The 21st December, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, is also my sisters birthday. For me it is also a reminder that the days will start getting lighter again.
For my sister, a GP in London, it was quite the opposite in December. Darkness had fallen, as a new strain of coronavirus was taking hold. For me in Edinburgh, it was time to admit to myself I had to let go of my small yoga studio. As the new year arrived so did the new covid-19 measures. It felt like the extra bit of daylight I always look forward to, had been taken away. For my sister it felt like all the lights had been turned off.
The pandemic has been a force at work challenging all of us to find our inner light.
The last nine months have been unprecedented, many of us have had our paths redirected. It’s often a challenging and painful experience that forces us to find our inner strength. As I was letting go of my studio, adapting my practice to support perimenopause and mild long covid symptoms, I was finding it hard to draw on any strength. Meanwhile, my sister didn’t have time to think about her inner strength. Suddenly she was swamped again after a few days off over Christmas.
Lack of self-care was the element bringing us into imbalance. As I was encouraging my sister to take some time to nurture herself in the evenings, like making sure she got out for the runs that she loves to support her mental health, it was apparent that I needed to do the same. My yoga practice and teaching schedule had to change to support me. Yoga teaches us interoception; mine hadn’t disappeared, I was just choosing to ignore it. A conversation with my sister, had highlighted what should have seemed obvious and yet, I wasn’t seeing.
Everything that happens in our minds is reflected in our bodies. As yoga practitioner’s we know and feel how our breath and bodies are linked to our emotions. In traditional Chinese medicine each organ is associated with an emotion. The heart with joy and the lungs with sadness and grief. In Max Strom’s book A Life Worth Breathing, he writes about emotional burdens and stress being held in the shoulders & neck; unexpressed anger in the jaw; sadness and trauma in the hips; anger in the thighs; internal anger and fear in the solar plexus. In The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes ‘Most traditional therapies downplay or ignore the moment-to-moment shifts in our inner sensory world. But these shifts carry the essence of the organism’s responses: the emotional states that are imprinted in the body’s chemical profile, in the viscera, in the contraction of the striated muscles of the face, throat, trunk, and limbs.’
At opposite ends of the UK, me and my sister were in different variations of darkness. Needing to relight agni; find a glimmer that could eventually evolve into an inner fire. Prajnaparadha is the Ayurvedic theory of imbalance. As Dr Robert E. Svoboda writes in his book Ayurveda for Women, “Prajnaparadha- literally, ‘an offence against wisdom’ happens when one part of you insists on an action that is detrimental to the rest of you. It happens when you know deep inside that something is not right for your body-mind-spirit, but you obstinately go ahead and do it anyway, ignoring Nature’s warnings.”
Yoga offers a present moment experience encouraging us to notice and listen, however I hadn’t been listening. The burdens and stress were being held physically in my body, aches and pains were creeping in and I was feeling exhausted. As I began to sit in stillness more often, practise restorative and yin asana, alongside meditation to support recuperation, the glimmer of light began to glow once more. I’ve been practising stronger asana and pranayama to energise myself through these dark days of January so far, stoking my inner glow into a flame.
Yoga is a support, a guiding light and source of strength. Each of us has our own source of light – agni. It offers solitude when needed and a sense of connection with ourselves and others through group practice. Planting a seed of intention for yoga self-care this year is what will offer me strength, resilience and support. Our yoga practice is a powerful tool and I feel eternally grateful to have it to support me through these turbulent times.
All of life is interconnected. Life is connection through the relationship we have with ourselves, as well as the relationships we have with others. I had veered off the path for a moment and thankfully through a conversation, a connection, a relationship, the universe had directed me back on course.