Down Dog as a Resting Pose

Hi, again! Thank you for understanding the hiatus from this project. The last two weeks have had me thinking about yoga, a particularly challenging pose, and how this interaction always seems to present itself in classes:

Instructor (calm, cool, collected): And remember if you're feeling tired, you can always take a break by entering Downward Dog.
Internal Me (arms shaking, breathing heavily, sweating profusely): You've got to be kidding! I haven't worked this hard since forever! Who talks this way?! Gah!

The instructor will inevitably share a story of such-and-such person who stayed in the pose for some outrageous number of hours and how the pose is designed to be a resting position, despite being painful for many people. I inevitably think of a long, creative string of words that I'll omit from this story.

So why am I sharing this with you? Because, friends, we are in the middle of our practice right now. This is the time of year when everyone needs us - And not only do we simply need to exist, but we need to be at our best. It's incredibly tough to find peace in chaos, which is precisely what my yoga instructor is asking me to do when she speaks of Down Dog.

Since my last post, I've attended three separate trainings. They were great! But, as you can all attest, even amazing learning opportunities leave you wondering when you'll find time to perform your primary job functions. Because I've been working this muscle, I leaned into the discomfort, explored just where that irritation was coming from (my biggest hot buttons are stupid and unlovable), and allowed myself to pause.

Will anyone call me stupid if I take an extra day to answer a message? Probably not. Breathe. Do I have to have a response to that text right now? Not really. Breathe. Will I be able to handle this? Probably. Breathe. Am I messing this up? Maybe, maybe not. Breathe. Breathe again. Once more for good measure. 

I sincerely hope you're all doing that for yourselves and your students. Modeling this kind of behavior is enormously beneficial. One of the trainings, Raising Resilience, used a metaphor that goes like this:

Imagine a rider on a horse. Now imagine that the rider is your cerebral cortex. The horse is now the limbic system. What happens when the limbic system takes over? The horse bucks and the rider likely gets thrown off. In order to regain control, we have to calm down the horse and safely get the rider back on. How do we do that? We pause. We breathe. If it's a student that's been thrown off, we use calm, low, quiet voices to encourage them to breathe. We offer simple choices. We move slowly.

I adore this metaphor. The trainers even brought up the fact that it's terrifying to be thrown from a horse. If you've ever had that happen, you know just how it feels to hit the ground, wondering if anything is broken and quickly getting up to get out of the horse's way. Getting back on the now-calm horse is equally frightening! So how do we treat our youth when this happens? Do we create a power struggle or do we teach them the skills to calm down and regain control?

I'll leave you with a couple pics of my spunky girl who just loves rainbows and dinosaurs. Take care of yourselves out there, team.