Burning Candles: Trying To Stay Present In Sickness & In Health

I am sick.  I burnt the Candle (not the posture but rather my lifeline) at both ends and ended up pretty burnt out, a day off of work to recoup, and hoping tonight and tomorrow bring enough energy to get what needs to be done with yoga school done–this is no time to get behind now heading into the 1/3 mark of the program!

So how do I stay present, centered, grounded and not curmudgenly when the present is all  headaches and sinus pressure?  No, really, how?  I am sorting through this one and my favorite word of this blog seems to pop back up–perspective.  I need to take what is for what it is without spinning out in frustration.  I have to modify my do-five-things-at-once and collapse motto that I have been living by to get through two jobs and yoga school down to doing what needs to be done and giving myself room to breathe in between. 

MY TOP 5YOGA SCHOOL TIPS (for me &  for anyone else for whom this might apply):

1) Sleep, sleep, sleep.  Whenever you have a free minute give yourself a break and a rest.

2) If you have a low immune system take lots of Airborne!

3)  As my yoga teacher says “Attitude, attitude, attitude.”  It’s all about the attitude.

4) Keep a balance–yoga school, work, home.  And ease up the reins on each one–don’t expect perfection when juggling life tasks (or at any other time).

5) Sleep! Rest! Relaxation!  And so I am going to go lay down again although everything in my brain is saying get more stuff done!

Max The Duck: What’s For Dinner?

 

I always loved the chewy taste of a rare, juicy, meaty steak and even when I would have “bouts” of vegetarianism for a week or a month I always said it was just for healthful purposes, I wasn’t one of those people who wouldn’t eat meat because it was mean to the animals because it seemed an unrealistic premise–we were born omnivores. Recently I have been having a change of heart and stomach.

The steps on this journey are as follows:

• Watching the movie “Avatar” of all things and being reminded of the ancient, native traditions of blessing all animals that give us food and killing them in kind ways (reminiscent in the movie of Native American traditions where the animal is given a blessing as and after it is killed).
• Reading John Robbins (heir to the Baskin Robbins throne) Food Revolution which was by mandate for yoga school but brought me to a new consciously aware place about what I eat, where it comes from, what that food can do to me, and what was done to it before it got to my plate.
•  The desimation of our Iguana population at work by people poaching them for food.
• And Max The Duck who wanders in front of our door (at work) with more and more frequency and who I find myself conversing (well briefly) alone with at 730am when I come from meditation to work very early and he is waiting hungrily for the crackers I feed him.

 

My realization that my consciousness about what I am doing and what is being done to others calls me to see that as a real piece in the process before my trip to the supermarket for plastic wrapped limbs. My learnings from yoga school to the amazing lecture by Richard Rohr who was introduced at the beginning of his lecture on his new book The Naked Now as part contemplative mystic and a proponent of eco-spirituality. He spoke about all the same wisdom as my yoga teacher in terms of our relationship and treatment of the world around us and how reflective it is of our inner selves–how neglect of these things are as much spiritual void as nature negligence.

My world and life, as it often works, seems to be circling back to an eco-friendly framework. One that spans beyond just recycling when I can and trying to be sustainable in a small scope. In a world where livestock has become an industry of warehousing and cruelty unless I plan on building a humane farm for one there is no way to really participate in mainstream omnivore lifestyle without being an affront to consciousness and conscience-ness.

This is of course a personal plight and journey and I by no means want to send waves of negativity towards the vibrantly carnivorous among us (ahem, my husband). I have not decided yet how this new attempt at gastronomy is going to go or what I am going to leave on the table–literally or figuratively.

What I do know is that I will have to do whatever I do with awareness and mindfulness of what I know and not be capricious about eating at any level. I think it is, also, no random coincidence, that my dietary suggestions for my chronic illness (endometriosis) include avoiding, if possible, most meat and most dairy altogether. Perhaps I am on a path I was meant to be on–spiritually and corporeally.

