Inside Yoga 201 (18/4/2017)

None of us like feeling anxious, fearful, angry and stressed, and many of us beat ourselves up for being like this, but what might have escaped us while feeling low and bad is that these are normal thoughts and feelings… if we first understand human nature before finding a solution.

Recently, I read Ruby Wax’s book on Mindfulness (see blog https://www.yogabristol.co.uk/2017/03/17/ruby-puts-a-shine-on-mindfulness/ )
in which she writes that our instincts are the root of our problems with for example feeling happy and being depressed. As other mammals in the wild our instinct is to survive, so we are always on the lookout for danger. She says: “There’s this endless search for happiness, but let me ruin your day by telling you that we are in fact natural-born pessimists because, that way, we keep the species going. We have to be ready for danger. This is why we have a leaning to the negative rather than the rosy.”

A famous comic often said “it’s the way I tell ’em” and this is what Ruby did here, straight to the point, she said, “we are in fact natural-born pessimists”.

We give ourselves a hard time because we indulge our pessimism when we think there must be something wrong when we feel anxious or worried, but the truth is we might have a situation to deal with and our body/mind is warning us to be on guard, cue anxiety, worry or anger, and we misinterpret the signal for the problem building that up instead of dealing with the situation. And this then leads to chronic anxiety, stress, depression or uncontrollable anger.

Putting it another way, there’s an allegory which says that “when a hand is pointing at the moon we should be looking at the moon not the hand”. Here we are so busy looking at the hand we are missing what is going on with the moon.

In our routine, which often feels safe and predictable, we still get these warning signals because as Ruby says we are naturally on guard but we have forgotten to recognise the signals. We are unaware that these horrible feelings are there to make either fight or fly – in other words we are meant to rise to the challenge and find a solution.

Author Douglas Abrams, in “The Book of Joy” – with the Dalia Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in conversation, he writes that “It turns out that our perspective has a surprising amount of influence over the body’s stress response. When we turn a threat into a challenge, our body responds very differently.”

Abrams writes about the findings of psychologist Elissa Epel: “our stress response evolved to save us from attack or danger, like a hungry lion or a falling avalanche. Cortisol and adrenalin course into our blood. This causes our pupils to dilate so we can see more clearly, our heart and breathing to speed up so we can respond faster, and the blood to divert from our organs to our large muscles so we can fight or flee. This stress response evolved as a rare and temporary experience, but for many in our modern world, it is constantly activated.”

He continues: “The problem is not the existence of stressors, which cannot be avoided; stress is simply the brain’s way of signalling that something is important. The problem – or perhaps the opportunity – is how we respond to this stress.”

As a remedy to this situation he says: “One simply notices the fight-or-flight stress response in one’s body – the beating heart, the pulsing blood or tingling feelings in our hands and face, the rapid breathing – the remembers that these are natural responses to stress and that our body is just preparing to rise to the challenge.”

The point here is to recognise that the sensations and thoughts we get might be there to help us face a challenge – and hopefully overcome it – and not to get caught up in the sensation.

Reb Anderson, a Zen master, said at a retreat I attend many years ago, that the Buddha taught “appropriate response” as opposed to a “reactive response”. This is what the above explanation is describing – that we find an appropriate response not a reactive action. For example, when feeling anxious we can become consumed by not wanting to feeling anxious metaphorically or actually walking in circles saying repeatedly I don’t like this, I hate this, and so on. When we need to be seeing what can be done to rid ourselves of these fight-or flight feelings.

In some cases we will know why we feel the way we do. So we then address the situation and take steps to solving it, however, what we need to be able to do is switch off the stress when the time and place we are in is not the time or place to take action. For example, we have a meeting to go to which is worrying us, we have planned our strategy and approach, but the meeting is not until tomorrow. We have to find a way to not think about it until then which can be hard but this is where all the lessons in meditation are useful. Remember to breathe and focus on just your breathing and body while you keep thinking about the dreaded meeting. And you keep doing this, until you have stopped thinking about it. Alternatively, we often divert ourselves, with more work, a run in the park (but do we keep thinking about the meeting) or we get drunk?

There is another scenario which can cause us trouble, which is called “non-descript” anxiety, worry or stress. We feel crap and worried but we do not know why? This situation can cause more grief than the above scenario, because the former has a clear source of problem and outcome. If we label the feelings and thoughts as “non-descript” sadness, anger, anxiety and so forth, we are giving it an identity which we can then remove… we can disarm its negative effects by nipping in the bud the need to know why we feel so bad. Looking for the source is not always useful or beneficial, so we practice to drop the thoughts and concentrating on returning to state of balance and calm.

There is a Buddhist tale which describes a person walking in a wood who is suddenly struck by an arrow. This person has no idea who shot the arrow or why. The practical response is to first deal with the wound and make it better, and not lie there bleeding to death while trying to work our who shot the arrow, why the arrow was shot, and then where was the arrow bought and made, and so forth?

When an animal in the wild is suddenly on alert, anxious and worried, ready for fight-or-flight, if the source of the threat is not clear the animal will not waste time trying to solve that riddle, it would run. Similarly, often we don’t need to know why feel worried/anxious/stressed but we do need to do something to feel safer and more relaxed again.

This is yet another reason why I keep coming back to the same message: this is where yoga practice helps, because by immersing yourself in yoga asanas, seated meditation, breathing exercises, or all of this, we can move ourselves both physically and emotionally into a balanced calm place.

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