with strangers? Supermarket? On a plane? Walking down the street? In traffic? Have you ever hugged a stranger?

But, if all these “rules” tell us anything, it should be that the divisions we create are arbitrary. What if we chose to break them? What if we chose to make everyone an insider? What if we consciously chose to find our common similarities rather than awkwardly push the “Door Close” button on our interactions with others? What if we made these decisions before disaster strikes? After all, lawyers prepare for disaster.

Are you willing to break the rules? Are you willing to push “Door Open”? Are you willing to engage with "the other"?

Namaste!

© 2011 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

Expecting Disaster

Lawyers have a lot of unique skills, but perhaps one of the best is the ability to deal with disaster. When I teach Stress Management for Lawyers, I focus a lot on the stress of what it means to live a life where your entire focus is on disaster. What do I mean by this? There are two types of lawyers – litigators and transactional (ok, there are a lot of other types as well, but these are the two most common, and the themes covered relate to others as well).

Litigators spend their lives cleaning up disasters in other peoples’ lives, from divorce to businesses gone awry to asbestos to hot McDonald’s coffee. When something has already gone wrong, people call a lawyer, and the lawyer has to find a way to clean up the mess. Transactional lawyers, by contrast, have a slightly more interesting job – imagining all the ways that disaster can strike and hopefully eliminating it from happening, either by counseling their clients correctly or by writing contracts that cannot be misinterpreted. Anyone who is a lawyer, knows lawyers, or just understands how the world works, knows that no one can clean up every disaster, and even more importantly, we cannot predict every disaster.

But lawyers continue to try . . . to do both. And it is a tough place to live.

The mind is a powerful tool. What it imagines has an effect on the body, has an effect on our lives. Research into mirror neurons (really, if you have not heard of these, check them out – fascinating) tells us that when you and I talk, the neurons inside of your head that would allow you to move your arms fire when I move my arms. In other words, what we see is what we get, and when we see disaster, we get disaster. We get stress and illness and fear and . . . well, you get the idea.

Unless you have been living in a cave, you will have noticed that the Earth is acting up a bit more intensely recently. Since the earthquake in Christchurch on 22 February, there have been four other major earthquakes, including the most recent one in Japan, and two volcanic eruptions (counting the one in Hawaii that was a change in how an already-erupting volcano is erupting now). All of this has occurred on what is referred to as the Pacific Rim of Fire.

I am currently living in New Zealand, much of my family and many friends, live in CA, and I have friends in Japan and Hawaii, not to mention Oregon and Washington. In other words, I’m a bit concerned about all this disaster and destruction. And what has happened? I have gone into lawyer mode! Yes, each step becomes a question about whether it is safer to be under the overhang or out in the street while walking. Do I leave my computer at the house when I go out? What if I cannot get back to the house? I took a hike yesterday in the trees, and at moments it was very narrow (and I was carrying a bag with my computer), and I thought, “I would fall down this cliff if an earthquake hit right now.

But then today, I took a step back. I went into yoga mode. Yogis do not live in a state of disaster-preparedness. No, yogis live in the moment. Through yoga, we focus on the breath, we focus on each moment as it unfolds, knowing that we may not know what is coming next but being fully able to enjoy and live the moment at hand. So today, while “being forced” to wait around, I took a moment and sat under a tree, and was present. I have learned a lot from tree pose, but I have learned just as much from trees. They sway in the wind, they allow their leaves to fall off in the winter knowing that they will come back in spring, and they can grow sideways when conditions require. In other words, they adapt and adjust, with no preparation.

There are all sorts of predictions about disasters, from earthquakes to the Apocalypse (for the record if anyone clicks that link, it is to some 2012 information, and I have not actually read the site, but that is what I am referencing here as a prediction, not my own beliefs about such predictions). The truth is that we have no idea what tomorrow will bring, and even if we did, we could not fully prepare for it (though Japan’s amazing building codes probably saved thousands of lives, it could not save them all). But what we can do is live our lives right now. We can tune in and recognize that life is not about preparing for and cleaning up disasters. Life is about living and about connecting. The disasters remind us that we are “one” in a moment under a table, but it is every moment when we have to live that way, lest we create a disaster within ourselves.

Namaste!

© 2011 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved
This blog is not affiliated with Fulbright or Fulbright New Zealand, and all opinions expressed herein are my own.

When Stability is Lost

As you have all probably heard, on Tuesday at 12:51pm New Zealand time, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch. I was there, and after a few days of reflection, shock, etc., I have decided to blog about it on this blog. For those interested in my personal story about that day, please check out my other blog dedicated to my time in New Zealand, having little to do with yoga or the law, but for what I encounter in my daily living. 

