Self-care strategy #5 - Don't take everything personally

So many times I get really worked up if people make a criticism of me or if they don't like me. I feel like I am not good enough, likable enough, smart enough, agreeable enough, that I lack social skills, patience, understanding, humor. I cringe when my flaws are verbally exposed by others.

I need to remind myself that nobody is perfect. Even those who seem effortlessly charismatic on the surface may feel insecure deep down. Overly charming people are either people pleasers or can be quite arrogant. People also assume a lot of things, especially if they come from a more homogenous culture. When they say, "This is how we always do things in my family/culture/country", I have to struggle not to snap back that "I didn't grow up in your family/culture/country and you have no idea what kind of (flawed) values were taught to me when I grew up. Your values do not universally apply to everyone in this world."

Decades of biting my tongue when others make quick judgements and criticism has made me seem overly aloof. I want to appear to be a warmer person but I think I have to allow myself to process everything that has happened to me rather than feeling bad when people say that I'm an adult now and can just suddenly make the switch to be totally confident and pretend my upbringing is over and does not influence me now at all.

When people make naive judgements I guess I need to  remind myself that they are lucky they grew up in a more conventional environment, but it also makes them understand less about the shadows and darkness in this world. It makes me more sympathetic to the less fortunate people. It feels burdensome but I have to find ways to accept my knowledge and experience as gifts.  

Where's my yoga practice headed?

Ever since I've returned from India, I feel like I haven't been the same. Surprisingly, I feel a lot less attached to my asana practice these days. When I first started practicing asanas, the physical attributes really got to me. I sweated buckets within a few minutes into a yoga practice. My muscles couldn't stop shaking as I held a pose; bunched up fascia were being opened up. I felt dizzy from breathing too deeply or getting up too quickly from a standing forward fold. I have been steadily gaining strength, balance, flexibility. I begin to be able to observe my thoughts, reactions, and feelings from a third party point of view. It has been an amazing journey. But while in India, the asanas just didn't seem to do it for me any more. I still tried my best, and all these shaky sweaty dizzy stuff still happened to me; I got stronger, and learned lots, but the practice felt more like a chore than something fun and magical.

When I think about the most precious moments I had in India, I think about the times when I sat quietly with an Indian friend. This happened with a few different people actually. I wasn't really thinking about anything, nor was I bored. I was just short on words that was all. Back home this would be considered as rude / socially inappropriate. Usually people would get bored or anxious; they would immediately pick up the conversation by nervously crack a joke or change topic. One or two people would even take out his or her smart phone and do something with it to divert anxious attention. Then I would feel bad about myself, the fact that I made the other party uncomfortable. I have such terrible social skills. I'm a horrible person. I felt incredibly grateful and relieved that these Indians were allowing me to just be, whether I was happy or moody, confident or confused. It's possible that these were merely a cultural misunderstanding (they didn't know what to say either so they just smiled quietly instead). Nevertheless, these moments of comfortable, shared silence felt like what yoga and meditation techniques aim to achieve. For so many years, I have been feeling like I lack the skill of picking up the last sentence of another person's line and say something funny back to keep the conversation going non-stop. I've been subconsciously feeling deeply inadequate for way too long.

People ask me what I do these days. Many assume I would be doing a ton of yoga (asanas) - come on, this girl went all the way to India to take an entire month of yoga class. She must be signing up for yoga teacher training any time now. I really did go to India with the intention to get stronger and improve my asanas. I had no idea I'd end up in this weird mental place where I don't feel like going to yoga classes, or do my own Ashtanga practice, or apply for a job, yet I'm not depressed either. I don't completely understand what's going on with my mind right now. I guess it's a shift from focusing on the physical to the mental aspects of yoga. Seems that my Chinese upbringing has tried to teach me how I should act/feel in each social situation and ignore/suppress the feelings/emotions that naturally arise in a human being. North American culture has emphasized the importance of staying positive and doing whatever we can to get rid of negative feelings right away (retail therapy, exercise, go to a spa, drink a beer, make a joke; just feel good and be happy!). Too many years of schooling has made my brain stuck in constant analytical mode.  Maybe it's time for me to let go of some of these culturally conditioned constraints and get back in touch with myself again. Maybe asanas are not as important right now, at this stage of my yoga journey.

