We know how easy it is to numb out, to find ways to distract ourselves from our own difficult emotions. When painful feelings arise for clients, unhealthy patterns may reassert themselves -- default strategies like bingeing on food, drugs, or alcohol, zoning out on television, or oversleeping. Sometimes even healthy strategies help us and our clients avoid being honest with ourselves. We can become compulsive about exercise. Even yoga practice can be an escape from what's right in front of us -- a pressing thought or emotion that needs our attention. Yoga asanas can be practiced mindlessly, obsessively, in a driven way that blocks true self-inquiry. And meditation, too, can be an escape from difficult emotions or thoughts.
But when yoga is practiced with attention to breath and sensation, emotions arise on their own, daring us to take a look. If we don't, the body constricts. We experience stomach discomfort or a headache. When we don't turn away from what is arising, we have the perfect opportunity to cultivate self-study (svadhyaya). Exploring the opposites of belief and emotion through the doorway of the body softens our reactivity to life. Instead of constricting around a hurtful memory or clinging to a happier one, we can move back and forth, ultimately standing in the place of awareness -- both are necessary; both are the essence of life in a human body. This timeless teaching from the yoga tradition is being validated by current research on the "reconsolidation window." Neuroscientists at New York University have shown that spending at least 10 minutes with the negative belief or feeling before moving to its opposite may help release the grip of the negative thought form, including fear (Shiller et al., 2010). pg. 179
---In a therapy session, you may not necessarily want to stay with a negative for 10 minutes, rather finding the unity of the opposites for 1 - 3 minutes each.
IT'S OKAY TO EXPLORE AND FEEL!
Love