Although I spent many years in Michigan and Arizona, I grew up in California, so Tuesday’s quake (for ease, I am using NZ days, not US days) was by no means my first encounter with a shaking Earth. It was, however, the strongest feeling earthquake I have ever encountered, though not highest magnitude, and it has affected me differently than anything before.

Yoga and law intersect in a myriad of ways, but one of my favorites to discuss is the concept of balance. As I have pointed out fairly recently, vrksasana (tree pose) is my favorite pose to do wherever, and it is wonderful for helping create a sense of balance both internally and externally. Lawyers are constantly struggling to find balance in their lives, in all different arenas, and balance postures of all types (but of course tree!) are a great step in the right direction.

When teaching a balance posture in a class, my most typical instruction/statement is, “feel the support of the Earth for steadiness.” An earthquake, by contrast, eats away at that steadiness, and it literally shakes the one stable part of our lives. That is a really big deal. It is the reason that the 4 months of aftershocks the people in Christchurch felt since September had been so wearing on their souls. Tuesday just ripped them apart, emotionally as well as physically.

But what happens on a broader level when that which is supposed to be stable in our lives is completely lost? For the briefest of moments, it forces you to go by instinct alone. Being raised in CA, we know what to do in earthquakes, and before I knew what I was doing, I was under a table covering my head, making sure others were under the table as well, hearing the kiwis (also well-trained) yelling at us silly Americans to be under the tables. No thought, just action. We were on the 5^th floor of a Rugby stadium (I was in Christchurch for a conference/forum that was taking place at the stadium, though many of the delegates were not at the stadium at that time, my group was), and by the time I got to the bottom outside, I had emailed my parents. No thought, just instinct. When stability is lost, thoughts are lost, and we can only act on instinct.

Our bodies are designed to survive. That is what stress is – a survival instinct. It gets us excited, shuts off non-essential functions, and we are able to do what it takes to survive. In this instance, stress was what allowed me to cover my head before my computer. In these moments of non-stability, stress is what keeps us alive, our instincts guide us.

Down on the ground, outside the stadium, I saw the next step – the coming together, the community creation. Still unstable, and probably slightly in shock, we did what we did without thought. Hugs, including group hugs, were common for hours. Stadium employees, citizens of Christchurch, helped us all afternoon long. They brought us blankets, gave us updates, directed traffic, etc., all while being unsure about their own homes and some of them, unsure of their families. As the delegation boarded a bus to leave the city, I hugged a new friend. I will probably never see her again, and I do not know her name, but I will never forget her. In those moments of instability, we seek comfort and community. With each aftershock, we all grabbed whoever we were near and held on. Not only did we try to hold one another up, but if we were going to go down, we were going to go down together.

So much of this blog has focused on the problems with letting stress and survival instincts get out of control, but this is all the more reason to remember what instincts are really about. The Forum I was attending was the NZ-US Partnership forum (that page has a photo of the cathedral on it from before the earthquake), and I was part of the first-ever Future Partners Forum. When asked how to increase partnership, what we want the world to be in 20 years, and what changes we think we need to make, I kept coming back to interconnectedness / community, which I am sure is not surprising to anyone who reads this blog regularly.

As I sat on the C130 Air Force Jet taking us away from the Christchurch war zone, I started to cry. I wondered how we get to places where instead of banding together, we create enemies, whether in war or in the office. I heard story after story from the main delegates who were in the main city center when this happened, not to mention my own feeling of community, and I knew that our deepest instinct is to support one another and find stability together.

As we got off the plane, I told a high-ranking US politician that if we are to survive, we have to act, at all times, as we acted that day. The best part was that he agreed. For a brief moment, idealism, from my yoga background and my generational attitude, was able to come through. 

So, when stability is lost, we look to recreate it, we look to community. What a different world this would be if instead of looking to our small community, we looked to humankind as our community, and we realized how similar we all really are. Yoga, meditation, and even legal conferences, have helped me find community, but we are at a point in history where instability is becoming the rule of the world, from governmental overthrows to the Earth fighting back, and we have to make a choice whether we tune into our deepest instincts for connection or whether we allow ourselves to see our differences, our otherness, etc.

There is so much more to say on this topic, and I am sure I will come back to it. Christchurch was an intense experience, and its teachings fit so well into the theme of this blog. But when stability is lost, we seek to recreate it. Instinct is immediate, but after that we have a choice. What choice will help as many people as possible? What choice can create the biggest and strongest community that will become unshakable, pun intended.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not express my continued gratitude to all who were there with me, but especially to the US Embassy and its staff, and to Fulbright New Zealand and its staff. Together they informed the world quickly and efficiently that we were okay, and they got us (and our kiwi friends) safely out of Christchurch before 7:30pm.

Namaste and Blessings! 

© 2011 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved
This blog is not affiliated with Fulbright or Fulbright New Zealand, and all opinions expressed herein are my own.