By Marianne Williamson

I hear a lot of people say we have to wake people up… convince them of the urgency of this moment… make them realize that the planet is headed for disaster!

But I don’t see it that way. Anybody who needs to be woken up at this point is so deeply asleep that they’re not the target audience for global activism. We don’t need to wake the sleeping so much as we need to harness the energy of those who are already awake. Enough people know we’re in trouble; what [read more...]]]> Courtesy of the Huffington Post.

By Marianne Williamson

I hear a lot of people say we have to wake people up… convince them of the urgency of this moment… make them realize that the planet is headed for disaster!

But I don’t see it that way. Anybody who needs to be woken up at this point is so deeply asleep that they’re not the target audience for global activism. We don’t need to wake the sleeping so much as we need to harness the energy of those who are already awake. Enough people know we’re in trouble; what they want to know is what to do about it.

We’re living at a time when whole systems break down, calling for a whole systems response. It’s not just outer change but also inner change that’s called for. It’s not just that this is wrong, or that that is wrong. The entire direction of human civilization is wrong, as we have placed economic principles before humanitarian values and in so doing have placed the very survival of the human race at risk.

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related. The probability vectors for the next twenty years are grim, and our job is to turn the probability vectors into possibility vectors… in other words, we have to turn this ship around.

In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common anthropological characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. The lioness, the tigress and the mama bear are all examples. The fact that the adult human female is so relatively complacent before the collective threats to the young of our species bespeaks a lack of proactive intention for the human race to survive.

Yet how things have been has no inherent bearing on how things have to be, and I think we’re living at a time when Western womanhood is just a moment away from emerging into the light of our collective possibility. Especially given the relative lack of power – even basic rights – given to millions of women in other parts of the world, we have a particular responsibility to speak up not only for ourselves but for them as well. And we are ready. Maybe not all of us; but enough of us. Western women should be a moral force on this planet. We should not be infantilized; we should not be pretending we don’t know what’s going on; we should not be giving in to the various and ubiquitous temptations to anesthetize ourselves. Quite the opposite, we should be taking the wheel of human civilization and saying to anyone who will listen: We’re turning the ship around, and we’re turning it around NOW.

One thing we should all be aware of is the Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight goals signed on to by all 189 members of the United Nations in the year 2000. The goals are important because they speak to the underlying causes of so many of our most important problems, addressing them on a global level and giving everyone the chance to monitor how we’re doing as a species.

The goals are a road map to cutting absolute poverty in half, improving health, getting children in school and reducing disease by 2015. When we think of “women’s issues,” we should be thinking of these issues. They should be our concern as the mothers of the world, the lovers of the world, and the leaders of the world.

Specifically, the goals are these:

1) Cut Extreme Poverty and Hunger in Half

2) Achieve Universal Primary Education

3) Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

4) Reduce Child Mortality by Two-Thirds

5) Cut Maternal Mortality by Three-Fourths

6) Halt and Reverse the Spread of HIV/AIDS, Malaria, TB, and Other Diseases

7) Ensure Environmental Sustainability

Develop a Global Partnership for Development

We are five years away from 2015, the year we are supposed to achieve the Millennium Goals. We are making progress but not fast enough. We need an accelerated sense of urgency from our decision makers. And nothing would make that happen more effectively than for the women of America to learn this information, to take it to heart, and to refuse to shut up about it. No matter what else you’re doing to make the world a better place, add a P.S. about The Millennium Goals.

Facts to consider: Putting a child in school is one of the most powerful things we can to do to reduce poverty. An educated child earns more later in life, knows how to keep their own children from dying, produces more food, is less likely to get AIDS, and in the case of boys, is less likely to engage in armed civil conflict. And we already know how to address the problems of AIDS, TB, and Malaria; we just need to do more of it via mechanisms like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.

So what can you do? You can call or write your Congresspeople (go to http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml) as well as the President, and tell them you want them to actively and substantially support the Millennium Development Goals. Remember: our Representatives get lobbied by wealthy corporations every hour of every day, but the poor of the world have no economic leverage. The only voice they have in the halls of power is yours.

And do more than that. Educate yourself. Look at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ Use your own platform, or create one. Consider ways to help spread the word. http://www.results.org/ Use Facebook and Twitter and every other way you have of building a buzz about something that could matter to the lives – even the survival – of millions of people. And some of those people might someday be your own grandchildren.

Then, when it’s all handled, when 17,000 children a day are no longer dying of hunger; when the ecosystems of the planet are well on their way to restoration; when nuclear bombs are scarce if not completely gone; when females of the world are no longer treated like chattel; and the nations of the world are beginning to achieve a real and lasting peace; then, we can celebrate. But until then, we should mourn. Anyone who’s looking at the world and not grieving isn’t conscious; but anyone who’s looking at the world and not rejoicing in the possibilities for how we can turn all this around, is underestimating what human beings can do. We can learn to love each other. We can be conduits for the miraculous. We can stop playing small and start playing large. We can stop giving in to our weaknesses and start claiming our strengths. We can tell truth to power. We can act like we mean it. We can never, never, never give up. We can be the mothers and the fathers of a new and better world. And all of this is possible because human beings can decide. We can decide to say something. We can decide to write an email. We can decide to step up and participate. But we must decide now… not later. There is no more time to waste.

In Purna Yoga, everything — from the greatest disasters, to personal challenges, to the seeming insignificance of breaking a glass — must be viewed through the yogic perspective of cause and effect, so that we may take personal responsibility for our lives.  Purna Yoga teaches us to look at each of our actions, thoughts, and feelings and to take full ownership of our choices and their effect upon the world.

When we break a glass, it may be [read more...]]]> I always value Aadil’s perspective.  When we can learn to accept our participation in the problem, we will have the power to change our course.

In Purna Yoga, everything — from the greatest disasters, to personal challenges, to the seeming insignificance of breaking a glass — must be viewed through the yogic perspective of cause and effect, so that we may take personal responsibility for our lives.  Purna Yoga teaches us to look at each of our actions, thoughts, and feelings and to take full ownership of our choices and their effect upon the world.

When we break a glass, it may be easy to accept the consequences of our choice: we clean up the broken glass, and resolve to be more aware and respectful of material objects. But when the problem is an oil spill of devastating proportions, it may be a little harder to accept personal responsibility. For, no matter how you look at it, each one of us is personally responsible for this oil spill.

Now before we all want to bury our heads in our hands and never look up, let me tell you that while this burden is shared by all of us, and it only takes a few of us to make a difference.

So, what do we, as yoga students, do? The first thing we have to do is to understand what is really happening and why. Energy sources such as oil and coal were pressed into the earth thousands of millennia ago. These resources were meant to be left alone and were put into the earth to sustain the earth and were never meant to be brought up to the surface. When we go inside the earth and pull out what is meant to be kept inside, there are going to be problems.

Very often you will hear that coal and oil are the black fuel from hell, while solar and wind are the bright energies from heaven. These resources are designed to be used because they are so accessible! However, because solar and wind energies are practically free, there is not much financial gain for large corporations for promoting solar and wind. Having made the decision as a race to use oil, we now need to decide what to do. We have to ask ourselves if it right to use so much fuel. Is this in integrity with our purpose?  Are we willing to change in order to save our planet?

Second, we must understand the ramifications of this spill on all of us. The oil is polluting the water and the atmosphere as it evaporates. The oil is turning into tar balls ranging in size from pin heads to golf balls. Since fish do not distinguish between oil and food, when they open their mouth, tiny tar balls are swallowed and become part of the fish. If we consume these fish, or the fish that ate these fish, we are bringing these toxins into our bodies. Very soon we will have to stop eating fish until there is a total disintegration of the oil itself. This may take decades.

Third, we must do our work by inviting Divine Light into the earth and into the oil. We must ask with deep sincerity for the protection and the transformation of this dark energy that has been violated, that has been yanked out from the earth. Therefore it is important that students of yoga bring as much light as possible into the oil spill and into the earth, and ask The Divine to help us find a more peaceful resolution to our energy issues, ones that do not interfere with nature. As Margaret Mead wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” The Divine only needs a small group of people willing to pray with enough sincerity for real and lasting change to occur.

P.S. I have posted on our blog an article about another of the root casues to the oil spill – corporate deregulation – that I hope you will all read. It was written by Barbara Streisand for The Huffington Post.

“nyasa” = to place

“krama” = step by step

Change is challenging.

When confronted with change, it’s easy to get swept up in anxiety, discomfort, depression, or panic.  We distract ourselves, or seethe as we create a million contingency plans.  We cling to our “creature comforts” – those small habits we’ve created that anchor us in an easy ride of familiarity, that soothe us when we get ragged around the edges.

So how can we cope?

While she was going through a particular challenging time, my Mum said to me, “It’s not one day at at time, honey.  It’s [read more...]]]> “Vi” = in a special way

“nyasa” = to place

“krama” = step by step

Change is challenging.

When confronted with change, it’s easy to get swept up in anxiety, discomfort, depression, or panic.  We distract ourselves, or seethe as we create a million contingency plans.  We cling to our “creature comforts” – those small habits we’ve created that anchor us in an easy ride of familiarity, that soothe us when we get ragged around the edges.

So how can we cope?

While she was going through a particular challenging time, my Mum said to me, “It’s not one day at at time, honey.  It’s one hour at a time, one minute.”  We can cope with change by getting out of our head – which is wired to try to analyze and “fix” our problem – and move into the spaciousness of the present moment.  In the present moment, we are generally “okay.”  However, we are so used to living in the past and the future (in analyzing past actions, in projecting future results), that we have forgotten how to arrive in our own skin.

Our yoga practice can help.

In the “vinyasa krama” practice, which literally means “to place step-by-step in a special way,” we cultivate our capacity to return to each unfolding moment.  When we bring our attention to how we place our feet, our hands, or move in and out of our asani – we are continually brought back to each arising moment.

The first yoga sutra is “Now the exposition of yoga is being made.”  The very first word in the sutras is “atha” or NOW.  This is a clarion call to return to the Now, the only moment that truly exists, the only moment in which we can actually accommodate change.

As you practice your vinyasa krama, open to step by step progression of your asana.  Use this practice as a reminder that our deepest creature comfort is our fundamental and eternal connection to ourselves.

Pema Chodron writes, “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves again and again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible in use be found.”  As we ride the currents of change, the dauntless center within us becomes polished and revealed.

ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds [read more...]]]> From the New York Times. Some food for thought: What is yoga?  What is your yoga community?  Does it reflect what you need?  As a side note, Yoga for the People, based on Gumucio’s model, is now here in Vancouver.

ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds up, and the high-end Pure Yoga, a chain with two outposts in Manhattan, requires a $40 initiation fee, and costs $125 to $185 a month.

You can even combine yoga with a vacation in the Caribbean, but it will cost you: in August, the luxurious Parrot Cay resort in Turks and Caicos has a six-night retreat with classes taught by the “yoga rock stars” (in the words of the press release) Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman. The cost? A cool $6,077. (In August!)

