HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Welcome, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us for our October community conversation. It is always a great pleasure to be here with all of you, and honor to have you showing up for our monthly conversation, which this month will be with my good friend Sara Sheikh, who some of you know as Syamala Priya.
Sara is a yoga teacher and a licensed clinical social worker with a trauma-informed, holistic approach to therapy. She provides health mental health counseling to people of all ages who are hoping to shed behaviors, feelings, and ways of thinking that no longer work for them. Her work is about empowering people to mindfully engage in a process of self-discovery and transformation. So we’re going to explore topics at the intersection of mental health and yoga.
Sara, thank you so very much for joining me for today’s conversation about how to stay sane in an insane world.
SARA: Thank you, Hari. It’s great to be here as a regular participant in the community conversations usually listening in.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Yeah, and I’m very happy to have you in the guest seat, as opposed to being a regular participant in the usual sense. Greetings to all of you who came in in the last few minutes. Thank you all very, very much for being here.
Sara, I wanted to start by hearing a little bit from you about how you got started practicing yoga and eventually teaching yoga, and how you got started as a social worker and therapist, and how those two things eventually came together for you.
SARA: Okay, sure. Um, I think my journey into yoga began in my mid 20s. Um, I, you know, my first kind of career in my late teens and mid to mid 20s was I was an organic vegetable farmer. I ran a community supported agriculture in upstate New York, in the Finger Lakes region. And I had a child pretty young, and, you know, growing up outside of Ithaca, New York, there there’s a lot of kind of alternative folks in that area.
And I was already, you know, in, in alternative culture, in a way, even the school that I went to and, you know, growing up in that area, just kind of exposed to that, like the guy who would paint our house growing up was like the local yogi. He lived in this tiny little his name was Tiny and he lived in this very, very tiny house. And he was a yogi. And I remember even. Yeah, as being, you know, I don’t know, young in my teens asking him if he would teach me yoga. And he just kind of was like, not sure if he wanted that level of responsibility in my life. And so, you know, he gave me a book, you know, Iyengars, you know, book… the classic book with the woman in the red leotard and da da da.
But when I was pregnant, you know, I started being more connected with different healers, midwives, healers and such. And that was a really tumultuous time in my life of, you know, after having my child and not having a great relationship with my child’s dad and things like that, it was a very difficult time for me.
And I met some I met a person who became a mentor for me, and she was a yogi. She was also involved in, like, mindfulness meditation with Thich Nhat Hanh. And so I lived in a community households with this mentor and the the structure of the household was based on like living the yamas and niyamas or trying to.
And we had yoga classes in the house. We had weekly meditation sessions and I was able to live there in community with my son up until he was about eight years old. So that mentor really kind of grabbed me by the shoulders and she was like, all right, you know how to do all this asana? You’re very flexible, blah, blah, blah. That’s not what you need. You need to understand how to live your life, how to interact with others, how to have healthy relationships, how to live by certain principles and values. And she was very kind of hardcore with me… that kind of tough love relationship. And she had me doing a lot of service. She was like, you just you need to do things, you know? You need to be engaged.
And, I accepted that I did. I just went, you know, I fully accepted it. I don’t think I previously was a full-fledged vegetarian, but it when she kind of laid out the scheme of what it means to be a yogi, I just said, okay, I’ll be a vegetarian. I’ll won’t eat eggs, meat, fish, onions, garlic. Da da da. And I’ll start living in, in this community where we, we try to practice these things and so that was really helpful and really hard.
You know, in those days, meditation wasn’t that easy. I had all this combat internally in my mind going on. So I’ve had a lot of years of practice and opportunity for purification before I moved to Baltimore when I was 33. So I had, you know, almost ten years or maybe, you know, nine years or eight years under my belt of some aligning my life to yoga principles.
And when I came to Baltimore, I felt that I had something to give. I had a very different kind of upbringing and experience than most people do living in Baltimore. So I felt that that was a good match for me rather than where I was from everybody’s kind of like me. So I, you know, it was kind of just working jobs, getting paid eight bucks an hour, working in vegan restaurants, working at a vegetarian grocery store. And it just occurred to me maybe the best thing I could do, what could what would be the best thing I could do? And I thought the best thing I can do is be a yoga teacher.
