Bouncing Back

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

By Sally Kempton

In addition, yoga often provides people with a powerful experience of inner tranquility. Knowing that such a state exists—and that they can get there—has given countless yoga students the support to move through difficult times. It's one of the first gifts of yoga practice, and it's often the reason we originally take up yoga. Yet touching that state is just a beginning. It becomes a lasting resource only when we learn how to turn back to it again and again, when we learn how to act from that place. Resilience is not just a set of skills. It ultimately comes from our contact with the clear core of egoless awareness behind our personalities.

In June 2003, I moved out of the spiritual community in which I'd lived for half of my adult life to begin living and teaching independently. The leave-taking was friendly, and the connection to my teacher remained strong. From the beginning, the process felt like an adventure. It was also somewhat overwhelming. After 20 years as a monk, I was out of practice at living a worldly life, naive about countless situations that any normal adult in 21st-century America would have mastered years ago. Profound and basic questions kept arising: Who am I? Can I really do this?

One morning, I woke up in a sort of primal panic. Sitting for meditation, I felt quivers of anxiety running through my chest and stomach. After a few minutes, I found the inner witness and began focusing on the sensations inside my body, the thoughts beneath my feelings. Behind the fear, I saw a belief that I was alone, without protection, completely vulnerable to the winds of change. Intellectually, I knew that these were old feelings, ghosts left over from childhood. But telling myself they were unreal didn't make the feelings less intense.

So I did what practice trains you to do. I breathed out, slowly releasing into the space at the end of the exhalation. Then I faced the fear and said to myself, "Suppose there is no external support? Suppose that’s the truth?"

With that thought, it was as if a floor dropped out from underneath me. I was, suddenly, groundless. Empty. There was no "me" in the usual sense. Instead, there was just a pulsating presence and an astonishing feeling of tenderness. I felt free, protected, and filled with joy. That moment of letting go had opened the door to the deeper power, the egoless awareness behind my ideas about who I am and what I should be doing.

I've seen again and again that any real resilience we possess has to come from that energy and presence. Our other resources come and go. But when we're touching that pure presence, the pure egoless space of the heart, we are unbreakable. With that connection, which is the deepest gift of yoga, we can deal with just about anything.

Sally Kempton, also known as Durgananda, is the author of The Heart of Meditation (SYDA Foundation, 2002). For more on her teaching, visit her Web site at www.sallykempton.com.

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