Hot yoga and sitting with your pain

I recently listened to Glennon Doyle’s book Love Warrior (which I highly recommend) and was struck by Doyle’s recollection of an experience she faced during her separation from her husband. She describes how one day, she accidentally found herself in a hot yoga class, expecting it to be a regular air-conditioned yoga class. Instead of joining the others in the stretches, she sat on her mat and let herself feel her pain. She had been distracting herself from it, keeping busy with her children and with writing, and this was the first time she sat and faced it. She chose to not run away.

And I realized how guilty I am and have often been of distracting myself from my pain. I’m a private person and prefer to grieve alone, and these days, I am hardly ever alone. But even when I do have time to myself—after the kids are in bed, for example—I do whatever is fun or engaging. It’s not even necessarily that I am currently in pain or grieving any recent loss, although right now I am. Sometimes the pain is years old and has just never been felt because I’ve pushed it away.

There are so many losses I have not let myself fully grieve, actually sitting with my pain. My favorite person in the world, my grandpa, passed away six years ago, and I foolishly missed my chance to say goodbye. I came home from his memorial service directly into a separation from my husband that led, several months later, to divorce.

When my husband left us, I didn’t have--make--time to grieve. I jumped right into the job search and taking care of my kids as a single mom.

A year later, another of my favorite people, my high school mentor, died after a five-year fight against ALS.

When my coworker Sarah died suddenly this past May during the birth of her beautiful baby girl, I actually sat in my pain. The people around me pushed me to feel the grief and made space to process the loss. I didn’t know Sarah half as well as I’d have liked, but she was so precious, and knowing how much the others around me were hurting actually validated my own pain. I wept for Sarah and those she left behind. And the act of weeping in itself was healing.

But grief doesn’t just come in the deaths of loved ones; it comes in transitions, in losses of ability, losses of fellowship, losses of stability. When a friendly coworker moved away to pursue graduate studies, I experienced loss that I never processed. Even in this, our most recent move, leaving people and a job I loved—and faculty who really got me—I experienced loss.

I used to consider myself a pessimist. Then I referred to myself as a realist. My psychology faculty last year let me know that realists aren’t on the spectrum of optimism to pessimism, that “realists” are actually pessimists. I’m still not entirely convinced, but in the consideration of the point, I’ve begun to classify myself as a reluctant optimist. Don’t get me wrong: I still get depressed about certain things, such as the state of our presidency and the plight of people in Syria. But in day-to-day things, I have forced myself to be positive, to hope for the best, to tell myself, “It will all work out somehow.” And I actually believe it. Maybe this is because of a family history of clinical depression. Maybe I’m just frightened that if I lower myself into my pain, I won’t be able to climb out again and will only sink deeper and deeper into darkness. Maybe. But whatever the reason, I make myself face forward probably more often than is healthy. I have no desire to wallow in despair for the things in my past I cannot change, but moving forward in a healthy way does require acknowledging and experiencing the pain.

Since Sarah’s death in May, I have lost two other people I liked and respected—a caring therapist who doubled as one of my Psychology faculty, and a mission-field “uncle” I’ve known since I was nine years old who doubled as one of my Family Medicine faculty. Both deaths were sudden, and my heart aches in their loss. So I will choose to make time this week—maybe even tonight—to sit with my pain, to let myself feel their loss. 

It will perhaps be my final act of love.