Definition of "healthy"

What exactly is the definition of being "healthy"? Everyone around me seems to care quite a bit about their health, but somehow I the sense that people also seem to obsess about some aspects of health over others.

Traditional Chinese culture tends to assume that everyone has a weak organ, usually either the liver or the kidneys, and needs nutritional + herbal supplements to strengthen these organs.  Some people will go as far as not bothering with exercising or watching their diet, and attempt to cultivate health entirely from Chinese medicine and health food supplements, sometimes to the point of overloading the liver and kidney.

On the other extreme, some people equate the term "health" with "fitness level". To be healthy means being the fittest person one can be.  Some people erroneously think that by running ultramarathons, winning Ironman triathlon and/or Strongman competitions, their superhuman fitness will make them invincible to all diseases. It does seem like some people's bodies are built to be able to comfortably run insanely long distances or lift super heavy weights, but I hope these people realize that what they achieve are celebrations of human performance capability, rather than a pursuit of ultimate health.  Sometimes people overestimate the body's ability to regenerate.  When we're younger (20s and younger), our body can handle a lot of abuse and we seem to be able to recover in no time. But we can learn from observing retired Olympic athletes that they seem to age faster than people who exercise in moderation.  It seems like they have used up their youth prematurely in achieving those superhuman feats during competitions and training.

Now let's take a look at yoga.  The general impression of yoga is that it is a relatively mild form of activity that will exercise the body, increase flexibility, and lowers stress levels.  This makes it especially popular for people who dislikes gyms and not very sporty.  It also makes ultra-athletic and competitive people look down on yoga.  Now the extremeness of yoga comes when people see the advanced yoga poses that requires extreme flexibilities, for example the feet behind the head poses, or the crazy backbends (kapotasana or Tirieng Mukha Uttanasana.. ouch!!!).  Just looking at these pictures can make people feel pain (especially for people who are particularly not that flexible).  I was fortunately born quite flexible and could touch my toes to my head when I was 5 years old (though I lost that ability as I grew older).  I have avoided yoga for the longest time because I felt these poses acted to showcase these yogi's contortionist capabilities and were not a sign of health.   My belief for health has been "everything in moderation".

Now that I'm completely hooked on Ashtanga, and worship the ground my teacher walks on, seems like my belief system is slowly morphing.  In the beginning I was careful to take things easy and not push the poses to the extreme, but my teacher has been quite enthusiastic in helping me into a lot of the poses while taking care not to use too much force on me.   So now that my knees have stopped aching when doing Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimotanasana (I was quite concerned for awhile there) and my feet can come off the floor in supta kurmasana (uh, off the ground but not over my head, yet),  it just seems like every pose will be possible with enough practice (at least it feels this way in my first year of Ashtanga practice. We'll see when I hit a bottleneck). Soooooo, am I working towards the extreme poses for my ego, like the marathon runner going for that extra mile, or the strongman looking to break his personal weightlifting record?  Is the Ashtanaga practice actually healthy for me, phyically?

I am certain that mentally it's doing me wonders.  When I started coming to yoga, my teacher told me that I looked like I carried a lot of tension. I didn't talk to anyone for months. I went for the corner spot of the room every class and pretended I was invisible.  Now I actually smile at people who look my way instead of averting anyone who makes eye contact with me.  Every practice makes me happy, no matter how exhausted I may feel when the class is over.  I don't really understand why I need to twist and fold myself into a human origami in order to nurse my mental health back to life.  I suppose yoga is not the only way to cultivate, but the yoga community happens to be the most supportive community I have encountered yet in my life.  I'm guess that it's the shared sensations and experiences in the journey of Ashtanga that brings people close together (Teacher: I know exactly how you feel; my ankle would hurt too if I didn't flex them during Mari B, D, and padmasana).

To bring it back to my question in the beginning: while Ashtanga is a very physically demanding practice, especially in terms of pushing one's limits in flexibility,  I appear to be pursuing this path more for the sake of my mental health more than physical health.  I happen to be the type of person who requires something this extreme to save my mind, a mind with a tendency to over-worry, over-analyze and over-criticize.  Actually I have available to me opportunities to pursue alternative activities that are more physically demanding than Ashtanga,  in terms of strength, power, agility and coordination.  By choosing Ashtanga, I am actively choosing to not strive to be the fittest person I can be physically, and instead go down this path of deepening my mind-body connection.  Who knows where this path will take me?