Yoga and Resilience

Read about yoga and resilience in this post that Yogashala guest teacher Marcella Dean contributed to our blog. You can find her regularly on Sunday mornings at Yogashala, teaching from her deeply rooted love for yoga.

My perfect life

How will you react when your life starts to crumble and the illusion of control over what is most important in your world is taken away from you for good? Not so long ago I got the opportunity to experience this, when my ‘perfect life’ fell into many discordant pieces.

My husband and I were a successful dual career couple with two healthy, intelligent and beautiful children. Then our marriage broke up.

In the midst of a difficult separation, we received a phone call from our daughter’s school. The school councilors were extremely worried about our 15 year old daughter. As it turned out, she had self-harmed herself. She had suffered from anxiety attacks and depression, apparently for years. We had been clueless the entire time our daughter was miserable. She’d been hiding her problems from us until she simply couldn’t anymore. This was the beginning of a long time of despair and agony for all of us. Our child needed to be hospitalized to protect her from her suicidal urges.

Hone your resilience skills

Worrying about how you would handle such a situation is not very useful, but there are things you can do to ‘prepare’ yourself like honing your resilience skills. Changes are certain to challenge us, what we want to hold on will disappear and relationships will end. We want to protect our children from harm, would gladly suffer all the illnesses in the world if that would keep our offspring healthy. But unfortunately that’s not how it works. Constant worrying is useless and overprotective parenting counterproductive. So how can you strengthen yourself for tough times?

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