|
 I would love to hear your thoughts on the right use of negative emotions,
as they naturally arise in the course of yoga practice. Anger, in
particular, is incredibly powerful, and useful, in my opinion -- when it
arises naturally, spontaneously -- but I wonder how each of you, personally,
deals with negative emotions, when they come up. What tools do you
use? This is not something I tend to talk about a great deal in class
-- as I certainly don't want to ENCOURAGE you to cultivate negative emotions!
-- but it IS certainly an important aspect of a mature yoga practice. Forrest
Yoga and Kripalu, two schools with which I am not terribly familiar, have
done a great deal around the healing of past trauma through yoga, and I
wondered if any of you might have any thoughts to share on the subject
that might be helpful to me, as a student and teacher of yoga, and to everyone
else in class, as well. I'll send you my own thoughts on the subject
as I finish composing them; last week's practice focusing on the
Fire center brought up challenging emotions -- predictably centered around
the right-use of anger -- for many of you, so I thought it worth exploring
a bit, together.
Namaste,
Jamie
"
Brief answer re: negative emotions. I first learned yoga at Kripalu and
have done several retreats since. All-in-all, it's my favorite type
of yoga because of the focus on compassionate attention to both physical
and emotional components of practice. Yoga is one of the easiest ways
for me to access emotions that I really don't want to feel--primarily fear
and anger. Sadness also comes up on occasion. How do I deal w/ them? My main
strategy is gratitude; for me, it's so rare that I can actually feel fear (as
opposed to burying it), that I try hard to cherish the experience when
I have it in yoga. Second, I sometimes shift my attention so that
my main task becomes staying present to the emotion (rather than
staying in or coming out of the asana, for example). Third, of course,
is simply breathing, which helps me stay present. Over the years,
I've found that the more I can be present to emotions in yoga, the better
I am at identifying them and being present to them "off the mat"."
" I deal with anger in a very quiet way and keep it to myself most of the
time. I am not saying this is a good thing but it is what I mostly do.
emotions are something difficult for me to deal with. Probably people who
know me better will notice anger in my face so easily but not in my body
or expression, as i am quiet and introverted. There is that voice inside
me telling me: "it is ok, calm down, this is not a competition and
you just have to do as much as you can without comparing", "in
fact you will be still alive if you don't do any yoga so what is the problem
if you cannot do it?"."
"
It's still early days for me dealing with this issue in yoga. I'm afraid
I'm still a bit primitive when I get angry. Hypoglaecemia is an obvious
source of anger for me - well, it can induce or exacerbate anger, anyway.
Other sources of negativity and anger exist. For example, negativity about
what I can/can't do in yoga practice and anger about injuries I have. I
get unbelievably frustrated with injuries.
I really want to practice while I'm injured, but find it very difficult
to take it easy and, to be honest, rarely trust myself to practice at an
appropriate level when I'm in an injured state. I often doubt my judgement
over whether I should be doing specific poses/postures, and the intensity
I should be putting into them.
Like most people, I probably have a tendency to try and power-through angry
moments or times when I feel negative in exercise. I think I've carried
this to yoga from other sports I practiced, such as soccer and running,
where I'd harness anger and negative thought to drive myself on, through
injury or otherwise.
This is probably not a great approach to exercise, particularly when you're
carrying an injury. It actually does one more harm than good. Not only
physically, but also mentally. I realize the attitude won't take me very
far with yoga. Such an approach seems to be the antithesis of yoga.
So, it's a habit I'm trying to break. I'm trying to go a little easier
on myself in practice. When a negative thought/feeling comes into my head,
I try to focus on my breath and not force myself into a position that is
too challenging and likely to exacerbate an injury or insecurity.
I try to think through my anger. Chill out and maintain a happy outlook
throughout the class, laugh at myself, and not take things too seriously."
+++
"
anger: well, for me it starts with pain, usually in the quadriceps where
i'm weak, for example, when i bind in a side angle pose and have to hold
it for a long time. or hold a deep knee bend for a long time. (sorry,
i don't recall the sanskrit nomenclature.) but that's pretty superficial.
hmmm... i'm afraid i'm not going to be very insightful on this one. although
i guess physical or muscular "weakness" may correlate with emotional
weakness on some level. i'll think about that one more."
+++
" As for anger, I feel that anger and love are two sides of the same coin.
