I am sharing this practice, publicly, for you all because it is something that is close to my heart. It is something that is important to share.
More than that, because recently the need and discussion around this topic has come close to home.
Those of you who might know our family in person, will know that my husband had a harrowing experience towards the end of last year which has, 6 months on, morphed into some heavy and hard mental health experiences for him.
It has culminated in him having to look at his inner world which is incredibly hard, especially when the inner world is already so severely impacting the physical parts of your body. However, as he has come to know these past few months, and especially in this last month of being at home unable to fully feel grounded or able to participate in day to day life, the physical aspects really are just the tip of the iceberg. There is always so much happening beneath the surface of what you can see or even acknowledge.
If you are somebody who has experienced mental health episodes or periods of time in your life where your mental health has been on the precipice, you will know that when you are there, it is incredibly hard to see outside of that place especially when it is impacting you physiologically.
I have no doubt, he is not alone in this experience, and in fact the more he / we speak of it, the more we uncover that there are so many people have had similar periods of time in their own way. In fact, there are so many ways in which mental health illnesses/episodes can appear, sometimes we see it coming, other times we are blindsided - the common denominator though is that it exists, it’s real, and the pathway to healing, even just the physical manifestations of it, is hard.
It’s times like these I can only be grateful for the level of curiosity I’ve always had on the topics of psychology, mental health, the nervous system, self-awareness, mindset and perception. A level of curiosity that allows me to ebb and flow between worry and understanding (instead of being stuck in worry altogether).
I first leant into the subjects of psychology and personal and professional development when I was studying my degree. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was going to be stepping into a career (not as a yoga teacher) where 90-95% of the time I was going to be exposed to mental health and mindset challenges for a broad range (and ages) of people in a multitude of ways. And by exposed, I was having conversations with real human beings about their mental health day in and day out. It was clear to me that there was a huge misunderstanding of the mind, there was a lack of tools and real support for people to lean into or simply be in these dark and difficult times and more often than not people were isolated and so deep in the trenches that they didn’t have the capability to find the right words to ask for help to get out. It’s easy to look at a physical illness and create a plan for healing, what’s harder is to understand the depths of the iceberg that lies below the surface of the mind and the beautifully convoluted array of memories, experiences and thought processes taking up space there.
Thankfully, for my own mental health, three years into my career I took the chance to deep dive into yoga, which over time I found was really another way of talking about how we look at and tend to the mind. I’m also thankful for this because it A: gave me a greater depth of understanding of how the mind impacts the vessel, B: it helped me with my own tools that I didn’t have to support the shifting of experiences within my entire being and C: it gave me the greatest appreciation of the depths of our human complexity and greater reverence for all human beings and what they experience.
I felt and still feel the benefits of these yogic tools for myself, especially in how I was able to move energy in my body, and could see how much of a positive impact it had in shifting physical world, my mind and in doing so was also being asked to look more clearly at what was happening internally, for me, on a regular basis.
These new habits and ways of looking at myself allowed me to get really close to my physical vessel to notice when things were changing or shifting, to see when things felt good or bad, and it wasn’t about always having to save myself or heal myself, but just to know that my body, mind and breath could change depending on what I was perceiving and processing and what was happening in life. The beauty of all of this zooming out and zooming in was that it allowed me to see how interconnected body and mind are and to build a level of resilience and knowledge to be in some pretty heavy times myself.
Our mind, body and nervous system, in fact our whole vessel is so fully intertwined. The nervous system is in part there to protect us but also to protect us from ourselves and what the mind is processing. We have these inbuilt functions and I truly believe that when we are given the tools to see what is happening we have a greater capacity to find a level (it’s not 100% of the time) of resilience and more than that, when we are challenged even if we don’t have the tools to deal with that particular scenario on our own we at least have the capacity to ask for help with a little more awareness.
An example of something that Tobi and I have been talking about through this process of healing is when one sees a thought, that may not be the whole truth of reality, what do we do with it then? How do we stay true and authentic to what we felt and experienced at the time without attaching to it. Or how do we look at something that our conscious or even subconscious mind is telling us to be true and decipher whether it is or not? How do we retrain the habits of the mind and in particular - how do we access the intellect part of the mind as opposed to always being the manas (memory) or thinking mind or even the ego? Each part plays a role in living and functioning in society however if we spend most of our time in only one or two functions of the mind we create a solid habit which means in difficult times it can be hard to access the intellect to step out of an emotive response. Also, so many of these questions are still very much questions, I don’t pretend to think there is a single answer to solving anything like this.
Overall, this period of time has given real meaning to something that one of my first yoga teachers said “stay out of the mind, it is a dangerous neighbourhood” - he was right.
What can happen through the senses and through the perception of the mind and the lens that it chooses to put on, is that we can lose sight of what is actually real. Over time, if we allow ourselves to continually be in that way of being / thinking without curiously inquiring into our perspectives and inner dialogue, we may find that we have built such strong neural pathways that our mind habits are then hard to break.
In yogic texts, they talk about the mind’s illusions. It is also perhaps true to say that so much of what we think is an illusion, so much of what we read, digest, experience - are illusions. This is because our lens, our senses are filtering EVERY SINGLE THING - from the most minuscule thing to the biggest, most traumatic or ecstatic - and from there we process and digest through our cells. I won’t go into science of synapses because I am no expert but even just a simple understanding of these electrical currents that fire within us (energy you might call it) can make you realise how intricately every thing that our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hands are exposed to are processed internally, and equally how even without these senses the intricacies of our inner energy.
So where does that leave us when we experience something and our neural pathways are already wired to constantly perceive worry, anxiety or fear? It can mean that over time the iceberg below the water grows and grows, it can mean an explosion of volcanic proportions - but it can also mean that we simply live in a way where there is this constant rhetoric of being controlled by the illusions and the stories of the mind. Instead of us, holding the reins firmly to see what has and will happen, but without changing our energy patterns and lines to be based solely around those experiences (this is a metaphor from the Katha Upanishad I’ll share another time).
Through this unfolding happening close to home, I have been reminded that even though my I was NOT qualified to be having so many conversations about mental health in the workplace, I was incredibly passionate about helping people see their own potential, their own patterns, helping them find their tools, support networks and practitioners -whatever it might have been. Because lo and behold, whether something has already happened to us or not, this self awareness, perception, this village this support WILL BE NEEDED AT SOME POINT IN YOUR LIFE.
For the last 6 years I have had a deep focus on motherhood, all of the ways that I can model acceptance, resilience, vulnerability, village connection - all of the things that we as human beings will need, and I forgot, that adults need it too. Now, I have realised I need to continue to stay in the adult world too, because actually, it’s through our awareness, practices, awareness and perhaps our healing that we create a more solid foundation of understanding and resilience for our children too.
So here is a practice, it will not solve your problems, but it may bring you a little closer to you. Some things, you will like, some things you won’t. Some days it will feel easy, some days it won’t. Some times this will help and sometimes it will not.
Either way, the opportunity to lean in and to see what is there is here for you, in video form, with a short chat at the beginning about the nervous system.
Lastly, if you have written about mental health, or have an experience, a tool, something you want to share - please leave it on this post, let’s collate, let’s talk about it, let it be known what lies beneath the surface.
With love,
Kat x
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