So I had started practicing in a yoga studio, and that was the first time I had practiced in a yoga studio, because my relationship to yoga was very, in, like, I didn’t know about yoga studios. I thought yoga was like this thing you learn from a mentor and a community. So I found out about yoga studios and I realized, My God, you can become a yoga teacher. So I did a certification and I started teaching full time, and I started teaching in schools in Baltimore City, recreation centers with youth.
And that was my specialty, is working in going to these communities, going to these locations and stepping into their world. And I really loved that. Absolutely loved it. And I during that process, I realized that, you know, if I first of all, I also needed a career because I was like really kind of just living, you know, just I, I didn’t have a lot, you know, getting paid eight bucks an hour for work and raising a child isn’t the easiest thing to do.
So I thought, all right, I need to also have a career. And I had a really good therapist in Ithaca when my son was really young, and she was an inspiration for me. She was also a very spiritual woman. And, that seed was also planted in me quite at during that age, that during that time when I was practicing yoga and doing my own trauma therapy.
And so that seed also fructified right to say, okay, well, I think this would match this would also help to open if I become a clinical social worker, that would also help to open the doors of sharing yoga in places that I’m already sharing, but I don’t know. And really, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a yoga teacher, but if you’re a clinical social worker, that gives you a little more. And it did. I became a clinical social worker and people were like, oh, oh, you’re somebody now. Oh, wow. We have a lot of respect for you.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Yeah. Your authority changed dramatically.
SARA: Completely. I was like, oh, well, I guess so. You know. And it was, you know, I found my dharma. I found my this lifetime, you know, occupational dharma. Matched with a growing eternal dharma.
And. Yeah. And so my. And that’s how I met Hari is through the yoga community. I was, you know, I was looking for something that I thought would be real yoga, like an authentic, teachings of yoga. And I waited and I waited, and I waited. I remember telling myself, just be patient. Just wait. Don’t get involved in all this stuff that you know is not what you need, and it does not seem true to you. And that. Yeah. And then I met Hari and that skyrocketed every everything else.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: That was my good fortune that you happen to wander into my class. Yeah. So you’re in a pretty good position to help people navigate the intersection of yoga and mental health. And not just people in general, but particular kinds of people. People who have had similar challenging experiences to yours as a single mother. People who are living in challenging circumstances and challenging communities where the needs are a little different from what people need who live in either more, let’s call it privileged situations or more advantageous settings.
So let’s talk first about what the intersection of yoga and mental health looks like in general.
SARA: Okay. Well, you know, yoga, it’s a massive intersection, you know. In one way, speaking, everything impacts our mental health. Everything that we do, our mental health is so fragile, right? It’s part of our subtle body. And it’s this thing just that is constantly in motion.
This idea that we can control our mind is completely ludicrous. We can guide and direct our minds. So our mind is constantly affected by everything that we do in our life. And yoga offers an absolutely complete lifestyle approach that has this incredible impact on our mental health. And even with that, that yoga and I can go into detail about all the ways in which yoga speaks to our life guides our lifestyle and our values. Everything.
And even still, we will have issues with our mental health. Even if we utilize all of the tools and all of the wisdom and knowledge and association connected with yoga, we will still have this mind that is prone to moving into a state of disturbance and illusion.
So it’s a constant. It’s a constant meeting and tending to and guiding and checking. So yoga helps us to find those aspects of ourself that can be qualified to do that, or qualified to seek the guidance to do that.
So I truly believe, yes, yoga offers a complete map for how to increase our mental wellness. Yoga speaks to, you know, yoga helps us understand what to eat, how to cook, you know, how to sleep, when to wake. You know what our home should be like, what our actual home should be like. A place of pilgrimage. A place of worship. What our relationships. What kinds of relationships can we have? How do we behave? How do we act? What is our etiquette within those relationships? What do we do? What’s our purpose in life? What’s our dharma? It helps us answer those questions.
All of the questions that people come or problems people come to a mental health therapist for our things that yoga can essentially offer guidance around. Um, yeah.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: So there were three things that you said that I thought were particularly significant. And I’d like to circle back to. One, we hear you said that you spoke about the difficulty of controlling the mind as opposed to directing the mind.
