Fostering an ethos of self-care amidst a culture of ego

As those of you who know me in person or regularly follow this blog are aware, my relatively recent return to a consistent yoga practice has brought up a number of challenges - physical, emotional, and psychological. First among these has been the notion of self-care that is such an important tenet of yoga practice. If you have ever been in a yoga class, or followed one online, or read a yoga book, or even used one of those asana apps on your phone, you know it: the instructor repeatedly reminds you to "listen to your body," "don't jam yourself," "take rests if you need to," "find your edge, but don't force yourself past it."

I grew up with a competitive American spirit. As a child, I competed in two sports at the state and national levels and I have always been exceptionally hard on myself, not necessarily expecting to win or even outperform others, but always expecting to improve and perform my "best," whatever that is. And that's just the thing; my concept of my personal best was based on a rather linear imagined trajectory, not on the very non-linear reality of my life and the multitude of factors that shape our performance in anything. Along with this ego of performance expectation came a drive to "train" at a certain level as well. Though I no longer ride horses competitively, I find it difficult to ride "for fun" outside of a training program, and expect myself to commit six days a week to it. Though I climb recreationally, I find it frustrating that, unless I devote at least 4 days per week to it, I just don't have the naturally powerful physique to make progress or even avoid regression. This struggle to let go of my own ego in sports has actually kept me from enjoying them to the max in the busy and complicated context that is my everyday adult life.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, when I began practicing yoga on a regular basis, I found myself beginning to fall into this same trap. If I missed a day, I felt guilty. I wanted to be a "good yogi" and this meant practicing ___________ . . . it started with every other day and morphed into daily. When I missed a day because I was tired, or because I climbed, or because I just felt like writing all day instead, I was consumed by guilt. Although I was learning the ethic of self-care on the mat (I try to choose my practices according to my needs on a given day, I have learned to laugh when I fall out of a pose rather than becoming frustrated), I was blatantly ignoring it in my daily decisions around whether or not to practice.

Yesterday, while I was playing around on twitter after a long day of teaching a psychological anthropology unit, I came across this fun, tongue-in-cheek article. Not surprisingly, the thing we need to stop saying about yoga that resonated with me the most is "I'm so mad I missed yoga yesterday. I wanted to go every day this week." Kate Stone, the article's author - a yoga instructor and personal trainer - insightfully wondered why we say these things, asking, Why? Did your body want to move that much?

The article, and specifically the author's challenge to the externally and systematically imposed expectations made me think about the lesson I had taught earlier in the day. In particular, anthropologist Eileen Anderson-Fye's exploration of body image among adolescent girls in Belize. The notion of self-care was something that Anderson-Fye argues is a possible protective factor against disordered body image and eating behavior in a country where beauty is highly valued and Western media is visible. Other researchers have posited that Americans' sense of the self as being changeable, something always "in progress," contributes to our relative risk for eating disorders.

But maybe it's also this relative absence of an ethic of self care - despite living in a highly individualistic society - that places us at risk for all kinds of things. That makes it so hard to listen to our bodies, even in a yoga class, because we are more concerned with meeting expectations, with meeting an externally mediated and measured notion of "success" or "progress." I see it all over the place: in my plethora of friends who brag about not taking vacation time; in those I know who pride themselves on working through their off days or wake in the middle of the night and rather than reading themselves to sleep, choose to get up and work; in the bristling judgment I've faced when I explain that time spent with my husband, my horse, and my dog is more important to me to me than following a particular career path. In essence, to some degree, one could argue that our culture of ego has created a culture of braggart martyrs, of people who sacrifice themselves for others (or for work), but rather than doing so in quiet acceptance or even enjoyment, do so for the status associated with the embodiment of a particular notion of the ideal self.

However, the importance of self-care is something that is receiving increased attention, especially for those who work in the caring professions. In essence, people are starting to recognize that to avoid burnout and actually increase efficacy in helping others, we must honor and nurture ourselves and our own needs and even wants. And this growing appreciation is something that I've elected to prioritize for myself. I guess the trick at this point will be keeping the ego out of self-care itself...hard as it may be, when I decide to listen to my body and skip that yoga class, to take off work when I'm sick, to spend time with family instead of working overtime, I also need to avoid judging others who don't follow the same path. Because, at the end of the day, maybe self-care looks a little different for all of us.

