In the Face of Tragedy

I do not usually post about man-made tragedies. I have certainly posted before about natural disasters (Christchurch and the Japan earthquake), but I never feel like I have a good response to shootings and bombings and the like. I do not, in any way, want this blog to become political, and these issues are usually so wrapped up in politics (perhaps as they should be) that I just feel uncomfortable.

And yet, the bombing at the Boston Marathon seems exactly like what needs to be addressed here.

If I have learned one thing from a yoga practice, it is how connected we really are. There is a lot of talk about oneness in yoga (and other spiritual disciplines), and yoga gave me the opportunity to experience that and know I was experiencing it. It is a concept the legal community would do well to understand a bit better. There is simply no escaping that what happens to one person happens to us all.

And it need not be next door. I am not a runner. Never have been. To be honest, I did not even know the Boston Marathon was happening yesterday. I have only been to Boston once. I loved it, but it is not a place with years of nostalgic memories for me. For all the ostensible lack of interest in the event and even the place, the tragedy touched humans and, therefore, touched me.

A tragedy such as this is an opportunity to remember that what we do to each other matters. How we treat each other affects the entire world. And I have lamented before about how it takes a tragedy or a disaster to remind us of these truths, but sadly we seem to forget in our everyday life.

The people at the Boston Marathon finish line experienced firsthand trauma. Whether they were physically injured or not, they experienced the shock and horror themselves. Those of us watching from afar had to experience the secondhand trauma, the vicarious trauma. And this is why these moments shock us into paying attention. All of a sudden, we all need to be comforted at some level. For anyone on facebook, I am sure you saw, as I did, the number of prayers sent out. And then there was the Mr. Rogers quote reminding us to “look for the helpers.” In the internet age, it takes only seconds for there to be an iconic image of an event, and the ones emerging from Boston always seem to have people helping out. The favorite story was of people who had finished the marathon running to the hospital to give blood.

We reach out together to find the people that make us feel better about the moment. After the Christchurch earthquake hit, I remember people in suits helping dig people out of rubble. In Boston, police ran into the street unsure of whether more bombs would explode and others helping those who were wounded. Mr. Rogers’s quote reminds us we need those stories because we need to feel a sense of calm. We need to see that not all of humanity is set on destruction. That is how we shake the trauma.

As people start saying Boston will never be forgotten, just like 9-11 and the Holocaust, I ask you, again, what that means. Does it mean we just remember these awful tragedies? Does it mean we expand our knowledge and remember other bombings and genocides? Or does it mean we remember the lessons of these tragedies?

Can we remember every single day how precious life is? Can we remember every single day how precious our friends and family are? Can we remember every single day how precious the stranger on the street is? Can we remember every single day how precious even those we do not like are?

That is what we learn in the face of tragedy, and hopefully that is what we can remember going forward. 

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl, 2013, all rights reserved. 

When Crises Leads to Trauma

The word lawyer has a lot of connotations in the non-legal community. Our reputation is created by daytime television ads, television drama, famous trials, and stand-up comedians. There is, however, on aspect of lawyering that seems to have evaded notice by the general populace. The legal profession, as a whole, is unhappy. This is not true of all lawyers, and it is not even necessarily true of the majority of lawyers. But there is something about lawyering that leads to a higher rate of depression and substance abuse than the general populace. 


But why?


I started thinking about this again because a friend of mine posted a really depressing article about lawyer depression on facebook. It is called, “Broken hearted idealists,” and it is written by a Kentucky Supreme Court Justice. It is absolutely worth reading, and here is the link. The article starts with a friend of the author’s committing suicide, the fourth of his friends in “recent years.”

His thesis is simple. Many lawyers go to law school to change the world, but it is not as easy as we had hoped. Instead, lawyers deal with crises, one after another. I have written about this before numerous times, but I think he explains it well.

Lawyers—most of them—are heroic. You go home at night with your problems. They go home with the problems of many. And then they deal with their own personal problems— sick children, an alcoholic spouse, or a parent who is deep in Alzheimer’s—layered over by the demands of clients and judges and other lawyers.

But worst of all for practicing lawyers is the sinking feeling which settles upon them that in all the struggles, in the thick of battle, it all amounts to nothing. The growing suspicion that all that they do makes no difference. . . . But they lose purpose. They lose hope.

The article is full of the statistics about depression and substance abuse in the lawyer population, but unfortunately, the author provides no solutions. This article ends dark and sad for those of us in this profession.

I will admit it; I went to law school to change a system I think is slowly changing for the better but needs to move at a much more rapid pace. I went to law school specifically to give children a voice. A real voice. And after six months, I often go home at night wondering whether I have done anything worthwhile. Nearly all my clients are in some form of acute crisis, or else they would not need a lawyer. 

What most people call burnout from dealing with clients in crisis day after day has another name – Second hand trauma or vicarious trauma. This concept has graced this blog before, but it needs some more discussion. It needs some more depth. Why here? Why in a blog?

