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.

Creating Stability

"Our American friends were absolutely petrified. We were all as one in a moment under the table." -- Auckland Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive talking about the Americans he was with at lunch on Tuesday in Christchurch as part of the NZ-US Partnership Forum

As I said in the last post, I was in Christchurch during the huge earthquake that hit. Here is a link to another, more personal, look at what we can take away from that experience, and what I took away. But here I want to focus on the world of professionals and modern life.

I love the quote above as much because of who said it as what he said. I think the first sentence is almost humorous, having been with several Americans who did not know what to do in an earthquake and all of us trying to get them under a table (I grew up in CA), though I was not with the man who said that at that moment. But the second sentence is what is really important.

It seems so long ago that I posted about "The Downward Spiral of Email," but it was less than two months ago. That post was about an article in the American Bar Association e-Journal about lawyers attacking one another by email to the point where one attacked the other’s child and his intelligence. 

Since that post, Gabrielle Giffords was shot, I moved across the Pacific, and a major earthquake led the Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive in the largest NZ city to say, “We were all as one in a moment under that table.” In the not-to-recent past, such a comment would have been only heard from a hippie and ridiculed by the business/legal community. But then stability was lost and a new paradigm opened.

Lawyers and other professionals have a tendency to work very, very hard, at the expense of their health, their families, and their happiness.  The stress and need to win, especially for lawyers, leads to the ability to see the “other” side as somehow lesser, as someone to whom you can send nasty emails. The stress also leads to disease. Sometimes people get very, very sick.

How many times have you heard about someone who worked 60-80 hours per week, got a deadly disease and realized that life was not about the work? How many times have you heard about people being in a natural disaster and realizing that life is worth more than all their possessions? How many times have you heard about tragedy and disaster and sickness bringing people and communities together?

Disease, disaster, and tragedy are wake-up calls. They force us to see life in a new way, and we realize, perhaps without acknowledging it, that the definition of yoga, “to yoke/unite” is really what matters. We must all come together as one. We must live our lives to help each other. The US-NZ Partnership Forum was, in many ways, a trade conference. The main delegation consisted of business and political leaders from both countries discussing how to increase cooperation between the two countries.

It took an earthquake, however, for one of those leaders to stop and say, “we were all one.” But he went on to say, “for a moment.” Why? Do we only wake up to our oneness in disaster? Do we only learn to care for ourselves and others when disease and tragedy strike?

No.

We have an opportunity, with all that is happening in the world, from Gabby Giffords to Christchurch, from Queensland to Libya, from Egypt to Wisconsin, to carry our unity and oneness forward. In fact, we have an obligation. We can choose to go down the spiral of nasty emails, or we can choose to recognize that our health and our lives and our togetherness are far more important than anything that can happen in the courtroom or the boardroom. It might be petrifying for a moment, but once we are all under the table together, we are one, and we can hold each other in that space and grow together, in business and in life.

After all, it is always about community. What can you do to increase your community today?

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.

Are you united?

I just realized that I have been writing this blog for several months now, but I have failed to consider what the word yoga really means and why that matters. So here goes. Yoga means "to yoke." It has also been translated as "union," which is probably a more pertinent word in the 21st century. In real words, this means that yoga is about bringing parts of ourselves together, and then bringing the external and internal words together. It is about bringing balance to our physical selves, and taking that balance into our lives. Using the imagery of yoking, yoga helps keep us together. When my life sometimes feels overwhelming, and I have too much to do, I find that yoga helps me rein everything in, hold it together, and create harmony within my life. Not always, but yoga always makes helps me work to obtain the more perfect union.

Growing up in the YMCA, this same idea was represented by a triangle, with the sides signifying Spirit, Mind, and Body. The triangle balanced on its point, representing the balance between the three. That triangle has always stuck with me, and it guides my ideas about yoga today - uniting spirit, mind, and body. Yoga helps make that point possible and helps keep the triangle from falling over.

But how do we take this idea of uniting into our professional lives? Sometimes it is called work-life balance, how we unite our home lives with our professional lives. When we yoke in all the aspects of our lives, we can work from a place of stability. Yoga can help us find the balance between carpools, court appearance, grocery shopping, client visits, and oh yeah, sleep. This blog is about that union. It is about bringing yoga and the law, yoga and the modern world, together. As I open up more to this idea, I have found that, at work, yoga is more respected, and I'm overjoyed about that. I have a nagging suspicion that my lawyer friends think all I talk about is yoga, and my yoga friends think all I talk about is being a lawyer. Both worlds, so different, yet so important to who I am. But I have struggled with how to unite them, how to express the true essence of yoga.

I went to law school in order to help children (long story for another day). I was not sure that I wanted to practice law, but I found myself fascinated by it, including areas of the law I never dreamed I would enjoy - contracts and business entities. I fell in love with constitutional law, and I refused to miss my Separation of Powers class even for important meetings. In other words, I was hooked on the law in general, but I still wanted to do work with children. I currently work at the Court of Appeals, and one of the many reasons I wanted to work there was to see all aspects of the legal profession at work, to make sure I was not determining my professional future based on ideas I had when I was 16. 

But my current job offered me another opportunity - time. That is something lawyers rarely have. I work 8-5 - perfect for obtaining a yoga teacher certification at night. And as the months of no sleep and yoga community mixed with sitting in a windowless office under florescent lights staring at a computer screen all day, I realized a new calling - bringing yoga to lawyers and eventually to other modern professionals. I know that yoga can make a difference in the workplace, and I want to be a part of that difference. 

But professionally, I have been more and more convinced that I really do want to do legal work on children's issues, and this week that dream came one step closer to coming true. I was awarded a scholarship and am going to spend ten months in New Zealand studying family law. My hope is to spend that time learning how New Zealand created a family law system that recognizes children's rights, helps families, and reduces conflict. Then I want to come back to the United States and help set up similar systems here. 

But I still want to teach yoga to lawyers. 

What to do? How about some yoga, some yoking and uniting?

It is time to bring all these ideas together, the passion to work for children's representation in the law, and the passion to help the legal profession function better with all that yoga can provide. So different you think? Not at all. The uniting force here is a desire to make the legal profession work for more people. I fell in love with the law in law school because it has the power to change lives for the better. I fell in love with yoga because it has the power to change lives for the better. Not so different anymore. A better system of family law could definitely benefit from yoga. I may not know how it will pan out, but both will happen.

Yoga is about union. Who is to say that we cannot take seemingly incompatible ideas and make them one? The true essence of yoga is to create a whole out of all these parts of ourselves. What areas of your life need some yoga, need some uniting? I bet they are more possible than you ever imagined!

Namaste and Blessings!