And we hear in yoga an awful lot about how important it is to control the mind and how yet how difficult that can be and how the practice is about directing the mind. So sometimes we hear the definition of yoga. Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, and we misinterpret that as meaning we need to make the mind stop, as opposed to directing the mind to a singular place. So I want to come back to that and the intersection of mental health and the relationship between controlling and directing the mind.
Then the second thing… the second thing was how it’s a constant thing. And that there are what you inspired me to think of is that there are elements that are beyond our control, like physiological things like, you can be very advanced on the path of yoga, but then, you know, you’re not immune to physiological causes of mental distortion, such as dementia and such like that. So that issue came up.
And then the third thing was how yoga gives us instruction about how to live in the world, insofar as creating the environment in our home that is conducive for mental health, how we conduct our relationships with people. And part of your specialty is dealing… helping people who have very problematic home situations and have very problematic family relationships and how you create an environment with, while dealing with those obstacles can be really, really challenging.
So I want to come back to those. So let’s come back first to the idea of controlling the mind versus directing the mind and how that works both for mental health and for yoga.
SARA: Yes. We have a control complex. I mean most people do come to therapy because there is a theme around this, you know, a sense of responsibility and control or responsibility and shame or responsibility and a feeling of guilt.
So this idea of control controlling the mind, I mean, you know, it’s a really tricky word in our society. You know, if you think of your mind as one part of yourself, it’s one part of yourself. You know, it’s like if you could draw a picture of your mind, what would that what would that mind person look like? Right.
And it’s not that we want to control. Right. That that’s our problem. We want to control everything. We don’t we don’t have control. So having that humility to know that, you know, I’m not going to be able to control and force something in a kind of like a harmful way to, to, you know, that it’s just not good enough. It’s it’s got to be like this. It’s, you know, that sets us up for a very frustrating experience.
But if we know the things that the mind likes, and if we also know that we have a parallel experience, we have a spiritual parallel self alongside this material temporary constantly changing self. And if there’s a way that we can assist our mind also to tap into some of the activities that strengthen and cultivate our eternal, joyful, connected, spiritual, changeless self that can also feel very satisfying to the mind.
So it’s also learning how to nourish and give the mind activities that are deeply nourishing, not just temporarily satisfying to, you know, to our to our senses, but more deeply satisfying.
So that’s why I say, you know, what do you bring to the mind? What do you bring to the mind? And, you know, certainly we all have learned about the modes, the material modes of nature, of material nature. Right. The modes of goodness, the modes of passion, the modes of lethargy or, illusion or ignorance. Some might describe it as right.
So we utilize some of the knowledge from the yoga system to bring our mind into environments like that, that are more in the goodness, or to understand how our mind is being impacted, that we have to utilize our intelligence to discern what’s happening here. Why is my mind getting depredated degraded? Right. Because something is happening and I’m using my intelligence and the knowledge from yoga to create a realignment.
And that could be through our hearing by, you know, purifying the mind through how we take in, through things, through our ears, our hearing, what we see, searching for beauty, searching for gratitude in the world through, you know, our speech aligning our speech and our tongue, how we eat with the mode of goodness and beyond to a spiritual to a spiritual level, a transcendental level.
So that’s how we bring our mind to places. We are the primary caregivers of our mind. And that’s how I like to see it. You know.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: That’s a really interesting way to put it that I haven’t heard before that we are the caregivers of our mind. That our mind is, is like someone, uh, we are responsible for taking care of. And you spoke about using the power of discernment to be able to see what yoga wisdom calls the tri-guna the three qualities of material nature um, luminance, passion, and darkness. And to be able to recognize how our minds are being influenced by these different modes of being, and from that vision of our own minds, being able to care for our minds appropriately.
As Krishna tells us in the Bhagavad Gita, the mind can be it’s difficult to control the mind, but it can be done by appropriate practice. And so, using our discernment as caretakers of the mind to determine what is the appropriate practice to bring equanimity to the mind, bring peacefulness to the mind. To elevate the mind beyond the qualities of material nature that you referred to, to an actual transcendental position. It’s a really, really interesting way to think about it.
