The Subtleties of the Bigger Picture

Yoga teaches us to trust our intuition. Some days it is a really good idea to go to a vinyasa class and move. Some days it is a really good idea to relax into a calming, restorative class. But every day is going to be different, no matter who you are. One of the only parts of each of us that is the same is that we change on a daily basis.

And yoga not only allows this, but it encourages these differences. It encourages us to look at our subtleties and understand them more fully. We can move into our bodies each and every day and understand its needs that day. We can use different modalities to calm our minds and calm our nerves every minute. We live in an age where there are thousands of modalities, and we just need to find the one that works for us.

The “real” world, however, still has not quite caught on. Law schools still seem to think the right answer for every student is a law firm life, the bigger the better (and yes, I know not all schools do this, but the underlying culture still does). Professionals specialize more and more such that simple answers outside their specialty evade their understanding. We live in a world where we try to make every situation the same because then it fits a pattern that is familiar to us.

When I was studying in New Zealand, there had recently been a change in New Zealand requiring lawyers who represented children to actually see their child clients in person. Prior to that, many lawyers just assumed all children were the same, so they did not actually have to meet their particular client in this case. And that was in family law, where seeing the child with each of the parents and more fully understanding that child’s relationship with each child was even more important.

I do not mention this to say these lawyers did not care. They simply did not think through the fact that every single person is unique and has individual qualities. When I went to see a surgeon, he really only looked at my MRI. The physical therapist and another doctor said, “I want to see you before I look at the images.” When we get into too much specialization, we lose subtleties of each and every person.

And this does not only affect the professional world. It affects our everyday lives. If we stop expecting people and situations to be different, we start making assumptions about how certain situations are going to happen. And with that, we have the potential to stop trusting ourselves in the moment of those situations. But yoga helps us tap back into that intuition in the moment. It helps us see that each and every day our body and mind are different.

For example, we learn to tap into the subtleties that make up our every day lives. We learn to find new meaning in what we might have otherwise thought would be a mundane situation. This is really the next step in gratitude. Not only can we be grateful for what we have, but we can start to see how nothing is really as it seems, and our lives are richer and more interesting than we might otherwise imagine.  But first, we have to learn to look. We have to learn to step outside of our focused vision and see the bigger picture. But in order to see that bigger picture, we have to learn to notice the small differences in each and every person, encounter, and situation.

I guess the big question is, “so what?” My 8^th grade English teacher used to ask us that on our writing assignments. Why am I mentioning this? How does this affect our daily lives? Some people believe that one of the underlying reasons for unhappiness in our world is when people believe they are not fully seen for who they are. If we believe that everyone of a certain characteristic (whether race, occupation, age, etc.) is the same, we fail to see the person before us. It is not easy to do. It is much easier to put everyone in a box and go from there. It takes less mental effort . . . on the surface.

But in the long term, what takes less mental effort is not keeping people in those boxes, whatever they are, but allowing yourself to fully experience life. Just like we do not usually need the fight or flight response in our daily lives, though it is great when we do, we do not need to box people into categories anymore. We live in a different world than we did 10,000 years ago when there were reasons not to trust anyone but our clan.  Now our world will be better served by tuning into the subtle differences of each and every person and situation. For me, I have found the ability to start doing that through yoga.

Do you find yourself caught up in assumptions? How do you get out of that mindset? How do you see each person as an individual?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, The Subtleties of the Bigger Picture, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Speaking Yoga

"Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.” – Buddha

The word yoga is often translated as "union." Literally, it means "to yoke," and metaphorically, this has come to mean union. Words are one way to bring union among people. Words are how we communicate, how we interact with other people. But what good do they do if they are not used to bring us peace amongst each other? How do they create this union? Words can be scathing, hollow, or positive, but they always affect the listener. We must be conscious not only of how we think our words will be heard but of how the listener will actually hear them.

Lawyers like to talk. A lot. In fact, most people like to talk. For some reason, people feel the need to make noise and fill the emptiness that is silence. But how many of the words we speak are hollow words? How often do we speak only to hear the sound of our own voice? How many of the words we speak do not bring peace to others or ourselves? How often do our words create dis-union rather than union?