And is it surprising that yoga, like so much else in this age of celebrity, now has something of a star system, with yoga teachers now almost as recognizable as Oscar winners? The flowing locks of Rodney Yee. The do-rag bandanna worn by Baron Baptiste. The hyper perpetual calm exhibited by David Life and Sharon Gannon, who taught Sting, Madonna and Russell Simmons. The contortions (and Rolls-Royces) of Bikram Choudhury.

Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal, concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to 15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7 billion.

“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’ yoga teachers are the style gurus.”

Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that. There’s a brewing resistance to the expense, the cult of personality, the membership fees. At the forefront of the movement is Yoga to the People, which opened its first studio in 2006 in the East Village on St. Marks Place, with a contribution-only, pay-what-you-can fee structure. The manifesto is on the opening page of its Web site, yogatothepeople.com: “There will be no correct clothes, There will be no proper payment, There will be no right answers … No ego no script no pedestals.”

One more thing: There are no “glorified” teachers or star yogis. You can’t even find out who is teaching which class when, or reserve a spot with a specific instructor. And that’s exactly the way that Greg Gumucio wants it.

LATE on an overcast Saturday earlier this month, just a little before sundown, Mr. Gumucio, the founder of Yoga to the People, was sitting on the rooftop of his East Village studio, surprisingly refreshed after a birthday party downstairs for his son, who had just turned 5.

Propped on the ledge on a round pillow, his wavy, shoulder-length hair framed by the urban jungle backdrop of tar-covered roofs, Mr. Gumucio recounted his biography, and how it was linked with that of Bikram Choudhury, perhaps the most famous name in yoga today.

“The idea for Yoga for the People came to me because of Bikram,” Mr. Gumucio said, explaining that he worked for Mr. Choudhury for six years, from 1996 to 2002, sometimes running teacher training for Bikram Yoga in Los Angeles, commuting from Seattle, where he was living. He channels Mr. Choudhury, one suspects not for the first time, talking with a raspy, slightly accented voice: “Boss, do me a favor, take everybody’s class and tell me what you think.” Mr. Gumucio obliged, and when reporting back, mentioned one teacher whom he didn’t like. Mr. Choudhury was not sympathetic. Just the opposite, telling Mr. Gumucio to, in essence, suck it up and go back to the class — that the problem wasn’t with the instructor, but with Mr. Gumucio himself. “You are your own teacher,” Mr. Gumucio said he was told. “You are responsible for your own experience.”

It was a revelatory moment for Mr. Gumucio. If the student was more important than the teacher, why was there such an emphasis placed on the individual instructors? Too often, Mr. Gumucio saw students stop doing yoga because they couldn’t practice with a favorite teacher. Why not jettison that system? Why not just assign students to the next available teacher?

A second revelation occurred in class when he was struggling to keep his body in a difficult position. “I was sweating, my muscles shaking, in triangle pose, and Bikram was talking about how fast he was as a boy in Calcutta. How he could catch this dog.” The situation was almost more than Mr. Gumucio could bear. “In my mind,” he recalled, “I was thinking ‘What is wrong with you. Stop this stupid story!’ ”

Later, Mr. Choudhury again dismissed his complaints, telling Mr. Gumucio that distractions were everywhere: “Candle, incense, music, easy to meditate!” Mr. Gumucio recalls being told. “Try being calm and peaceful in your car when someone cuts you off.”

Message learned. Yoga isn’t about a pristine environment — yogis can work downward dog to downward dog, no matter where they are, even if in a crowded, unadorned studio. “Being able to do yoga with a foot in your face, that is a really powerful practice,” Mr. Gumucio said. He would take that no-frills philosophy with him when he left Bikram in 2002, and a few years later (after a stint as a mediator in small claims court), in 2006, moved to New York to open his own studio. “The first few months there were four or five people, but within three months, it really took off,” he said.

Today. Mr. Gumucio has three studios in New York (including two hot-yoga studios that charge $8 a class), one in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, Calif., and one to open later this year in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He has just signed a lease in Chelsea and is considering expanding to Austin, Chicago and Los Angeles. (But his philosophy of keeping a low profile seems to be working: a question to many students about what they think of Mr. Gumucio usually provokes little more than a blank stare and “Who?”)

High volume is the key to his business model — he says up to 900 people may go to a Yoga to the People studio in a single day, with perhaps half of them paying at least something in the form of a donation — as well as an important part of his overall philosophy. “I truly believe if more people were doing yoga, the world would be a better place,” he said.

LAST Sunday morning, the sun streamed through the windows of the clean airy loft on the second floor as the teacher, Haven Melynn, stood at the buzzer letting in students from the street. On a metal stand sat an empty tissue box. Some students dropped a donation into the box, others didn’t. The students fit in one studio, and at prime times, the teacher will send any overflow up to the studio above, and then the studio above that.

Mats are rolled out, a few inches apart, with no one under the illusion that it may be an empty class. The classroom holds about 60 students, and people are socializing, chatting about their late nights, where to get falafels, and upcoming art exhibitions. Music plays quietly in the background. No opening “Oms.” (“I like that there isn’t any chanting, or big spiritual message,” Layan Fuleihan, a college student, said afterward. “I like that you make the class what you want.”) Instead, Ms. Melynn started off with slow movements to warm up, sun salutations, then quickly picked up the pace. Jammed, yes, but the yogis stuck to their own mats, boundaries defined, during a sweat-producing vinyasa class, flowing and moving, as the teacher cajoled people to make cathartic exhales of HAA-sss — all to the sounds of a play list that includes Michael Jackson and the Dave Matthews Band.

Yoga to the People isn’t the only entity raging against the yoga machine. In New York, other studios are popping up, offering affordable, if not entirely donation-based, yoga. Do Yoga and Pilates, in TriBeCa, is donation-based; Tara Stiles, who has an iPhone app with Deepak Chopra, has opened Strala Yoga in NoHo, offering multiple class levels for $10 each. Yoga Vida NYC on University Place opened in January. Classes are small and it costs $10 drop in, $5 for students. “Our studio isn’t better or worse, it’s just different,” says Hilaria Thomas, yoga director of Yoga Vida NYC and a former instructor at Yoga to the People. “Different energies.”

Better-known rivals in the yoga world don’t seem to take offense at this back-to-basic movement. “I think the donation model is awesome,” says Baron Baptiste. “It’s a balancing act. If someone has the means for what I’ll call ‘high end yoga,’ like going on exotic retreats, they should enjoy it.” He adds, laughing, “I never know what the term rock star yoga teacher means. Someone like Iyengar, one of the most famous teachers in the world, is he a rock star? Is Iyengar the Bono of yoga?”

Mr. Gumucio knows his niche — “the ABC’s of yoga” — and that Yoga to the People has its critics. Its detractors say that classes are too big, that there isn’t a lot of advanced alignment breakdowns, that the exclamation HAA-sss isn’t the way you are supposed to breathe. He mimics a naysayer, sniffing: “Oh, that’s not yoga!” He laughs and shrugs, a wordless: Who’s to say what is yoga?

Shoulder injuries are common among yogis, but they don’t have to be. Here’s how to care for your shoulders, not tear them down.

Trish Jones knew trouble was brewing when her right shoulder began to throb during her favorite yoga class. The 29-year-old was no stranger to such pain. She had suffered from unstable shoulder joints for years. Her doctors call it “multidirectional instability,” but Jones refers to it as “having loose nuts and bolts.” So loose that in 1995 she had [read more...]]]> A great article on caring for your shoulders in yoga class,  from Yoga Journal.

Shoulder injuries are common among yogis, but they don’t have to be. Here’s how to care for your shoulders, not tear them down.

Trish Jones knew trouble was brewing when her right shoulder began to throb during her favorite yoga class. The 29-year-old was no stranger to such pain. She had suffered from unstable shoulder joints for years. Her doctors call it “multidirectional instability,” but Jones refers to it as “having loose nuts and bolts.” So loose that in 1995 she had surgery to stabilize her left shoulder. Last summer, when pain began to gnaw at her other shoulder, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was in trouble, too.

Still, Jones kept practicing Ashtanga three times a week at a studio near her home in Alexandria, Virginia, in hopes that the pain would work itself out. That is, until her right shoulder dislocated in Vasisthasana (Side Plank Pose). “Luckily, I knew exactly what happened, so I went out into the hall and popped it back in,” she says. Still, the incident served as a wake-up call. She knew the way to dodge a second surgery was to figure out how yoga could build up her shoulder strength without aggravating the instability.

After her injury, Jones switched to a restorative yoga practice and sought advice from yoga teachers, physical therapists, and doctors. Two weeks later, she was back at the studio. Under the close supervision of her teacher, she modified every pose in the Ashtanga primary and second series to spare her shoulder. They jettisoned all weight-bearing asanas, like Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog Pose) and Chaturanga Dandasana (Four-Limbed Staff Pose), and took an easy-does-it approach to shoulder openers, like Marichyasana I (Marichi’s Twist I.) “It was a much different practice than the typical first series,” Jones says, “but it wasn’t in my best interest to stop practicing altogether.”

Although Jones was eager to build strength in the damaged joint, she knew the only way to thwart another dislocation was to perfect her alignment. So she analyzed her shoulder position in every pose. To prevent rounding forward in the front of the shoulders, she started each asana by widening her collarbones. To protect the back of the joints, she made sure her upper back was engaged, with the bottom tips of the shoulder blades drawing together and down. Soon, these shoulder adjustments became a meditation in themselves.

As Jones found out, yoga can be a boon to the shoulders, but it can also be a bust. While an intense yoga class can leave your shoulder muscles a little sore the next day, you shouldn’t steamroll past any sharp or throbbing pain in the joint during or after practice. If your shoulders start to gripe whenever you roll out your mat, it’s time to tune in and figure out what’s going on before you do more harm than good. If your shoulders are free of trouble, don’t be overconfident: Now is the time to protect them from future injury. Either way, your shoulders will thank you, and your yoga practice will be stronger.

How it Works

Shoulder problems shouldn’t be shrugged off. In 2003 (the latest year for which numbers are available), nearly 14 million Americans visited a doctor complaining of a bum shoulder. Joint instability, like Jones’s, is one of the most common ailments. Others include impingements, rotator cuff tears, and arthritis.

Athletes often suffer disproportionately from shoulder injuries because the various repetitive movements stress the joints, says Jeffrey Abrams, an orthopedic surgeon in Princeton, New Jersey, and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. “In other countries people play soccer, but here we like to ski and play golf and tennis, all of which are hard on the shoulders.” Jones is a typical example—when she was younger she played basketball and tennis and loved rock climbing. Now she puts her shoulders through their paces in Ashtanga.

But there’s another factor at play—the natural structure of the joint. “Shoulders are designed for mobility, not stability,” says Roger Cole, Ph.D., an Iyengar-certified teacher in Del Mar, California, who teaches workshops on shoulder safety. The mobility allows for an astonishing range of motion compared to that in the hips—if you have healthy shoulders you can move your arms forward, back, across the body, and in 360-degree circles. But the relatively loose joint relies on a delicate web of soft tissue to hold it together, which makes it more vulnerable to injury. (The soft tissue includes ligaments, which connect bone to bone; tendons, which attach muscle to bone; and muscles, which move and stabilize the bones.)