SARA: Yeah. And we’re doing we can we have the option to do those things at the same time. We can be taking care of our mind by, you know, having the right material environment and things to digest to allow the mind to digest. And it can be dovetailed into that transcendental on onto a transcendental level as well.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: So the more you answer my questions, the more questions I end up having. And before I go any further with the questions that I have, I want to throw it out to everyone who is here with us. And welcome to all of you who joined us after our conversation got started. Thank you very much for being here.
If you have any questions or comments or insights with regard to what Sara is sharing with us, please go ahead and use the react tool on the bottom to raise your hand. Or you can type a question or comment into the chat. Or if you like, you can just unmute yourself and share what you’re thinking. Stanley. Go ahead.
STANLEY: Thanks so much, Sara and Hari. This is so, so interesting and important. One of my questions as you were describing some of the different tools and strategies that can be applied from yoga to the work that you do more in the mental health counseling realm was does breathwork play a role at all in the work that you do in terms of working with individuals to address some issues, such as things like being able to quiet the mind or deal with issues like anxiety or stress. Thanks.
SARA: Thanks, Stan. Yeah, that’s a great question. And, you know, that’s the beauty of this yoga wisdom that it also addresses and informs how we take care of our physical body because like, like you said, you know, that anxiety i shows up as a physical feeling.
It can turn into, you know, a panic attack, an illness. So you know, some of the first rungs on the ladder assist with that. You know, the asanas are movements that really do help regulate this incredible, intricate physical system that we have our circulatory system, our respiratory system, our metabolism, our, you know, our nervous system.
So all of these things are, are tone our system as, as best as they can. Right. Again, similar to the mind that we can do our best and it still may not be perfect. Okay.
And the breath, and the pranayama. Absolutely. Pranayama is described as something that helps to still write or to still or. Yeah, to still the fluctuations of the mind. So it is an important, very important part of a yoga practice. And we’re seeing that all the time in counseling, you know. Breathing exercises, you know, are used as a, as a coping strategy. Right?
Or physical movement. Exercise. Um, our understanding of our vagus nerve. Right? All of those things are like yoga hits those with the asana and with the pranayama. And those things then create a foundation or a nice soil for hearing wisdom, for having the space in your life to be reflective and to have that pause to then make other choices that are not just out of habit or ancestral passing, you know, passed down ancestrally.
And it allows us that it that ground to be able to meditate, to start bringing our mind and our consciousness to a chosen object. So, yeah, thank you for that. Do you feel like that that answered your question, or did you have thoughts about that as well?
STANLEY: Yeah. Thank you.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Yeah. Thanks for your question, Stanley. Yeah. There’s a good reason why pranayama is between asana and the different stages of meditation turning before you turn your senses inward.
I’ve always understood it as the bridge between the breath, as the bridge between the body and the mind. And settling, settling the mind with pranayama prior to meditation is very helpful, like kind of table setting way to get the most out of your meditation practice.
Yeah. Sara, thank you for that really nice explanation. Um, Paula. And then Sophia. Unmute yourself, please. Paula.
PAULA: Sorry. How or what techniques or methods do you use to introduce people that do not do yoga to recognize the eternal, joyful, true self Atma that’s within each of us, especially if they’re resistant to meditation.
SARA: Mhm. So how how would I or someone help to bring someone? Can you repeat your question again. I’m trying to phrase it, frame it in the right way for.
PAULA: Someone that is not familiar with yoga and perhaps doesn’t even have a religious background. How do you introduce them or get them help guide them to recognize their eternal joyful self that resides within?
SARA: Mhm. Yeah that’s a great question. That is the ultimate question for me. You know in, in um in the work that I do and being a bhakti practitioner because it’s it’s delicate. It’s a delicate thing. And it’s it really is a creative process with each person to find what is going to, you know, what is the right thing for them in that moment. You know, so it’s it’s very specific… it’s very individual to the person.
I do tend to. I definitely plant a lot of seeds right away. And I know one of the things that Hari and I were going to talk about of were some of the obstacles that, you know, the obstacles to accepting and receiving the wisdom of yoga, you know.
And you mentioned that, that there might be some there, there might not be a strong connection to a faith orientation, or there might be a hurt or a pain or a trauma connected with a religion of community and faith and all of those things. So, you know, it’s… I do have to tread carefully around that.
