My Anger Practiced Yoga Today
During my yoga practice this morning I felt anger arise. My thoughts kept returning to racial prejudices, white terrorists, environmental laws and regulations being abolished, violence, meanness, insanity of political leadership. At first I redirected my mind to stay with the practice and steered it away from the anger but my body, opening more as I stretched and breathed into it, led me to be present with my emotions. As I stretched and breathed I invited my anger to be with me on the mat.
Too often we judge ourselves negatively when unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings arise–yet isn’t a foundation of yoga to be present with ourselves no matter what?
So today, my anger and I practiced yoga together. It doesn’t have to hide from me any longer. Perhaps the most spiritual practice we can do is to simply practice self-acceptance, self-love. For that is the basis of love that can then flow to others freely and without judgment.
All of who I am is welcome to be here…now and always.
As I was walking down the mountain this morning I thought about the little herd of white-tailed does that live here. It’s always a joy to see them. Once I was standing under a tree watching a hooded warbler sing and heard a sharp and powerful snort and foot stamp. I turned in time to see a big doe bound off through the woods.
As I continued walking this morning my mind wandered to the bucks and their antlers and then to the elk that live nearby and their gigantic antlers. White-tailed bucks begin growing theirs in late March and continue to grow them until August. They have the fastest growing bone, some growing 200 inches in 120 days. And then…they fall off in January or February.
As I thought about that process, I felt a sort of kinship with those guys. Growing, growing, growing…then bam. Gone! Then start over…growing, growing, growing. It seemed all too familiar for the cycles of life humans grow through. Not so much the physical but the emotional and spiritual cycles. Relationships…double ugh. Talk about cycles.
It was a bit depressing thinking of the continuing, spiraling cycles of growth. Seriously. What’s the point if we keep repeating the same lessons and re-visiting the same old stuff? The same questions revolving in and out of our minds…blah, blah, blah.
I was walking along a gravel road where I live, surrounded by green…trees, wildflowers…and mountains. And as I paused to be present with all the bountiful beauty, I heard clear as a bell, The cycles in Nature are the point. Being present with the cycles is the entire point of it all. Not going anywhere in particular in life but being present with whatever is happening. 
So…there’s no destination. Nowhere to be. Nothing to escape from or go to. Every morning awaken, arise, live, rest. Really?, I asked.
Antlers…who knew they held such wisdom.
It’s been ten years today.
After documenting the oil spill for a year on the Alabama Gulf Coast, I thought it would be the wake-up event that would shake the world. I was wrong. Completely wrong. As soon as the well was capped…which wasn’t soon–85 days, 16 hours and 25 minutes–that mile-deep gusher polluted the Gulf of Mexico.
Chemical dispersants were used that made the spill MUCH worse than letting the oil float to the surface for removal. I watched tide pools of fizzing oily water along the beach and witnessed the destruction first-hand.
My heart broke open. I felt grief beyond anything I had known. I felt anger. I felt shame at being human and part of the problem. And now, ten years later, I feel rather hopeless because there wasn’t an awakening…for some of us, sure. But overall…now regulations are fewer and more lax thanks to the current USA administration…worse than before the spill.
We have an even greater opportunity to awaken on a worldwide level with a tiny virus making a huge impact. My greatest fear is we will not take advantage of this opportunity to make major changes that will improve the health of all life on planet Earth…and that would be the saddest of all outcomes. With such a high death toll my prayer is that it will fuel a world-wide awakening to positive change so these deaths will not have been in vain.
I wasn’t going to write about the oil spill disaster today but how could I not? It was an awakening for me and I will never be the same. Which is a good thing because I won’t go back to sleep…ever.
P.S. I don’t know why I tasted oil in the air that night in Curacao but I suspect on some level I sensed what happened. We are One, connected to all life. Perhaps my cetacean self got the message loud and clear.
We’re in a time now where the system is damaged. We’ve known it hasn’t been working for quite a while. So during this time of pause we have the opportunity to choose what we will input once things are up and running again. And so the question comes, What kind of world do we want?
Do we want more time at home with family? Do we want to do more things that enrich our life? Do we want to feel more compassion, more connection, more Oneness? Everything is up for renewal, rebooting.
So in this time of pause, the gift we are given is the choice to make changes that will steer us into a new direction. It’s easier to go back to what we’ve known but will we have the courage to make life-enhancing choices? Every one of us is being given the opportunity to choose…What kind of world do you want?
The other day I reflected on survival resources. Not outer ones that address our physical needs but inner ‘resources’ that help us find our way back…home, to balance, to sanity.
For the most part I’m handling this time with calm, groundedness. There are moments where tears come for the suffering of the world, where I take a journey down the bumpy ‘what-if’ road but I find my way back. So I questioned myself…how do I find my way back to that place of calm, grounded, peace?
As I asked the question I started seeing scenes from underwater caves…of my first dive into a high-flow cave system, of a dive in Mexico when one of our team members had light failure in all three lights, when a guy leading our group out of a cave took a wrong turn (but we quickly steered him back to the correct line)…of one of my first open water dives as a newly certified diver diving with two guys I didn’t know and coming up in a maelstrom and them leaving me to my own devices underwater to find my way back to the boat or the shark dive that had the entire hungry shark cast coming to me as I struggled against the current (also a newish diver and left by my dive buddy).
Those scary times and more all gave me experiences in problem-solving, working together, learning to remain calm when things around me were stressful. Those times prepared me for this time we are all experiencing now. I have successfully navigated situations that required me to momentarily suspend the fear and make a plan to make it through to completion of the experience.
As that newly certified diver surfacing in six foot seas and lightning popping all around, the first thing I thought was, OH SHIT! The next thing I thought was…Stop, breathe, think, act.I stopped, looked around. A boat was close enough to swim to even though it wasn’t the boat I was a guest on. I took some deep breaths and then decided to swim to that boat to rest. Even though they didn’t want me to board their boat because I wasn’t a paying guest, I not-so-politely told them to get out of my way and let me board to rest. I rested, calmed myself even more and then made a plan with their dive master and the boat crew which I had to swim back to. I got my compass out, took a heading, dropped back down underneath the six foot seas and made that lonely, hard, against-the-current swim back to the boat.
When we find ourselves spinning with anxiety we can practice good self-care by developing strategies that will lead us back home to our self. Call upon all of who you are and all the past experiences where you learned vital life skills and coping mechanisms….and if you never learned them celebrate the opportunity to learn them now.