The main ball-and-socket joint is also quite shallow, adding to the flexibility but putting the joint at risk. Abrams likens it to a basketball sitting on top of a plunger. (The basketball is the head of the humerus, or upper arm bone, and the plunger is where it meets the scapula.) The rotation of a big ball on a little base makes the shoulder mobile.

When the soft tissue around the joint is strong and toned, the system works flawlessly. But factor in years of repetitive roundabout movements, like throwing a baseball, swimming, or even stretching the arms overhead in yoga, and shoulder ligaments can overstretch and lose elasticity, like worn rubber bands. Plus, as muscles age, they lose tone, making it even more likely that the ball will slip off the plunger at some point. The best way to stay out of a sling? Be diligent in your quest for proper alignment and build balanced strength around the joint to create stability.

Check your Alignment

Sounds easy enough, but here’s the hitch: Perfect shoulder placement in yoga can be elusive. For starters, unless you practice yoga in a mirror-lined room or have eyes in the back of your head, it’s tough to know what your shoulders are up to. To make matters worse, poor posture is habitual. If your shoulders slouch, slump, or cave all day long, you can’t help but bring a few bad habits into the yoga studio. “I see a lot of students with shoulders that slope, turn in, and jut forward,” says Mitchel Bleier, a senior certified Anusara Yoga teacher in Rochester, New York. “If those misalignments are maintained during yoga practice, especially during weight-bearing asanas, the risk of a shoulder injury goes up dramatically.”

Therefore, weight-bearing poses, such as inversions, require extra vigilance. Inversions are safe for the shoulders, Cole explains, but they are best performed with precise alignment.

The first step in understanding correct shoulder alignment is to start simply, by exploring Tadasana (Mountain Pose) and Urdhva Hastasana (Upward Salute). Here are Bleier’s alignment instructions for his students in Tadasana: First, lift your shoulders slightly so they line up with the base of your neck. Simultaneously, draw the heads of the arm bones back, toward the wall behind you. Keeping a slight curve in the back of your neck, draw your shoulder blades down toward your waist. Your shoulder blades should lie flat on your back, instead of winging out. Feel your chest rise, but resist the temptation to pinch your shoulder blades together—doing this will only compress your spine. Instead, keep the bottom tips of your shoulder blades pressing into your back and spreading. If you want to feel deliciously supported while doing this, try the Strap Jacket.

Reaching your arms overhead is a little more complex, but once you learn to do it correctly, you can apply the same principles in poses such as Downward-Facing Dog, Plank, or Adho Mukha Vrksasana (Handstand). Before you sweep your arms up into Urdhva Hastasana, it’s important to rotate your arm bones externally and move them down so the head of the arm bone is in the socket. This will strengthen the muscles on the back of the rotator cuff (the infraspinatus and teres minor), which are typically weaker than the front, and it will spare the supraspinatus, which can get pinched between the edge of the scapula and the head of the arm bone when the arms lift. If the tendon is pinched repeatedly, it wears and frays like a rope. Eventually, what begins as a mild irritation can progress to a severe injury, such as a tear.

Once your arms are straight overhead, you don’t have to pull your shoulders down quite so firmly, because that will inhibit your ability to reach up. To get the maximum reach safely, start in Urdhva Hastasana and spread your shoulder blades away from each other. As your shoulder blades wrap around toward the front of your rib cage, you should have more space to really lengthen up. The tops of your shoulders will lift slightly, which is OK. Just don’t let them bunch up by your ears. Now keep your shoulders in place and press your palms up toward the ceiling. Feel familiar? This is similar to the placement for Handstand.

Counteract Misalignment

Once you’ve mastered the ins and outs of proper alignment, you should be ready to build the strength to maintain it. And therein lies the rub. Done correctly, yoga poses strengthen the shoulders, but in order to do them correctly and maintain proper alignment, your shoulders have to be strong. Of any yoga pose, Chaturanga Dandasana (Four-Limbed Staff Pose; exemplifies this—if you’re not strong enough to keep your shoulders in their proper place, you leave yourself wide open to injury.

The most common misalignment is to collapse the chest and allow the heads of arm bones to drop forward toward the floor. You’ll know this is happening if your shoulder blades poke out instead of lying flat on your back, or if the fronts of your shoulders are sore the next day. This can strain the front of the rotator cuff and can also build strength unevenly, making the front of the rotator cuff stronger than the back. Over time this imbalance will pull the arm bone forward, contributing to a vicious cycle of misalignment.

To counteract this, start in Plank Pose, and as you move into Chaturanga Dandasana, see that the heads of the arm bones stay level with the elbows. Try not to let them dip down. (Practice at home in front of a mirror.) If they drop, you need to build more strength around the whole rotator cuff. To do that, practice Chaturanga with your knees on the floor and the Supine Sleepwalker Pose.

You can also practice what Cole calls the anti-Chaturanga, or Purvottanasana (Upward Plank Pose). “Purvottanasana stretches most of the muscles that Chaturanga strengthens and also strengthens opposing muscles,” Cole says. It’s one of the poses Trish Jones credits for helping her escape another shoulder surgery. “My rotator cuffs are stronger since I’ve adopted Purvottanasana into my practice,” she says. Finally, stretch the front of the chest by doing Setu Bandha Sarvangasana) (Bridge Pose), Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand), and Matsyasana (Fish Pose).

Strengthen and Stabilize

To stabilize the joint and reinforce the rotator cuff, you’ll also need to focus on your supraspinatus, the muscle that helps you lift your arms out to the side. More specifically, the supraspinatus engages during the first 30 degrees of lifting the arms. Once your arms are shoulder level, your deltoids hold them up, which won’t strengthen the rotator cuffs. To strengthen the supraspinatus, practice standing poses where you reach the arms out, such as Trikonasana (Triangle Pose) and Virabhadrasana II (Warrior II). Hold the poses for five breaths and bring your arms down and back up between each pose.

Once you feel ready—meaning, the head of the arm bone isn’t slipping around and the joint is free of pain—toss a few weight-bearing poses into the mix. One of the best ways to build strength around the rotator cuff is to move slowly from Downward-Facing Dog out to Plank and back again. Just be careful not to let the upper back hyperextend and sink toward the floor in Downward-Facing Dog, which, according to Jean-Claude West, a kinesiologist and master manual therapist, can compress the joints. “Maintaining width in the upper back keeps the shoulder girdle active and the shoulder joints stable as you approach Plank,” he says.

Many yoga poses build arm strength by requiring you to push away from the floor—poses like Downward-Facing Dog, Handstand, and Urdhva Dhanurasana(Upward-Facing Bow Pose)—but few demand that your shoulder muscles pull against resistance, which is part of the reason the back of the rotator cuff gets so weak. One way to build oomph in the back of the shoulders is to engage in activities that require pulling, like swimming or even pull-ups, says Cole. On your yoga mat you can practice poses that require pressing the back of the shoulder joint against the floor, such as Jathara Parivartanasana (Revolved Abdomen Pose), or on a stable part of the body, such as the front leg in Parivrtta Parsvakonasana (Revolved Side Angle Pose).

Finally, create balanced flexibility by practicing poses that require an inward rotation of the shoulder, such as Gomukasana (Cow Face Pose), Marichyasana III (Marichi’s Twist III), and Parsvottanasana (Side Stretch Pose). “If you feel a pinching sensation when you rotate your shoulders inward, you are probably irritating a tendon or other connective tissue,” Cole says, “in which case, let the scapula wing out a little bit.” (Don’t practice these poses if you have a history of dislocation or shoulder instability.)

Although these practice tips are meant to keep your shoulders free of injury, when it comes to pain, it’s important to remember that there are no guarantees in yoga or in life. “Injuries can be a wonderful blessing; they offer us an opportunity to learn, to grow, and to be able to help others,” Bleier says. “We all have asymmetries in our bodies; there is no perfect way for the body to be, and if you have pain, it’s just your body’s way of asking you to examine what you’re doing.”

If anyone has learned that lesson, it’s been Trish Jones. “My shoulder pain has taught me to slow down and take my yoga practice back to basics,” she says. “The journey has been a humbling one, but I know I’m better for it.”

The Shoulder Strengtheneing Sequence.

Supine Sleep Walker

This movement not only trains the heads of the arm bones to stay in the sockets during a wide range of movement but also builds well-rounded strength in the rotator cuff. Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor. Hold a yoga block horizontally between your hands and extend your arms up toward the ceiling. Draw the head of the arm bone into the shoulder socket so both shoulders press into the floor. Keeping the arms long, slowly lower the block overhead. As the block moves toward the floor, the backs of the shoulders may lift off the floor just slightly. But if the shoulders begin to bunch up by the ears, stop the block’s descent, realign the shoulders, and then continue to lower the block until it rests on the floor an arm’s length above your head. Now slowly lift the block back into the starting position while keeping your shoulders stable. Repeat up to 10 times.

Purvottanasana Upward Plank Pose

Purvottanasana counteracts the effects of Chaturanga by stretching the pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, and anterior deltoids. Sit in Dandasana (Staff Pose) with your hands several inches behind your hips and your fingers pointing forward. Bend your knees until you can place your feet flat on the floor. Exhale, press your feet and hands down into the floor, and lift your hips until you come into a tabletop position. Straighten your legs one by one and lift your hips still higher without squeezing your buttocks. Press the soles of your feet toward the floor. Lift your chest as high as you comfortably can. Keep the back of your neck long as you slowly drop your head back.

Jathara Parivartanasana Revolved Abdomen Pose

Lie on your back with your arms in a cactus position. Bring both feet off the floor and bend your knees until they are directly over your hips and your shins are parallel to the floor. Keeping your arms and shoulders pressing into the floor, exhale and lower your knees to the right. Don’t worry if your knees don’t come all the way to the floor. Instead, focus on keeping your shoulders grounded. Inhale and bring the legs back to center. Exhale to the opposite side. Repeat five times on each side. Keeping the back of your shoulders in firm contact with the floor strengthens the back of the rotator cuff, an area that’s commonly weak. This is generally safe to do if you’re recovering from injury because your body is well supported by the floor.

Standing Rotator Cuff Strengthener

This pose is similar to Jathara Parivartanasana but can be done from a standing position. Stand with your back to a wall. Raise your arms into a cactus position. Pull the heads of the arm bones back until you feel the upper back engage and press into the wall. Keep the tailbone tucked to avoid overarching the lumbar spine. Maintaining firm contact between your shoulders and the wall, and keeping your elbows bent at a 90-degree angle, slowly slide the arms up the wall. Ultimately, you may be able to touch your fingers overhead, but it may take time to get there. The key thing is to keep your shoulder blades flat against the wall. Repeat up to 10 times.

Strap Jacket

Getting the strap set up can be tricky the first time you do this pose, but it’s worth it. The harness supports and stabilizes your shoulder girdle by lifting the fronts of the shoulders up and drawing the bottom tips of the shoulder blades down.

