Bouncing Back

When crises arise, some people flourish while others flounder. Here's how your practice can help you build resilience.

By Sally Kempton

The Resilience Toolkit

Tapas, Svadhyaya, and Ishvara pranidhana can be applied in any situation and practiced at any level of spiritual awareness. When your life feels hard, when you feel overwhelmed or victimized or distraught, try asking yourself questions like these: What effort do I need to make now? What (or how) should I surrender? What would the sages tell me to do in this situation? What is the deeper truth beyond these circumstances and emotions?

As you ask these questions, remember that effort, self-study, and surrender are interdependent. Tapas alone is just willfully toughing it out. Surrender without austerity and effort can lead to passivity or fantasies of collapsing into the lap of an omnipotent cosmic parent. And unless we keep practicing self-inquiry, looking into the truth of who we are, our other practices may become ritualized, external observances that fail to transform us inwardly.

Yet yogic self-inquiry can be difficult, demanding great subtlety. Most of us carry layers of emotional baggage that can make it hard to discern the essential Self within so many layers of thoughts and feelings. To successfully peel away the layers around our basic awareness, we may need an array of tools—contemporary psychological practices as well as more traditional techniques from the yogic lineages.

Take the example of Bob Hughes, a Tennessee yoga teacher and psychotherapist who had an incident of sexual abuse as a child. Until he began practicing yoga, he often dealt with his internal discomfort through that disappearing act sometimes called "doing a geographical": When life got too stressful in one place, he would simply move away.

Hatha yoga helped him change that pattern, shifting his relationship to his body and the ways in which he managed his energy. But then Bob found out that his spiritual teacher was having sex with students. The discovery catapulted him away from his spiritual community, but it also made him realize that he needed to deal with his own charged emotions about sex. Bob spent six months in therapy, doing inquiry into his own psyche, supported by his practice and his family. He says that without the years of yogic discipline and practice, he doubts he would have been able to work so deeply with such difficult memories and emotional issues—but that without the psychological work, he might never have been able to let go of the charged emotions.

Bob has since worked with many yoga students who have been sexually abused, as well as with traumatized war veterans. He learned that certain yoga postures tend to bring up buried emotions, and he often guides students toward staying mindful of these feelings and working with them in therapy. Yet he notes that the postures have a healing power of their own. A student who learns to hold steady in an asana while charged feelings arise has taken a significant step toward resilience. Often, she can carry this lesson with her when she leaves the yoga mat and returns to her daily life.

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