Get flexible, lose weight, look good in a bikini, stand on your head and take a selfie.Īnd that’s cool. It’s something to hold onto when things fall apart.Īll too often yoga is sold as a physical pursuit. They cry in Savasana and some days it hurts to breathe. The one common denominator is that these people practice yoga week in, week out. These people find solace in someone else understanding their suffering. They have found hope among despair, light in the darkness, freedom from suffering and joy amidst the grief. These people have been using yoga as a safe container to fall apart, pick up the pieces of their former life and start putting things back together. Some are in denial but others have had everything they know and love stripped from them until all they have left is themselves.Īnd all they can do is take one breath at a time. Everyone who comes to our Brisbane Yoga studio is suffering to some degree. Yoga held me together when things fell apartĪnd it’s not just me. I was able to pick up the broken pieces from the floor and yoga was the container that held me together during that time. I sat there on my floor, the carpet wet from tears and I let wave after wave of suffering smash into me. There were times when pain was my constant companion, when the gravity of my situation seemed impossible, but I didn’t run and hide. I experienced death, divorce and serious illness in the one year. I’ve been through the dark night of the soul. And when we face up to ourselves, when we give presence to our suffering we can reduce the tight grip that suffering has over us. When life becomes unbearable we can seek an instant fix to numb ourselves or we can face up to our suffering. And for someone who likes to be in control, this was comforting. I couldn’t control the chaos that surrounded the destruction of my life, but I could control how I reacted. But I made an effort to peek inside every day. Usually just lying on the floor and taking a peek inside my turbulent mind. I prescribed myself sequences to soothe a broken heart, to shift stagnant energy and to release fear. When you lose everything precious to you, there’s really only one thing left. Then the tsunami of pain would hit but I never actually drowned in it. Some mornings I would wake and for a moment I was oblivious to the pain and suffering. I slept a lot and found peace in my dreams. Have you ever eaten so many salt and vinegar chips that your tongue hurts? My tongue hurt but it was better than the hurt of my new reality. It helped me to manage the intensity of the shock I was feeling that my world had been torn apart. It just keeps returning with new names, forms and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating to ourselves.”- Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart What do you do when things are unbearable?įor me, denial worked really well for a while. If we run a hundred miles to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem for us when we arrive. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. “Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast.
WHEN REALITY FALLS APART FREE
The way to free ourselves from suffering is to fully experience our suffering. The book is a a pearl farm of wisdom but the central premise is that in order to deal with our suffering we have to face up to it. My whole world had fallen apart and I was looking for something to cling to. I started reading it when I separated from my husband. When things fall apart is a book title from Buddhist monk Pema Chodron.
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