Oh the lessons I've learned . . . Yoga as a Vessel for Personal Growth

In true American fashion, I have spent most of the nearly 3.5 decades of my life thus far in a hurry. Even as a kid going to horse shows, it’s all “hurry up and wait.” As a student, I rushed between school and work and activities and my social life. As an adult, I find myself rushing to meet deadlines, sometimes staring at a computer screen for so many hours for so many consecutive days that I awake with eye strain. American culture is all about linear trajectories to “success,” it’s all about overachieving and multitasking and, ultimately, it’s all about ego. And despite my background in anthropology (Read: Shouldn’t I be able to identify these characteristics as cultural? I trained for this!), I am no less prone to the influence of my birth culture than anybody else. I have been lucky, however, as yoga has taught me about presence, about the moment, and about sitting still and quiet and without judgment for long enough that I am finally, at 34, beginning to accept and enjoy myself.

Yoga has come in and out of my life since I first stepped onto a mat at 18. I was drawn to it for the physical challenge but soon discovered that, as wonderful as backbends and hip openers and inversions may feel physically, it was what they’ve brought to the heart and mind of my life that are the most valuable to me.

While I have been practicing yoga with varying consistency for 16 years, there are three distinct periods in my life when I sought the practice out, and each of these times has taught me a distinct (though connected) lesson about the benefits of being still yet present, about being in the moment: to sit with emotion/pain; to quiet the mind; and, most recently, to accept myself, without ego and without judgment. 

Sitting with emotion/pain

When I was 15 years old, my first horse, Clancy, broke his leg and we had to “put him down.” Clancy had been my best friend for the past four years, since coming to me skinny and frightened, and we had grown up together. But there was nothing I could do when he broke his leg. I wasn’t even there when it happened. 

I responded to Clancy’s death in a quintessentially American way. I evaded the many emotions - sadness, grief, guilt - that accompanied my loss and threw myself into horses, competitions, and teenage experimentation. Between my overachiever personality and my inability (or unwillingness) to feel the pain that accompanied this loss, I was quickly drawn to methamphetamine. In addition to increasing my confidence, meth allowed me to bury my pain while continuing to present an illusion of success. During the subsequent years, I slept little and hid well, disguising almost daily drug use with all kinds of traditional achievements - I maintained good grades, competed at nationals in my equestrian division, worked part-time, got into college. Outside of those first days after Clancy’s untimely death - when the pain was still overwhelming, gut-wrenching - I managed to avoid feeling the loss.

That is, until my very first yoga class. I was 18 years old and living away from home for the first time, attending the University of California Los Angeles. I had traded methamphetamine for more readily available coping mechanisms and had begun to truly loathe myself. Yoga was offered as an elective two nights each week for the duration of the ten week quarter, so I signed up, expecting to gain flexibility and possibly some “cool” points. What I found was much more. Yoga helped me revisit a pain that I had been avoiding for 3 years. What’s more, yoga taught me to acknowledge it, to feel it, and to let it go. For me, this did not mean letting go of Clancy, or forgetting our time together, or minimizing the loss, but it did mean leaving the destructive baggage behind so I could begin to ease my way into the present. To this day, I don’t completely understand the mechanisms of this lesson, but I think it was the relative quiet of the class, the remarkable stillness of Savasana. 

The class was held on a raised deck, open to the air, and, being Los Angeles, the evenings were warm. That first night changed my life. I was surprised at the physical challenge of the practice itself. But I was stirred by what happened at the end. As the instructor guided us into Savasana, I first discovered the challenge of true relaxation. In fact, I came nowhere near it. Instead, my body weary, my heart strained, I fell into a lucid dreamlike state during which I finally said goodbye and mourned in truth for the first time over the horse that I had lost, the one that had been my best friend, the one that I had saved, and the one that I had somehow totally let down. With no images, no words, no music to distract my mind from the guilt and sadness that I had carried with me for three years, I was forced to sit with it, and the grief shook my slack body. That night, I learned my first lesson from yoga - I learned that it is ok to feel, and that until we truly acknowledge our emotion and let it move through our bodies, it will be impossible to forgive or to grow.

Quieting the mind

In the years immediately following that first encounter, I practiced yoga sporadically, but struggled to find another transformative moment. In fact, caught up in the rush of life and the exhilaration of becoming an adult, when I did attend class, I would catch myself clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth throughout the practice. Racing through postures in flow and power classes, I simply could not quiet my mind enough to experience yoga as anything other than a workout. And I didn’t just practice yoga this way; I was living this way, moving from job to job, from town town, from person to person.