What if we made a commitment to using our words for the benefit of others? What if we consciously used our words to bring peace to others and ourselves? What if we used our words to create the union of yoga? A conscious effort to have our words bring peace is a conscious effort to consider how others may hear our words. Making the commitment is a step toward empathy and compassion. We want to bring peace, and we are conscious of how best to do it.

The first, and I believe most important, step is to meet people where they are. This is definitely a lesson I have learned from yoga. In discussions about trauma-informed yoga classes, teachers must be conscious that while for some people, “lie down and relax” is a stress-relieving statement, for someone who has been held down by someone, it can trigger a trauma response. Understanding where people are, and how they view the world, helps us choose our words carefully so as not to cause them harm we do not mean.

Second, we can ask ourselves what people may want or need to hear to bring them peace in this moment. I often think to myself in difficult situations that there are simply no words that can express what it is I want to say. But sometimes a simple acknowledgement that we care is enough to bring a moment of peace. We need not come up with a tome of how we feel about a particular situation. Instead, a simple word or two, along with our presence, might be sufficient.

Third, and this is one we so often forget, we can ask people what they need. So often, we think we know what other people want and need, especially when we are stressed or worried about saying the right thing. We speak and stumble over our words until we are blue in the face without ever stopping to ask, “what do you need?”

People in helping professions such as lawyers, psychologists, etc., have a tendency to use a lot of words to explain and counsel their clients. Those words may be necessary, but they also often fall on deaf ears. Sometimes people are not ready to hear them. Sometimes they are simply unable to understand. Those words become hollow words, even when we mean them to bring peace. The Buddha is not saying that these hollow words are bad or wrong or improper. But they do not serve the same purpose as one word that might bring peace.

Taking the time to stop and ask ourselves, and the listener as well, what it is that will bring peace in the moment, is a better use of the universe’s energy, and our own. It also forces us into the moment and forces us to create a deeper union with each other. That is how we create yoga. 

How can you bring a sense of union and peace to your words? Can we present a world of empathy and compassion where our words are designed to always bring peace to the listener? How would that world look to you?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Recognition is the First Step

In the last post, we discussed the concepts of Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Shock. At a conference I attended last week, a presenter called it Compassion Fatigue. That is a lot of names for the same issue. But what is it? And what does it have to do with you? Most importantly, how can we know if it is affecting us?

As I mentioned before, I had not heard of this concept until after I graduated from law school. I loved law school (seriously, I did), but I find it unconscionable that I managed to graduate never having heard of this concept. Lawyers are four times as likely to be depressed as the general population. I knew that statistic, but I did not understand why. Of course, part of the problem is the hours, but I think it actually has more to do with Vicarious Trauma and Compassion Fatigue.

This is burnout on an entirely different stage. Burnout is not a lesser form of vicarious trauma, but it is something different. The difference between them is what causes each of them. Burnout comes from overwork or from a lack of support. It comes from stress that never dissipates. Vicarious trauma originates in the repeated interactions with people experiencing trauma. While some of the symptoms may look similar between burnout and vicarious trauma because they are both stress responses, the symptoms of vicarious trauma also include those  associated with PTSD.

I am not, in any way, minimizing the effects of burnout. It is painful and difficult and can be just as awful as vicarious trauma. My point is simply that they are different in kind. It is possible, and common, to suffer from both, but recognizing how each is different helps us recognize how best to overcome them on their own terms. And here we are focusing on vicarious trauma. In many ways, this entire blog is about burnout. In this series, however, I want to stay focused on the issues associated with vicarious traums.

What makes vicarious trauma unique is the trauma. It is the constant, repeated exposure to other peoples’ trauma. The person experiencing vicarious trauma gets there by being empathetic. Too empathetic. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to put yourself in their situation. Too much empathy is wearing those shoes until the soles fall off. One of the first stages of compassion fatigue is an overzealous need to change the world. Sound familiar? That was the last post.

But overzealous leads to something else when we realize we cannot change the world overnight. And that’s the vicarious trauma. The symptoms follow many of the signs of primary trauma, though they are not always as intense . . . at first. Zealous excitement to change the world becomes cynicism, hopelessness and despair at the belief that change is possible. This leads to changes in our underlying belief structures, of ourselves, our family, our friends, and even our spirituality. Instead of believing we can change the world, we start believing we cannot change anything. 