Start in Tadasana and make a large loop in a 10-foot-long strap. (If you don’t have one, you’ll need to hook two straps together to create a big round loop.) Hold the loop behind you and put your arms through it, as though you’re putting on a jacket. Make sure the strap buckle is at the bottom of the loop, so you can reach back and adjust the length of the strap easily. The strap will pass over the tops of the shoulders and under the armpits.

Reach back and take hold of the part of the strap that is lying horizontally behind your neck. Grab this top part of the strap with one hand and pull it all the way down toward the floor. As you pull it down, the bottom part of the strap will pass over it and move up your back, creating a harness.

Reach behind you and twist the strap several times to help keep it in place. Now hold the dangling loop and pull down firmly. When the top part of the strap is pulled all the way down, it should be about hip level. The strap should roll your upper shoulders back and down while pressing your lower shoulder blades into your back. Don’t arch your lower back. Keep your legs and pelvis in Tadasana.

Stay here with your hand pulling down on the strap or, to go a step further, take a dowel or a broom and thread it horizontally through the bottom of the strap. Press your hands down onto the broom. Stay for at least 10 breaths.

SetuBandha Sarvangasana Bridge Pose

According to Iyengar-Certified teacher Roger Cole, when you clasp your hands behind your back in Bridge Pose, you stretch the muscles on the fronts of the arm bones, which makes it more difficult to lift your chest. For this version of Bridge Pose, you’ll use a strap around the ankles to help counteract this.

Lie on your back with your feet flat on the floor and hip-width apart. Your heels should be about six inches away from your buttocks. Place a strap around the front of your ankles and take hold of the strap, one end in each hand. Walk your hands down the strap, toward your ankles. Lightly shrug your shoulders toward your head and roll the heads of your arm bones back, rooting them into the floor. Keeping the backs of your shoulders pressed into the floor, pull on the ends of the strap and begin to lift your chest. Then, by pressing down through your legs and feet, lift your hips toward the ceiling. Lengthen your tailbone toward your knees. Keep pulling on the strap to encourage the heads of the arm bones toward the floor as you breathe and lift your chest.

Catherine Guthrie is a freelance writer based in Bloomington, Indiana.

My only comment on this article – awaiting moderation- was that I felt it was unclear which muscles she was referring to when indicating the “back rotator cuff.”  Seems that this about rhomboids and traps rather than infraspinatus.  If anyone has thoughts, do submit!  I’ll keep you posted if I get a response.

The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter, written to a specialist in “psychological medicine,” he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence” and “hysterical crying” whenever Emma, his devoted wife, [read more...]]]> A great article from the New York Times Magazine about the possible benefits that we actually derive from having the blues. Depression may not feel good, but maybe there’s a glimmer of a lining.

The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter, written to a specialist in “psychological medicine,” he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence” and “hysterical crying” whenever Emma, his devoted wife, left him alone.

While there has been endless speculation about Darwin’s mysterious ailment — his symptoms have been attributed to everything from lactose intolerance to Chagas disease — Darwin himself was most troubled by his recurring mental problems. His depression left him “not able to do anything one day out of three,” choking on his “bitter mortification.” He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.”

Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding in science. Instead, the pain may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work. His letters are filled with references to the salvation of study, which allowed him to temporarily escape his gloomy moods. “Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me,” Darwin wrote and later remarked that it was his “sole enjoyment in life.”

For Darwin, depression was a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems. In his autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own life story. “Pain or suffering of any kind,” he wrote, “if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.” And so sorrow was explained away, because pleasure was not enough. Sometimes, Darwin wrote, it is the sadness that informs as it “leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial.” The darkness was a kind of light.

The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit. We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less. We will think a lot about death.

The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.

ANDY THOMSON IS a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. He has a scruffy gray beard and steep cheekbones. When Thomson talks, he tends to close his eyes, as if he needs to concentrate on what he’s saying. But mostly what he does is listen: For the last 32 years, Thomson has been tending to his private practice in Charlottesville. “I tend to get the real hard cases,” Thomson told me recently. “A lot of the people I see have already tried multiple treatments. They arrive without much hope.” On one of the days I spent with Thomson earlier this winter, he checked his phone constantly for e-mail updates. A patient of his on “welfare watch” who was required to check in with him regularly had not done so, and Thomson was worried. “I’ve never gotten used to treating patients in mental pain,” he said. “Maybe it’s because every story is unique. You see one case of iron-deficiency anemia, you’ve seen them all. But the people who walk into my office are all hurting for a different reason.”
In the late 1990s, Thomson became interested in evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain the features of the human mind in terms of natural selection. The starting premise of the field is that the brain has a vast evolutionary history, and that this history shapes human nature. We are not a blank slate but a byproduct of imperfect adaptations, stuck with a mind that was designed to meet the needs of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. While the specifics of evolutionary psychology remain controversial — it’s never easy proving theories about the distant past — its underlying assumption is largely accepted by mainstream scientists. There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head. Instead, researchers have moved on to new questions like when and how this sculpturing happened and which of our mental traits are adaptations and which are accidents.

In 2004, Thomson met Paul Andrews, an evolutionary psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, who had long been interested in the depression paradox — why a disorder that’s so costly is also so common. Andrews has long dark brown hair and an aquiline nose. Before he begins to talk, he often writes down an outline of his answer on scratch paper. “This is a very delicate subject,” he says. “I don’t want to say something reckless.”

Andrews and Thomson struck up an extended conversation on the evolutionary roots of depression. They began by focusing on the thought process that defines the disorder, which is known as rumination. (The verb is derived from the Latin word for “chewed over,” which describes the act of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food.) In recent decades, psychiatry has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods. Consider “The Depressed Person,” a short story by David Foster Wallace, which chronicles a consciousness in the grip of the ruminative cycle. (Wallace struggled with severe depression for years before committing suicide in 2008.) The story is a long lament, a portrait of a mind hating itself, filled with sentences like this: “What terms might be used to describe such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?” The dark thoughts of “The Depressed Person” soon grow tedious and trying, but that’s precisely Wallace’s point. There is nothing profound about depressive rumination. There is just a recursive loop of woe.

The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed. They’re also more likely to become unnerved by stressful events: for instance, Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And then there are the cognitive deficits. Because rumination hijacks the stream of consciousness — we become exquisitely attentive to our pain — numerous studies have found that depressed subjects struggle to think about anything else, just like Wallace’s character. The end result is poor performance on tests for memory and executive function, especially when the task involves lots of information. (These deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise.) Such research has reinforced the view that rumination is a useless kind of pessimism, a perfect waste of mental energy.

That, at least, was the scientific consensus when Andrews and Thomson began exploring the depression paradox. Their evolutionary perspective, however — they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs — led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose. They started with the observation that rumination was often a response to a specific psychological blow, like the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. (Darwin was plunged into a debilitating grief after his 10-year-old daughter, Annie, died following a bout of scarlet fever.) Although the D.S.M. manual, the diagnostic bible for psychiatrists, does not take such stressors into account when diagnosing depressive disorder — the exception is grief caused by bereavement, as long as the grief doesn’t last longer than two months — it’s clear that the problems of everyday life play a huge role in causing mental illness. “Of course, rumination is unpleasant,” Andrews says. “But it’s usually a response to something real, a real setback. It didn’t seem right that the brain would go haywire just when we need it most.”
Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. The ruminations might take the form of regret (“I should have been a better spouse”), recurring counterfactuals (“What if I hadn’t had my affair?”) and anxiety about the future (“How will the kids deal with it? Can I afford my alimony payments?”). While such thoughts reinforce the depression — that’s why therapists try to stop the ruminative cycle — Andrews and Thomson wondered if they might also help people prepare for bachelorhood or allow people to learn from their mistakes. “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”

This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

But Andrews and Thomson weren’t interested in ancient aphorisms or poetic apologias. Their daunting challenge was to show how rumination might lead to improved outcomes, especially when it comes to solving life’s most difficult dilemmas. Their first speculations focused on the core features of depression, like the inability of depressed subjects to experience pleasure or their lack of interest in food, sex and social interactions. According to Andrews and Thomson, these awful symptoms came with a productive side effect, because they reduced the possibility of becoming distracted from the pressing problem.

The capacity for intense focus, they note, relies in large part on a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is located a few inches behind the forehead. While this area has been associated with a wide variety of mental talents, like conceptual knowledge and verb conjugation, it seems to be especially important for maintaining attention. Experiments show that neurons in the VLPFC must fire continuously to keep us on task so that we don’t become sidetracked by irrelevant information. Furthermore, deficits in the VLPFC have been associated with attention-deficit disorder.

Several studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients. Most recently, a paper to be published next month by neuroscientists in China found a spike in “functional connectivity” between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. One explanation for this finding is that the hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem. (Andrews and Thomson argue that this relentless fixation also explains the cognitive deficits of depressed subjects, as they are too busy thinking about their real-life problems to bother with an artificial lab exercise; their VLPFC can’t be bothered to care.) Human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated.
But the reliance on the VLPFC doesn’t just lead us to fixate on our depressing situation; it also leads to an extremely analytical style of thinking. That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.

The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

Consider a young professor on tenure track who was treated by Thomson. The patient was having difficulties with his academic department. “This guy was used to success coming easy, but now it wasn’t,” Thomson says. “I made it clear that I thought he’d need some time to figure out his next step. His problem was like a splinter, and the pain wouldn’t go away until the splinter was removed.” Should the patient leave the department? Should he leave academia? Or should he try to resolve the disagreement? Over the next several weeks, Thomson helped the patient analyze his situation and carefully think through the alternatives. “We took it one variable at a time,” Thomson says. “And it eventually became clear to him that the departmental issues couldn’t be fixed. He needed to leave. Once he came to that conclusion, he started feeling better.”

The publication of Andrews and Thomson’s 36,000-word paper in the July 2009 issue of Psychological Review had a polarizing effect on the field. While some researchers, like Jerome Wakefield, a professor at New York University who specializes in the conceptual foundations of clinical theory, greeted the paper as “an extremely important first step toward the re-evaluation of depression,” other psychiatrists regarded it as little more than irresponsible speculation, a justification for human suffering. Peter Kramer, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, describes the paper as “a ladder with a series of weak rungs.” Kramer has long defended the use of antidepressants — his landmark work, “Listening to Prozac,” chronicled the profound improvements of patients taking the drugs — and criticized those who romanticized depression, which he compares to the glamorization of tuberculosis in the late 19th century. In a series of e-mail messages to me, Kramer suggested that Andrews and Thomson neglect the variants of depression that don’t fit their evolutionary theory. “This study says nothing about chronic depression and the sort of self-hating, paralyzing, hopeless, circular rumination it inspires,” Kramer wrote. And what about post-stroke depression? Late-life depression? Extreme depressive condition? Kramer argues that there’s a clear category difference between a healthy response to social stressors and the response of people with depressive disorder. “Depression is not really like sadness,” Kramer has written. “It’s more an oppressive flattening of feeling.”

