Well, 2016 has been quite a year, one way or another, for all of us. Endings, beginnings, and plenty more shake ups or just the intensity associated with positive changes and lots happening at the same time.
If there is something to be learned from it all, it may be that we know ourselves better having survived the wobbles, knuckle-biting edginess and doldrums as they came up. Intense times call for more patience and kindness to ourselves but it’s hard to do when you’re in the thick of it, isn’t it? It may even feel self-indulgent – stiff upper lip, right?
In my work as a mindfulness therapist at a psychiatric hospital, I see how the stiff upper lip syndrome pushes people to do it all, carry it all on their shoulders and hold it all in. People either implode or explode. Thankfully, healing can occur when working with body and mind as one unit – this understanding is an important part of recovery as the body’s signals provide clear guidance about our life. The ancient yogis knew and taught this essential truth.
Maybe the kindest and most generous thing you can do for yourself is to practise yoga and meditate – as a preventative and even curative therapy. Yoga and meditation as a global health and anti-stress phenomenon is even accepted in the big corporations that run the world. They are neither medicine nor talk therapy (I don’t provide either service for students), yet a regular practise can undo all sorts of knots making it easier to unpack your story, if necessary, with a friend or someone paid to listen.
Before another year of having, being and doing it all undoes you, get yourself to a yoga and meditation class soon.
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