In so much that hurt and pain come are often a result of love, communication
and reconstruction are often the results of anger. So there is a place
and a time. Like all emotions love and anger need to be harnessed, not
suppressed but harnessed and used constructively. They are incredible forms
of energy. Anger can solve short term problems, but is not effective in
the long run because it is almost impossible to sustain and be healthy.
But that does not mean it does not have purpose.
I find it interesting that anger is labeled negative, when it is just energy,
what you do with it can be either positive or negative. Unfortunately it
often manifests in negative behavior but with positive results.
Yoga practice or any form of exercise is a must for people who are prone
to anger, or unable to process or understand the source of their anger
even if that practice (or sport) at times brings up that very anger. There
has to be a physical release of the energy somehow or they body will begin
to succumb to the stress and pressure of being angry."
"
Karla McLaren has a set of tapes called Emotional Genius where she does
a genuine job of pointing people towards using their emotional body as
a tool to communicate with the soul or spirit of oneself. She finds
(and as I have easily applied her teachings to the massive amount of emotional
energy my body has been producing, I find them to be true..) She finds
that each of the emotions offers a kind of lesson, or points to an issue. Sadness
asks the question of 'What is there to let go of?' Fear asks 'What action
needs to be taken'. In her experience anger is a boundary holder. So
if anger came up really strongly in my body, the practice is to ask the
anger what boundaries have been trampled or need to be created. The
idea is that anger naturally guards us. If we lash out at people
it moves from our sphere and we are left unguarded, if anger turns inward,
we also are left unguarded. Anger naturally burns and strengthens
aura/ boundaries whatever you call them. I have loved this. And found
it useful. Although I find the practice of using anger to simply
strengthen my energy field to be somewhat energetically similar to retaining
sexual energy. By which I mean the practice of circulating
instead of releasing the sexual energy. In both I find it useful
but sometimes a good release is just what the doctor ordered! In which
case I recommend throwing eggs."
"
I find the constructive use of anger to be as a purgative that cleanses
away emotional plaque. It induces intense, short-term focus and an
outward flow of energy. Anger is a reaction to an external stimulus
and it can be a powerful motivator, but, like caffeine, sugar, and other
motivating substances, it can leave you drained after its effects wear
off.
I don't know if anger has ever arisen for me during yoga practice. I
think that would be awesome. The pose I picture as being a proper
way to use anger in practice is Virabhadrasana II -- a strong grounding,
upright core, and all that negativism shooting out the fingertips."
How do I deal with negative emotions that rise during yoga practice?
I usually switch to my breathing (meditate), turning off my thinking. But,
your question have made me analyze the situation and consider other choices. It
might be to my benefit to observe my thoughts and feelings without judging
them. In that way, I am not pushing them back to my subconscious
and hopefully accept reality. Observing myself will allow to know myself
better. Similar feelings might rise in other situations without realizing that
they are caused by negative emotions."
"
My most intense experience of emotional release in yoga practice was
at a workshop with Sarah Powers -- actually the only class I ever took
with her -- early one Saturday morning in a beautiful home on the side
of a mountain in Marin. The room was quite cool, and I hadn't done anything
to warm my body up before we started practice, with the hip-opener Cow-Face
Pose (Gomukhasana). I don't think we even did the shoulder binding behind
the back. It was only the hips (one knee stacked on another, feet by
opposite hips, the variation most commonly practiced in Iyengar classes).
We were doing it as Yin practice, so we sat in it for five minutes (at
least) on each side, while Sarah read from the "Bhagavad-Gita".
There's really nothing objectionable about Sarah. She seems calm, warm-hearted,
like a genuinely kind person. Nonetheless, within ninety seconds I was
absolutely filled with rage. My mind was going mad with it, trying to
find an object for this overwhelming and wholly inappropriate experience
of pure anger (which was not an emotion I had experienced myself as being
particularly prone to), rattling out all the reasons why my cold body
shouldn't be subjected to this excruciating pain early in the morning,
and trying to convince me that Sarah Powers was Evil. My mind, a bit
crazy with the experience as I continued to remain in the pose, and simply
breathe, started presenting -- for the first and only time -- homicidal
ideation. The anger, freeing itself from my tight hips, and having no
actual connection to Sarah Powers, was trying to find an outlet and attached
itself directly to the nearest possible target -- the person in control
of the class. Happily, once it reached this level of absurdity, the humor
of the situation became unavoidable, and the sense of mirth began to
balance the anger, and somehow, I managed to sit quietly through the
rest of the time in the posture, though I didn't absorb any of the reading
from the "Gita". And, after practice, my hips were never
as tight again. Something shifted in the willingness to simply sit
through
the emotions as they arose; some of the holding in my hips was simply
no longer necessary to keep it in. It was cathartic."