Physiological signs include sleeplessness, irritability, guilt, anger, disgust, and fear. The downward spiral of email is a common side effect. Interestingly, someone with vicarious trauma experiences some PTSD-like symptoms including hyper arousal (at noise or startling events) and increased sensitivity to violence and other kinds of pain in the world. Watching the news becomes not mildly depressing but painful and nearly impossible.

And then this parade of horribles leads to relationship problems, social withdrawal, issues surrounding trust, and the favorite among lawyers – substance abuse! When your entire worldview is shattered by feeling that you cannot change anything, substances can numb the pain (alcohol) or keep you going long enough to keep on working, hoping you can get it back (cocaine and other stimulants). It starts to feel as though you never have time for yourself. You know you have to take care of yourself, but there is simply no time. There are other signs and symptoms, but these are the big ones.

But why? Where does all this originate? Why do these particular symptoms occur?

Cortisol! Once again, we are back to the fight-or-flight response. As I learned while being chased by a sea lion in New Zealand (hey, I had to add a bit of humor to this post), the fight-or-flight response is necessary to survival. We only exist because we respond to trauma with hypervigilance and what feels like superhuman strength. But we are not supposed to live in that state constantly. Cortisol and adrenaline shut down what are non-essential bodily functions. You know, digestion, rational thinking, creative thinking, and immunity. They do not sound too non-essential, do they? In their place, we get an increased heart rate, speedy and shallow breathing, and tensed up muscles. The natural cycle is to come down from that state, but vicarious trauma does not allow that natural cycle to occur. Instead, we live in that state of hyper-vigilance. And on top of the stress response, there is the fear response. Every sound freaks us out, and news reports bring us to tears. 

When our bodies live in that state, and continue to experience vicarious trauma, there is no coming down from it. And then it becomes a downward spiral. The lack of sleep precludes our bodies and minds from releasing the trauma, and then we need more stimulants to get us through each day, and then we retraumatize throughout the day, do not sleep, cannot release the trauma from the day before, and on, and on, and on.

Sound like someone you know? If you are interested, here is a link to a self-test you can take to see where you stand. Maybe you are not as bad off as you think. Maybe you are in a more heightened state of trauma. The key is knowing. Recognition is the first step.

The next post will be less of a downer and will offer some tips for overcoming vicarious trauma. But until then, do you see this in yourself? Do you see it in others?

Namaste!

"Recognition is the First Step" 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.

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved. 

My Way or the Highway

Law, especially litigation, is a world determined by sides and “facts.” I have mentioned these issues before (here and here), but today I want to focus on something that has come up repeatedly in my life recently, both in my office and on my yoga mat.

Lawyers like to be right. It seems that anyone who likes to argue “will make a good lawyer” to their parents. I guess this is a time for a little self-disclosure – that is what people said about me. So, arguing and holding onto positions is in our blood. In law school, lawyers are taught to see all sides of a situation, but out in the real world, we have to take positions . . . and we have to stick to them. We have to stick to them even when we disagree with them.

In addition to the courtroom, lawyers take positions by writing. We write emails to other lawyers, motions to the court, closing arguments when we have run out of time, and even sometimes articles and books. In all these written communications, we must take a position. The good news is that your thoughts and ideas can be disseminated more widely, but the less than good news is that those thoughts are in ink . . . forever.

At a conference several years ago, I was speaking to a psychologist, and I had made a point of disagreeing with something he had written in my law school note. We were discussing that particular area of disagreement, and he said something that has stuck with me forever. He said, “That is the problem with writing; it is there forever.” In other words, he had begun to disagree with himself. This is a man who is well known throughout the world for his work, and people love him or love to hate him. And here he was saying that he has evolved and changed over the years. For the record, in discussion, we understood one another and agreed on most aspects discussed. I have the utmost respect for him . . . even when we do sometimes continue to disagree.

Constantly being expected to take a particular position and stick to it creates patterns, or samskaras, in the brain. We learn to do nothing but stick to our guns and tell people, “it’s my way or the highway.” It makes it easier, sometimes inevitable, that we become less compromising. It is not necessarily a choice, but over time, it just becomes the way we see the world.