Finding Balance: In Headstands & In Life

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

Thomas Merton

 

Thomas Merton, who also wrote the book of essays entitled No Man Is An Island, wrote with such clarity and certitude it is hard to argue with the above statement or the one in the title of his short stories.  I have often had a problem trying to defy both of his certainties in my life–living life in intensity rather than balance and in solitary defiance rather than union with all.  I have gotten better as I age, and learn, and read more of the wisdom of people like Merton, but somehow the roots of my old patterns seem to rear their ugly heads just when I think I am dissolving them.  Like in HEADSTANDS. 

Headstands are the symbolic and literal depiction of balance.  If you are out of balance you may be able to hide it in a shoulder stand or even a tree pose but somehow the headstand always knows.  And I am a flunkie of the headstand barometer of balance.  I fall, I flop, I roll out, and crumple up.  Fear, indecision, uncertainty, and lack of personal balance all come falling onto the floor with me and leave me feeling bare.  I am brutally aware of my faltering points in headstand, or rather not-in-headstand, in a way that somehow I can ignore in the world off the mat. 

But the headstand knows–and it towers over me in mockery of what I cannot yet do.  Let go enough to just give over to the unknown.  Find centeredness at my inner core unshakable even when the world topples on its head and flips upside down.  But I am working on it and I breathe and release and try again, lifting off the mat for a moment before crumbling down again. 

I may be floppy and fumbling and anything but graceful but I persist.  And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I will lift off with confidence and equilibrium–proving that even when the world flips 180 degrees I can stand firmly on my head and face it.

 HAVE A WONDEFUL, BALANCED , & CENTERED WEEKEND!

Horses & Finding Freedom

 

“A horse loves freedom, and the weariest old work horse will roll on the ground or break into a lumbering gallop when he is turned loose into the open.”

 

 Gerald Raferty

 

 

Monday mornings at work are always a swirl of mystery, magic, and surprises.  I suppose this is bound to be the case in beginning my work week at a Therapeutic Riding Center.  The facility I run my Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy group out of is a quiet nook of the world on a sandy dirt road edging a canal ravine.  I don’t know if anyone else does this on this particular stretch of street but I find myself glancing down at the murky green waters waiting to see round, black alligator eyes peering up at me.  The center itself is vast acreage lined with white wooden fences and a crisp white barn that houses 16 or so horses.  Monday mornings are reserved just for my group and the cleaning crew, inmates from a local prison facility.  It is an interesting mix of life–horses in stables, convicts driving small tractors, and my little group of trauma survivors working with their equine counterparts.  In its surreality it is quite freeing and outside of social norms and constructs.  We are dancing a dance that is part magic, part illusion, and yet more real than most that life has to offer.  Something in horses brings real to the surface and pushes out all the tedium and strife that are found outside stable gates.  Horses, like yoga, strip life away to its naked essence and allow for us to breathe in the moment and leave everything else behind. 

 

 

This particular Monday morning I was absurdly alert and reflective, still lingering on my 5am wake up, 6am meditation and the lack of television, radio, and all superfluous noise in my life.  My mind was paradoxically more quiet and more active than it normally is on any given Monday.  In that I mean that my brain had omitted a lot of the white noise from conscious thought and in its place was an awakened clarity and sharpness that I guess is the result of having been up for hours and having meditated to start my day.

 

 

Suddenly, I heard a loud thunk and vocal commotion and turned around the side of the barn to see a white mare galloping off through the back of the stalls.  I see a correctional officer, the guardian of the inmates, standing baffled and amused holding the chain latch of the horse’s stall.  “I can’t believe it, she chewed through the damn thing again.  That is the second time she has done that,” he said and kept repeating it as if he could not imagine such tenaciousness in a horse.  An older inmate standing next to me, and dressed in his working blue cotton uniform, looked in my eyes and said, “She just wants that freedom, you can see it in how she’s running.”  He stared after her, mesmerized, as the last bit of her white mane disappeared around the corner and I looked over at him wondering if he knew how profoundly metaphoric his statement had just been.

