Connection
I’ve been reflecting on my time with the middle school students a little over a week ago. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about one young person’s one word message.
During my yoga time with them, we considered the theme, “Keep calm and rejoice.” As we began class, I asked them if there was anything that might be keeping them from feeling calm or able to rejoice, and if so, they could write it on a slip of paper I’d given them, then place that paper under their yoga mat. As class ended, they had some choices of what to do with their slip of paper. One of those choices was to leave the paper behind, under their mat, if they wanted me to dispose of it.
As I cleaned up at the end of the final yoga class of the retreat, I found under one of the mats a slip of paper with one giant word: STRESS.
These young people are no less, and maybe even more, affected by the general climate and temperature of these time. Children with more diagnoses than time outdoors. Children with far more on their minds than maybe many people know.
There is a yes, and of keeping calm and rejoicing that is so essential to consider. Yes, there is stress. More stressors for young people than perhaps I recognized in my own life at their same age. Yes, these stressors are challenging and can wreak havoc on nervous systems in people of all ages. Yes, this havoc can rock the calm of even a twelve year old and can leave any person feeling anything but the impetus to rejoice.
And when we’re regulated, we might experience stress, and also calm and joy.
What might this look like? I drove home from the retreat listening to an On Being podcast episode with Christine Runyan who is a clinical psychologist and professor at UMass. The episode was recorded a little while after lock-down was lifted. In it, Runyan is asking important questions about what the pandemic and the way we were asked to live did to our collective nervous systems and how this is playing a part in the world we’re living in now.
The whole episode is worth listening to (listen here), but this quote stood out to me:
"What is often protective in instances of such widespread trauma, if you will, has been taken from us in this pandemic: connection. And it’s that connection and community that doesn’t ask, 'What sign do you have in your yard? Are you on my side?' 'Are you voting for the same person as me?' People put those things aside, and they come together, and that’s how we express this common humanity. This is how we heal. And so much of that has been taken from us during this time. We’ve had to do it in very different ways that our nervous systems don’t interpret as much. Our nervous systems know touch. They know closeness and a hug. And to not be able to do those things when people are really hurting has been a huge loss, and there’s much grief there."
This was part of the yes, and of retreat, both with adults in Italy and middlers at church camp. In a setting like retreat, people have the opportunity to experience how it is that we can have stress components, challenges, hard things in life and feel a sense of stability and the delight of rejoicing.
Humans need spaces of connection in order to heal from a long stretch of disconnection and divide. None of us is different in this. Every single one of us has the biological code of a human nervous system. We respond to stress with the information that this nervous system code remembers and has written into it.
I have witnessed the way that community connection creates healing again and again. During yoga training, during retreat, at church camps. It’s a powerful way that our source code remembers safety and healing.
We are encoded and we can rewire that code. We have the potential to grow our capacity to experience the discomfort of stress AND experience calm and steadiness within the uncomfortable. We might even find ourselves being able to hold this discomfort, this stress, and also rejoice.
I’ve begun thinking of this upcoming yoga training as a kind of handbook to living life with greater connection, more healing, greater ease. We experience all of this in a rich community. You’ll also learn how to teach these tools to others. Join us to learn how regulate and heal your nervous system! Sign up HERE or reach out to me with any questions (401-440-0279).