And lawyers are not alone in this. One of my yoga teachers (actually one of my first teachers), on Sunday, asked us all to tune back into that essence of trying to always be “right.” She, too, had such an encounter during the week. She asked us to look at how it impacts our relationships with ourselves and each other. Timing could not have been better in my life. That was a theme of my week this week. Longtime readers will know that I just returned from New Zealand where I wrote a thesis on a new model for representing children. Now I represent children. Anyone else see a potential butting of the proverbial heads?

And this week it happened. The discussion about the proper model came to me front and centre (I take myself back to NZ when I can through spelling). Not surprisingly, someone disagreed with me. My model for representing children is definitely controversial, so this was not entirely unexpected.

And an amazing thing happened for me. I was okay with the disagreement. I was a bit upset. Of course I would like people to agree. But I stepped back, and I learned a lot from the conversation. I felt a little downtrodden – all that work on a thesis for naught? Really? But then I read a blog post that brought me back to my purpose by none other than my cousin writing about her 3-year-old son’s first imaginary friend. And then I went to the yoga class where this ebb and flow of relationships through being “right” was the theme du jour. I still think my model will work, but I do not see it as the only model.

There is no question that I like to be right, and I like when people agree with me. Not only am I a lawyer, but it is ingrained in us in society. But over time, through yoga, it has become easier for me to accept other points of view, to hold them, and to listen to them. Am I perfect at it? Absolutely not! There was some intensity in my discussion earlier in the week. But each encounter where we hold the entire story begins to create a new brain pattern, a new samskara, and we can begin to explore the world from all points of view.

Of course, it can also lead to caving on your position all the time, but that is a post for another day.

Where do you notice your “my way or the highway” approach to life? How do you respond when people disagree with a position you hold and believe is fundamental? Does it matter how much you care about your position?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

The Body as Storage, or Confronting Trauma

My travels have finally stopped for a bit, and I have found a few yoga classes I like. It feels good to be getting back into the groove of a more “normal” life. By normal, I mostly mean that I stay at home on the weekends and can actually do some errands. It also means I can start attending yoga classes more regularly. My daily practice has, once again, become daily, and it feels wonderful. But there is something differently wonderful about attending a class. Sometimes they are not everything I hope they will be, but sometimes they hit me just where I need. This Sunday’s class was one such class.

The teacher started class by reminding us that we hold emotions in our bodies. She said, and I am paraphrasing to the best of my memory, “Each traumatic experience we have is stored in our body, and it can come back to us at any moment.” Think muscle memory and brain patterns. The body literally holds onto experiences until we let them go. Of course, this is just as true for joyful memories as it is for traumatic ones. People have been known to laugh or cry hysterically in yoga “for no reason.” The reason, however, is the body remembering the occasion and bringing it back to the surface.

This is something I think about all the time on my own (some would, perhaps, say too often). In the class, however, we went together into the pain we hold in our bodies. The teacher asked us to face the fear we hold in our bodies. Generally, the only classes I attend where we consciously go deep into long-held postures and really confront the body’s depths are restorative and yin classes. I love both those types of classes. In Sunday’s class, however, we held Warrior 1 and Triangle for long periods. We did not hold them for five minutes, but we definitely held them for longer than is generally typical.

While I certainly have my own hip / low-back issues to address, I found myself thinking throughout class about my clients. With the reminder that every traumatic experience we have is stored in our body’s muscle memory, my mind turned to my clients who, by definition, have experienced some sense of trauma, and many of them have experienced a significant amount of it. My clients range in age from 17 days to 17 years. All of them have trauma.

And then my mind turned to the lawyers with whom I work, and the rest of the people who work within the legal system generally, whether lawyers, staff, social workers, psychologists. More and more people recently have become aware of the concept known as Secondary Shock or Vicarious Trauma, in which people in helping professions experience the trauma of their clients vicariously through them. The only difference is that when trauma is experienced secondhand, we do not always recognize it for what it is. The body can tell no difference, but our minds, for whatever reason, think there is one.  

I asked myself what I can do to help these people who hold so much in their bodies and have no idea. My mind wandered to my infant clients born into this world in even more trauma than typical of birth (birth, of course, being a traumatic experience for everyone). It then wandered to my clients who have chosen life on the streets because, as they say in their own words, they don’t know any different.

