Life Drawing - Creating Life After Lockdown

As we move out of lockdown and into something close to what we previously understood as normal life, there is a sense of trepidation.  Some feel nervous, embarking on life outside the home again – if you are living with anxiety, there might have been something comforting about the level of control and consistency that lockdown life can bring, even as the news outside raged.

But there is also a great opportunity here.  I feel my life is a blank canvas for the first time since my teenage years, when life seemed to open out before me with endless opportunity and possibility. 

What is it that I want to put back into my life?  Who are the people that I want to spend my time and energy with?  How will I balance the things I have gained during this strange period (a beautiful garden, more time for reading, silence and repose), with my desire to see new things (travel, the ocean, enlightening exhibitions)?

I am also 50 this year, which seems to mark a turning point.  There have been others, the turn of each decade seems to bring some new focus to life that wasn’t there before: young children in my 30s, work in my 40s and now this: grown up children who are a delight, treading their newly independent paths, increasingly away from home.

As I take some time to contemplate the colours, textures and accents with which I plan to paint, the one thing I know I don’t want to do is rush. 

There are some spaces that I will certainly leave blank: time, space, yoga and the luxury of silence are the four corners of living well for me.  But as for the things I will positively choose to paint across my canvas?  They will be deliberately and carefully chosen.  This is not the Jackson Pollock of my early years as a mother, the sombre Rothko of my early 40s or the riotous Keith Haring of my 20s.  This is something that only I can paint, with my half century of lived experience and wisdom. 

I fully intend to consider each stroke of the brush carefully, to choose wisely and from my own instinct.  The shining white spaces are very important and I will guard them carefully, but there will also be joyful explosions of colour and the paler shades of quiet times with beloveds; the dark shadows we all must face will be embraced by that colour and light. 

I simply don’t have room for the fruitless, pointlessly noisy brightness that shouts the loudest but contains scant benefit.  I choose something different this time.  How will you paint yours?

Transformation

She booked herself a one to one with me out of the blue and arrived on my doorstep perfectly on time one cold winter's morning. She sat on my studio before we practised and I asked her about her health and why she had come to yoga; like many people that I have taught, she had been thinking about trying yoga for a number of years, but beyond a couple of classes here and there, had never found the right teacher. She had suffered, a couple of years before our meeting, a catastrophic accident that had nearly killed her and left her handicapped, although you would not know it on meeting her, such is her indomitable spirit. She is Amazonian, intelligent, self-determining and through hard work, dedication and bloody-minded will power she had saved her body from the story that the doctors had written for her (you won't walk again, you will need a wheelchair and you will never have a child). When she arrived at my door, she didn't even have her crutches with her.

She gave a great show of being in control; I think she might even have thought for a time that she was; but when I acknowledged what she had told me, when I said to her, 'You are in pain' her face crumpled like a child's and she wept and couldn't stop.

I think that my doorstep was the end of one particular road for this woman and she knew it. For many years she had battled against the femininity of her body, she had trained it to be strong and tough and had rejected the soft lines of herself, scraping her long hair back into the severest of ponytails; I'll hazard a guess that she liked to think that she could take on any man at any task and whip his butt at it (in fact, I'll bet that this was more than often true). But in living this way, she had been in denial of an essential part of herself - her femininity, her mothering spirit, her emotional self - and it is impossible to be whole and healthy if you are at war with any part of yourself; if there is something of yourself that you refuse to accept and love.

I well remember the day I asked her, as she lay on her back on her mat, ‘How do you feel about the word acceptance’? She snorted with laughter, instinctively rejecting it, her habit was to change through willpower that which she did not want or like, not learn how to accept it.

Yoga transforms everyone who approaches it, but teaching this woman was like watching a plant emerge in seconds from seed to flower in one of those time-lapse photography clips from a nature show, it was so quick and so clear that she was growing, changing, blooming. She did all this herself, as all yoga students do, my teaching was just the water she used to tend the germ of a better life that was already within her. So I showed her how to move, how to bend and stretch, how to strengthen and protect, and I recommended books, Sanskrit chants and meditations and she took them away with her and made them into something of her own.

It was hard for her to lose her habit of going for everything at full throttle, she would move too far forward too quickly and her body would hurt for a while, or she'd have a set-back and would have to stop for a time. She had always lived this tough way, it was the story of her life, only now, through yoga and her commitment to it, she began to learn how to listen, how to notice the messages her body was sending her and how to acknowledge them and take pause, rather than ploughing on regardless, or worse, forcing her way through them and hurting herself even more.

One time she came to practise here and I was astounded to watch her; she had become graceful, tender, almost balletic in the way she moved her body; it takes great strength to move in such a fluid and gentle way and I told her so; she smiled at me, because I believe she had already felt this in herself, I was simply voicing something that she already knew.