Yoga is one of the best ways to overcome trauma, whether first hand or second hand. The universe has been sharing a lot of yoga blogs about trauma with me recently. Here is a link to a series on Trauma Sensitive Yoga, and here is another link to an interview by someone who teaches trauma yoga therapy (with links to other articles on teaching yoga to people with PTSD). In addition, a Tucsonan (I have to give Tucson a shout-out once in awhile) has written a book called, Yoga for Depression and teaches her techniques around the world. This is but the smallest introduction to a topic that is bursting at the seams.

Lying in savasana one night during my yoga teacher training, I was extremely relaxed and thought, “lawyers need this,” and this blog was born. But as it has grown over the past 2.5 years, something has changed. Yoga for lawyers is not just about learning to relax. It is not just about learning to sit at a desk. There is little that is easy about being a lawyer. We interact with people in crisis all day long. And we need an outlet.

Most of the lawyers I know really do want to be doing great work. They really do want to be helping people in crisis. They really do care about the people they serve. But it is difficult to face their crises every day without some balance, and unfortunately for many lawyers that means mind-altering substances. 

But it does not have to mean that. So with that, I am announcing a new series on this blog called, “Overcoming Crisis Mode.” Several older posts probably qualify, but going forward there will be new ideas from around the world of Vicarious Trauma experts and Yogis alike. I am tired of reading articles about the depressed legal profession and the suicides it is causing (the article here is not, by any means, the first I have read). Not all lawyers are depressed. Not all lawyers abuse substances. And most lawyers enjoy the work they do. 

Together, we can learn to give to our clients and take care of ourselves all at the same time.

How do you notice your clients’ crises becoming yours? Do you tend to get pulled into the darker areas of your being? Has yoga helped before?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

When Crisis Leads to Trauma is part of the Series, “Overcoming Crisis Mode,” in which we discuss the second-hand trauma associated with being a lawyer and specific ways to overcome it. 

Are You Listening?

I revealed in the previous post that one of the reasons I went to law school is because everyone seemed to think I would be a good lawyer because I liked to argue. The truth, however, is the real reason I went to law school was to give children a voice. It is a long story, and not really relevant to this post, but the short explanation is simple. Children have little to no voice in the legal process, and lawyers are one way to give them that voice. I wanted to ensure the courts were listening to children. Of course, the lack of job upon graduating from undergrad helped push me along as well, but I digress.

Yoga and law both teach us, nay require us, to listen. Yoga teaches us to listen on the deepest levels. As we learn to listen to our body’s cues, we can learn to heal the pain we associate with daily living, from movements we can do “at the desk” to asanas that take us into our deepest being. We learn to listen to the mind without judgment through meditation, and we learn to listen to the breath to learn what it has to teach us. In many ways, all of yoga is training for how to listen to ourselves and all we can learn about ourselves, and therefore, the world. Listening, with more than just our ears, is fundamental to the practice of yoga. 

Listening with more than our ears is also fundamental to our lives as lawyers. As lawyers, we tell stories. In order to tell those stories, we have to listen to our clients’ stories. We have to understand our clients better than they understand themselves, at least understand how their stories relate to legal ramifications. This means listening between the details and listening to the minutest detail to ensure that no stone is left unturned in order to provide them the best representation possible. Sometimes, when our clients do not have the words, we have to listen to their lack of words, to their body language and reaction to our questions.

Listening, in both yoga and law, therefore, is a deep exercise. It means understanding. It means stepping out of our own perspectives and stepping into the perspective of the other person. It means suspending our own biases and viewpoints in order to see the world through someone else’s eyes. It is the first step to moving beyond the concept of "my way or the highway." From there, we may step back into our own world and understanding, but the first step is to deeply listen. And this is where the tension starts.

We live in the modern world, a world that moves quickly and loudly. All the extra noise and distraction make it very difficult to tune into those deepest bits of information. Instead, the ding of the smartphone, the radio, the television, the other cars on the road, the planes flying overhead, and the kids screaming around us distract our attention and rip us away from what we may otherwise want to notice. 

In addition, we live in an action society, one in which action is rewarded while listening deeply is often considered idle. Lawyers, in particular, are action oriented. We have a bigger function than listening and telling stories. The lawyer’s job is to resolve crises, either before or after they happen. Thus, lawyers have a tendency to see the world through “fix-it” eyes. We hear a problem, and instead of listening to the entire story, we stop and think, “what can I do to fix it?” We get so used to fixing crises that, over time, we jump to conclusions without all the facts and expect to solve the crisis. The desire to make things right, therefore, can sometimes supersede the need to listen to ensure we solve the appropriate problems.

Yogis do not necessarily always listen better. People push through pain in order to get to the fullest expression of a pose when their bodies are not ready. We often fall into muscle memory to flow through postures not noticing how they are affecting us on that particular day. We ignore the breath as it becomes strained.

But then we can remember that each moment is an opportunity to come back to the state of listening. Each moment is the perfect moment to recognize what it means to listen deeply. From there, we can find the appropriate solutions for the appropriate situations. Listening requires us to step outside ourselves and tune in to whatever is happening, whether it is what we expect or not. That can be a scary prospect. It means letting go of preconceived notions and simply being present in whatever is happening.

But when we hold that space options and opportunities arise that we never dreamed possible. We settle cases and learn to stand on our heads, or simply learn to stand on our own two feet with full awareness of all that is happening around us.

Are you listening?

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Crisis Management: A Changing Perspective

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.