Of course, this blog is the step I took to try to bring awareness to these issues. I do not see this being my only confrontation of this topic on this blog. It is not only important; it is vital that we learn about it and talk about it. But what about today? What about the people who have no internet access or the people who know nothing about yoga. I take my yoga-ness with me everywhere, on some level. I have talked to clients and others about breathing and walking away at times.

But then I remember the trauma. I remember all they have experienced. All I can do in those moments is hope, pray, and believe that the human spirit and consciousness is greater than the sum of its parts, and that everyone and anyone is capable of overcoming anything they have experienced in life.

I have said before that I believe yoga is for everyone. It does not take a particular level of fitness, calm, flexibility, or even time. It does, however, take a desire to start. Sometimes living life through a yoga lens means seeing all the people who have not yet seen its beauty. I do not think yoga is the answer for everyone, but I wish more people were able to find their answer.

Where do you notice the tension being stored? Have you ever experienced unannounced emotion in a yoga class?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

When we Dehumanize the Dehumanizer

I think there is one thing upon which most people with whom I interact, and probably you as well, can agree: child abuse is bad. We may not always agree on what point discipline becomes abuse, but I am willing to bet that when a child arrives at a hospital with retinal hemorrhages and brain hemorrhages, the line has definitely been crossed. The conference I attended this week focused on such injuries, and it forced me to confront an issue that has been boiling below the surface for me for years. 

Where I tend to disagree with most people with whom I work is what we think of the person who caused the abuse.

Working in child welfare again has reminded me how quick we are to judge, how quick we are to throw people under the bus when we think they are monsters who can dehumanize innocent children.

But why does that give us the right to dehumanize them? Dehumanizing others, while convenient, takes its toll on your own humanity. That, however, is a topic for the next post.  Here I want to focus on what we do to others.

I am the last person who is going to say that it is okay for someone to harm a child. I am the last person who is going to defend actions that lead to hospital trips and very often the morgue. The actions, yes, are abhorrent. But my first response to that is, what happened to the person who did it such that he or she got to the point where abuse occurred? What was his or her life like? Someone like that needs our compassion, not our judgment.

I know there are people in the world who believe that someone who can abuse a child cannot be rehabilitated. I know there are people who believe they are monsters who should be locked away forever. But how is there any chance of someone changing if the rest of us believe it is absolutely impossible? I refuse to give up hope. Many people have told me that more time working in this field will knock that idealism out of me. They think that with enough time seeing the horrifying nature of some people, that I will go to their side.

But they do not understand the power of the yoga and all it has taught me over the years.

Just like the last post, I am not sure I have an answer to this dilemma, but I do know that I refuse to dehumanize anyone. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Jesus said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” None of us are perfect, and if we attack each other, we destroy life and go blind. We are all connected, and destroying anyone in that connection destroys a piece of us. I want to ensure we can all see clearly.

Law school tried to beat the humanity out of many of us. We are asked to be “rational” and think about how evidence is relevant to the law, ignoring how it is relevant to people. We live in a world where corporations are considered people. Our concept of humanity is skewed. I have little doubt of that anymore.

But yoga gives us the space to come back to that sense of humanity. Perhaps you are not ready to see someone who abuses a child as a fellow human being, albeit one who needs some serious help (and to stay away from children until receiving that help), but are you willing to see opposing counsel as a fellow human being? What about the client on the other side of the case? What about your political rival? What about someone who disagrees with you about gay marriage or taxing the rich?

I know these ideas are controversial, but I strongly believe that if we do not have these discussions, we are going to continue down the road to destruction of all of us. And I think it is one of the most important lessons yoga can teach us, especially those of us being asked through our jobs to dehumanize, whether that dehumanization is of a child abuser or just the lawyer across the street. 

And what if your act of humanizing someone else allows them to pay it forward? What if we all treated each other with humanity? Could that eventually stop the abuse? Could that eventually allow us all to see clearly? I believe it can.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

Ten Years On . . . Holding Community

I know the internet is full of commentary about September 11, and the 10-year anniversary. To be honest, I did not want to add to it. But then my heart told me I must. On my blog about my life in New Zealand, I wrote about the odd feeling of the world coming together for the Rugby World Cup, yet feeling like an outsider as an American in New Zealand on the anniversary of that day. Ironically, the United States Eagles Rugby team plays its first match on 9/11, though I guess it will only be 9/10 back in the United States. Still, something does not feel right about that. Here is an interesting link to two of the players discussing playing on the anniversary.