Even scientists who are sympathetic to what Andrews and Thomson call the “analytic-rumination hypothesis” remain critical of its details. Ed Hagen, an anthropologist at Washington State University who is working on a book with Andrews, says that while the analytic-rumination hypothesis has persuaded him that some depressive symptoms might improve problem-solving skills, he remains unconvinced that it is a sufficient explanation for depression. “Individuals with major depression often don’t groom, bathe and sometimes don’t even use the toilet,” Hagen says. They also significantly “reduce investment in child care,” which could have detrimental effects on the survival of offspring. The steep fitness costs of these behaviors, Hagen says, would not be offset by “more uninterrupted time to think.”
Other scientists, including Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan, say that complex psychiatric disorders like depression rarely have simple evolutionary explanations. In fact, the analytic-rumination hypothesis is merely the latest attempt to explain the prevalence of depression. There is, for example, the “plea for help” theory, which suggests that depression is a way of eliciting assistance from loved ones. There’s also the “signal of defeat” hypothesis, which argues that feelings of despair after a loss in social status help prevent unnecessary attacks; we’re too busy sulking to fight back. And then there’s “depressive realism”: several studies have found that people with depression have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. While each of these speculations has scientific support, none are sufficient to explain an illness that afflicts so many people. The moral, Nesse says, is that sadness, like happiness, has many functions.

Although Nesse says he admires the analytic-rumination hypothesis, he adds that it fails to capture the heterogeneity of depressive disorder. Andrews and Thomson compare depression to a fever helping to fight off infection, but Nesse says a more accurate metaphor is chronic pain, which can arise for innumerable reasons. “Sometimes, the pain is going to have an organic source,” he says. “Maybe you’ve slipped a disc or pinched a nerve, in which case you’ve got to solve that underlying problem. But much of the time there is no origin for the pain. The pain itself is the dysfunction.”

Andrews and Thomson respond to such criticisms by acknowledging that depression is a vast continuum, a catch-all term for a spectrum of symptoms. While the analytic-rumination hypothesis might explain those patients reacting to an “acute stressor,” it can’t account for those whose suffering has no discernible cause or whose sadness refuses to lift for years at a time. “To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful,” Thomson says. “Sometimes, the symptoms can spiral out of control. The problem, though, is that as a society, we’ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We’ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we’ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.”

For Thomson, this new theory of depression has directly affected his medical practice. “That’s the litmus test for me,” he says. “Do these ideas help me treat my patients better?” In recent years, Thomson has cut back on antidepressant prescriptions, because, he says, he now believes that the drugs can sometimes interfere with genuine recovery, making it harder for people to resolve their social dilemmas. “I remember one patient who came in and said she needed to reduce her dosage,” he says. “I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I’ll never forget. ‘Yes, they’re working great,’ she told me. ‘I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.’ ”

The point is the woman was depressed for a reason; her pain was about something. While the drugs made her feel better, no real progress was ever made. Thomson’s skepticism about antidepressants is bolstered by recent studies questioning their benefits, at least for patients with moderate depression. Consider a 2005 paper led by Steven Hollon, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University: he found that people on antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse within a year when the drugs were discontinued. In contrast, patients given a form of cognitive talk therapy had a relapse rate of 31 percent. And Hollon’s data aren’t unusual: several studies found that patients treated with medication were approximately twice as likely to relapse as patients treated with cognitive behavior therapy. “The high relapse rate suggests that the drugs aren’t really solving anything,” Thomson says. “In fact, they seem to be interfering with the solution, so that patients are discouraged from dealing with their problems. We end up having to keep people on the drugs forever. It was as if these people have a bodily infection, and modern psychiatry is just treating their fever.”
Thomson describes a college student who was referred to his practice. “It was clear that this patient was in a lot of pain,” Thomson says. “He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study. He had some family issues” — his parents were recently divorced — “and his father was exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on him to go to graduate school. Because he’s got a family history of depression, the standard of care would be to put him on drugs right away. And a few years ago, that’s what I would have done.”

Instead, Thomson was determined to help the student solve his problem. “What you’re trying to do is speed along the rumination process,” Thomson says. “Once you show people the dilemma they need to solve, they almost always start feeling better.” He cites as evidence a recent study that found “expressive writing” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings — led to significantly shorter depressive episodes. The reason, Thomson suggests, is that writing is a form of thinking, which enhances our natural problem-solving abilities. “This doesn’t mean there’s some miracle cure,” he says. “In most cases, the recovery period is going to be long and difficult. And that’s what I told this young student. I said: ‘I know you’re hurting. I know these problems seem impossible. But they’re not. And I can help you solve them.’ ”

IT’S TOO SOON to judge the analytic-rumination hypothesis. Nobody knows if depression is an adaptation or if Andrews and Thomson have merely spun another “Just So” story, a clever evolutionary tale that lacks direct evidence. Nevertheless, their speculation is part of a larger scientific re-evaluation of negative moods, which have long been seen as emotional states to avoid. The dismissal of sadness and its synonyms is perhaps best exemplified by the rise of positive psychology, a scientific field devoted to the pursuit of happiness. In recent years, a number of positive psychologists have written popular self-help books, like “The How of Happiness” and “Authentic Happiness,” that try to outline the scientific principles behind “lasting fulfillment” and “getting the life we want.”

The new research on negative moods, however, suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers.

Last year Forgas ventured beyond the lab and began conducting studies in a small stationery store in suburban Sydney, Australia. The experiment itself was simple: Forgas placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To control for the effect of mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.
The enhancement of these mental skills might also explain the striking correlation between creative production and depressive disorders. In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

And then there’s the virtue of self-loathing, which is one of the symptoms of depression. When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.

But is that closeness effective? Does the despondency help us solve anything? Andrews found a significant correlation between depressed affect and individual performance on the intelligence test, at least once the subjects were distracted from their pain: lower moods were associated with higher scores. “The results were clear,” Andrews says. “Depressed affect made people think better.” The challenge, of course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair. To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.

Jonah Lehrer is the author of “How We Decide” and of the blog The Frontal Cortex. This is his first article for the magazine.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 14, 2010
An article on Feb. 28 about the benefits of depression misstated the name of a university in Australia where studies have been done on the subject. It is the University of New South Wales, not South Wales.

Of habits, relationships (healthy or toxic), of expectations, of dreams? Even when we know we’re hurting ourselves by hanging on, what drives the compulsion to keep gripping?

What do we do when old behavioral patterns no longer serve our life?

In the transition stage between awareness and change lies a really sucky phase of awareness without change.  It’s torturous.  “Why do I do this?”  “Why can’t I change this?”  We lament.  We tear out our hair.  And we still don’t change.  But now we’ve spiced up our situation by hating [read more...]]]> Why is it so hard to let go?

Of habits, relationships (healthy or toxic), of expectations, of dreams? Even when we know we’re hurting ourselves by hanging on, what drives the compulsion to keep gripping?

What do we do when old behavioral patterns no longer serve our life?

First of all, don’t beat yourself up.

In the transition stage between awareness and change lies a really sucky phase of awareness without change.  It’s torturous.  “Why do I do this?”  “Why can’t I change this?”  We lament.  We tear out our hair.  And we still don’t change.  But now we’ve spiced up our situation by hating ourselves.  Stop adding fuel to the fire.  Rest assured, you created your habits for excellent reasons.  To cope, to deal with stress, to survive.  They have served you well.  But now the time has come to change.  So let go of the blaming and put that fabulous energy into changing your situation.

Cultivate tolerance for discomfort.

You can either be uncomfortable in your old habits, or uncomfortable in your new habits, so why not choose with awareness?  Once you start, it becomes easier every time. Remind yourself that following your old habits may bring short-term relief, but longer term suffering.  Find ways to take care of yourself during this time, whether it’s yoga, massage, tea, time with friends, or a trip somewhere that grounds you.  Cultivate your capacity to take pleasure in the little things, moment to moment.

Reach out to your community.

You are not alone.  You are wired like a human being, and we’re all programmed to create habits in order to become more efficient.  As your awareness increases, you may realize that some of your autopilot tendencies aren’t ideal for you.  Reach out to others who may be experiencing similar growing pains.  There is comfort in community.

In the spirit of radical change and letting go, I’m including some inspiration below from different sources, even Dr. Phil   The first is about the Hindu goddess Kali.  Put this girl in back pocket when you need to up your potency for radical transformation!

Here’s a blurb from Anita Revel’s Goddess Site:

Kali Kali’s esoteric attributes are PASSION and physical and sexual energy. Be alert to those who undermine your self-confidence – Kali is here to hurl your life onto a new path that will ultimately prove to be more fulfilling than your current path.
SUGGESTED MANTRA:  AWAKENING SUGGESTED AFFIRMATIONS: My new life path reveals itself to me I say goodbye to destructive influences There are rainbows in every rainfall I am awake to my life’s calling I welcome Kali’s strength & recuperative powers I trust the Universe to provide It’s OK to release my juicy anger I can say “no” to negative influences ESSENCE: Goddessence KALI 100% pure essential oil blend GEMSTONES: Ruby, garnet, bloodstone, tourmaline, smoky quartz (red stones)		Kali 100% pure essential oil blend for the Base Chakra - Reclaim your independent spirit If you are feeling “stuck in a rut”, use this Base Chakra blend to energise your intention. The blend of five 100% pure essential oils represents strength, unwavering willpower and insight. It helps you purge elements of destruction in your life and reclaim your independent spirit by directing your life onto a new path – your true path. Walk with confidence and know your place in the world.
MORE ABOUT KALI According to ancient Hindu tradition, Kali is the mother of us all. Kali is often depicted as a bloodthirsty harbinger of destruction, but this is so that through death we can experience the wonder of rebirth. Hence, when our lives seem as though they are out of control, this is Kali telling us that we have not chosen the right path. Through Kali’s strength, we are forced out of complacency and fear to find the right path for ourselves. HER MODERN ENERGY Kali has unwavering judgement, strong willpower and penetrative insight. She also characterises how we feel about our attachments to people and possessions, and how we react when we are threatened with losing them. Don’t be afraid to shed – Kali offers you the strength to rid your life of excess baggage, to confront the forces that threaten you, to destroy the elements of destruction in your life. Once this is done, you can celebrate new life! DO THIS Kali is related to our root chakra, home of the kundalini energy. When our root chakra is in balance, we feel secure, alert, stable – our lives are full of active and positive energy. If you are not feeling like this, it is no wonder Kali is speaking to you today. Sit on the floor, close your eyes, and while nurturing a related gemstone, feel your spine grow and take root in the earth. Feel the strength of the earth energise your spine and your body. You are indestructable! You are strong! You can shake the weight from your shoulders and conquer the demon shadowing your life. Go Warrior Woman!!

From the Buddha Dharma Education Association:

If we contemplate desires and listen to them, we are actually no longer attaching to them; we are just allowing them to be the way they are. Then we come to the realisation that the origin of suffering, desire, can be laid aside and let go of.

How do you let go of things? This means you leave them as they are; it does not mean you annihilate them or throw them away. It is more like setting down and letting them be. Through the practice of letting go we realise that there is the origin of suffering, which is the attachment to desire, and we realise that we should let go of these three kinds of desire. Then we realise that we have let go of these desires; there is no longer any attachment to them.

