Road to the Ranch by George O’Keefe

by Nina

Yoga has helped me through everything—divorce, widowhood, financial disaster, and so on. I never thought about it like that because I’ve practiced yoga (not just asana) for over fifty years so it’s like breathing.

—Beth Gibbs, yoga therapist and author

I don’t know about you, but these days I sometimes I feel like a little kid in the backseat of a car on a long journey heading Back to Normal that never seems to end.  Once in a while, I ask, “Are we there yet?” And not only is the answer always, no, not yet, but these days my adult self has some challenging news for my inner child: It looks like we might need to give up entirely on Back to Normal and start heading for a new destination instead, New Normal, a place we’ve never been before. To be honest, my inner child is crying over this. But my adult self is managing to feel pretty grounded and has been able to comfort my inner child with stories about impermanence—the nature of life in the material world—and to offer my inner child practices that can help her adapt to and accept change.

You see, when I was writing my book Yoga for Times of Change, I spent a lot of time thinking about how yoga can help us with this very dilemma of a world turned upside down by a pandemic as well as many other changes we all experience throughout our lives. So today I thought I’d share my conclusions about how yoga can help you adapt to and accept change in case you need some ideas for things to try to help yourself get through these challenging times.

I wrote my book because I believe that yoga is especially powerful for helping you adapt to changes because it includes both ancient and modern techniques that enable you to move back into balance when you’re experiencing challenges and to fortify yourself for the future. And the large number of options allows you to choose the poses and practices that work best for you, for your particular needs and in your particularly situation.

Here are the main ways that yoga can help you move back into balance when changes big or small are throwing you off:

  • Choosing yoga poses to balance you. Various yoga poses can affect your moods, stress levels, and energy levels in different ways. When you’re experiencing feelings of stress, anger, anxiety, depression, or grief, you can choose poses to relax you, uplift you, quiet you, stimulate you, or release your pent-up energy or emotion. And the poses themselves can easily be adapted to your current physical abilities and energy levels. See Balancing Your Emotional Body With Counter-Poses.
  • Selecting breath practices to balance you. Yoga’s breath practices provide you with a key to your nervous system, allowing you to calm yourself, balance yourself, or stimulate yourself when you want to stabilize yourself during times of change. That in turn can help you regulate your moods. See Breath Practices (Pranayama): The Big Picture.
  • Meditating to quiet your mind. Yoga’s concentration style of meditation provides you with the ability to quiet your mind as well as to reduce your stress levels. The deep peace you experience during practice can be a refuge that you can rely on during times of change. See All Good But Not Equivalent: Meditation Types.
  • Using yoga’s guiding principles to help you make skillful decisions. The yamas, yoga’s ethnical guidelines for conducting yourself in all your relationships, within your community, and with the world at large, are all intended to help you live with greater equanimity and can guide you in making decisions that will reduce your own suffering as well as that of others. See The First Branch of Yoga: The Yamas.

As important as it is to adapt to change, learning to accept change is essential for staying calm and steady through the ups and downs of life. People who refuse to accept that change is an intrinsic part of life will always suffer because when what they were hoping for doesn’t happen or when they find they can no longer do things the way they used to, they may end up “fighting” against their new reality instead of adapting to it. I think we all saw examples of that throughout the pandemic and after the 2020 U.S. election. But when you make peace with change, you not only experience greater contentment, you’re also able to pivot as needed to accommodate whatever your future holds.

Here are the main ways that yoga can help you learn to be content with whatever is arising and to move through times of change with more equanimity and contentment:

  • Practicing yoga poses mindfully. Practicing yoga poses with awareness— and without judgment—teaches you to listen to what’s going on with you mentally, emotionally, and physically on any given day and to let go of attachments to what you think you should be experiencing. See Coming to Your Senses in Yoga Poses.
  • Using breath practices and meditation to be present. Both of these train you to be present as you practice, a skill you can then bring into your everyday life. During times of change, being present helps you respond skillfully to what is happening in the moment rather than focusing on what you’ve lost or panicking about the future. See Breath Practices (Pranayama): The Big Picture and All Good But Not Equivalent: Meditation Types.
  • Meditating to learn about your thought patterns. Observing your thought patterns during meditation can teach you about your automatic reactions to changes both big and small and help you to learn about which of your thoughts are actually untrue or are not serving you. During times of change, this understanding can help you to let go of habitual thoughts that cause you suffering and to adopt new points of view that foster more contentment. See All Good But Not Equivalent: Meditation Types.
  • Meditating to foster positive emotions. Focusing on cultivating a particular feeling in your meditation, such as compassion, gratitude, joy, forgiveness, or relaxation, can train your mind and heart to respond with those feelings more often in your daily life. This not only increases your personal happiness, but also improves your relationships and encourages you to take actions to help others. See All Good But Not Equivalent: Meditation Types.
  • Using yogic tools to work with your thoughts and emotions. Yoga provides tools to allow you to listen to your emotions and thoughts and to respond skillfully to them. Responding skillfully can include taking actions to help yourself or others or using yogic tools to let go of thoughts and emotions that aren’t serving you. This can help you navigate more adeptly through life’s transitions and times of change. See Letting Go, Part 1 and Part 2.
  • Studying yoga philosophy. Learning about yoga philosophy provides you with alternative ways of thinking about your life, enabling you to be more content with what you have and what you don’t have, and to become more comfortable with change. This in turn can make you a better citizen of the world. To find our many posts on yoga philosophy, simply search on “yoga philosophy.”

These general topics will all covered in detail in my forthcoming book Yoga for Times of Change: Practices and Meditations for Stress, Anxiety, Grief & Life’s Transitions, which will be released on May 24, 2022. In the meantime, if you’re having trouble adjusting to the idea of a New Normal, I hope this list and the articles I linked to provide you with some new ideas for things to try to help yourself get through these challenging times.

 

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