 

 

Here stood a man who was living in a world that was predominantly caged and in the one place in his week where he was given freedom, space, clean country air, and equine surroundings.  And as he watched this white mare’s dedicated effort to break free of her cage I could feel, in my proximity to him, his understanding of her yearning.  And in them both I saw a moment of magic–connection between human and horse and metaphor from the stables into the world.  It was one of those moments you want to bottle both miraculous, soulful, joyful, and sorrowful.  The smile on the inmate’s face lingered as he turned from the horse and went back to his shovel, back to his work, and back into the mind of a man who understood the yearning to be free. 

 

 

In that moment I shared with both of them, before the white mare was brought back to her stall, I saw a sliver of that man and a glimmer of that horse, and both of their natural longing to be free in the world–the way they once were.  Some days, especially lately, juggling worlds upon worlds, I feel like maybe I am overloaded and completely insane in my juggling efforts.  On days like Monday I am grateful for the world I live in, the life I have, and the honor I feel in being able to work in a way that facilitates moments like these–spontaneous and amazing. 

 

Sivananda Monastics: Finding Both Peace & Delirium At 5AM

 

“Serve, Love, Give, Purify, Meditate, Realize.” 

Swami Sivananda

What I expected to find in my foray into a monastic lifestyle and 5 am wake ups was a bit of delirium and a lot of discomfort.  This is true, there is no doubt.  But in the process, even 8 days into my 8 week internment into the monastic protocols of my Sivananda yoga teacher training I have also found a teensy bit of peace of mind that seems to, in my brighter moments, more than make up for complete body and mind exhaustion by day’s end.  Here is a bit inside my Sivananda world  and tandum work experience for a bit of insight into this whole endeavor:

Monday :

5am rising

6am-715am meditation

730 (early) to work-4:30pm TRAUMA THERAPY

5-600pm second work ADDICTIONS THERAPY

630pm Home to write some notes and go to sleep

Tuesday:

5am rising

6am-715am meditation

730 (early) to work-5:10pm (late staying and early coming most days because there is not enough time to come home between the two in the am and pm) TRAUMA THERAPY

5:30-6:45pm Yoga class (take or assist in the class)

7-10pm yoga academics class

10:30 Home for sleeps

Wednesday:

5am rising

6am-715am meditation

7:15-8:45am Yoga class

9-10:30am Yoga class (make up for missed class Mondays because of night job)

IF I can 11:00-12:00pm yoga class (make up for missed class on Friday because of night job)

12:30pm-9:00pm TRAUMA THERAPY

9:30pm Home for sleeps

Thursday:

5am rising

6am-715am meditation

730 (early) to work-5:10pm (late staying and early coming most days because there is not enough time to come home between the two in the am and pm) TRAUMA THERAPY

5:30-6:45pm Yoga class (take or assist in the class)

7-10pm yoga academics class

10:30 Home for sleeps

Friday

5am rising

6am-715am meditation

730 (early) to work-4:30pm TRAUMA THERAPY

5-7:30pm second work ADDICTIONS THERAPY

8:00pm Home to write some notes and go to sleep

Saturday

5am rising

6am-715am meditation

745-845am YOGA CLASS  (take or assist)

9-1030am YOGA CLASS (take or assist)

HOME FOR COLLAPSE J

Sunday:

7:45-8:30am Breathing class

8:30-9:00am Karmic yoga (ie: clean up the studio)

9-11:00am ADVANCED YOGA CLASS (take)

5:45-7:15 Meditation

7:15-8:15pm Vegetarian Pot Luck (mental note, must remember to make something each and every week—when I don’t know!)

WEEK 1 of yoga school completed.  WEEK 2 is moving forward–with or without my consciousness!  I am proud to say I have only had an emotional or exhaustion breakdown 1-2 times per day!  Hoping to maintain or improve over the next week!