So it might not be the first thing I do is say, hey, you know, you have a spiritual aspect of yourself as well, and why don’t we start cultivating that? And hey, what’s your relationship to God? I might not be able to be as direct.
Just as my own process… it was very gradual. It was gradual. So I also trust that’s where faith comes in for me too. I trust that I’m planting seeds. I’m helping to lay a foundation. I’m working at a certain pace that’s not harmful to the person. You know, if I try to move too fast and give them something that they can’t digest, they’re gone. They’re out. You know, so it’s better to take my time and to help people with some of their immediate needs.
Because again… and for the suffering of others and to not be aloof to that, to not go over their head and spiritual bypass to say, but to say, how can I help you with the concerns that you feel are the most important? Okay. Thank you. Okay. Cause I got, … I mean, I’m answering your question, and I’m not answering it because it’s it’s such a big topic, and. But was that helpful? I’m curious. How did that land?
PAULA: Okay, so I’m about to be certified as a yoga therapist and working with people with high anxiety. Like you said, I plant seeds about how to find joy within. And first of all, the fact that it even exists is kind of mind blowing for some people.
SARA: Yes, yes.
PAULA: And like you said, tread carefully, meet them where they’re at, keep planting seeds. And when the seeds starts, that little sprout, give it a little water. Help it grow.
SARA: Yeah. Yes. And to speak about some tools and strategies is that I might ask questions like, you know, describe a time where you did feel more calm, more neutral, more connected, more grounded.
And so you’re I’m searching for what is this person’s resources? Is it a person, a place, an object, a feeling, you know, nature, an animal. And then expanding that, let them feel that and use it as a meditation point to let that state of being expand. So that… and then would it be possible to take that state of being more calm, more neutral, more grounded, more connected, more joyful to this situation that’s challenging for you? What would it be like?
And then you know, you start… because that’s what we do as yogis: we try to bring our resources, our consciousness to difficulty all around us. There’s difficulty every day we’re faced with this again, you know, this difficulty.
So it is a practice. Believe me, they’re already learning those practices without me having to say anything. Which is really, really beautiful. It’s what? State of being would you like to experience more? And they might not know completely, but it’s something. They have something because the Lord, you know, is present in everyone. There is assistance and help that paramatma is present with everyone. Right? So I have to trust that they’re also going to have some guidance from within.
PAULA: Thank you.
HARI-KIRTANA: Paula, thank you very much for your excellent question. We do want to circle back to obstacles in general. And what other obstacles in addition to the one you brought up, Paula.
But before we do and go on to other questions, we have Sophia. Sophia, please go ahead.
SOPHIA: I’m a Kundalini yoga teacher, and in our practice, in our training, we’re always taught like, you’re not a therapist, you’re not diagnosing, you’re not…
So I tread the waters very carefully but with the emergence of these 1 to 2 days breathing workshops, there is a lot of people that are coming in with heightened sensitivity.
And just yesterday, due to hurricane preparedness, I only had one person in class, first time student, very young and he shared with me because it was just the two of us. He shared with me that he participated in one of these breathing workshops and what he described as spiritual awakening that put him into two weeks of a manic state that so he was just not sleeping and just was seeing everything through a different lens. His family, his parents are freaked out and put him in a psychiatric observation hospital, and now he’s on medication.
And, I was kind of uncertain. I trust my inner guidance, and I trust my compass to be able to guide a student through the practice. But having been informed with this information, I was kind of questioning like, wow, is it enough to be just a yoga teacher at this point? Like, do I have to look into additional resources for myself to be able to hold space for someone with that kind of experience?
And so I was very gentle in guiding him through the practice, focusing on more grounding and spinal movement. And even though I don’t know the whole story, I’m, I’m, I’m asking, like, what would be what guidance can you offer to teachers that encounter things like that.
SARA: Yeah, that’s a great question and an important right thing. We have community, right? So we need we need community. We need other healers, other resources, other individuals in our community to refer people to. We can’t do everything alone.
Each of us are so complex. There’s so much need and complexity. And so I have I’m constantly developing my referral network and of caring, loving, kind helpers in the community.
