The Silent Fog

Covid-19. Hard to avoid the topic these days. I am writing about it, although I am already sick of hearing about it. It sounds like a futuristic movie or even some type of machine gun. It snuck upon us, slowly at first, then it suddenly became the center of our lives. For most of us in the West, this at first was just something far away: we saw images on a screen of places that looked unfamiliar and of people who spoke a different language. It was easy to sympathize (rather than empathize) and cast this away as an unfortunate circumstance that was happening to someone else, somewhere else. We humans are so good at dismissing what we do not like to acknowledge. Then, all the sudden, it came upon us too and we could no longer dismiss it. One day we woke up and overnight a silent fog had taken over and all around us was only deserted desolation. From one day to the next, the hustle-bustle ceased and the Fast West became slower and slower and slower and slower. A new kind of dark web forced social distance upon the global world of social media. In the global world where country hopping had never been easier, we all had to swiftly choose a place to call home as borders shut down one by one. Just one thing has stayed the same: media and social media. That fire has not ceased. Only the content is different: now we are overloaded by disheartening death tolls and government press releases of more restricting measures. Meanwhile, a new wide range of coping tools are crowding our devices: from ideas on how to reinvent a business, to funny COVID videos, to indoor workout sequences, cooking classes and Zoom church meetings. Our minds, bodies and souls are confused and conflicted by all this mess.  Before we consume COVID-coping tools like we would a Netflix series, we might want to take just a moment to look inside and discover what actually hurts. We might learn a few interesting things. There is no question that the COVID monster is taking a toll on each one of us. Before we take action though, before we get to the coping stuff, the true question is: which one is our very own invisible enemy? Cabin Fever? Family dynamics that we cannot escape? Uncertainty about the future? What is that thing that mostly makes our breathing a bit harder and our sleep a little restless? Let’s not dismiss this enemy like we did the COVID at first, it did not work, as we all know now. To find out, we shall not aimlessly cope using random tools. Instead of getting to action, we might want to consider breathing through it, literally and figuratively. Our breath will run through the discomfort, like salt on a wound. It will hurt, but if we sit with the feeling, slowly the pain will start to ease. Then we can start breathing a little easier, to sleep a bit more peacefully. Then and only then, we can truly benefit from the zoom yoga sequences, workout videos, cooking classes, because only then we will have seen through some of the fog and deciphered the name of our very own COVID-19.

Sitting in the jungle

It often feels as if that next thing, that next life-changing goal is just right around the corner. Just another short stretch of jungle and a patch of breezy, beautiful break in the thickness of the trees will be awaiting peacefully. Just a little longer holding your jaw clutched tight, pushing through with all your might, and this thick treacherous jungle will be behind you once and for all. Just a little longer: a day, a week, a month, a year. No matter how short or long the next stretch may be, you should just pull through. Then, once in the clear, you will be able to allow yourself to finally rest and peacefully enjoy your success in its fullness. So, do not stop, do not lose speed or your momentum will be lost. Just keep going, you are almost there.
Yet, looking behind, sometimes it seems as if this jungle never even ended before. Didn’t acne turn into high school drama, which then morphed into college applications? Didn’t the heart ache of the the first few months of a relationship turn into the problems of finally being with each other? Didn’t the joy of becoming a parent morph into the worries and exhaustion of parenthood? Didn’t the aches of looking for a job suddenly become the pains of one job and then those of the next? Doesn’t it vaguely seem as if one stretch of jungle morphs into another, each time leaving you to anticipate the illusion of the next patch of green grass? Meanwhile, you were so obsessed with making it through the new patch of jungle, that you did not realize that the previous one had ended after all and you entirely missed that patch of grass that you had been longing for, finding yourself already projected right into the next part of the jungle. This whole thing seems a bit disconcerting.
In all of this jungle trekking, did you know that thousands of beautiful birds live in your jungle? Did you hear the sounds or see the colors of this incredibly complex and delicate ecosystem that is your very own jungle? Most likely, you did not, busy as you have been trying to get through it, blinded by the illusion of the green lawn ahead. Who said that the jungle is a bad place after all? Ins’t it just the most needed place on earth, the beating heart and the breathing lungs of the planet, where trees grow and fall, destroying the vegetation around and making space for new, healthy ones to grow? What if for once you did something revolutionary? What if you just sat and let yourself take in this jungle of yours, right in the middle of it? Even if the next patch of grass is just around the corner? What if you did not in fact wait for the next seemingly perfect grass, but instead sat right there where you are, on the muddy dirt or maybe on a slippery rock , with mosquitos and all? Just like that, no big deal: you could get some rest, take a breather and take in the flowers, the snakes, the mosquitos and all that life has to offer, right here, right now, in all of its unfinished imperfection. Maybe, after some rest, for a change, the trek will seem less exhausting. Maybe, who knows, if you get into bird watching, at times this whole journey may even resemble a stroll. I even heard that some people who reached that famous grassy patch, got bored after a bit and jumped back in the jungle. Crazy stuff. What an inconceivable idea, you better get moving, the breezy grass is just around the corner, that anxiety of getting there is mounting.. you already spent too long in the jungle reading this blog post.