Yoga School Musings: Starting From Scratch

Well, I had a post all ready to go but life and mild delirium got in the way and I left my power cord for my laptop at work and so I am starting from scratch and the other post will come when I juice back up my computer.  For now, grudgingly plodding away at my husband’s Apple laptop (which is a great machine but for a PC person a bit to figure out), I am going to begin again.  And in this I find a great metaphor for my life path right now.

There is nothing like taking your life and shaking out all the white noise, chemicals and hormones, and waking and “om”-ing at 5 am to make a person feel like they are starting from scratch on the whole.  I feel a bit disoriented, a little big quieter, and a tiny bit more delirious as I step into the last day of my first full week of yoga school.  One week down…seven more to go.

What I have learned so far:

• I am not as bendy as I thought I SHOULD be but much bendier than I have been before.
• A graduate degree in Clinical Social Work gives me zero “edge” in this world of quiet mind and intense educational practicum.
• I find a veggie lifestyle and omission of all the “white noise” of life (radio, television) overall far more satisfactory than I had imagined.
• Although I am still NOT a morning person I find myself more awake and enlivened with every new 5am waking.
• It is possible, be it exhausting at moments and delirious often, to immerse yourself in a monastic life even with one full-time job, one part-time job, and a family of husband and dogs (although a little wearing on the quality time).
• As much as I knew what to expect in this program I truly had no idea what I was getting myself into.
• That  (above statement) is more a good than a bad thing.
• Having a yoga teacher who can manifest into a drill Sargent at will is good for my need for structure and stretching (literal and metaphoric).
• Although my degree is useless in this new professional milieu the ideas of emotion and will and psychology do still come into play as much on the mat as in the world–and therapeutic mindset can be applied to best understand how students come into a class and out of whatever reality they exist in.
• This one is definitely a “DUH” moment: Taking Yoga Teacher Training means I am being trained fully to be a yoga teacher–I just really got that.  I thought it would be a wonderful tandem piece to learn in my integration of mind/body work and my passion for yoga in the therapeutic context but I guess, duh, it never occurred to me that in the process I would be fully prepared to lead a class myself–I saw myself as a teacher training student in an academic sort of way but never related that to being taught to be a hands-on, in the field yoga teacher.
• The above realization is both terrifying and exhilarating.
• While Thursday morning 6am meditations at the beach are messy there is something blissful and wonderful about watching the sun rise one sliver at a time between Sanskrit melodies.
• The amount I have learned about myself in the last week is astounding…and the prospect of seven more weeks of such an intensive exploration is very exciting and somewhat intimidating.
• I am finding more and more I love about the nuances and traditions of Sivananda yoga (the tradition I am learning): I will share more on this soon!
• I am already, of course as I do, found the two follow-up yoga trainings I want to take…but of course cannot afford right now:   Yoga of Recovery for Counselors Training Certification Course (Something new I have discovered created by a Sivananda yoga program director and another teacher)  &  Yoga for Depression and Anxiety with Amy Weintraub (I have heard so much about it I really want to get the training and see for myself)
• I can’t wait to see what the next week brings…this week brought me effortlessly into wheel and almost into a head stand on my own…that is pretty big for little ol’ me.

NAMASTE and Happy Weekend to everyone!  I am looking forward to my Sunday as we start at 7:45 am instead of 6:00am (like the other 6 days of the week) so I get to sleep in till 7!  The tiny pleasures .

Back To School

“Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire.”

William Butler Yeats

Day one of 57 days of yoga school has just begun.  And tomorrow I have my first (maybe ever) 5:00am morning rising.  I am an awful and vicious morning person–I feel that this experience will either surmount this issue or solidify it.  Hoping sincerely for the former to happen.  The latter would be detrimental to household harmony and inner balance that is the ultimate goal of this whole excursion into self. 