Ten years ago, I was a sophomore in college. I had never done yoga. I swore I would never be a lawyer. I embodied everything about stress and had not experienced the world outside US borders for more than three weeks. Since that day, yoga and the law have come to dominate my life, and I have lived abroad for nearly two years. I spent 6 months in Aix-en-Provence, France (during which time the United States invaded Iraq) and 7 months in Dreux, France (during which time the United States reelected President Bush), and now eight months and counting in New Zealand (during which time the United States killed Osama Bin Laden).  

So what, you ask? What does all of this have to do with yoga? What does it have to do with law? What does it have to do with living a more balanced life in the modern world? Everything!

The attacks on September 11, 2001 have defined the vast majority of my adult life. The death of Osama Bin Laden showed me just how tense and scared that time has been. Yoga has taught me much over the past 9+ years, but one of the most profound lessons has been that we must recognize the interconnectedness of humanity. On this blog, I have discussed this as community. Ironically, on this 9/11 anniversary I feel more alone than I have ever felt (this is the first time I have been away from the United States on 9/11).

A part of me yearns to be among many other Americans, rather than 2 or 3, who remember that day. A part of me yearns to tell my friends here, whether Kiwi, Malaysian, English, or Argentinean, how confused and vulnerable I felt, we all felt. A part of me yearns to explain how that fear became misguided arrogance, but that I also felt relief, sadness, and again confusion, when Osama Bin Laden was killed.

But I hear the responses before I open my mouth. I hear people remind me about Guantanamo. I hear people remind me about the drone attacks in Pakistan. I hear people remind me about the tens of thousands of civilians (and military) that have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I do not know how to express that I see both visions to people in each camp. 

I do not know if people are willing to accept that there are layers and layers to these stories and that sharing them does not mean that any other layer is less important. Few people seem willing to hold the many layers. Few people are willing to struggle and see that no single vision is “right.”

I do not remember if I cried on September 11, 2001. I would like to think I did, but shock and confusion may have prevented it. But yoga has also taught me to open, and trust, my heart. It has taught me to truly feel what others feel, from the jubilation of the Rugby World Cup opening to the pain and horror that people describe in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. I have learned to see fear spiral into its own unimaginable consequences of war and destruction. But that does not mean the fear is not palpable and real. The vision of the planes flying into the Twin Towers now brings tears nearly every time. But so does the vision of Iraqis. So does the thought of the soldiers who have died. All of these events are tragic in their own right.

This theme of being “right” has made its way onto this blog before, as a play on words about being careful before crossing the street in New Zealand where they drive on the “wrong” side of the road. But this time the stakes are higher. This time it means understanding that September 11, 2001 was an awful day. It means understanding that other countries experience their own horrors and war on a daily basis. It means understanding that the United States has made many mistakes over the past 10 years.

Recognizing all of these does not undermine any of them. Disaster breeds community. We saw it on 9/11/2001. We saw it after the Christchurch and Japanese earthquakes. We see it anytime some event shocks us out of our sleep and reminds us that we are connected and together. I hope that this anniversary can remind us of the next step in that process. There is no single story to explain who we are and no single story to explain any event.

Some days it is nearly impossible to hold all these stories, to hold onto so many different visions of the world. But that is when yoga provides its most important, and simplest lesson; come back to the breath. Come back to the breath and let the thoughts and craziness swirl around the head for a moment. Then let it settle. At the end of the day, we do not need to make sense of it all. We simply need to remember that we are all in this together, ready to share our stories.

I hope this time of reflection provides you with a feeling of community and a little bit of peace. I hope we can hear each others’ stories and hold them all with a sense of togetherness and comfort. I hope we can remember that when we think we cannot hear another layer that we remember to come back to the breath and remember that we can, and will, grow together.

Namaste!

© 2011 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

The fallible mind

As I mentioned in the last post about where we store our memories, today I want to explore the reliability of our memories. Does anyone remember the beginning of thefacebook.com? Remember the days when you not only had to have a college email address to use it, but only certain universities were eligible? It was a big deal to have an account on thefacebook.com. I distinctly remember being a little sad that I could not get an account because I had let my University of Michigan email address lapse after graduation, and the University of Arizona (where I attended law school) was not one of the “elite” universities. Bummer. Yep, I remember being at the University of Arizona without a facebook account. I remember it like it was yesterday.