Yoga Mat Mania

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are in many ways the pillars of contemporary understanding of Yoga. In the Sutras, Patanjali spoke of Eight Limbs of Yoga as a sort of roadmap of liberation from suffering. So, for thousands of years, yoga functioned quite well with its Eight Limbs. Then, just after a few decades since its landing in the West, Eight Limbs were no longer enough to keep up the fast pace of the Fast Fast West. Yoga had to grow a 9th limb, a rubber one: the yoga mat.

Born as a solution to its inventor’s medical condition, the yoga mat slowly became a sort of Status Symbol for the Western Yogi. Today the appeal of any given city or of neighborhood is more or less measured by the number of yoga enthusiasts walking around with a green drink in hand and a yoga mat rolled under the arm like a hippy French baguette. When, sometimes towards the end of the 2000s in Brooklyn I started encountering several of such specimen around my neighborhood, I knew rent prices were bound to go up soon. I had no right to complain though, as I happen to one of those people proudly carrying the yoga-baguette.

In the early 1980s, Yoga teacher Angela Farmer likely did not anticipate the success of her invention, when she came across rolled rubber material used to lay under carpeting and started adopting as a aid to her yoga classes. The issue of slipping while practicing yoga especially plagued Angela because of a medical condition that prevented her from sweating from hands and feet. Angela’s father later turned her clever makeshift solution into a business venture and a quarter century later the mat is the ultimate yoga-essential.

Although Angela’s idea was undoubtedly creative and quite effective, it is hard to imagine ancient Indian yogis practicing on colorful mats thousands of years before rubber was even invented. Many of them in fact practiced simply by maintaining a meditative position seated on a carpet, or likely even on bare dirt. With yoga’s westward pilgrimage, the third of Patanjali’s eight limbs, the Asana (posture), became more central in yoga practice, to the point of now being mistaken by many as the entirety of yoga. As a result, slipping during practice has slowly become a more relevant issue in yoga.

Today, there are mats of all kinds: cheap mats, rental mats, thick mats, eco-mats, expensive mats, cork mats, pretty mats, fancy mats, mapped maps. But is slipping truly the sole reason of this mat-mania? I am not so sure. Are yoga mats truly so essential to yoga-safety? They certainly make yoga more comfortable, or rather, they make it easier. Just by practicing the same asana sequence with and without a mat, one can find that WITH a mat, suddenly strength and balance become less central to the practice, leaving the stage to flexibility. Not slipping means that a pose can be held even applying less strength and with less stability. This is often at the cost of pushing joints beyond their natural limit, exceeding the body’s true capacity for flexibility, hence exposing it to the risk of injuries.

Isn’t this after all what westerners are great at? Finding short-cuts to make things easier and easier, accessible even to the ones who do not want to work too hard. Then, short cut after short-cut we end up losing sight of what we are doing and – to everyone’s surprise — someone gets hurt. We take something that by nature is not for everyone, because it takes a lot of work to attain, we twist it and turn it, until we make it commercial enough that it can sell. Look at what we have done to mount Everest (which truly should be for almost no-one at all). High-tech gear after high-tech gear, tour package after tour package, we have filled the place with plastic left-behind by thousands of enthusiasts who collectively spend millions to bring their big egos on top of the world (along with their trash).

How did I get from yoga mats to mount Everest? Not sure. Anyhow, back to yoga mats. I have nothing against them per say, especially when they are environmentally friendly. I still use my very own first mat, bought in 2009 in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn at a garage sale for just $2. I love it so much that I shipped it along with my stuff all the way from New York to Italy when I moved in 2013. So, no doubt, I am part of the mat-race. What I find interesting, as a psychologist, are the emotional and relational functions that yoga mats play.

