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.

How to Earn A Living as A Yoga Teacher

“My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people; those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to be in the first group; there is much less competition.”-Indira Gandhi

The other night, while having a marketing meeting for a new Haunted House downtown some friends of mine are building, I took advantage of a lull in conversation to continue freaking out about my future. One of my friends (again, she’s happily employed AND lives alone, so who is she to talk BUT) kindly assured me, “It’s great that you’re becoming a yoga teacher. No one is at all worried except you.”

Of course, I’m not actually worried about it, either, because I know this is something I’ve dreamed about doing for years. But sometimes, helplessly, I slip into that career-driven mentality and when I say out loud, “I’m doing a yoga teacher training” I hear a voice in my head that says, “you’re unemployed and it’s pretty pathetic that you never even bothered to take the LSAT.” Then, yesterday, I read this article on doublex.com titled, Can you earn a living as a yoga teacher? The answer is: not very easily.

For a split second after reading this article, I felt more concerned. But as I’ve plunged into the philosophy reading required for the training, I have slowly started to realize: I can’t earn a living without becoming a yoga teacher.

Contrary to popular belief, yoga, unlike true Buddhism, does not require, or even suggest that you give up ambition. Entering into a very deep yoga practice (which is essentially what a teacher training is) is a way to get clearer perspective on your path. Whether you are employed or not, entering into a healthy relationship with your desires, ambitions and abilities is necessary for progress. For some people progress is measured in whether or not they make vice-president, and for others progress is measure in how far they go in the study of yoga.

But even people who seek to achieve great heights in yoga are constantly struggling with the ego and ambition. This can lead to injuries, or a sloppy practice, if you push through an “edge” in your practice when you should be pausing, says Joel Kramer. That philosophy applies to all aspects of life, including your career. And pause is necessary, because “the more slowly and carefully you treat your early edges, the deeper your final edge will be.”

Now, Kramer confirms that ambition is an inevitable fact of life and mind, and even trying to eliminate it is an ambition itself. But we can avoid its ill effects if we pay more attention to our behavior and actions as we reach for our goals, rather than whether we have achieved perfection.

Unfortunately, in real life, our bosses want to know whether or not we’ve completed a task, and how well we’ve done it. We compete with our peers, our co-workers, and ourselves and if we don’t succeed greatly, there are tangible repercussions. However, in a yoga practice, you can’t really create the full manifestation of a pose without being in tune to those “early edges.” I think that same idea applies to our careers: awareness of obstacles and behaviors will lead us to fuller success later.

At least that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself, for as long as I’m unemployed.