So you, you know, you probably already have a bit of that. I find that that’s helpful for me when I feel like, gosh, this is just not my area. This is not my area of expertise. We don’t want to go outside of our role because that can also be misleading to another person. And that could potentially cause harm by not allowing them to find the right resource. So I would say that that is number one. That is the that is the first line of defense of care. Community care.
SOPHIA: So thank you for that. I’ve advised him that his parents are not the enemies. They’re their allies, and their doing what they feel is the best for him, and to seek maybe a second opinion or a therapist that is more spiritually inclined. And that’s all I could offer him.
Like, I don’t have a a book of therapists that I would recommend. It’s so interesting, but maybe it would be good for a studio to have something like that on hand. But yeah. Yeah, I feel like. Yeah, acted in in line with your recommendation. Thank you.
SARA: Yeah. And you know, I do that in my community. Like, if someone needs someone, you know, because okay, let’s say I’m in this network of therapists, I have colleagues all over the country and internationally, and I find certain modalities very, very effective and bridge really well with spirituality. In fact, you’d think that some of them are rooted in some of the wisdom that comes from yoga philosophy of how they were developed, because there’s some really nice compatibilities
So, you know, I frequently do that. Do you know someone in California? Do you know someone in Sweden? Do you know? Yeah. Let me link you with a helping person.
HARI-KIRTANA: Sophia, thank you very much for that very thoughtful question and sharing that experience. I think that when we take the seat of the teacher in a yoga class or a workshop or and develop relationships with students, yeah, we find ourselves in these kinds of challenging positions where we feel some responsibility to care for someone or give them direction that will be helpful.
We also had a nice comment from Nurit while you were speaking: this is a very important topic. And it’s true. This is why, before we start with pranayama, we cultivate the asana practice which establish the connection with the earth.
The Earth seems like a crazy place, and one of the things we said we would talk about today is what are our best strategies for maintaining our equilibrium during such tumultuous times? But before we even approach that question is the world really as crazy as it seems to be? Sara, what do you what do you think about the state of the world? You know, it seems pretty crazy. Is it really as crazy as it seems?
SARA: Yeah, absolutely. It definitely is. And more than that. It is. And at the same time, if you if you are using the yoga wisdom to help you understand why things are like the way they are, then we’ll also understand that no, there is a complete understanding of why why it’s going amuck like this. Why? Why it is the way it is. That there’s also laws. There’s laws of nature. There’s, you know, it’s there’s a whole framework to understand what it is that we’re seeing and experiencing in the world. So yes, it is, it is cray cray. And it also makes complete sense.
HARI-KIRTANA: So this is another really interesting Intersection that perhaps we can quickly look at the terrain of. Because as a mental health professional, you are dealing with science particularly the natural sciences. And when we get tools from yoga philosophy about understanding the world, it’s very metaphysical. You know, the way you’ve many of you have heard me use this analogy that, you know, if you understand how something works, you know how to respond to it. If you know what a toaster does and how it works, then you know how to turn bread into toast.
So similarly, if you know how the world works and why it is the way it is, then it makes it easier to respond to it. You know what to do with the world.
But it introduces this metaphysical idea that one of which you referred to earlier, the three qualities of material nature, which is probably not something you would find in a science-based textbook about mental health.
So I’m wondering how you integrate what we know about the world from natural science, and how that applies to mental health and what we hear about the world from the metaphysics of yoga philosophy, and how you integrate these two things to give people strategies for keeping their equilibrium.
SARA: Well, it’s just that it’s saying this here. This is what yoga wisdom says about the material world. So I introduce it like that. Here’s a frame that can be helpful. Here’s a frame that I utilize. And this comes from yoga wisdom you know. So it’s as simple as that.
And people absolutely love it. They’re like, My God, that’s so helpful. Now you know that can be done also with other frames to some extent. Around the concept of time I can introduce, I can say, I can say here is something… here’s a frame from yoga wisdom around time or around our purpose or around, you know, any of those topics. Right.
And then let it land where it does, you know, for people. Right. Can they utilize it? And then it’s the question, is this something that you could utilize in your life? How might you? You know, based on the specific difficulty that they’re experiencing okay.