Why then have mats been so successful? Most people, unlike Angela Farmer, do not have a medical condition that prevents them from sweating from their extremities and while not slipping in convenient in yoga, no one was that bothered by it until the 1990s. So what happened then? What happened was that Yoga slowly became something for everyone and it had to bend to the needs of the Wild West. Mats do not just prevent us from slipping, they define us. And we westerners, sure like our labels and neatly defined little boxes. Tell me what kind of mat you have, I will tell you what kind of yogi you are.

Having a yoga mat seems to make a real yogi. Moreover, mats are a representation of how much Western-Yoga is now its own thing, which bent and changed so much to adapt to the rhythms of the west that it feels almost like something anew. We managed to take a practice that is all about connecting with the world around us and about radically accepting our circumstances and turned it into a practice that happens within the individual, confined, sterile, space of a colorful plastic mat.  Each so isolated on our diligently sterilized little rubber-squares, separated from our fellow yogis and from the earth, we feel happy and safe. We can meditate without feeling the discomfort of pebbles under our butt, we don’t have to get our hands dirty, we are not faced with the risk of coming face to face with an ant crawling under our face while in Downward Facing Dog. As we clearly send a message of “keep away” to our fellow practitioners, we feel content and protected in our rubber bubble.

Sarcasm aside, again, if this is what it takes to slow down the Fast-Fast West, to bring a Wolf of Wall-Street to meditate just even for a few minutes, who cares, so be it. If yoga is Union and a way to connect the various parts of the world, maybe to grasp a limb of the Fast-Fast west, we had to go through yoga mats. So be it. The world was not built in a day. Personally, I try to keep an open mind. I still love my old Brooklyn mat, and use it quite often. Though, when I am at the park, at the beach, in the desert, on the hard wood floor, I do not say no to yoga, just because a mat in not in sight. I just take off my shoes and dive inward.

How do I explain to my wife that when I look out of the window I’m working?

Said Joseph Conrad , telling a truth that belongs not just to writers– like himself –, but also to psychologists. The clinical practice of psychology remains more of an art than a science. It is the art of rewriting life. If writers observe life and write stories of lives, psychologists observe life and re-write stories of life. Therapy happens within defined physical and relational boundaries, which are essential because they make it possible for the whole thing to feel like a safe space. Yet, the essence of therapy inevitably expands far beyond those borders, flowing in and out of the lives of patient and therapist. Therapy goes way OltreConfini – beyond borders – because life, the object of its art, has no borders, not in space and not in time. Where one life ends, another begins. A yogi would say that each Atman (Individual Breath) converges into Brahman (Universal Breath).

So, if psychology is the art of rewriting life, what is its contribution to society? How can psychologists concretely help people? How can you help another re-write their story? Well, one way is to take a deep breath with your patient, hold their hand, put on your goggles, and with them dive deep under, looking into life from left to right and from right to left, from below to above and from above to below. As together you swim underwater, your job is to point to whatever big and small things seem interesting along the way. Then you go back up to take another breath and together you talk of the journey, you map the road. Together you try to make sense of it and accept that you won’t understand some of it after all. Then you take another deep breath and go back under for another pass. You do it over and over again. You don’t let go of your patient’s hand until going down is no longer so scary for them.  Then you stick around a while longer, you let them go down alone, and once they come back up, you listen as they tell you about their voyages.

It’s no joke that psychoanalysis is the “Impossible Profession” (J. Malcolm, 1982).  How do you dive deep into one, ten, one hundred lives, time and time again?   How can one become an expert on life to the point of being an editor of it? First you accept that you are indeed not an expert about it at all and that you never will be one. Just like with diving, some ocean floors will not be accessible, some mysteries won’t be solved. Then there is only one thing left to do: you live. You live as deeply and as intensely as you can, all the time. You let yourself be happy, sad, bored, angry. You keep your eyes and your senses wide open, always. You learn not to be afraid of life, first of your own, and then that of others.

Like everything else, this awareness has a cost. As a psychologist, you can never turn off that sixth sense of yours, you cannot take off that pair of goggles that likely you always had and that brought you to psychology as the art of your choice. Psychology training gives you the tools to adjust those goggles and put them to use. With time you even learn to turn down their sharpness at times, but you can never take them off. They become a part of you. They are the very tool that as a psychologist you use to dive and explore the unknown that is in each and every heart. Like writers, psychologists, to do what they do, must live and observe life, taking in each moment of it to its fullest. For this, they must always look in wonder through that window that Conrad talks about, mesmerized and attentive to what they see. This Blog is a place to put into words fragments of what a psychologist sees from the window as she looks out and takes dives into her own and other’s lives