"I don't think anger is inherently a violation of boundaries, though
acting it out is often a violation of interpersonal boundaries, and pushing
it down is often a violation of self, ultimately. Gandhi, for example,
used anger as a positive tool. Martin Luther King, Jr. as well, to choose
rather obvious examples. My most powerful experiences of emotionally-generated
satori have been when I've simply allowed my emotions to be, almost as
if they were happening on a movie screen, and observed, accepted, long
enough to know how to act, consciously. I think that this is true, in
fact, in MOST situations, but certainly, not in all."
"Anger doesn't come up very much in my practice. But I will say
that sadness tends to creep in more, and sometimes I actually find myself
crying during yoga. It's challenging but cathartic."
"In so many areas of life, we're too quick to place a positive
or negative value to experiences. This is exemplified with the notion
that anger is a negative emotion. I've been very focused recently on
trying to have "experiences" without a positive or negative
attachment to them. After all, it is an experience in and of itself and
doesn't have to be good or bad. Can't it just be?With that in mind, I
agree with your comments that experiencing emotion in practice is an
opportunity to witness without attachment and without response. I've
been very conscious of this, particularly in recent weeks, but I find
it difficult to not place the positive and negative valuation to which
I referred. I find that more often, I place both positive and negative
value to an experience. My knee for example... it sucked! My hatha practice
was developing nicely; mycycling was at it's peak, and in many ways I
would not have wanted to change life as it was at the time of the break.
I had to give all that up, and I was so lost in the resulting stillness
that I isolated myself from friends, family, etc; and became pretty depressed.
On the flip side, it was an incredible opportunity to learn about myself.
I realized how attached (to an unhealthly level) I was to many things
in my life. I learned that the pace of life doesn't have to be frenetic,
and that I can 'do nothing' and still be okay. In some ways, you could
say that I learned to like myself for who I am instead of the things
I can do, and that's been transforming. That was quite the tangent, but
the point stands that the goal of not attaching value is difficult, but
something I'm working on because I think as human's we're too inclined
to avoid anything we consider to be negative.""On the issue
of negative emotions for me the biggest challenge in the last few years
has been dealing with grief and helplessness. I seem to have a much more
difficult time letting go of those, and the emotional states trigger
some serious ruminative clinging to the delusion that if only....(fill
in the blanks) then...(fill in the blanks). From the perspective of helping
others cope with negative feelings anxiety and depression as well as
negative self talk seems more prevalent in the folks I work with than
anger...though I guess depression is often described as anger
turned toward the self. Where the skills learned in yoga come in handy
is in developing a non-reactivity to the emotions, allowing the wave
to crest (to use a Kripalu image) and fade away. Also the noticing of
what the mind does to "feed" a particular mind state has been
an important part of the equation because it implies one can choose to
not feed the negative states (or the positive
ones for that matter)"
"For me, depression is by far the most challenging 'emotion', and
it is usually without an actual object, just a sense of pervasive sadness
that leads to fatigue, occasionally irritability, and basically the feeling
of being stuck. Anger, which doesn't arise for me that often or very
strongly even when it does, is actually a very useful antidote. It is
a balancing. My tendency is to take in negative experience and act-out
inwardly, leading to depression rather than the (perhaps) more common
external acting-out. Without yoga, I feel quite certain I would have
imploded long ago. Happily, there IS yoga. My personal experience is
that a state of depression is the result of action not taken on my own
behalf, boundaries not enforced, creativity not engaged. Things get stuffed
in and then there's no room to breathe. The solution is NEVER more thought;
it is always action. Anger, when it arises, gives me a clear picture
of where boundaries are not appropriate and so a fairly clear guide of
where to act. Acting out anger is rarely a problem for me; inaction is
far more likely in a situation where another might act out."
"Naming emotions is tough. When I'm angry, I'm angry at. Outward.