I am a bit intimidated by this intensive monastic retreat into yogic curriculum during which 5:00am rising is mandatory for 7 days a week for 6:00am meditations, as well as 7 yoga classes a week, 2 three-hour sessions of yoga scholastics Tuesday and Thursday nights, breathing class and advanced yoga on Sundays, and no meat, fish, eggs, music, television, internet only sparingly (I count my blog as my one indulgent foray into the cybersphere for this journey), alcohol, smoking, ect. 

The isolative nature of this process is one concern as with my husband a meat-eating, television watching, music listening, internet scouring, smoking (one habit I wish he would leave behind) individual plus both of us avid movie-goers…with my newfound passion project afoot we have little in the way of compatible schedules and extracurriculars. 

This foray into self, into body, mind, spirit and beyond is certainly going to test me and my life on many fronts.  First, and foremost, being COMMITMENT.  This is a 57 day commitment like nothing I have ever endeavored before and one that has to come in conjunction with all those other, already committed endeavors–like my fulltime job, and my recent addition of part-time work at another therapeutic facility.  Plus dogs and husband–oh, my! 

I shall have plenty of room to breathe on this journey but what about down time from my introspection and self-reflection and stretching muscles of mind, body, and will?  My teacher training instructor made a joke at the beginning of our first session together tonight saying, “This is going to stress you all in new and intense ways.  Teresa is a trauma therapist so when you guys have become traumatized by this strenuous experience, everyone can go to her.”  He admitted, with a sly grin, he had waited since I signed up for this program back in August to say that joke. 

My only question–where does the trauma therapist go with everyone coming to her? Hmmm.  I will ponder the intricacies of my trepidation and exhaustion at the thought of exhaustion.  One day at a time, right?  It has to be.  Day 1–check.

Mission: A Year Of Thank You’s

I always try to be grateful and verbalize that gratitude if someone does something nice, goes out of their way for me, or is just accommodating in any way BUT I am terrible with “Thank You” Cards.  I never remember to send them`or any mail for that matter. 

Today a friend of mine did a wonderful, over the top, kind and giving thing for me.  She went out of her way for no other reason than she knew I really needed something and she knew she could help me with it.  I was so grateful to her and sent her an email (we live at a distance) telling her so, but somehow the act felt flat.  In an age where an email is a couple of clicks away it didn’t quite seem to match her gesture in terms of going out of my way to give her something.  Not that I was looking for a this-for-that kind of act but I just felt like I wanted to put some effort in return for all of the effort she put forth for me.  And then I thought about the “Thank You” Cards on my desk that I never use and have sat in the same desk console forever. 

The Thank You Card seems reserved for traditional thank you moments: someone gives you a present all shiny and wrapped and you give them the requisite card with the requisite statement.  What about giving a thank you for the everyday things–those moments that come and go where someone does something special for us.  I am feeling a want to acknowledge all the moments of gratitude, all the wonderful acts the people in my life bestow on me with no thought but to be helpful, and all the great people with great hearts I encounter.  I figure, what a better way to maintain a perspective on all the good in the world–as, especially with the recent Haiti disaster, there are already plenty of reminders of all the bad, sad, and ugly in the world. 

I have decided to take one moment in my month, every month, and really give attentive gratitude to it with the effort and intention of sending out a Thank You Card someone–1 someone for every month of the 12 months–who has done something lovely for me.  As I think back over my last year on moments when others went out of their way for no quid-pro-quo reason I think this may be the easiest thing I do this year…and maybe one of the most rewarding. 

Who would you give a Thank You Card to this month?  What act of random kindness has come your way recently?  Looking at every month with this vantage point I hope to cultivate an intentional awareness and appreciation of the goodness in my own life.  I will let you know how it progresses.  Likewise, although the crisis in Haiti is horrific and awful, in crisis some of the most inspiring acts of kindness and giving are exhibited.  I am hearing those stories already of people coming to the aid of others in this time and I am compelled to both give more of myself to others and acknowledge those who give more than they need give to me.