When you find yourself attached, remember that ‘letting go’ is not ‘getting rid of’ or ‘throwing away’. If I’m holding onto this clock and you say, ‘Let go of it!’, that doesn’t mean ‘throw it out’. I might think that I have to throw it away because I’m attached to it, but that would just be the desire to get rid of it. We tend to think that getting rid of the object is a way of getting rid of attachment. But if I can contemplate attachment, this grasping of the clock, I realise that there is no point in getting rid of it – it’s a good clock; it keeps good time and is not heavy to carry around. The clock is not the problem. The problem is grasping the clock. So what do I do? Let it go, lay it aside – put it down gently without any kind of aversion. Then I can pick it up again, see what time it is and lay it aside when necessary.

You can apply this insight into ‘letting go’ to the desire for sense pleasures. Maybe you want to have a lot of fun. How would you lay aside that desire without any aversion? Simply recognise the desire without judging it. You can contemplate wanting to get rid of it – because you feel guilty about having such a foolish desire – but just lay it aside. Then, when you see it as it is, recognising that it’s just desire, you are no longer attached to it.

So the way is always working with the moments of daily life. When you are feeling depressed and negative, just the moment that you refuse to indulge in that feeling is an enlightenment experience. When you see that, you need not sink into the sea of depression and despair and wallow in it. You can actually stop by learning not to give things a second thought.

You have to find this out through practice so that you will know for yourself how to let go of the origin of suffering. Can you let go of desire by wanting to let go of it? What is it that is really letting go in a given moment? You have to contemplate the experience of letting go and really examine and investigate until the insight comes. Keep with it until that insight comes: ‘Ah, letting go, yes, now I understand. Desire is being let go of.’ This does not mean that you are going to let go of desire forever but, at that one moment, you actually have let go and you have done it in full conscious awareness. There is an insight then. This is what we call insight knowledge. In Pali, we call it nanadassana or profound understanding.

I had my first insight into letting go in my first year of meditation. I figured out intellectually that you had to let go of everything and then I thought: ‘How do you let go?’ It seemed impossible to let go of anything. I kept on contemplating: ‘How do you let go?’ Then I would say, ‘You let go by letting go.’ ‘Well then, let go!’ Then I would say:

‘But have I let go yet?’ and, ‘How do you let go?’ ‘Well just let go!’ I went on like that, getting more frustrated. But eventually it became obvious what was happening. If you try to analyse letting go in detail, you get caught up in making it very complicated. It was not something that you could figure out in words any more, but something you actually did. So I just let go for a moment, just like that.

Now with personal problems and obsessions, to let go of them is just that much. It is not a matter of analysing and endlessly making more of a problem about them, but of practising that state of leaving things alone, letting go of them. At first, you let go but then you pick them up again because the habit of grasping is so strong. But at least you have the idea. Even when I had that insight into letting go, I let go for a moment but then I started grasping by thinking: ‘I can’t do it, I have so many bad habits!’ But don’t trust that kind of nagging, disparaging thing in yourself. It is totally untrustworthy. It is just a matter of practising letting go. The more you begin to see how to do it, then the more you are able to sustain the state of non-attachment.

About letting go of love, from Dr. Phil:

Have you been dumped, betrayed or left so heartbroken that you didn’t ever want to love again? Are you still stuck on an ex and don’t know how to move on? And how do you know when it’s time to let go and look for love somewhere else?

For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of House [read more...]]]> I loved this article from the NY Times Magazine.  At some time or another, most of us have experienced a slide out of the comfort of our lives.  Whether it’s been through trauma or an internal shift, we’ve experienced a descent that leaves us clutching our habits and stripped to the bone.  Dominique’s journey reminds us that transformation does come, and that joy arrives in smaller packages than we might expect.

Losing It, by Dominique Browning, from the NY Times Magazine

For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of House & Garden, a magazine that celebrated the good life. It would be an understatement to describe this enterprise as part of a company not primarily in the business of philosophical, spiritual or moral soul-searching. Condé Nast’s roots and branches are in the material world. The good life at House & Garden generally meant cultivating your own backyard rather than being involved in the body politic. I pushed against the limits of making a so-called shelter magazine by publishing articles about spiritual issues and the environment, but I always felt clear-eyed about how things stood. I spent more than a decade in the belly of the beast of muchness and more. That was a precarious place to be when the real estate bubble began to leak.

The folding of the magazine was ruthless. Without warning, our world collapsed. No one was expecting it, though with five publishers in 10 years, we had our share of turmoil. I came to work on a Monday in 2007, went to the corporate offices for a meeting, had a different meeting, got the news and was told to have everything packed up by Friday. Security guards were immediately ­posted by the doors.

In the four days we were given to pack up our belongings, I was overwhelmed with an urge to hoard and began stuffing every House & Garden paper bag, pencil and notepad I could get my hands on into a box, so that I would never run out of office supplies. I salvaged enough to run a small corporation from my kitchen. I didn’t think of this as stealing. I thought of it as a twisted sort of recycling — part of the strange new economy of severance into which I had been thrown. Everything with our logo on it was destined for the Dumpster anyway.

Even so, a few weeks later I realized I had some gaping holes in the inventory: I had no ink for my printer. The pages of my résumé looked faded, ghostly. You would think I was fading, too, but I wasn’t. I was getting plump. All I could think about was food. This was the beginning of being hungry all the time. My addled brain interpreted the white noise of unemployment to mean that I was going into hibernation, that I had to lay in reserves. After the closing of the magazine was announced, my public line was, “We had a great run, we took a magazine from zero to 950,000 readers in 10 years, fabulous renewals, we won awards, published six books. . . .” I was a zombie. “Great run . . . 950,000 readers . . . six books. . . .”

But privately, I was in a whiplashing tailspin. My nightmare had finally come true. For years, I had a profound dread of unemployment that went way beyond worrying about how to pay the bills. I would like to say that this was because of the insecure nature of magazine publishing, but my anxiety had more to do with my own neuroses — though I didn’t think of it that way. Work had become the scaffolding of my life. It was what I counted on. It held up the floor of my moods, kept the facade intact. I always worried that if I didn’t have work, I would sink into abject torpor.

I have always had a job. I have always supported myself. Everything I own I purchased with money that I earned. I worked hard. For the 35 years I’ve been an adult, I have had an office to go to and a time to show up there. I’ve always had a place to be, existential gravitas intended. Without work, who was I? I do not mean that my title defined me. What did define me was the simple act of working. The loss of my job triggered a cascade of self-doubt and depression. I felt like a failure. Not that the magazine had failed — that I had.

The thing about running a magazine is that there is always too much to do. I liked not being in control of my time — I was always busy. I didn’t want time to think things over, things like feeling guilty about spending more time with my office mates than with my children; feeling sad that those children were leaving home; or feeling disappointed in love or frightened by terrible illness. Everything else, in other words. The demands of my job kept me distracted. Besides, no one else was paying my mortgage.

With the closing of the magazine, my beloved family of colleagues was obliterated. And so was the structure of my life.

Within hours of leaving my office for the last time, I could hardly bring myself to care about my reputation. I just wanted to eat. I began calling every employed person I knew to take me to lunch. I wanted to fill my calendar with the promise of meals, even if they were only penciled in — this, after all, being Manhattan. Only food could ward off the rage, despair and raw fear that overcame me.

How had I managed to get this far in my life completely unprepared for the unknown — which I had always known was out there?

During my first post-employment lunch, my panic was full-blown. It was all I could do to keep myself from wrapping a dozen breadsticks in a napkin and tucking them into my bag. I floated the idea, actually, and my companion laughed slightly, nervously, gauging the level of my seriousness. I managed to control myself. He is a good friend and gave me loads of advice, which I heard through my frantic chewing. I ended the meal extracting a promise of several more meals in the future; I wanted friends bearing menus.

After a few weeks of being unemployed, I began to settle into a routine — of getting up.

“Today is Saturday,” I said to myself one morning. I repeated this several times, trying to convince myself to get out of bed. Saturday is what I came to think of as one of the nice days, like Sunday — that is, when I considered days at all. “Today is Saturday. No one is working today, so you are no different from anyone else,” I would say out loud.

In fact, I found it hardly necessary to be aware of what day it was. One of the pleasures of a workday morning had been to rise early, have a cup of tea, walk through the garden and get to the train on time, where I could read the paper front to back. Now that I did not have to get to work, I no longer had a structured time to read the daily paper, so I would pile it into a stack, thinking I would get to it later, until I realized I was creating a weekly daily.

I missed Fridays especially. They once meant relief, time for rest and housekeeping. Now every day was Friday. Or Monday. Whatever.

Time hangs heavily on the unemployed soul. If I ate an egg at 8 a.m., by 9:30 I was starving. I became obsessed with eggs, gazing on their refined shape in wonder. Perfect packets of nutrients. I ate eggs all day long. When I had a job, I never thought about eggs.

I would feel busy, and then, when I was in bed again, realize I had done nothing. The last time this happened I had a newborn and was so exhausted from nursing through the night and keeping an eye on the sleeping infant all morning that I couldn’t get into grown-up clothing until late in the afternoon. For heaven’s sake, I hadn’t even thought of it as grown-up clothing since I was a 5-year-old dressing for kindergarten. Frankly, I no longer saw any reason to get out of my pajamas at all. A long coat covered everything up when I went out for food.

The pace of my life had become so slow that I was struggling to keep up with it.

“How are you today?” my sister Nicole asked whenever she called. She phoned several times a day. “How was your morning?” my sister wanted to know.

“Incredibly busy. Unbelievable.”

“What were you doing?”

“Sleeping.”

In this way, being unemployed is a lot like being depressed. You know how there are millions (O.K., a handful) of things you swear you would do if you only had the time? Now that I had all the time in the world — except for the hours during which I was looking for work — to read, write, watch birds, travel, play minor-key nocturnes, have lunch with friends, train a dog, get a dog, learn to cook, knit a sweater, iron the napkins and even the sheets, I had absolutely no energy for any of it. It made no difference that music and books and nature had long been the mainstays of my spirit. Just thinking about them exhausted me. I had absolutely zero experience in filling weeks — what if it became years? — with activity of my own choosing. Being unemployed meant being unoccupied, literally. I felt hollow.

“Today is Saturday. Get out of bed.”

Saturday meant that I could feel a little bit normal. Saturday is not a workday. What mattered was that everyone else’s Saturdays were different from Mondays and therefore the same as mine. I rose early. I made a breakfast of the leftovers from a post-employment lunch and then I put on a hat and mittens. Did I mention that we were all fired just as the holiday season was upon us? So much for Thanksgiving.

I headed into the streets. The early sunlight slanted across the shop windows. Everyone hurried past me. Suddenly I noticed that the men on the sidewalk looked strange; they were in overcoats and polished leather shoes and carrying briefcases. The women were dressed up. They had introspective, determined, grim faces. Strange for a Saturday.

That’s when it hit me.