Of course, this memory is factually incorrect. My friend remembers using facebook with me when I lived in France, which was before I went to Arizona. She was so certain that she went all the way back to 2004 on her wall to make sure. She was right; she found a post from me while I was in France.

But what about that memory of mine? It may seem trite to use a memory about facebook on a blog post about the fallibility of memory, but unfortunately it is my clearest “incorrect” memory.

Can our memories be so fallible? Are we really unable to trust what we “know” to be true? The answer is a perfect lawyer answer – it depends. We have known for years that eyewitness testimony can be very unreliable, but few of us have turned that knowledge on ourselves to ask whether our own memories are true.

One psychologist who has studied the fallibility of memory for decades had the table turned when her uncle informed her that it was she who discovered her mother dead in a pool when she was a child. The death, which she had repressed for years, started to come back, the memories of finding her mother floating in the pool, began to flood her daily thoughts, but then her brother called to say their uncle had been mistaken; someone else had found her mother. So where had the “memories” of finding her mother originated? If this can happen to a woman who studies these issues, it could happen to any of us.

Think about your memories from childhood. Do you remember them, or has the story become family lore, and with the story, the memory embeds itself into your mind? Think about the stories you tell over and over again. Has anyone ever told you that you used to tell it differently, that you now embellish it?

But then the question becomes – does it even matter? What is true for you remains true for you. I still remember not having a facebook account until I was in law school. But now I’m starting to second guess it . . .

Certainly this is an issue when we talk about repressed memories and whether they are real, but that is not the point of this post. Memory is our definition of our Self. It is our history. It is what we think makes us . . . well, us. To think that our memory might be incorrect is to think that we are not who we think we are. That is a big suggestion and one that many of us are not willing to accept, even if there is evidence “proving” us wrong.

This is where yoga can help. What is another perspective of memory? What if we look at it as a pattern? It is a story we tell ourselves, a story that is sometimes grounded in fact, sometimes grounded in other peoples’ stories about a fact, and sometimes factually incorrect on all accounts. Yoga, as we have seen before, helps us recognize our patterns for what they are. Patterns, like memories, are neither good nor bad. They are simply our patterns. Memories are neither necessarily factual nor false. They are simply our memories. And as memories, they help make us who we are.

And just as some patterns can lead to destructive behaviors over time, holding onto memories that may not be based in reality can be harmful. This does not mean that we need to start distrusting our every thought and our happy memories of childhood Thanksgivings spent with our family. But it is important to understand that they might be false, and that if someone has a different narrative of the same event, that their story might also be true. And yoga helps give us the ability to reflect. It gives us the tools for learning how to question our past, and recognize that what we remember is our own reality, but it may not be based in an external reality. The awareness of our bodies, our breath, and our mind, that come from yoga is the first step to seeing our memories as something that may be just a pattern.

Once we begin to recognize this in ourselves, we can use it as a path for empathy and compassion for others, but that is a topic to be explored in the next post.

How about you? Do you have any memories that you have since learned are false? Do you have any memories that are the result of family lore or a family photo? Are you willing to believe that what you believe may not be fact? Do you think it matters?

Namaste!

© 2011 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

Being upside down

While this blog does not specifically focus on asana (yoga postures), I am trying to put more explanation of asana in as a way to ground the blog in some various ideas. Thus, I have talked about Vrksasana (tree pose) and Tadasana (mountain pose), and today I want to talk about inversions and being upside down.

Today is the Autumn Equinox in New Zealand, yet in the northern hemisphere, it is the Spring Equinox. This is the first change of seasons I have experienced on the underbelly of the Earth. What does this mean for yoga? For law? For life?  It means that once again my life feels turned upside down.

Being upside down forces us to see the world from a different point of view. It helps us understand that our way of seeing the world is not necessarily right, but sometimes we have to “look right” to realize that. The other night, I took a walk to see the glorious full moon, and as I looked up at the sky, it looked slightly different – I could see the Southern Cross constellation, which is only visible from the southern hemisphere. This is really the only visual reminder of being in the southern hemisphere, but it is stark, and that is why it graces the flags of both New Zealand and Australia.

