The Wired Warrior: Move into Fear

Yoga doesn’t want to destroy your anxiety. Yoga just wants to have a nice open dialogue with your anxiety. “The Wired Warrior,” will be devoted to facilitating that dialogue. Every few days, I’ll be sharing work-related and real-life-related dilemmas, with an explanation of how yoga can prevent you from breaking things and hating people.

I was talking to a former co-worker tonight about her new job and she mentioned that she’s starting on a three month trial period. “More reasons to just be nervous,” she explained.
“I’m sure it’ll turn out better if you try not to be nervous and just do your work,” I suggested.
“But being nervous is a big part of my personality,” she protested.

I totally hear her on this. Fear is a big motivator for many people, and constant fretting can be as natural as breathing. But through careful observation of my own work habits, I have noticed that worrying about the future, or things that are not immediately in my control, has a negative effect on the quality of work I do. Constantly worrying that I might lose my job in 3 months would almost definitely lead to me losing my job in three months.

It made me think of something my teacher-trainer Kara Sekuler said this weekend. We were practicing handstand, and she told us, “Move into your fear. Don’t try to conquer it–it’s too hard. Just move into it.” For many people, myself included, handstand is the White Whale of the yoga practice. Whether it’s kicking up, not looking like a banana once you’re up there, or trying to balance off the wall, everyone has a challenge. For many people, myself included, an entire class can be tainted by concern about the handstand practice.

As it turns out, the handstand practice can also be tainted by fear about the handstand practice. Take someone like me. If someone helps me up into handstand, I can balance fine. But I cannot kick up to wall to save my life, or anyone else’s. Once I got so mad that I threatened myself by saying, “your mother will die if you don’t kick up into handstand.” I didn’t do it. (Sorry, Mom.) On the downside, I no longer believe in mind over matter, although on the upside, my mother is still alive.

It’s not that mind-power and will aren’t important. But my problem was that I was trying to conquer my fear of handstand. Clearly, since I can balance once I’m up there, my fear isn’t really of handstand. My fear is about kicking myself up. By focusing on “conquering the handstand,” I was able to keep being sloppy and weak when I kicked, because I distracted by trying to force myself towards the final pose. Similarly, for most of us, the big worries, i.e, will I lose my job? will I get promoted? will anyone ever visit this site? distract us from the little worries that we should be focusing on, i.e, does this sentence sound right? did I fact-check? are there any typos?

The thing is, you can’t just conquer your fear of kicking. You have to deliberately and mindfully move into your fear of kicking, and you do that by forgetting about the end goal and kicking with the best form you can possibly have. It’s a more manageable way to deal with whatever is blocking you, physically and psychologically. Kara also told me that my block was that I wouldn’t really commit. (I told her commitment was impossible for me and that I could get a doctor’s note to prove it.)

While it’s true that I have fear of commitment, I found that moving into that fear slowly–not committing to a full handstand but just to kicking really well, was doable. For people who love to worry, it’s hard to imagine putting the end goal aside for even a moment. But for people who love to succeed, it’s probably worth a try.

The Wired Warrior: It’s Time to Talk to Your Anxiety About Yoga

If you’re like most people, using yoga to calm your mind sounds great in theory, but when push comes to shove, the idea of wasting precious time and energy taking deep breaths kind of gives you an aneurysm. I was once one of those people. In college, I competed with people in my yoga class to see who could hold “om” for longer. I cried and refused to go to class for a week if I had an ego damaging practice, and ultimately took a long hiatus because I brought my best friend, who was an ex-ballet dancer, to class and she turned out to be way more flexible than I was.

Like most people, I sought after aerobic exercise, or activities where I could count miles, stairs and blow off some steam. But I’m at a point in my yoga practice where I’m actually generating steam, and not because I do yoga in a hot room, but because I’ve learned how to engage my muscles so intensely. The difference between running and yoga is that when you run, you do blow off your steam, and when you do yoga, you harness it inwards.

For me, getting to this place took years of practice, getting to a point where my anxiety and competitive nature were literally destroying my life, and getting laid off. I had the “good” fortune to be laid off in the summer (no jobs!), during the worst recession in history (no jobs!), with a skill set that’s not-so-saleable in the current economy (too many writers!) That meant that I had to come face-to-face with the fact that no matter how driven I was, the car was out of gas. That obstacle enabled me to deepen my yoga practice and make some major shifts in my life and persona.

That’s some major shifts. But now, it’s September. And I can feel the weight of that two-sided coin, ambition, in my pocket. Why two-sided? Because ambition can lead us toward new adventures, intellectual growth and slots on Oprah! But it can also lead to the two other As: Anxiety and Anger.

