Managing anxiety: off the yoga mat and onto the stage

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Breathing, The Lady Project, yoga, You Look Like That Girl

I went to Providence, Rhode Island last weekend to speak at Johnson & Wales University and The Lady Project Summit. I did a reading from my book, spoke on a writer’s panel and gave a talk about the rewards and challenges living an authentic life and embracing who you really are.

It was a phenomenal weekend for many reasons. I  had lots of teary-eyed hugs with people who are on their own journeys towards living a life they truly believe in. I also met wonderful people like Maureen Petrosky who took me to Gracie’s, which is a restaurant that not only has unbelievable food, but also shares a name with my dog.

I was also scared out of my mind a lot of the time.

I have structured a pretty quiet little life for myself. I struggle with anxiety and get overwhelmed easily, so I try to keep life as simple as possible. I spend time with my husband, dog, and close friends. I do yoga. I stay home a lot, watching Netflix and reading books and cooking dinner. It’s lovely.

But I’ve started doing these events which thrill and terrify me in equal measure. Sometimes, when I am in a new place, standing at the front of the room with a bunch of people looking at me, I panic and go into fight or flight mode.

This is a pretty typical evolutionary response to fear. When our ancestors had to face down a woolly mammoth, we had a couple of choices. We could try to kill it or we could run away from it.

The thing is, these days, we don’t see many woolly mammoths.

We see public speaking.
Or an uncomfortable conversation.
Or a group of strangers.
Or an opportunity that is unnerving.
Or a situation we can’t control.
Or an outcome that is unknown.

But our minds go back to woolly mammoth territory and we want to either fight it or run from it.

What if there was a third way?

This is the most monumental thing that doing yoga has taught me.

Yoga is hard. It’s 90 minutes in 100 degrees.

But it’s not nearly as hard as life.

So, the yoga studio is my place to practice dealing with the actual hard things in life. Because when I get to a yoga posture that is challenging me – and my instinct is to either run out of the room or walk up and kick the instructor in the shins for making me do this – I hear my teacher’s voice in my head:

Meet resistance with breath.

Maybe I can get beyond my caveman mentality and just stop for a minute. I can realize that I’m stronger than I think I am and I can be still for a moment and stop the spinning of my mind. I can take a breath – then decide how I want to respond.

So, as I stood in a glorious theater in Providence, RI, with a group of strong and interesting women all sitting there, ready to listen to me speak – the spinning started:

What am I doing here? Who the hell am I? What makes me think I have the right to stand here and say anything about anything to anyone? They are going to throw things at me. I need to run out of the room right now.

And then I took a breath. I met that resistance from my inner critic, with my breath. Then I remembered that they actually invited me to come speak. They wanted me to do this. These people had voluntarily signed up for this workshop of mine and no one was tied to their chairs.

So, I said:

“Hi. My name is Lisa. Thanks for being here today. I’m a kind of nervous, but really want to talk to you about something that is important to me. I want to talk about how we can all live a life that feels authentic even if it’s different from what other people expect of us. And the reason that I feel like I can talk to you with some authority about this topic is because I screwed it up so majorly, for such a long time.”

And then they laughed and then I loved them.

That’s what can happen when we don’t operate on automatic pilot and when we are open to options beyond the binary way we are tempted to see the world. It’s not always yes/no, black/white, good/bad, kill/run – the world is nuanced and so are we. When we can still the story line in our minds, a whole beautiful world of middle options become clear.

Sometimes we get a chance to make friends with the woolly mammoth, and we’re rewarded with a fantastic weekend, spectacular people and some really good macarons.

* This was originally posted on my other blog, LisaJakub.net *

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Scuba diving lessons for yoga

Tags

Bikram yoga, Breathing, mindfulness, scuba diving

I was young when I learned how to Scuba dive. The minimum age for diving was 13, but I somehow convinced my dad to lie to the dive master, since I was only 11.

Dad and I took the class together. I read the books and studied the colorful charts that the teacher pointed to in the dive shop. I learned about buoyancy compensators and decompression sickness. I learned the hand-signals. I was good to go.

We did our test dive in the pool at the YMCA. The first moment of being able to breathe underwater was mind-blowing, a whole new world opened up for me. Each inhale was a revelation. I was mesmerized by the bubbles that danced up to the surface when I exhaled. It was not something they could have explained in the textbook. My breath became an absolute wonder.

I’ve always had ear problems and as the dive master swam with me down to the deep end of the pool, my ears started to hurt from the pressure. He signaled for me to try to clear them, but it didn’t work. I panicked, forgot I could breathe underwater and tried to catapult myself up to the surface.

The dive master grabbed my arm.

He shook his head – No

He put his palm up in front of my face – Stop

He pointed to the regulator in my mouth, which was providing me oxygen – Breathe. 

He made me just stay there for a moment. He locked eyes with me as my panic dissipated and I started to take smooth, long breaths. He signaled that I should try popping my ears again. This time it worked.

I was in the Bkram yoga hot room the other day and I was convinced there was just no air. I was dizzy, my heart was pounding and I wanted to quit and bolt up to the surface. Suddenly, that dive master from 20 years ago popped into my head, his bug-eyed mask was right in front of me again.

No.

Stop.

Breathe. 

All I needed was right there, I just forgotten that it was accessible. I forgot what a wonder my breath was and that I could just be present with it and watch the bubbles dance. I could just chose to be still.

I had forgotten what I was capable of.

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Pranayama: the art of breathing

Tags

Breathing, health, yoga

For the past several weeks, I have been attending a class called Yoga philosophy: beyond the poses. I think I am in love.

We are studying the Eight Limbs of Yoga and I am totally buying what they are selling. I sit in class, nodding in agreement like a crazed bobble-head doll, feeling that these ancient concepts are perfectly aligned with what I always felt about spirituality and life. I think that back in 100 BCE, Mr. Patanjali was talking directly to me.

We are working our way through the eight limbs and this week we discussed Pranayama – yogic breathing.

It is kind of nuts that unless you are a singer, you don’t learn about breathing. How is it that I am 33 years old and I have never spent two hours devoted to studying my breath? It is my life force and if I stop doing it for more than a minute, I die. Perhaps it’s worth a little of my time.

We practiced many different types of breathing techniques to improve the quality of our breath. A few of them made me want to puke. This is apparently normal. When you are just learning how to breathe properly, your body rebels a little; I think of it like the body version of my Monkey Mind.

Here’s the other kicker – I breathe wrong. Yep, my whole life, I’ve been doing it incorrectly. I am what is known as a “reverse breather.” This means that when I breathe in, I suck my stomach in. This is wrong. It doesn’t allow the diaphragm to expand and let air into the lower parts of the lungs. This makes it difficult for the prana, or energy, to flow properly and now I have exercises (like the three part breath) so I can begin to correct this habit.

When I got up this morning, my first thought was – oh, yay! I get to try out new breathing today!

I’m now seeing something clearly which has always been there, but I was too preoccupied to notice. The breath is simple but epic and essential to the quality of my life. I can now appreciate its beauty and engage to the best of my ability.

This is the way I want to start waking up to my life.

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