It's All In Your Head

JUST IN YOUR HEAD
There are some of us who heard our whole lives "it is just in your head", meaning that what ever we were feeling was an illusion or delusional thought. The implication was that we were not in reality, our responses and reactions were based on ... nothing. IN FACT we were responding (with more or less skill) to what was going on around us. Sometimes said, sometimes unsaid, but we KNEW what was going on. As a child of an alcoholic I learned well how to gauge my environment. I developed coping mechanisms solely upon the criteria of staying safe. But that phrase "it is all in your head" frightened me away from believing in my mind.

THE POOR BRAIN!
Imagine my delight when I discovered that they were right (to a degree) - but not in "that" way. Trauma of a chaotic and unsettled household and my later active addiction did, indeed, change my brain. The chemistry was certainly affected by ingested drugs and alcohol but more important is the fact that my life long experiences had changed the functioning of my brain.

THE GOOD NEWS
Just as sensory inputs had harmed the brain; wise and healing sensory inputs can restore the brain. YES! The brain can be healed.

THE QUESTION IS HOW
The tools we can use to restore us are simple. With breath, meditation and mindful awareness, as well as intentional movement - the damaged brain centers can be brought back on-line. The hemispheres can re-establish a relationship - right brain and left brain can unite. You can re-integrate the "dis"-integration of the brain, your being and your sense of self. Yoga combines these three modalities and that is why the impact is so tremendous - a brief consistent practice, over a relatively short period of time shows results. The word "results" referring to the fact that the brain heals. The trauma that turned off functioning in the brain can be repaired. Trauma exists at other levels: it is also in the body, and we can address it with the movement. The trauma is also in the self, and we can love that back to health.

THE YOGA SERVICE COUNCIL CONFERENCE
The talented, compassionate and passionate yogis who attended YSC the conference this year at Omega have been serving communities who need to heal. All forms of trauma; illness, poverty, abandonment, disease, neglect, marginalization and harm affect the populations that these yogis have decided to serve. The service means offering the tools for self care that yoga provides in an appropriate and inviting venue. Kelly McGonigal, B.K.Bose, Bessel van der Kolk (among others) gave group talks that amazed and inspired us. Sharing the results of their research freely with us, inviting us all to be part of the remedy, they explained how, what we were doing, had such a profound positive impact on the populations we served. It was a delicious affirmation of our efforts. It was grace.

Their documented research shows exactly this- that the brain, carefully and lovingly attended to, can reframe, reform and remap itself bringing integrated vitality and a wholesome life back to a once damaged being.

Remember - breath awareness, mindful meditation, and yoga. Now let the phrase "it's all in your head" be empowering and remind you, you have the solution.

Kyczy Hawk E-RYT200 is the author of "Yoga and the Twelve Step Path", a leader of Y12SR classes, and the creator of SOAR(tm) (Success Over Addiction and Relapse) a teacher certification training she holds with her good friend Kent Bond E-RYT500. Find out more about her, her classes and the training at www.yogarecovery.com

Breaking the Cycles

I am honored to be a guest blogger at Breaking the Cycles. Please click here to read what I wrote. Breaking the Cycles has been sharing research, information, personal experiences and opinions on these topics such as drug addiction, alcoholism, substance abuse, dual diagnosis, underage drinking, help for families, prevention, treatment, recovery and the neuroscience of the brain disease and brain health and more since 2008. Their goal is to change, and in some cases simply start, the conversations so together we can end the stigma, misinformation and shame. They do this through presentations, workshops, consulting, blogging and media outreach. Cruise on over to their website and see what other information you can find.

September is National Yoga Awareness Month and Recovery Month

September is National Yoga Awareness Month
This is the journey of a woman who is totally different from myself, a totally different lifestyle and completely different background (she a successful young business woman and I, a middle aged recovering alcoholic) and yet - we both have similarities in our path to wellness and wholeness: YOGA!!!.  Yoga has been a vital part of my recovery and reintegration, and it has, for different reason been hers.

A Gift Bag Of Puke

First let me say that lessons can be found anywhere, in any form. I choose to actively look for my lessons; life speaks to me. There is a window above my kitchen sink. I can watch kids going to and from school, people on their daily runs, or walking their dogs as I wash my dishes, pare my fruits and cut my vegetables or run cool water to drink.

 Sometimes a car will park under the curbside tree to make or receive a cell phone call. I look out with curiosity, hoping to recognize the occupant as a visitor and not just someone using the shade for convenience. A few days ago a car stopped and the passenger door opened. I gazed out anticipating recognition. Someone was dropping by! Instead the passenger leaned out and, partially hidden by the butterfly iris bush, began to heave. She spasmed over the curb several times, began to withdraw back into the car and lurched out again to wretch some more. I am standing at my sink watching this - feeling I should run a glass of water and bring it to her.

But my mind kicks in and overrules my heart with thoughts. I start thinking; embarrassment on her part, intrusion on my part, the front door sticks so I won't get out there on time, and so on. I waste vital minutes on prevarication eventually talking myself out of this basic act of human kindness. It is too late. She has drawn back into the car one final time, the car door closes and they pull away. I gaze back to the curb mildly concerned about what I would see - and there is it! A gaily, brightly colored gift bag in the gutter. I can't believe my eyes. She had found a container in her car to catch her effluvia. She had done what she could to contain the mess. I am astounded. I pause, drink the glass of water I had started for her and felt shame.

Shame that I had not overcome my reticence and offered this suffering traveler a gift of comfort; and yet she had done her best to reduce the impact of HER discomfort to me, and unknown homeowner. She had tried to mitigate the problem her pain had caused me. I had another lesson; follow your heart, your instinct for kindness.

 A walker trips in front of you- instinctively you reach to assist her. Someone drops a parcel - without thinking you reach down to retrieve it for them. Don't think: do. Don't let your head - which is NOT always wise - over rule your humanity. Rather than delaying a kindness due to some pre-sensed prejudice - such as the inconvenience of sick in the gutter - go with compassion and offer to ease a traveler's discomfort. 

 This is what I have learned from a gift bag of puke.

Kyczy Hawk E-RYT200, RTY500 is the author of "Yoga and the Twelve Step Path", a leader of Y12SR classes, and the creator of SOAR(tm) (Success Over Addiction and Relapse) a teacher certification training. 
Follow her ONLINE recovery infused yoga classes 
http://yogarecovery.studiolivetv.com/MemberRegistrationYR.aspx

Growing and Changing

A new class is being formed for Yoga and Recovery - Y12Sr - starting Monday, January 9, 2011 from 7 pm to 9 pm at the Gyalwa Gyatso Buddhist Center in Campbell. I am excited and feeling a little anxious. It is the kind of anxious I feel when I have invited folks over and the table is set, the food is all but finished, the house is clean, the towels arranged just so in the "necessary". I am ready and it is only four hours until the guests arrive! Not really, but it feels like that. The preparedness and the forward looking combine to being both in the past (preparation) and the future (arrival). The present looms large with the sensation of no NOW. Really, the NOW is all there is and being really there, in the moment, in each moment without the distraction of things to do, or conversations to begin, or projects to start, is very uncomfortable. This is actually the perfect time to practice now-ness.
While I experience anticipation and excitement I will make these days about being where I am; practicing the fullness of karma yoga. I do all that I can and let go of the results. Sounds almost like the program, doesn't it! Ha - tricked again into practicing the principles in all my affairs.
Happy New Year!

A Heart Cracked Open

I Love It - For Real, for real.