Now no one really wants to admit this, but ask yourself: doesn’t your anxiety kind of make you feel like you’re getting somewhere, even when you’re not? For many people, I think anxiety can be a motivator. But sometimes it fails us, or makes us completely f*&^ing miserable. If you’re at that point, even if you hate breathing, your hamstrings or the idea of not working a 70 hour week, yoga can help.

Yoga can teach you to take what would be epic anxiety and focus on the immediate details that you can control. Most of anxiety is the urge to fix things that are abstract and totally our of our realm of jurisdiction. But when we pay attention to the task at hand, and get really really good at fixing the problems that are right in front of us, we get closer to the big goals without even realizing it.

Basically, this 5-year old I know said it in a nutshell:

Kid: Why does my dad always worry about everything?
Me: I guess because he loves you…and because he’s a big worrier.
Kid: It’s not good to be a big worrier.
Me: Why?
Kid: When you’re a big worrier, you get hurt. It’s better to be a small worrier.
Me: Why?
Kid: When you’re a small worrier, you don’t get hurt. Only when you’re a big worrier do you get hurt.

Although I’m not sure my little friend understood what she was saying, I thought it was brilliant. We can worry, but we just need worry small. I believe that Yoga doesn’t want to destroy your anxiety. Yoga just wants to have a nice open dialogue with your anxiety. And this new section, “The Wired Warrior,” will be devoted to facilitating that dialogue. So what if you love to work hard, stay connected and check your email 40 times an hour? You still learn about how yoga and present moment mindfulness can make you work better.

The Wired Warrior doesn’t want you to disconnect, or stop worrying. It wants you worry more effectively, with less psychosomatic headaches and neck pain. Every few days, I’ll be sharing work-related and real-life-related dilemmas, with an explanation of yoga can prevent you from breaking things and hating people. Feel free to leave questions/comments or tweet @wickedrb.

Mary Stuart, The Tony Awards and Coping With Anxiety

Any Broadway fans or people who were really bored on Sunday night might remember that in the televised broadcast of the Tony Awards, when the time to announce the Best Actress in A Play, the camera/announcer accidentally swapped the names of leading ladies of Mary Stuart, Harriet Walters (Elizabeth) and Janet McTeer (Mary Stuart) when the camera focused on each of the women.

The problem is, I reviewed Mary Stuart (for popmatters.com) and have an incredible amount of self-doubt. At first I couldn’t breath. Then I shouted: “Oh my god. No! My life is over! I switched their names! I wrote an entire review and got their names wrong.”
“You never would have done that,” my friends assured me.
“But I would! I totally would. I did. I know I did. I remember.”
I was paralyzed. When I stopped being frozen in panic, I sprinted to my host’s laptop and began frantically searching for my review. But before I could call it up, the beautiful and talented Marcia Gay Harden came on and graciously informed the crowd that the announcer and camera man, not I, had made the terrible error.

I always really liked Marcia Gay Harden. I even thought she was great in Mona Lisa Smile. But at that moment, I wanted to marry her and have her all babies…However that would work….I don’t know.

Regardless, one thing to be learned from this situation is that no matter how many times you rehearse the Tonys, you can still mess up. (I’ve heard that they had 3 practice runs.) To that end, my host assured me that it was way more embarrassing for those people than it would have been for me. But I still felt a little strange that I had so little faith in my own work that I actually believed I would have done something like that. I’d written the review with playbill in hand–how stupid did I really think I was? And while in some situations doubt is useful (like if you’re trying to pretend Secretariat won’t win the Triple Crown so that betting is more exciting for the last race.) But living on a day to day basis with potent doubt about your ability to do simple tasks is not helping anybody’s odds.

Still, all writers and editors make mistakes. And while sometimes mistakes just don’t get caught, the more we make a habit of going through a systematic, pragmatic, checklist of proofreading and fact checking, the less likely we are to make them, thus less likely to doubt our own work. And the less we doubt, the less anxious we’ll get next time we have to something check. Reducing anxiety is good because if we’re already flustered, we’ll never catch obvious mistakes.

Of course, I personally have anxiety attacks every time I send an email, because I imagine that I have made an error, accidentally forwarded something embarrassing, or written something terrible about the person I’m emailing and accidentally included it , or am CCing the wrong person…the list goes on, and it indicates that I have probably far to travel to the Land of No Doubt. (no pun…)

But I haven’t taken a vacation in a while, so it’s probably about time to make the journey. Plus, Next To Normal collected a number of awards, so even if I never achieve faith and serentity, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that total and complete neurosis is the new black.