Anybody else hear “non-essential” used to describe their livelihood and instantly feel a little devalued? Yeah, I had my moment of “wait, what did you just call me?!” too. Those seem like some prime fightin’ words right there, but instead I decided to go with “okay, I’ll do what I can to be helpful anyway – with my non-essential self!”
First, we have to put it into context, don’t we?
The services I provide are not inherently unimportant or inferior. But within the framework of a public health crisis, teaching yoga is not crucial to community survival or safety in the short term. Fair enough. I will refrain from getting my feelers hurt. In fact, if it helps hospitals and emergency and critical care providers manage their caseload, then okay, I can easily be talked into putting my livelihood on pause for you. (Truth be told, it’s not hard to sway me because I have a particular spot in my heart for first responders and health care professionals already.)
To go one step further – because surely I’m not the only one who took the non-essential label personally for a hot second – I do recognize that it’s also not to say that I personally have no intrinsic value, or that my particular skillset and expertise have no merit whatsoever. Yet how humbling to concede that my in-person services are not at all crucial to my community at the moment!
And so I sat there with my gut reactions and mixed emotions…
And here is what I realized:
The whole world seemed to be turning upside down because my experience of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was indeed being turned on its head.
What follows is a quick sidebar for those unfamiliar with Abraham Maslow’s model in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” and if you’d like to learn more, click here.
If all of humanity’s common hierarchy of needs was diagrammed into a triangle, the base of that triangle – the “must meet these needs first and foremost” – are basic needs:
- first, physiological needs: air, water, food, shelter, sleep, reproduction
- and then, safety needs: security, employment, resources, health, property
Once the above are satisfied, the next needs in line are psychological needs:
- love & belonging: family, friendship, intimacy
- followed by, esteem: respect, status, recognition, freedom, strength
And once the previous needs are satiated comes our self-fulfillment needs:
- finally, self-actualization: fulfilling our inherent potential
I felt a little like I was losing at a game of Donkey Kong. I had nearly reached the top, was lining myself up to work on that self-fulfillment and self-actualization piece at the tail end of winter. I was about to release my first on-line course – a precursor to my new 500 hour yoga teacher training program! I was about to transition away from years of weekly drop-in, mixed level studio classes to teaching only a few private, personalized yoga sessions in order to shift time and energy to earning my yoga therapist certification.
All this in March when… Wham! That barrel of non-essentialness knocked me down a few rows. And here I am, with the rest of my community, just securing basic needs. How very humbling.
Lucky for me
Early on during the stay at home order I heard some insightful words from a longtime yoga therapist in New York. She reminded me that we have the unique opportunity to help our yoga community meet the basic safety needs of feeling secure and healthy. She admonished everyone on the group call, “Your task is not to teach them fancy asana, or profound philosophy, or complicated pranayama right now. Your task is to tell them that they are safe. Teach them self-care so they can feel healthy even amidst the chaos. That’s all.” It resonated, for sure! Yet several times she also had to repeat, “Good grief! Stop freaking out! You must be calm, so they can be calm.”
Shortly after those words, I actually had to bow out of the call early because the collective freaking-out-edness of the group was too much for me. The panic response among yoga teachers was triggering. But I took her words to heart.
Then in mid-April, I sat in on a video call with Judith Hanson Lasater and Lizzie Lasater. Judith kept reminding everyone that when the initial, emotional reactions come up, greet them with compassionate acknowledgement: “How very human of me.” And I took her words to heart, too.
So began my very intentional practicing YS 1.33: By embracing an attitude of friendliness toward those who are happy, compassion for those who are miserable, delight in the virtuous, and equanimity toward the non-virtuous, the mind retains its calmness. Not so easy a feat on any given day, but doubly so amidst the current social climate of very polarized experiences, reactions, and viewpoints. The advice in this Sutra is considered “the key to peace” – and couldn’t we all use an enormous dose of peacefulness about now?
The humanity of stress
It may help to remember that the stress you experience is a natural human reaction.
Why does everyone – yoga teachers on peer support calls included – seem to be freaking out? Because we are operating from emotional centers of the brain while the more highly functioning centers in charge of rational logic have gone on hiatus. The stress response that has been studied at length is now playing out on a massive scale.
It is a universal, natural, physiological function, and here is how the stress response works: We perceive a threat to any of our needs mentioned above in Maslow’s Hierarchy, and the amygdala (within the deep recesses of the brain, responsible for emotional reactions) sends distress signals to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system, which causes the adrenals to release epinephrine. The epinephrine results in elevated blood pressure, raised heart rate, and more rapid breathing. All the while, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for logical evaluation, rational thought, and inhibitions) becomes rather inaccessible, and the parasympathetic nervous system (the system that manages the rest-and-digest state of calmness) is on pause. All this leaves you floating (*perhaps swimming, maybe flailing about wildly, depending) in a pool of emotional and physiological upset.
The important points to note are 1) this is a biologically directed chain of events commonly experienced by you and everyone else (*some more so than others), and 2) it exists as a survival mechanism (i.e. is not a bad thing in and of itself). But much research has shown the damage caused by the domino effects of the stress response left unbalanced.
Balance and order, please!
The key is balancing stress response with relaxation response.
Tapping into the relaxation response + physical activity + social support is considered an ideal recipe to balancing the stress response (so that what was a temporary survival mechanism doesn’t turn into a runaway freight train). A combination of yoga techniques can be used as the recipe: pranayama (breathing techniques) + asana (postures to strengthen and stretch) + sangha (sense of community within your circle of fellow yogis).
The majority of my time in the initial weeks of the stay at home order was spent securing my own air mask. Every day I focussed on my own yoga practice and connected with my own yoga community (the one in which I am the student, not the teacher). I did this so that I can be more effective in helping others secure their air mask. Because who wants to take a class – virtual or otherwise – from a teacher who is still obviously operating under their own stress response? I don’t. And I wouldn’t ask you to either.
*Why do some of us seem to experience higher levels of stress or a more potent stress response? We react differently depending on our resources, physiological make up, and perspective. Some of us have more access to physical, emotional, and financial support that make it easier to reconnect with the relaxation response. Some of us are hardwired with temperaments that are more resilient. And some of us operate from a different view of things (i.e. seeing this all as a “tough challenge” versus “an all out threat”). But whichever way you perceive threats and respond to stress is valid – no better than or worse than, just different.
Part of the uniqueness of a global health pandemic is that we are experiencing different types of stressors, too. Some people are dealing with very real threats to their basic needs for health, safety, and financial stability. Others are healthy, safe, and relatively financially stable enough today, but there are psychosocial stressors threatening their connections with family, friendships, and freedom – because lack of connection, lack of information, lack of control, and uncertainty are high stressors, too.
Whatever is triggering the stress response, we need to acknowledge to ourselves and our community, “how very human of you.” And then find ways to help first ourselves and then those around us to tap into the relaxation response + physical activity + social support. It might be the only way we get out of this thing alive.
Consider: How are you helping those around you do so, too?
And if you would like to work with me to develop your own personal yoga practice to help you through, please contact me. I am happy to help – over here with my non-essential self!