There are other states -- irritated, impatient, petulant -- that are
related and don't have as clear an external connection. I'm not sure
if anger is necessarily stimulated by something external, maybe it is
just directed at something external. Or maybe it is both. It is interactive,
intimate even, perhaps a violation of boundaries. When I recall instances
of being angry or being the object of anger, I think of misuses of power
and insults and uncooperativeness and selfishness/thoughtlessness and
one person saying something to and about another person that the hearer
does not want to hear. The flash of anger that comes when someone tells
you something you don't want to hear about yourself, that's the purest
anger I can think of. Wee satori. Really, as close as I have come to
witnessing or experiencing anger during yoga practice is a teacher who
says something like, "What is wrong with you people today - nobody
is getting it," or being fed up with holding a pose and the teacher
says, "Just one more breath," but then she counts off like
three inhales and exhales. That doesn't quite rise to the level of anger,
in my thinking, but even that emotion, whatever it is, is interactive.
If I'm practicing on my own and feel anger, it's because I brought it
to the practice and I'm not concentrating on the practice but thinking
about something else. Anger directed at oneself is not a concept I can
hold onto. That would be shame, I think. Which is a frequent by-product
of anger."
"I have only been been to two classes, going on my third so, I
can't give you much insight on what yoga practice brings out in me. What
I can say is, that this experience has started out in a very intense
way for me, totally unexpected. In my life I have come to similar conclusions
following different paths. Negative emotions have been, for me, the main
source of energy, gratitude and realization of every precious moment
we are granted. Intense negative emotions are, in my opinion, outstanding
tools that if used constructively with awareness can lead to amazing
positive experiences. I guess the key words are acceptance and awareness.
I have worked with disabilies for years and by just letting these different
forms of energy arise from within, I think I was much closer to yoga
practice and meditation than I ever realized. I am very interested to
see, further down the line, where this path will take me."
"Acceptance, awareness, gratitude: that's yoga :) Posture/breath
practice just gives a vast laboratory in which to play with, explore,
these ideas/experiences. The feedback the body gives, in practice, is
often much easier to integrate than what shows up in daily life in the
ordinary school of life, but the lessons are no different, in my experience."
"It's interesting to read several responses to the issue only in
the context of asana practice. It may be the experience I've had athletically
(I've run, swam, and biked; I was completely dedicated to road bike racing
for about 6 years) that gives me a perspective from where I can't imagine
feeling real anger during practice. Frustrated maybe, toward things I
do awkwardly rather than a lack of strength or flexibility, and
also toward not being more dedicated to my practice. Bike racers learn
to suffer, and since I don't race anymore there's no need to compete
or suffer physically in a way that hurts my body (though it's relevant
to point out that I feel confident enough in my practice, that I don't
feel inadequate in advanced classes, but I could also really care less
about someone's handstand or hanumanasana b/c that's just external stuff
that has nothing to do with what's important in a spiritually related
practice). Any real anger I feel has a lot more to do with social or
economic injustices in the world or personal relationships that don't
go the way I want them to. While practicing asana that type of anger
is just sort of there, and I can relate to the other people who wrote
about noticing, observing and breathing through it. However, I can also
very muchrelate to whoever wrote this:
Yoga practice or any form of exercise is a must for people who are prone
to
anger, or unable to process or understand the source of their anger even
if
that practice (or sport) at times brings up that very anger. There has
to be
a physical release of the energy somehow or they body will begin to succumb
to the stress and pressure of being angry.
Really I'm generally so grateful to be practicing asana that I would
not be angry at my practice, and part of that is b/c I need physical
activity not only to feel good or work out energy but to stay sane."
"When I've sat out a rage, I am positively giddy afterwards. Not
immediately necessarily, or steadily, but as the anger fades, which might
take days or weeks, mirth is exactly the word to fill that space."
I've been really impressed (and even moved) by your
responses to these last few questions, and I really appreciate the thought
(and feeling) that
went into your answers. The quote below said so much, I'd like to
emphasize it here:
"
I find the practice of using anger to simply strengthen my energy
field to be somewhat energetically similar to retaining sexual energy. By
which I mean the practice of circulating instead of releasing the
sexual energy."
The only thing I would add to this (and the thoughts
above) is that the practice of working with negative emotions is (for
me) rather like meditation on the breath, as it is, without changing
anything. Without
controlling, without increasing the in-breath, without increasing the out-breath,
simply observing the breath, as it is, allowing it to be, witnessing. With
negative emotions, the practice is to simply let them be, exactly as they
are, without forcing them in, without acting them out, accepting them,
letting them breathe. Acceptance allows transformation. This
cannot be forced.
Namaste,
Jamie
|
|