HARI-KIRTANA: All right. So making that clear distinction between, yoga philosophy and say clinical therapeutics and such like that is how you introduce these ideas. And it’s really just a matter of the receptivity of the person you’re speaking to. Okay.
You know, the people that you are speaking to, irrespective of logic, will feel a certain way or feel some other way. And, you know, according to the influence of the mind, the influence of the combination of the qualities of material nature that are impacting them.
Is it possible to feel our feelings or embrace our feelings without being overwhelmed by them? I know a lot of people. That’s their real concern, is that they feel overwhelmed or they feel stressed out or they feel so discouraged. How do we embrace our feelings without being overwhelmed by our feelings.
SOPHIA: That’s. Yeah. Such a great question. A really really important one because feelings just ooh they pop up and if we try to push them down they’re just going to pop up harder.
So the way that I help clients with that is to learn again how to, you know, in yoga we understand that we have we’re in the a witness. Right?
Hari does this great meditation that takes us through all of our our subtle body, our our gross body, you know, to our spiritual sense of self and this witness. Well, who is it? Who is it that’s witnessing all of these activities of the body and the mind and the emotion?
So I present that. It’s also a therapeutic modality called internal family systems, where there’s a self-leader that emerges. It’s your spiritual self-leader, right? Who supports and interacts and forms a relationship with all of these different parts of ourselves. And we can find those parts. One way that we find those, that part is through emotion. There’s a part of me that feels anxious, and I’m going to turn inward, toward myself, utilizing myself leader. To witness and notice that part, that one little part again. Right?
It’s not all of me. What happens is that we become blended with that part.
It’s a small part. Anxious part. Right. We think oh we become disillusioned. That’s who I am. That’s all of who I am. No it’s not. It’s a part of you. So let’s look for the trailhead. What does that part look like? If you were to turn in toward that part and be curious, activate your self-leadership qualities of curiosity, compassion, calm, confidence, and a bunch of other C’s.
I could try to remember all the C’s that describe this self-leader and form a relationship with that anxious part form a relationship with that part that’s scared, that’s sad, and look for it. What is what do they look like? That eight-year-old me? That pre-verbal me, that young me, those vulnerable parts. That intense teenage manager, part firefighter, part of me that wants to control everything and is going to whip me into shape because, you know, self-critical, critical of myself. Dah dah dah.
So it’s learning those strategies of how do you turn inward to care for. Again, that’s where that we are the primary caregivers to our parts, to our emotions. Bhakti is relational. Spiritual life is relationship based. That all exists within us that all exists within us.
HARI-KIRTANA: And what you just described, what you just described, is a very nice way to think of turning inward pratyahara not as a kind of escapism, not as kind of a turning your back on everything, but rather as a as a way of integrating. A simultaneously giving some distance, insofar as not identifying with the feeling, thinking I am this feeling.
But using this technique as a tool for identifying the feeling, building a relationship with the feeling rather than being that feeling. And that is a, you know, sometimes we think of turning inward as escapism when what you’re describing is actually not escapism, but engagement with how the world affects you.
We have just a few minutes left. Sea had a very nice comment about, um, this integration or this relationship between yoga wisdom and the natural science underpinnings of mental health: I would be curious to see how trauma and psychology informed shamans, gurus and spiritual leaders would inform this question. I have the sense that this is the guidance that many people are needing during a spiritual awakening to not become medicated, and to learn how to navigate different states of consciousness.
So I think that this is a very interesting open space, this space between mental health and spiritual wisdom that is, is worthy of further investigation.
We are actually at our stopping point. Sea, thank you for that comment. Are there any final questions, uh, for Syamala before we… for Sara… before we sign off on our community conversation for today. Any last thoughts? All right.
Sara, thank you so much for having this conversation with us very, very illuminating and very, very relevant. And thank all of thanks to all of you for taking the time to, uh, participate in our conversation today. I look forward, oh, one more very, very important thing. If you would like to connect with, uh, Sara, I have just put her website for Inner Foundations counseling in the chat so you can reach her there, and I’ll be sure to make sure it’s in the comments section, uh, in the replay video. Again, thank you all very, very much for being here. And I look forward to seeing you next time for our next community conversation. Have a great, wonderful, fabulous, fantastic rest of your day.
SARA: Thank you Hari. Thanks everyone.