In a typical yoga class (aka not too advanced), teachers will often teach two different inversions – salamba sarvangasana (shoulderstand) and sirshasana (headstand). Technically, though, an inversion is any pose where your head is below your heart, so even uttanasana (standing forward bend) is an inversion. Thus, inversion postures are not necessarily physically demanding, and their health benefits are almost too numerous to recite. By forcing blood to flow upstream, so to speak, we aid our immune systems, improve digestion, calm the nervous system, relieve back pain, improve circulation, and perhaps most important for lawyers and modern westerners – reduce dis-stress. To put it bluntly, inversions are good for the body.

Inversions are also good for the mind, and much more so than just relieving the chronic stress that runs so many of our lives. Inversions are one of the best paths to learning empathy, to learning to understand others and their points of view. As previously noted, empathy is “Identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives.” Contagious yawning occurs as a result of our ability to empathize, and a recent study found that children do not begin to yawn when others around them do until about age 4. Empathy, therefore, is something we learn, something that we can cultivate within us.

Inversions help us cultivate empathy by literally forcing us to see the world from a different perspective. We step out of our comfort zones and look at the world through a new set of eyes, often with blood rushing to our brains making us feel for a moment like we might lose our senses, but then realizing that we are safe, and we can just be there. When we breathe into inversions, they are calming, and we can learn that even when life seems like it is going to rush to our brains and kill our sense of understanding, we can be calm within it. We can breathe, and we can even find empathy.

Looking up at the night sky and seeing the Southern Cross is a great reminder that sometimes life throws you upside down without you expecting it, but cultivating the ability to hold that space, breathe, and then using the time to understand how others might react is a step toward increasing our mutual understanding and limiting the occurrences of the downward spiral of email.

What have inversions taught you? What is your favorite inversion?

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.

A New Hope

No, the title is not another shameless Star Wars reference - it is a shameless reference to President Barak Obama and the hope that he helped inspire from the tragedy that rocked Tucson (my adopted home).

He said, “We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.” He implored us to tune into and find our true empathy.

I have never brought politics into this blog, nor do I hope to ever do it, but yesterday, before the speech, as I was walking along the streets of San Francisco, I was thinking how best to write about all that has happened in the media, in our lives, in politics, since Saturday, without being political. Well, the President answered that question, and it goes right back to where I was in the blog before Saturday - The Downward Spiral of Email.

This downward email spiral is the non-political version of the vitriol we have experienced these past few days. It can only occur when we allow ourselves to believe that the person to whom we are writing the email is divided from us, in whatever way. In order to speak ill of another, we must see him as “the other.” This is becoming all too easy, especially when we have the screen between us and them.

So, what can we do to counteract this? We can take the President’s advice - empathy. According to the Free Online Dictionary (hey, don’t hate, it was the most comprehensive definition in my Google results), empathy is “Identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives.” For a brief moment, if we place ourselves into someone else’s situation and ask about their motivation, but more importantly, their circumstances.

We have a few options when we receive those emails, or see the civil discourse getting out of hand around us. We can respond in kind, and carry the conversation down that path. We can ignore it and just respond with “facts,” bottling up the tension, hurt, and anger until the next email sends us overboard. We can also respond to the person and ask about the circumstances.

If we start from the point of view that President Obama provides - that we are all full of decency - it becomes easier to respond to these situations with more openness. A simple, “I did not realize that I offended you with my words, here is what I meant,” or “Did you mean for me to interpret this email in X manner, you are usually not like that” can immediately shift the conversation.

There is enough non-civil discourse in this world. There is enough caustic speech. Yoga gives us the tools to stop and reflect, to see that how we affect others greatly influences how they affect us and how we interact with ourselves. Yoga teaches us to respond and not react. If every person made the choice to treat others with love and compassion and empathy, we would not only begin to understand each other, we would begin to change the downward spiral into an upward one. How would your day look different if instead of sending a nasty response, or thinking a nasty thought, you reached out and tried to bridge the divide?

Tucson, Arizona, and the entire country have come together in the wake of this disaster, but let us not only find this community when disaster strikes. Building this everyday, in every moment, is how we change the world. Let us choose to treat one another with the love and compassion that creates community everyday.

Namaste and Blessings.

© 2011 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved