How to use Triggers as Growth Experiences

I wanted to respond to this meme I saw on facebook: "We will continue to be tested until we are no longer triggered".

It certainly seems true; as we become aware of our triggers, we start to notice how they manifest repeatedly, almost like we're being tested. This helps us make sense of why the triggers continue to happen, and implies a sense of responsibility over how we react. However, to call it a "test" implies that some higher power is throwing triggers our way, and the only way to make this painful process stop is to heal completely. But at times, thinking that only perfect healing will bring relief can feel overwhelming. After all, why should our experience of comfort and relief be tied to a standard of well-being that lies outside of present experience?

Fortunately, there is a way to find relief long before you achieve "complete healing". This involves becoming aware that you are creating your own triggers. This is not a statement of blame. It is simply true that once we have experienced a trauma, we often are drawn to situations that allow us to reenact that stress so we can come to understand: 1) why we did not respond fully in the first place, and 2) how we can respond fully in the present. Seen this way, triggers can be helpful, as they create learning experiences for us. But if they occur too often or too intensely, they are counterproductive, as the brain is not given a chance to turn off the stress response and process what has happened.

For example, in my 20's, I moved to the West Coast twice. The first time, it was to do an exchange study in California, and it was a great experience. When I returned to Ohio, I lived in 3 different places before moving back out, this time to Idaho. This time, the experience of being far from home with few resources was not an adventure - it was a trauma. When I came back home, I suddenly found it very difficult to stay in one place, and lived in 3 different places for the next few years. I came to realize that I was re-creating the trauma of moving so that I could understand my sense of uprootedness and become more grounded.

Once you become aware that you are unconsciously creating triggering situations, it is very important to take a stance of self-forgiveness and understanding. Once your brain has been traumatized, it is very normal to re-create situations as a way of learning. This can be a growth experience, especially when undertaken consciously. Consciousness of this process means knowing you can slow it down at any point. We all have an ideal level of stress at which we function best. This involves the right balance of comfort and challenge. For those who feel over-stimulated by life, it is really OK to follow your inner guidance and create comfort and stability. It is OK to avoid triggering situations. Just when you think you are not growing, you can think about creating a trigger and I assure you, it will happen! Another option is to create positive triggers, such as a spiritual practice, counseling, or therapeutic creative exercises. There is never a shortage of growth experiences. It's up to you to decide how often and intensely you want to experience them.

Yoga: a quiet revolution

The other day, resting in child's pose after a busy week of meeting deadlines for paperwork, I had a memory of when I first started teaching people to listen to themselves. As a 26-year-old beginners' yoga teacher, I felt quite surprised that women in their 50's looked to me for a certain kind of authority. I took me awhile to figure out what it was - then I realized, they needed me to tell them two things: 1, to relax, or 2, to listen to their inner wisdom. They actually did not know how to do these things, or had forgotten.

It stunned me at the time, because I had never thought of these as valuable skills, or skills at all. But to these women - most of whom worked in higher education or administrative work - Monday night yoga was a precious time when they could "just let everything go". The rest of the time, they were meeting deadlines, fitting in, or simply performing. We all live in a culture where we're supposed to be told what to do - starting in elementary school, and into adulthood. These women viewed me as an authority figure, but I refused to be that. I knew I could teach them more by showing them how to teach themselves, even if that meant they might not need me anymore.

I love this about yoga. That when we do child's pose, we are actually subverting the dominant paradigm - when we put our heads to the earth and listen to our own heartbeat, we are overturning the teacher's authority in exchange for our own. In daily life, this can lead to subversive acts like... smiling at coworkers, breathing deeply at the desk, or no longer stealing paperclips because of a belief in asteya. It can lead to putting one's own well-being and sense of alive-ness over things like work and keeping up appearances - honoring the self as the core of all we do. 

Here's to yoga revolution - from the inside out!

Chakras and Personal Power: naming and claiming relational needs

Like most people, you've probably heard of the 7 chakras - energy centers that connect to our physical, mental, and emotional selves. If not, this Anodea Judith website is a good primer. I was introduced to chakras in 2005 when I took the IYT 200-hour yoga teacher training. At the time I was a waitress, so the 2-week yoga intensive in the Pennsylvania mountains felt refreshing, to say the least. Our teachers taught us about the 5 koshas, or layers of being, that are affected by yoga practice. They taught us the 8 paths of yoga and how hatha yoga is about balancing energy through physical movement. And they taught us how the chakras are directly affected by yoga postures and techniques.

After the intensive, I had to teach a class for my internship, and I decided to base it around the chakras. Then in 2008, after several months of researching the chakras, I presented a Chakra Yoga series which ran for about a year. After taking a few years off to focus on my counseling career, I ran the class again from 2012-2013 at Lifesource Yoga. I also incorporated chakras into my mental health counseling with a few clients, since I understood the relationship between childhood development, psychology, and the chakras. For example, for a client who tended to neglect his/her physical health, we would explore early childhood experiences through the lens of the first chakra in order to normalize and conceptualize the experience.

Today I'm going to focus on how to use chakras as a vehicle for personal power. The very act of understanding your energy system is a step toward personal power. This is because chakras are an expression of our capacity to give to, and receive from the world.

Western psychology, in its 120 years or so, has had a huge task, which is undoing the myth of the individual and replacing it with healthy modes of relating. Since we live in a patriarchal society, masculinity is held up as a superior mode of being, and is defined by self-reliance and independence from relationship. Therefore, men and women who have relational needs (which is basically everyone) have been historically shamed and prompted to "grow up", "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", or otherwise become independent from our need for external approval. While it is not a bad idea to be free from external approval - after all, this need can feel like a straitjacket - psychology has raised excellent questions, such as: "if one's developmental needs are not met, how can one become independent?" "How can a therapist, through transference, assist someone in meeting those developmental needs?" and "Should independence really be the gold standard of mental health?"

Furthermore, as a result of the emphasis on independence, there is a lack of knowledge of healthy interdependence, or relationship skills. What exactly is a healthy relationship? Psychology has been busy answering this question, especially since the 1970's, as seen in the huge explosion of self-help books on the topic. "Personal power", a concept from feminist psychology, is one way to answer the question. This kind of power has nothing to do with dominating/forcing your way through life, but rather, invites you to take full responsibility for your own feelings, needs and actions, as a path to success, fulfillment, and even social change.

The full implications of this are mind-boggling. Good thing for me, I'm just going to focus on its relationship aspect! Rather than expecting others to make us happy, which leads to fear, grasping, and control, with personal power we take responsibility for our needs and feelings. This doesn't mean we give up hope of others meeting our needs, it just means that we ask them to, rather than expect them to. And from this place of awareness without expectations, we feel more empowered, more whole.

Enter the chakras: your guide to your emotional, sexual, spiritual and physical needs. Each chakra is a center of both giving and receiving. The heart chakra is where we experience needing love; it is also where we experience feeling joyful and wanting to give. Sensations in the heart chakra of tightness or deadness may signify a need for love, since the need for love is one of the scariest things to feel (in our culture). Those who have the most satisfying relationships are often those who acknowledge their need for love just as well as they give it. In obvious ways, the same is true for the 1st chakra: when one's physical needs are met, one is more able to do physical work. As for the 2nd chakra, sexual energy flows in and out of it: by opening to pleasure, the energy increases, and we feel moved to give pleasure in return. Or, lower-chakra energy can be channeled into higher chakras, which is why we need holidays at the beach. :)

Core needs of each chakra
1st: safety, health.  Sign of imbalance: anxiety, fatigue
2nd: pleasure   Sign of imbalance: tension, anhedonia, addiction
3rd: mastery, challenge   Sign of imbalance: low self-confidence, boredom, apathy
4th: love, connection   Sign of imbalance: chest tightness, depression
5th: integration ("processing time"), purpose.  Sign of imbalance: sore throat, impatience, overwhelm
6th: knowledge   Sign of imbalance: assumptions, prejudices, pessimism
7th: spirituality   Sign of imbalance: inaccurate perceptions of self, lack of faith   

By understanding the needs associated with each chakra, you are essentially taking a giant first step toward personal power. You take responsibility for the fact that you have needs, rather than expecting others to read your mind, or give you permission to need. Unfortunately, because of the myth of the individual, the belief persists that having needs is somehow wrong, which makes it more difficult to claim personal power. I can't tell you how often this would come up in my counseling work with couples; and guys, I'm not blaming you for this, but it was often the men who lacked that sense of empowerment to get their needs met. Actually, I think this fact is largely responsible for the lack of emotional competency in men (which is evolving, of course): that men tend to be under a lot of pressure to not have needs. Whoever you are, and whatever your level of self-awareness, it is wonderful to remember that it's OK to have needs, and continue fine-tuning your ability to feel and name them. The more we grow in this capacity, the easier it will be to find a healthy interdependence between ourselves, the world, and the people we love.