She practised regularly, both with me and at home; she meditated - can you imagine? This woman who had battled through life armed with her intellect and her determination, sitting still for long periods of time in compliant silence. It was on her meditation mat that she truly met herself in kindness; it was here that she found the wisdom to choose differently, to cease habitual, harmful patterns and replace them with a new way of living which was true to her authentic self; it was here that she discovered her vulnerability and learnt not to be afraid of it. Over and over again I watched her renew her commitment to this simple method that worked.

And, as is so often the case, things started to change for her in life as on her mat: she met a partner good enough to deserve her, she found a way to leave the job that had robbed her of so much of her vitality and freedom, she fulfilled her dream of moving away from the city to live in the countryside; and she has time now for the simple things that she hadn't realised were so very important to her well-being.

I have seen such transformations too often now to doubt that yoga plays a huge part in it. This beautiful woman had reached the furthest point of living in a way that broke her body, tortured her mind and rejected a significant part of her natural self. She simply could not continue that way any longer, because it would have killed her; and in the face of that knowledge, she was brave enough to find her way to yoga and then to do the hard work that yoga demanded of her if she was to stay true to it, the hardest of which is the silent inner work that must occur if we are to progress.

Hers is a story of extremes; not all of us must reach the pain in which she was living before we find a new way to move through the world, yet all of us will inevitably meet those moments when we realise that we have been living in a way that doesn't serve us, that there is another way of being, one which encompasses more of who we really are and allows us to express not only our strength and knowledge, but also our vulnerability and kindness. Sometimes we turn away from those transitions and sometimes we run towards them, sometimes we are patient and can wait for life to unfold, and others we feel we simply cannot go on this way for another second and things have to change immediately.

Teaching this woman lead me to understand more about pain and how the brain processes it, more about the structure of the body, the nerves of the spine, the human form. She taught me about accepting unacceptable things, that we might move forward with sensitivity to our own limitations, not wage war on ourselves by fighting them. She taught me about how much we can grow from being broken. She showed me how it is possible to understand and accept one's whole self and in so doing find an authentic way of life, full of vitality and enthusiasm and become the human that we are meant to be, doing the things that we love. In this era where the concept of self-determination and individual will predominates, she demonstrated to me that none of this is possible if we do not learn how to reach out to others and allow them to see our vulnerability; none of this possible if we don't know how to ask people for help and let them love us. And she taught me that fear will keep you small and stuck; that if we are to embrace our whole self and live a full life, we have to let go of fear of loss, fear of change, fear of pain, fear of being different: her life now is so unlike the one she had before and she herself is a renewed person, the things she wants and needs now are so simple and so few; she left behind a fast-paced, high-pressure, well-paid environment for somewhere entirely new and unexpected, and she has never, not once, regretted it; her only wonder is that it took her so long to get there.

Voices

Valuing yourself as much as you value others is a tricky subject for many yogis. In my experience most yogis are kind and humble people, apt to put others before themselves; indeed, doing so is part of our practice. But we cannot give wholly if we are not ourselves whole, as the Dalai Lama puts it: "One must be compassionate to oneself before external compassion".

Let's begin with the way you talk to yourself: sometimes the playlist we have running in our heads is not kind, and what's more, because those voices in our head stay in our head and are never openly expressed or challenged, we tend to think that they speak the truth. They are never challenged.

Recently a new student asked me what to do about the voices in her head. You wouldn't believe how beautiful this person is: a gentle spirit, kind, friendly and gifted.

Here is my answer:

Listen to those voices, acknowledge them, make friends with them. Get to know who they are and what their purpose is.

They most likely just want to keep you safe, to save you from being embarrassed or hurt. So they try to keep you small and in safe places that you are familiar with.

They want to circumvent any harsh judgement, so they tell you that your skills are no good. That way you stay quiet and nobody ever sees/hears you, but neither will they criticise you.

But I'm afraid that listening to those voices and following that road leads to a small, frightened life, when what we are seeking as yogis is an expansive, generous life of constant growth and growing understanding.

Make befriending yourself part of your practice; meet with the voices in your head, so that you can understand them and find ways to rewrite your internal script, making it more kindly and positive and thereby freeing yourself from the negativity that holds you back.

Try this: when one of your negative inner recordings starts rolling, stop it short, thank it kindly for trying to keep you safe, but remind it that it is not needed and move forward with your day.

Think about this: if you are someone who encourages others often to do new things, if you can see the potential in them, make yourself the beneficiary of your positivity and good advice.

Start with this: you are beautiful; you are here for a reason and you serve the world by finding out that reason and using it for good. Learn how to overcome your internal naysayers and confidently be who you are.

One place in which you can begin your journey towards peace is to meet, greet and get to know all of those voices inside yourself, to encourage the kind ones and to understand the motives behind the unkind. Nurture yourself as if you were your own child, for whom the only thing you wish is a life filled with optimism and confidence.

You were made this way for a reason and you are supposed to be this way; stop fighting it and let yourself be who you are in all of your glory without letting those harsh, judgemental, fearful voices within rule you.