It wasn’t Saturday. It was Friday.

After a month of unemployment, it had come to this — foraging for my dinner, at 4 in the afternoon. In my own kitchen. I had developed a habit of eating leftovers from meals enjoyed days earlier; my breakfast of spaghetti and meatballs at dawn sickened me by noon. Before too long, I was hungry again, but balky, wary of my own housekeeping. Better to have a drink. Safer.

Normally I like a bottle of Guinness stout when I need a nutritional hit, but I’d gone through my supply. I spotted a nearly empty bottle of Lillet moldering at the back of the refrigerator. Sugar and liquor only improve with age, right? I emptied it into an oversize breakfast cup and read the recipe on the bottle. A twist of lime? Who keeps limes? I threw in a slice of lemon. Then a few more. Half a lemon. Vitamin C. I like to rehearse the nutritional content of my food, and there are times when a drink qualifies as a meal. I took a sip, and it wasn’t half-bad, or, I suppose, it was only half-good. Note to self: Next time, make an effort. Have a whiskey sour. More vitamin C.

Drink in hand, I decided it was time to wash the windows on the second floor. I could use a little exercise, I thought. Funny how sugar works: suddenly a surge of energy. Cleaning was an activity I had thrown myself into in recent days. I might be a mess, but at least I could control the mess in my house.

“How are you today?” my sister asked. She was down to calling two or three times a day. “How was your morning?”

“Incredibly busy. Unbelievable.”

“What were you doing?”

“Vacuuming.”

I got a big sponge out from under the sink, filled a bucket and climbed the stairs to my bedroom. A few more sips of the Lillet to fortify me for the job, and my mind was racing. As I reached for the corner with my sopping sponge, sucking on the lemons at the bottom of my cup at the same time, I imagined the casement snapping under my weight.

I watched myself fall out the window. I watched my cup shatter on the flagstones.

I looked down from the window and saw myself splayed on the stone terrace, my back cracked and spine twisted — like the lime that’s supposed to be in my drink? — my head resting at a birdlike angle. This is where they (who?) would find me four days later, when it occurred to them (who, though?) that I hadn’t been seen for a while, hadn’t kept an appointment (do I have any?) and hadn’t called the children.

The children? I can’t help it. I think of Alex and Theo as children still, though they are grown and out of the house. The children were not going to be the ones to find me broken-necked on the terrace. Frankly, no one would. I’d rot.

I decided I was in no condition for housekeeping this evening and dropped my sopping sponge into the bathtub. O.K., so now I had watched myself hit bottom. That’s what you have to do to get better, right? Anyway, I was hungry. For a change.

There were three jars of peanut butter — protein! — on the shelf. I didn’t even bother to find my reading glasses so that I could choose the freshest jar, but I took down a dessert plate, just to maintain standards. I fished around in the utensil drawer and found a spoon, unscrewed the lid and dredged deep. I dolloped the stuff onto the plate — an extra helping so I didn’t have to go back downstairs for seconds. I put the plate of peanut butter, a half bottle of wine, a glass and a linen napkin on a tray and climbed back to my bedroom.

I started to lift my glass in a toast.

“To nothing.”

I thought better of it.

“To life!” I said out loud. Then I gave myself another one of my hourly lectures. Buck up. Just because something failed doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Just because something has ended doesn’t mean it was all a mistake. Just because you’ve been rejected doesn’t mean you’re worthless and unlovable. Sound familiar? It should, if you or anyone you know has gone through a divorce. This felt like the same thing.

Worse. I had no control over any of it. And no one was holding a safety net for me. For years I relied on only myself, but my confidence was shattered. Now what?

I began keeping notes about how I was feeling, what I was doing. Writing had always been my way to absorb things; I often wrote out my troubles. It even crossed my mind to write for a living. I had not changed my lifestyle while I was working at Condé Nast, so I had saved some money. I knew that writing wasn’t lucrative, having spent my career supporting writers. But I figured if I got consulting work and lived carefully, I could subsidize myself. Then I developed a strange typing problem — and I am a world-class typist, having spent years as a secretary. I kept mssng the “i” key — thngs kept comng out whtout t. There was certainly nothing wrong with the middle finger of my right hand. Mssng the “i” meant constant retypng. That was the end of wrtng.

Within months of House & Garden folding, the entire economy was in freefall. Advertising was vanishing, layoffs and buyouts were announced. I was beginning to feel like an antique, an artisan whose skills were no longer even respected, much less needed. Editing? How quaint. Managing creative people? All we’re trying to manage is to get rid of more of them.

It was strange and maddening to be forcibly retired. Even the generational rhythms were out of whack. It seemed just yesterday that my father retired. How could we have reached the same stage of life together?

Four months after being laid off, I decided to sell my house in the suburbs of New York. The stock market was sliding perilously. I didn’t want to spend my savings maintaining the mortgage and high taxes. I wanted to be out of debt.

It took me ages to create my home — 25 years, and all the years before that of daydreaming about how I wanted to live. This was the home I thought I would grow old in. It was a forthright, dark, wood-shingled, center-hall colonial revival, nearly a hundred years old. It was supposed to be my Forever House — the home you think you will never leave, the house you love beyond all others, where you’ve recaptured only what made you feel safe and happy in your childhood and left the rest behind. The Forever House is where you’ve passed along the values you admire to your own children — and filled the rooms with laughter and tears.

I called a real-estate broker, a cheerfully competent person who arrived disconcerted at the kitchen door, unwilling to brave the front path overhung with gnarled, carefully pruned azaleas. They gave the entrance character. Was I thinking, Character doesn’t sell, when I made my home? No. I was thinking, This looks good. To me. We toured the house: “And over here is the laundry room, with bookcases built in — ”

“I’ve never seen so many bookcases!” the broker said. “People don’t want bookcases. They don’t even want libraries. They want media rooms. Where did you say you hid the TV?”

I could see her mind whirring as she began to figure out just what type of character she had on her hands . . . single, unemployed, not going out much, reading instead.

We walked through the kitchen. She eyed the walls warily.

“Interesting color. Very.”

Isn’t that what people say when they can’t think of anything nicer to say?

“You’ve decorated your house so beautifully,” she continued. “This kitchen is gorgeous. Now you’re going to have to clear all the counters. Books. Knickknacks. All the stuff. I love what you’ve done with this house. Make sure you put it all away.”

Knickknacks? Maybe houses are like children. You can see yours only through eyes of love. Soon strangers would be tromping through my house, passing judgment, but the only way to have an open house is to shut away everything that made it your home.

“Don’t worry,” the broker went on. “You don’t have to be here. You shouldn’t even be in town! I’ll handle everything. Don’t forget! Counters! Walls! Personality! Cleared!” The broker smiled graciously. She was fantastically reassuring.

I felt as if I were in the presence of a dying beast. If Wendy and her brothers could have a big dog for a governess ­— well, this house could be my Nana. It was steadfast, if creaky; it gave me years of solace and protection. Every once in a while, when I thought of how I was about to abandon it, I would lean into a wall and kiss it. I loved my house.

I could not step past the threshold of a son’s room without becoming engulfed in memories, triggered by things as slight as the worn patch on the armchair where my elbow rested while cradling a nursing baby. This was the home I imagined my children would return to visit, with their children, whose first steps would be taken in the garden, their tiny fists curling around the white azalea branches for support, just the way their fathers’ had. I wish we still lived in a world in which houses were passed down through generations, but our sense of home has become portable. That may be one reason we invest our possessions with so much more meaning — they, rather than rooms and gardens, carry the memories.

The house sold quickly. It struck me that I had lost House & Garden, the job, and was now losing house and garden, the life. What took years to create was about to be undone in a matter of minutes. Come to think of it, kind of like being blasted out of a career.

I had access to a city apartment owned by a friend, but I couldn’t commit to living there all the time. It made me too sad — an unresolved chapter of my last decade. I decided to move to the small, coastal Rhode Island town where, after divorcing years ago, I bought a run-down Modernist house that had been on the market for years. I was rebuilding it. I know I was lucky to have such a choice — no, not just lucky! I had worked hard to save enough to buy that house. It was a wrenching move. I was haunted by the anxiety that it wouldn’t be the last, either. This was just the beginning of letting things go — starting with the Forever House.

I called Alex. “How can I give this house up? I’m walking around thinking this has become the museum of my happiest moments. I’m making a big mistake. Don’t you think? The museum of my happiest moments. . . . ”

Alex was used to me by now.

“Time for a new museum, Mom.”

Spring blew in so wildly that year that it seemed unnatural, or perhaps I just noticed what spring feels like once I wasn’t sealed in a climate-controlled building all day. Weather — the actual experience of it, not the forecast — is one of the more dramatic discoveries to come with a slower pace of life. There were days at the office when I didn’t know whether it was muggy or cool, or if it had rained. It dawned on me that there was something unsavory about having been so cut off from nature that I was surprised by the golden hue in the slant of light at four in the afternoon — on a weekday, no less.

I took to wandering in my garden at all hours. As if to give me one last chance to change my mind about leaving, spring unfolded in splendor. The daffodils multiplied generously and spilled across the front in a riot of gold. Bunches of hellebores appeared in March and nodded their prim white, mauve and purple caps for more than two months; when I bent down to turn up a small head and peer into a quiet, trusting face, I winced at the thought of leaving them vulnerable to whatever depredations a new owner might visit upon them. I apologized in anticipation. I strolled the paths, examining the thick, furry spools of the unwinding ferns; the gnarled purple fingers of the peonies clawing out from the damp, fragrant earth; the green stubs of the Solomon’s seal; the sharp tips of the hosta encircled by improbably large patches of bare ground that would soon be hidden by gigantic leaves, bearing aloft the fragrant white wands that seduce the moths at dusk.

With all the anxiety about the move, my brain flipped a switch, and I went from sleeping all the time to being utterly lost in sleeplessness. In exhaustion, my memory faltered. Black holes gaped open before me as I spoke; in the middle of a sentence I groped zanily for safe passage to the next word. During the moments of sleep that I could snatch, I had vivid, disturbing dreams. I was being born — I was blinded by a bright light — and seconds later I was dying. I was reaching for the telephone to call an ambulance but couldn’t remember which number to dial: 411? 911? 411? 911? 411? 911? What did I need? Help? Information?

I turned to the wisdom of the ancients. I went to Ovid, where women run from rapacious gods, and Dante, where women writhe in purgatory, and Homer, where women unravel their work, and finally I pulled off the shelf the old black leather-clad King James Version of the Bible I was given in high school. I read feverishly from cover to cover. I had forgotten how much of it is about fear — over and over again, the response to change, even to the miraculous, is fear. I was fighting fear. And what was I so afraid of? Being alone with myself long enough to wonder what is the purpose of my life?

I turned most frequently to the Psalms, whose gorgeous, intricate, sensual prayers blanketed me in wonder. There I found my anthem for that year, the most eloquent expression of grief I ever read: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.”

