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OPEN MIND OPEN BODY Yoga Philosophy in Everyday Life |
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Finding Balance in Life: Retreat Versus Engagement The ultimate goal in yoga is to reach a point where you can be at peace in any moment – every moment. In the yoga tradition, there are two archetypes or models for how an individual might reach this ideal state. The first is the yogi renunciate, on the mountaintop, or in the cave, totally separated and withdrawn from the busyness of the everyday world. In isolation, the yogi finds great clarity and peace. The second archetype is the yogic warrior, who is passionately engaged in the world, completely dedicated to the well-being of others, and vows to never rest until all other beings are happy and at peace. She learns to be at inner peace in the middle of external chaos. And what I find is that most women need to find a balance between these two archetypes. Seeking peace by creating a space free of intrusion, distractions, and external demands; and also channeling energy toward service, work, creativity, and relationships. I encourage my students to reflect on which of these two ways of recharging is missing from their lives. Another way to think about this balance – this cycle of retreat and re-engagement – is to use the physical body as an analogy. It has been said that the primary difference between animate and inanimate objects is that animate beings adapt to stress, whereas inanimate objects are simply worn away by stress. Imagine a mountain that is being eroded over time by wind or water. An animate being responds differently: it actually grows in response to stress. Without forces of resistance, for example, human beings cannot develop adequate strength. Think of how we develop physical strength –we ask our muscles to do something they have not done before, and they react by changing; by growing new blood vessels to fuel the muscle cells; by growing in size; by developing new neuromuscular patterns that make it easier to do something that once was difficult. The same is true for how our immune system develops, for how we learn new skills, for how we develop our mind. The key to this cycle of adaptation is that it requires a period of recovery. Whether we’re talking about a physical rest after strength-training, or the sleep needed to consolidate new memories and learning. If we do not offer the body and mind a period of rest, retreat, and recovery, our “engagement” with the world becomes a form of self-injury, of overload. We don’t develop resistance or resilience. We don’t become replenished by activity. We become more like inanimate objects, worn down by our daily interactions with the world. In
life, the recovery we need may be in scale with the stressor or activity
or challenge we’ve recently been through. A little bit of recovery in
every day may be enough to keep us learning and adapting. What I see often in my students is a different kind of cycle – a kind of positive feedback loop that has very negative consequences. For example, a woman who is overwhelmed by her job, and looks for way to “recover” through retreat. And she begins to try to take care of herself by cutting out everything that takes energy besides her work. As she gets more disconnected, she has fewer meaningful moments and rewarding experiences, and so becomes less able to tolerate the stresses of her job. She ends up unable to get out of bed in the morning, and feeling like she doesn’t have the energy to do anything at all. This is a classic cycle of depression, where the instinct to withdraw to “rest” is not balanced by the instinct to re-engage. And this is someone who needs not more rest but more activity; something meaningful that exhausts her in a way that actually “fills her up.” There is something to the fact that using up all of our energy creates more energy, because we adapt to experience. It’s like working out – the demands of activity create the strength, the flexibility, the endurance. People who are in the cycle of withdraw and retreat have nothing to adapt to – and they continue to lose resiliency with the challenge that full engagement creates. The other cycle I see is when someone is so involved that she thinks there is no time to rest, and looks for what is missing in more activity, more projects. The more she takes on, the more she feels unable to rest, and the more she needs to. If we think back to how the body builds strength or flexibility or endurance, there is always a recovery period. We cannot adapt without some kind of recovery. If we restress our body to soon, we create injury and chronic pain that makes us think we need to do more – and the more we do, the more we injure ourselves. Once we’re on either of these cycles, our instincts for balance are usually hidden underneath the strength and force of our habits and emotions. So most of us need to really observe our patterns, and look for what is out of balance. In my own life…I started to practice yoga when I was a student, completely over-committed to too many activities, jobs, and classes, and juggling a number of unsupportive relationships. The yoga I needed at that time was restorative, centered on relaxation and quiet. And that allowed me to clear up and clean out my life. But as I learned to take care of myself, something shifted: I realized that what would be healing at that point would be reconnecting to others, and becoming more engaged again. And that’s when I started teaching yoga, and the more I taught, the more I gave in that domain, the more energy I had. What’s especially interesting to me is how this cycle re-emerged years later, when I finished graduate school, and went through another cycle of needing to retreat to find clarity and the space to recharge. And at a certain point the peace of not being “busy” turned to a kind of boredom – what you might call a willingness to re-engage, take risks, and take on demands. But because it was coming from a desire to engage, and the space of having connected to my values, the responsibilities and demands I took on were meaningful, and I had the energy to commit to them. [Talk shifted to group discussion at this point.] Enjoy these ideas? Sign up to receive monthly ideas for your yoga practice in the free Open Mind Open Body Newsletter.
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