Top 10 Words of Inspiration for 2010

I was thinking about words that I keep coming back to, professionally and personally, that resonate with me at so many levels.  The words that I come to all seem to be connected in a web of healing and I wanted to share them with you and see if any resonate with you in your life now or in your aspirations going into January of this new year.

TOP 10 WORDS of INSPIRATION for 2010:

1 Mindfulness:  A point of weakness for almost everyone, mindfulness reminds us to constantly be aware of what is going on inside us and in the external world in any given moment.  I find that the more I work on this concept with my clients the easier it is for them to manage their daily existence and the more I work on this concept for myself I find the same.  When I am in the moment driving, acknowledging the sun and the color of the sky, thinking only of the bumps on the road and the car in front of me somehow the world beyond that melts away–the past, the future, and all the worries entangled in each melt away when we are in the now and mindful of that experience. 

2  Resilience:  Ah, forever a key concept in emotional wellness or the lack of it, resilience is our capacity to–like the iguana–bounce back from difficulty  and traumatic emotional experience.  Resilience is something that can be widdled away at over time.  Each additional difficult emotional experience weakens  our wall of self-protection, like rocks being thrown at a wooden fence, the stability will become shakier and it has more potential to break and fall down altogether.  Resilience is critical to be able to weather emotional storms and return to a healthy emotional state but there is work to be done to get there….but, see #3, there is hope….

3 Neuroplasticity:  I love this word for what it means…although it sounds overwhelming it brings a hopefulness to healing, resilience, and wellness in every way.  Neuroplasticity, simply stated, is the scientifically tested truism that THE BRAIN CAN CHANGE.  This brings hope to any obstacle and every internal roadblock in our mind because neuroscience has taught us that any dog can learn a new trick–young, old, traumatized, or otherwise.  We can relearn a sense of resilience, find new coping mechanisms, and rebuild our wall of safety so that we can weather anything with the right tools. 

4 Present-Centered:  This words in tandem with mindfulness practices as it symbolizes living in the moment of our daily existence.  Present-centered existence means really being able let go of our hold on  yesterday, our worries about tomorrow and visualize today for what it is.  Mindfulness teaches us the attunement of living in the now while present-centered philosophy embodies the very nature of being in the now.  If we can work just on being in the moment for a brief period every day we might find a richness and truth imbedded in where we are that we never expected.  When I have brief moments of really being present where I am there are rich spiritual and emotinal rewards–but it is a very difficult thing to embody and a practice I am working on….meditation, for me, is a way of training myself to keep in the moment a little longer every day. 

5  Somatics:  The essense of embodiment, somatic means that we feel and experience things in our physical self.  Our body holds, as many people I think have discovered in their practice of yoga, pockets of hidden secrets and rich emotional material.  We can feel our navel and be reminded of pleasures and pains in our psychological and emotional past.  For someone traumatized their body becomes the triggering point for many painful memories and our body responds along with our mind to what we are afraid of, sad about, happy for.  The somatic experience, meaning a body attunement and discovery, can unlock hidden pains that talk alone could have never explored so deeply.  In every way we emBODY our feelings, stories, and aches. 

6 Integrative:  The word integrative, along with complementary, has been linked within the medical and mental health community to symbolize the umbrella of holistic treatment approaches and therapies that are being discovered to be a great help for people in healing from emotional and physical ills.  Such fields as acupuncture, massage, yoga, creative arts, animal-bond, tai chi, and others are being explored and studied in relation to how they can help us heal.  I believe this year is going to continue to be exciting and invigorating for the study and practice of amazing programs incorporating all these wonderful healing practices–I truely cannot wait to see where it all leads, for me personally and within the field of mental health and trauma therapy!