I am going to take several days to integrate what I discovered and learned (which are quite different things) at the Yoga and Addiction Recovery Conference at Esalen this past week. Nikki Myers, Rolf Gates, Vinnie Marino, Noah Levine, Carrie Coppola and Tommy Rosen all shared with a generosity of spirit, an authenticity and availability that touched me deeply. Among the intense experience of somatic release, meditation, 12 Step sharing and dharma talks my mind, body, spirit and emotions found corners of my heart. These areas had been long protected. I let them emerge without having to analyze or explain why they had been hidden. This abrupt awakening left me with a heart cracked open. I felt this with my body in the form of tears, in my emotions as a sense of increased vulnerability followed by a sense of alertness and aliveness, and in my spirit with renewed love and affection for both myself and others. Yes, for myself and others. Both. What a gift.

Stay tuned for more.

In the meantime my article on the breath was published in the Dynamic Living Magazine. Click here for more!

Aparigraha - Non-attachment

Aparigraha - Letting Go

You have heard it in the rooms of recovery; “Let Go and Let God”. Holding on to the result of actions, feelings, events; trying to control outcomes or to predict the unfolding of events all cause suffering. These attributes of clinging, gripping, even greed can remove one from the moment and catapult one into a dissatisfying future. Yoga advises adopting the restraint of Aparigraha – or non attachment.
Do what is mine to do and let go of the result,  relinquish the clinging to an expectation, a considered outcome; what is usually "my way".

Developing Trust, and Being Trustworthy

On the other side of the coin is the fear that by NOT holding on, that I am uncaring or acting in a non-caring way. Somehow attachment and gripping had come tomean “connection” or even “love”. I didn't know that I could love or could care without being possessive.  I was possessive and attached to the out come, to the manner or its performance, or the event. When I let compassion and care, gratitude and trust be in my heart, when I do find union with and reliance on my higher power there is no need to grasp or hold. Life events, like a breeze or a gentle wave, move in and out a proper rate and duration. I need do nothing but breathe.

Kyczy Hawk E-RTY 500 is the author of "Yoga and the Twelve Step Path", a leader of Y12SR classes, and the creator of SOAR(tm) (Success Over Addiction and Relapse) a teacher certification training. Join her on www.intherooms.com  Sunday mornings at 7am PST at the Yoga Recovery meeting. Find out more about her, her classes and the training at www.yogarecovery.com

Ask Kyczy about Yoga and Recovery; Brahmacharya - Non-excess

Yogic Yama - Restraint

Brahmacharya used to be translated as celibacy but now is more accurately defined as non-excess as it refers to all facets and characteristics of our being. It refers to all our passions and our desires. It can refer to time spent, money spent, and energy spent: to excess.  It can refer also to the velcro attitude in relationships and all the ways we can over do things.

The disease of MORE

Doing; doing doing doing – we are always doing something. The more we have to do the “better” we are. The more impossible our schedules the more valuable we are in this over indulging society. Free time is not only a fantasy for most – we don’t know what NOT to do with it when we have it.

Wall off the spirit; find the door

Another danger of excess it that overindulgence can be a mask, a thick goo of someTHING that covers a true need and blocks the spirit.  Food, things, sex, time; we find a way to over use and justify our excesses. Then to top it all off – I am an ADDICT! As an addict (and in my less than healthy state) there is NEVER such as thing as too much – so non-excess doesn’t make sense to me. Then there is my recovering self; that self that does not want ever to return to the madness of “too much of a good thing is a good thing” where good is relative.

With that desire for recovery Brahmacharya become one of my restraints.  So I keep Brahmacharya in mind when I work with my recovery and work with my yoga practice and when I work with my life.
With the help of others and with a sponsor / mentor the core of the issue can be revealed and resolved. This is the core of step work and the core of yoga practice.
Finding the point of enough, the grace of sufficiency, the divine in needing what I have and having what I need – that is my practice. That is my struggle and it is my reward.

Kyczy Hawk E-RYT200, RTY500 is the author of "Yoga and the Twelve Step Path", a leader of Y12SR classes, and the creator of SOAR(tm) (Success Over Addiction and Relapse) a teacher certification training that she holds with her good friend Kent Bond E-RYT500. Find out more about her, her classes and the training at www.yogarecovery.comhttp://www.yogarecovery.com