That is, until I discovered the joy of a different kind of practice in a distinctly different place. At 23 years old, I was preparing to embark on an adventure of a lifetime. For others, I framed it as an academic excursion, a very pragmatic pre-grad-school-application test of my mettle. I was going to go to Morocco to study Arabic and to explore the possibilities of conducting graduate research there. After the fast-paced atmospheres of Los Angeles and New York City, after the bitter cold of manual labor in central Virginia’s harshest winter in a decade, the desert heat and open space were wildly appealing. I left for Morocco armed with a set of yoga asana cards and a mat and for three months I learned Arabic, spoke French, ate with my hands, and came to appreciate the value of a common Moroccan saying, “Un homme pressé est déjà mort”/“A man in a hurry is already dead.” During my time in Morocco, I practiced yoga nearly every day and rather than rushing through poses or working toward a sweat, I discovered a practice that was about what felt good each day, that was about being on rooftops overlooking strange cities, that was about opening up my heart to a world that I was learning to truly experience and be present in. 

When I returned to the US, yoga remained a regular part of my life and it was during this time that I first began to quiet my mind. Under the tutelage of Anusara-trained Jordan Kirk, my practice began to deepen. Through holding poses and finding the details of mental as well as physical alignment, I began to learn to quiet my mind for long enough each day to make room for the type of joy that radiates from within. While flow classes had enabled me to anticipate what would come next, feeding into my overanxious brain, Anusara taught me not only to wait, but to delve into the present with the same enthusiasm I usually brought to “what next?” I think the first time I felt this type of “present” was in Camatkarasana (wild thing), a truly invigorating and freeing pose that always encourages me to surrender to the moment. 

I still struggle with this lesson of quieting the mind, and often find myself looking to my husband and our dog as a reminder of its benefits. Both seem impossibly comfortable with “just being” in a way that I work for every day. But once I felt it for that first time, I now find this type of presence comes quickly during any yoga practice and every now and again, I catch glimpses of it in my daily life. After all, every day is practice. And while learning to slow down, quiet my mind, and appreciate the moment has not changed my craving for movement, it has changed the way I experience the journey.

The author reveling in history and adventure,
Egypt, circa 2005

Accepting myself

The importance of accepting myself, without ego and without judgment, is the most recent lesson that yoga has brought to my life. After an eight-year hiatus from routine practice, I recently returned to the mat, and my body and spirit have been grateful. This latest lesson is an important one, and in a highly competitive world, one that was sorely needed. Ego and self-judgment have become considerable barriers in recent years, blocking my ability to experience true joy, even in the best of times, even in activities that are supposed to be fun. 

When I went to that first yoga class 16 years ago, I had no ego, no expectations, about my own abilities. But a month ago, when I laid my mat on the hardwood floor of a yoga studio for the first time in years, I felt my stomach flip. Nerves. Would I be able to live up to my past performance capacity? It had been so long since I last engaged in a routine yoga practice, and my hamstrings had become so tight, my back tender from injury, my mind filled with the stresses of a competitive and demanding career and, at 34 years old - despite a valiant effort to remain active through horse-back riding and rock climbing - my body had already begun to reflect, and to manifest, these stresses.

Self-conscious and worried that I would both let myself down and look a fool attempting the very asanas that had once been so familiar and freeing, I beelined for a relatively isolated corner of the studio. As I took a seat beside the mirror, the self-judgement began immediately. I critiqued my reflection for its hunched shoulders and struggled to sit up straight. I ground my teeth in frustration with my own weaknesses and with the nascent fear that yoga, a practice that had helped me through hard times in the past, was now daunting, even more so than the first time I ever attempted it. 

Serendipitously, the instructor’s lesson that day, what she wanted each of us to take away, was about judgment. “Do not judge yourself, do not compare yourself to others - in your practice or in your life. Let go of society’s expectations about what is the ‘good’ or ‘right’ or ‘successful’ path for you. Let it go, and accept yourself in your heart.” They were the perfect words at the perfect time. The reminded me of the Sufi proverb, “No fear, no expectations,” that I had always found inspiring. My ego had grown too powerful, and I was becoming paralyzed with fear.

In the midst of a major life change, I had thought that returning to a regular yoga practice would help me make an important decision. Suddenly, however, I realized that yoga was not here to help me work through the decision, as I had expected, but to teach me to come to terms with my choice, whatever it would be. Whether I elected to stay on the same path or take that frightening leap into the unknown, I would need to overcome expectations - my own as well as those of others. And to do this, I realized, I would first have to learn to sit with myself, my true self, without judgment. And when the teacher began to speak and I took that first focused breath toward an awesome new intention, a tear rolled down my cheek. 