7 Yoga:  Each moment I spend delving deeper into the world and practice of yoga the more I see it as a sincere life path that seems to walk parallel and stand as a great  metaphor for so many of my core beliefs both personally and professionally.  Life, birth, death, and transformation all seem to begin and end with a breath.  In my new book I explore breath as the mark of both my descent into my trauma, PTSD, and my renewal and rebirth of recovery.  For me yoga was a pinnacle point of my changing life perspective, my renewal of resilience, and learning to be strong in myself again.  Yoga begins with breath and from there it can be applied, karmically, physically, emotionally into our practice and methods of living in the world at large.  I look forward to continue my exploration of yoga and learning new ways to stretch myself, literally and metaphorically, through this upcoming teacher training. 

8 Soul:  The soul is “the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life” as I quote e.e. cummings in one of my favorite poems.  Soul is the essence of what we are when we take away flesh and bone and mind and even heart we are soul in the beginning and in the end and at our very core.  Souls can become damaged in this thing called life and the tribulations within….sometimes we just need some soul renewal.  I think mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and just time of reflection can give us some insight into and attention towards the often neglected root of the self–the soul.  I have to remember to care for myself, we all do, as I work at so much of this mind and body “work”.  We cannot neglect the root of the root and the bud of the bud as we wander through our lives.

9 Equine:  I have begun to dream about horses.  They are entering my consciousness at a new level and it is a comforting and inviting experience to find them nestled in the pages of my unconcious stories.  I find my dreams with equines to be much softer and calmer than my other, more restless nighttime machinations.  In dream interpretation it is said that horses represent strength, power, endurance, and a strong physical energy.  I hope to be able to wrangle some of that equine spirit of my dreams into a stronger physical self in 2010–one that can defy the limitations of my endometriosis.  I hope to imbibe some of that overall strength inherently found in horses and breathe it into myself and my life in this upcoming year…and beyond. 

10 Empowerment:  In working with a few more clients heading into this year with severe self-esteem and body image issues (male and female) I find that this word has ever increasing importance in my vocabulary and the way that I think in terms of helping people.  Empowerment is a key element to any human’s will to persevere in their own lives–we must feel strong, proud, compitent, and confident in our own bodies and minds in some way to be motivated to take on the difficulties of life.  I think, perhaps, empowerment of the self can be one of the greatest keys to emotional wellness.  My hope, in 2010, is to start to create some workshop programming helping people with just this piece–finding a sense of empowerment and strength of self.  I believe that horses can be a great co-facilitator in this regard.   With their symbolic linkages to strength and their yogic-like attunement to emotions and the present they seem just the therapists to assist in the challenge.

Frozen Iguanas and Resilience

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
Japanese Proverb 

I have spoken about them before but nothing amazes me more than the resilience of an iguana. In the recent frosty cold nights and chilly Florida mornings teetering at temperatures under 50 degrees the iguanas have had some frozen slumbers. Below a certain temperature these amphibious creatures are unable to maintain a body temperature to function and their large scaly figures will freeze where they lay–often meaning that those seeking shelter in a tree will catapult to the ground, frozen, upside-down, but somehow unharmed in their statuesque state.

This unintentional game of red light, green light goes on as long as the temperatures drop at night and the sun returns to the sky to thaw them in the morning hours. And, as if nothing had changed, or any time had passed, the iguanas shake off their frozen slumber and head back out into the world to repeat the cycle again.

To me this is the epitome of resilience. The iguana may be made frozen and non-functional by life circumstances but they return again to consciousness and mobility ready to forge forward despite the snag of lost time. They come out of their slumber and back to life, not altogether unscathed or undazed but moving forward into the present, into the now.

What a perfect metaphor for trauma and resilience from traumatic experience. We can survive and thrive in the life we were given, work past our stuck points, and frozen moments of existence. Life moves on, we defrost, the chill passes and the sun shines. Iguanas, to me are the ultimate symbol of what is possible in ourselves.

Enjoy the cold, stay warm as you can, and persevere!