One night, at four in the morning, in a panic of sleeplessness, I went to my piano and on impulse pulled an old volume of music off the shelf, J. S. Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. I picked my way through the first aria, which has a quiet, dignified, spare quality. It is elegant, contained; it holds much in reserve. The music did nothing for my sleeplessness; if anything, within hours I was more completely, wonderfully awake than I had been in a long time. Unexpectedly, I felt a peace suffuse my bones as I lost myself in Bach’s lines. My own anxieties were no longer drumming through my brain; my mind, that hobbled old draft horse, stopped loping along in the same rut it followed night after night. It was locking into someone else’s harmony.

Bach has become a nightly visitor. I am obsessed with him: his musical tricks, jokes and puns; his charismatic energy and passion; his resilience through tragedy; his rigorous discipline; his bedrock belief in a force greater than anything human.

I have to teach myself, all over again, how to practice, how to silence the critic in my head. I have to remind myself that the repeats matter, that respect for the rests is important. What my fingers lack in speed, my heart makes up in feeling. If I have to, I will crawl through sarabandes and quadrilles, letting the dance fill my soul.

Slowly, slowly, the months go by, each one a variation transposing loss, loneliness and anger to gratitude and hope. I no longer dread the advent of another rosy dawn. As I stop struggling so with fear and simply accept the slow tempo of my days, all those inner resources start kicking in — those soul-saving habits of playfulness, most of all: reading, thinking, listening, feeling my body move through the world, noticing the small beauty in every single day. I watch the worms, watch the hawks, watch the fox, watch the rabbits. I open my heart to new friends. I settle into my new home; its healing balm has been there all along, nestled in a sofa that beckons me to pick up a book, hovering outside the window inviting me to take a walk. I find room in my life again for love of the world, let the quiet of solitary moments steal over me, give myself over to joy. What a surprise! That I can cook a meal for my children, or take a long walk on the beach, or watch an osprey wheel through the sky, or set down a page of thoughts — these are moments of grace. Old Testament loving-kindness, the stuff of everyday life.

One adventure is over; it is time for another. I have a different kind of work to do now. I am growing into a new season. At the water’s edge, watching the tiny, teeming life of that mysterious place between high and low tides, the intertidal zone, I begin to accept the relentless flux that is the condition of these days. I am not old and not young; not bethrothed and not alone; not broken and yet not quite whole; thinking back, looking forward. But present. These are my intertidal years.

In those sleepless nights, when I am at the keyboard, I connect with something I may have once encountered as a teenager and then lost in the frantic skim through adulthood — the desire to nourish my soul. I do not have the temerity to think I have found God; I think instead that I have stumbled into a conversation that I pray will last the rest of my life.

I cannot move through the music the way I hear it in my head. Nothing works the way it used to. My hands feel stiff. But every once in a while, I accomplish a passage adroitly. Fingers dance over keys. I take all the repeats. I observe the rests. I enjoy myself. And I am happy for small-boned miracles.

Dominique Browning writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund Web site and has a new blog, SlowLoveLife.com. This piece is an excerpt from “Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness,” to be published next month by Atlas & Company.

Well, two weeks later and I’m happy to report that traveling light was an excellent idea.  (Although my bag did come back [read more...]]]> When I went traveling to India this last month with my mom, I packed everything in a small backpack, determined to be a minimalist.  It was an experiment to see if I could really get away with traveling light.  “Aren’t you impressed,” I asked my boyfriend.  “I got everything into here!” I brandished my backpack proudly.  He looked at my bag skeptically, “I’ll be impressed,” he said, “if you still think that was a good idea when you get back.”

Well, two weeks later and I’m happy to report that traveling light was an excellent idea.  (Although my bag did come back a bit more stuffed than when I left.)  I was a bit dirty, I’ll admit, but it was incredibly satisfying to let go the usual defensive materials I like to shore up.  No extra books for reading, no “clothes for every occasion,” no mascara, no “just in case” items, and few distractions.

In celebration of traveling light, I’m sharing this article I found by Michelle Cook.  It’s that time of year: clean out the closets, dump off the waste, and let in the fresh air!

Spring Clean Your Body, by Michelle Schoffro Cook

Spring is upon us–at least in theory. Every year I get spring fever. I can’t wait to get outside, open all my windows to let some fresh air in, and get down to cleaning my house of all the clutter that tends to build up over the winter. I think spring is the best season of the year. It’s a season of birth and new growth. Flowers, trees, grass and shrubs all start budding with life. This spring, help breathe new life into your body by incorporating some simple detox suggestions to your day. Reducing the toxic burden on your body can spell: improved digestion, increased energy, clearer sinuses, normalized blood pressure, fewer allergy symptoms and hormonal imbalances, strengthened immunity to viruses, sharper mental abilities, better sleep quality, fewer mood swings, healthier skin, and much more. Here are 9 ways to spring cleanse your body without the harsh regimes or deprivation of most detox plans:

1. Throw out the trash…from your diet, that is. I probably don’t have to tell you what constitutes “trash”–fried foods, sugary foods, and the 3 Ps: processed, prepared, and packaged food since they tend to be full of trans fats, sugar, and food additives.

2. If you can’t read eat, don’t eat it. Read labels on the healthy food selections you choose. As a general rule: most of the harmful chemicals you should be avoiding have long and complex names. If you can’t read the words on the package, don’t buy it, and don’t eat it. Better yet, choose fresh foods that come directly in Nature’s packaging.

3. Drink at least 8 to 10 cups of pure water daily to help flush out toxins. For a really great detoxifying drink, add the fresh juice of one lemon to a large glass of water first thing in the morning. Lemons help alkalize your body chemistry, contain more than 20 anti-cancer compounds, and help cleanse your liver, kidneys, and colon.

I was reaching my arms overhead in urdhva hastasana and – I thought – doing a pretty good job.  I was straightening the arms, lifting through the sides of the waist, and (for once) not sticking my ribs at.  Ah-ha, I thought, I’m DOING it!  My teacher comes by and purses her lips at me.  “Relax here, stop working so hard.  Your collarbones are all tight.”  She wiggles my fingers until my collarbones have space to breathe.

Hmmmm, now I seem to be doing much less.  And it feels…better.

How many times [read more...]]]> I realized last week that trying too hard to lift my arms.

I was reaching my arms overhead in urdhva hastasana and – I thought – doing a pretty good job.  I was straightening the arms, lifting through the sides of the waist, and (for once) not sticking my ribs at.  Ah-ha, I thought, I’m DOING it!  My teacher comes by and purses her lips at me.  “Relax here, stop working so hard.  Your collarbones are all tight.”  She wiggles my fingers until my collarbones have space to breathe.

Hmmmm, now I seem to be doing much less.  And it feels…better.

How many times have we been struggling with a pose only to realize that the next step involves letting something go rather than adding on more effort?  “Sthira Sukham Asanam” as it says in the yoga sutras, which means “asana is a steady, comfortable seat.”  But somehow we find it much easier to focus on the “steady” part of the equation than the “comfort.”  When we go to yoga class, we are usually trying to be good students.  We want to “do it” right.  And it’s usually easier to “do” something than to “let go” of something.  So we do, do, and do… and hope that we’re on the right path.

It’s time to focus on the other side of the equation.  The comfort side.  The undoing side.  Can we simplify our practice so that we’re doing what we need to?  No more, no less.  Yoga then becomes a process of stripping away, rather than layering on.  We come down to the essential elements of the poses, rather than bogging them down in layers of tension.  Un-do. Simplify.  Do what is necessary, not more.

As a delightful challenge to the process of simplification, this week’s pose is parivrtta ardha chandrasana (revolved half moon).  A profoundly challenging balancing pose, we are asked to basically revolve our Virabhadrasana III (warrior III).  Even here, search for the sukha.  Do what is necessary, not more.

Component Parts:

Neutral legs: The back leg is certainly going to want to externally rotate.  Strongly lift the inner thigh of the extended back leg to the ceiling as you reach through the back heel.  The standing leg hip will want to rotate forward.  Draw the standing leg hip back and firm the inner thighs towards each other.   Find this adductor (inner thigh) action in earlier, more accessible poses like lunges, Virabhadrasana I, Parvottanasana, and Virabhadrasana III.

Thoracic Spine/Twist: For this twist, the thoracic spine must draw strongly into the body.  Keep the upper body open, use the bottom tips of the shoulder blades to dig into the chest and lift the chest open.  Broaden the collarbones.  Good places to find this: cobra, updog, open twists, parivrtta parsvakonasana, parivrtta trikonasana

Core: A strong connection from the inner legs into the center is essential.  The flexies among us will be tempted to twist by collapsing in the lower back.  Instead, lengthen the tailbone to the extended heel and lift the sides of the waist to the ceiling.  From this strength and foundation, then open the chest.  Find this core work in navasana (try it with straight legs, coming from dandasana – just like picking up your right angle and shifting it into another perspective.  It’s a whole new pose!).  A great way to workshop navasana is on your back.  This helps keep the spine long and the lower back drawing into the body (rather than collapsing away and rounding the spine – thanks to our quadratus lumborum for the support!).  Lay on your back about two feet from the wall and bring your heels onto the wall, legs together, like tadasasana.  Lift your chest without hyper extending the lower back.  With legs straight, make your heels light then gently lift them away from the wall until your legs are at ninety degrees.  Then slowly (slowly) lower the heels back to the wall, keeping the chest open, lower back long.  Once we’ve got that, we can try to come into navasana from dandasana with the legs straight.  Lift through the chest, tip back, zip your legs together, and lift your legs.  Keep the chest open and the lower back drawing up and in.  Guaranteed to warm you up.

Hamstrings: Oh yes, the hamstrings must be warmed up.  Uttanasana, parsvottanasana (pyramid), prasarita padottanasana (wide-legged forward fold), virabhadrasana III (warrior III).

Sequencing ideas:

Virasana/Meditation to start.  Teach the neutral legs.  Touch on the lengthening of the side waist, lift of the chest.

Extended cat/cow: neutral legs, reach through heels.  Opening chest without collapsing waist.

Make your way into Surya A’s as a general warm up, with lunges and an open twist

Warrior II to warm up hamstrings

Prasarita Padottanasana (with strap behind to encourage opening of thoracic), hamstrings, neutral

Surya B for neutral alignment in legs – add in parivrtta parsvakonasana with focus on lengthening both sides, rather than C-curve

Parsvottanasana (with strap behind, open chest)

To the wall:

Navasana core exercise (see above.  On back, then from dandasana.  Also an interesting option here to do jathara parivartanasana.)

Supta Hasta Padangustasana with extended foot on wall and using strap (to find alignment in non-weight bearing position)

Utkatastana at wall (to give hamstrings a break)

Utthita Hasta Padangustasana at wall (leg neutral)

Virabhadrasana III with extended leg at wall.  Use blocks under hands.  The openness and lift of the chest is a potent counterbalance to the extended leg.

Parivrtta Ardha Chandrasana with extended leg at wall – TADA!  I love using the wall here, as it encourages length and an accuracy in alignment that is freeing.

Cool down should include some bent leg hip openers to soothe the outer hips and give hamstrings a rest.  Baddha konasana, Ankle to knee, a forward fold in sukhasana would feel great.