As I have renewed my practice, and come to re-learn my body and its changes without judgment, without expectation, I have found greater joy in every activity. I can appreciate that I am stronger than I used to be, but that I am also tighter, and I am ok with this, because there is no greater value in one or the other. These physical qualities are simply the result of life - the result of rock climbing regularly, the result of hours sitting at a desk - and they will benefit from being balanced but they neither increase nor decrease the value of me.

Throughout my life, like many smart, motivated women, I have tied my self-worth up in what I can do, bound my identity to a career or an accomplishment. Once again, yoga has jolted me, offering perspective and a powerful reminder that self-judgment, ego, is not a motivator but a barrier to growth. Ego is what would keep me from embracing the joy of Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (bridge pose) simply because Urdhva Dhanurasana (wheel), once so accessible, is once again a challenge. Ego is what would prevent me from attempting standing splits class after class even though my lines may never be as stunning as those of the former dancers. Ego would not allow me to submit this essay or share these experiences for fear that they are not profound enough to be worthwhile.

*****

As an American, I have often been witness to, and sometimes experienced, that desire for a fast-paced, fitness-oriented yoga practice. Vinyasa flow and power yoga classes interspersed with asana-inspired crunches and held to thumping beats are no longer difficult to find. In fact, they tend to be far more common and crowded than the quieter, stiller (though no less challenging) Inyegar, Anusara, and Kripalu inspired classes that have taught me so much. And I by no means want to downplay the physiological benefits of yoga. Routine practice relieves years of spinal compression that comes from hunching over a computer and reminds me to stay in tune with, and listen to, my body. Yoga keeps me strong in the depths of my muscles and complements other sports I enjoy. The physical benefits of yoga practice are not and should not be ignored. 

But, for me, the physical benefits are simply a welcome bonus. Over the years, yoga has come into my life at opportune times and I have sought it out during times of mental and emotional turmoil. Again and again, I have found that, through the physical practice of asanas, I have explored lessons that went well beyond the physical, that taught me to integrate the physical with the mental. For me the concept of stillness, has been the most significant overarching lesson. Achieved through both the movement through poses and the deep holding of them, this learning to be present has translated into an ability to sit with my emotion, with my mind, and, eventually, I hope, with myself. As with my ability to focus in order to hold an arm balance or suspend my fear to permit inversion, as I become better at remaining present without judgment on the mat, the next challenge will be translating these lessons into my everyday living.

The anthropologist who didn't want to change

When I act as an anthropologist, that is, when I do my job, I go into the field as a child. Even though my research participants are mostly American-born and living in America, I must be willing to ask what may feel like stupid questions to clarify things I don't understand. This means I spend a lot of time watching so I can learn the rules before interacting. It means I may make lots of mistakes and it means I am seeking to experience and understand a different way of living, a different way of experiencing the ever-elusive "normal".

Interestingly, in research, this outsider status (however precarious as a researcher in my own "back yard") gives me the latitude to make mistakes without offending and to ask questions without ego. This leniency toward the ignorant outsider has been confirmed for me in casual travels abroad, where if I made a mistake, it was often chalked up as harmless and the rule I had violated was clearly explained. In our work, anthropologists are excellent at being quiet observers and inquisitive children. We are by necessity chameleons and must be willing to operate frequently outside our comfort zones. This perspective of being an outsider trying to experience the world as an insider is what gives our research its richness. But I wonder if am I the only one who struggles with this in real life.

In recent years, I have dealt very very personally with walking this line. I have sought to maintain my own personal space and identity and to live according to the cultural rules that have defined much of my life. However, when I (ad)ventured into a situation in which personal cultures clashed, cultural relativism was suddenly worthless. It didn't matter that, after a while, I could map the differences between respective backgrounds (and subsequent expectations) or that I had been able to turn a reflexive eye upon my own culture, had come to think critically about my own rules. I found myself not wanting to change; at times, in fact, I was aggressively resistant to it.

I hesitate (perhaps because of ego?) to say this was quite ethnocentric. I didn't, and still don't, think my way is better, but it became a symbol of me, a scrap that I felt I could hold on to in the face of a life that was swirling around me, often feeling out of my own control. Ironically, central to this very identity - that of an anthropologist - is a view of myself as adaptable and open minded.

All of this has made me wonder: Is this a struggle faced by all anthropologists? As anthropologists, is it fair to expect ourselves to be as accepting and as flexible in reality as we are in work? In fact, do we spend so much time changing, adapting, accepting, in our professional lives that change becomes overwhelming in our personal ones? Do we spend so much time distancing ourselves from judging the differences between cultures that we fail to truly empathize with, or even understand, people's personal connections to their cultural "truths"?