Author Archives: Janice Stieber Rous

After the October 7th massacre last year, it became clear to me that I was really frightened to travel to Israel to visit family and friends, as I had planned. Despite my fear, I kept making plans and reservations, and then canceling them. I would try to do it again and cancel again. Then I had the airline cancel on me. Finally, I made the trip on June 3, 2025.

Landing in Israel stirred a strange mix of feelings. On the one hand, I was coming home to a place I love so much, but I also found myself facing my fear and my deep, complex ambivalence about being somewhere that holds both so much love and often so much conflict for me. But once I arrived, I met my friends, I had a good cry, and from the moment I released my resistance, I knew I was in the right place at the right time. 

To my surprise, a week later, Israel declared war on Iran. There I was, right smack in the middle of a war—the very prospect that had frightened me most. And yet, when I showed up that first night in my friend’s apartment, with her friends, I knew I was there for a reason. It felt like my destiny to be there.

I could tell you about my experience of this trip in so many different ways, but mostly I wanted to focus on the overriding opportunity I felt almost every day I was in Israel. 

I am not minimizing the complexity or the ambivalence or the pain of knowing what was going on in Gaza while I was having a deeply meaningful time in Jerusalem, Safed, and Tel Aviv. But just as it is to be an American right now, I felt like my being in Israel—despite my differences with the current government—signified a time to be in solidarity with people I love, each of whom I have a deep and abiding relationship with. So with that said, I want to focus on some of the high points, snapshots, and moments from the visit that I hope will stay with me forever.

 First, though, I should note that I experienced the visit from the perspective of having spent the last five years as part of a meditation community. The word that describes my emotional landscape during the trip is heart-opening. With my heart open, I was able to drop into a quality of benevolence. I was able to approach each unfolding minute with expansiveness and breath, as an act of love. Rather than turning to judgment and all the ways in which I was brought up to see things critically, I came to this experience with a desire to open my heart. I came to it wanting to just be present, and witness my friends, family, and grandchildren in their present circumstances. 

When I left, what remained with me was a feeling of expansiveness and deep satisfaction for having spent almost six weeks being a part of an extraordinary community of people.

The Israelis I know are all, without exception, creative, resilient, and resourceful people. They exemplify what it means to care about one another and the sense of belonging and intimacy that comes along with that. That sense of belonging was the focus of my experience every day, and it helped me to stay grounded and to stabilize whatever inner turmoil might be arising.

On the evening of June 12, I received a cell-phone message from my partner in America that Israel had bombed Iran. Because of this text, I was prepared in the morning when I woke up to hear an announcement from the government about the bombing, telling us to stay in place and not to travel. Because people make their Shabbat plans in advance, a number of close friends were happy to have an invitation to gather for Shabbat dinner.

Eight of us were together for the meal, and the sirens went off at about 10 p.m. We didn’t have a safe room in the old Arab house (built long before the advent of “safe rooms”) so we gathered in the stairwell, knowing it was a precarious place to be but that it seemed to be the best choice for us while the sirens went off and the bombs were falling all over Israel.

We spontaneously and unanimously started singing a prayer taken from a Rebbe Nachman poem. “Do not be afraid” is the refrain we sang over and over. We all longed for protection, and the prayers surrounded us. We opened our hearts and mouths to voice our mutual desire to stay calm and centered. We let the syllables carry our hope and intention for safety for not just us, but the people around the whole country.

After the war ended, we gathered to celebrate a friend’s 77th birthday. Three of us agreed to get up at six in the morning before it got too hot and travel to a beautiful spring. We walked through a gorgeous deep, dry gorge and arrived at the sparkling, small natural pool. 

It didn’t disappoint us when we submerged our bodies. The contrast of it being so cold in the water and so hot in the air was a mirror for our inner experience of being refreshed by the water in this arid landscape. We sang and surrounded our friend with love and blessings for another creative and healthy year. The three of us once again felt the energy and protection of Shekhinah, the great mother, as we encircled one another and the birthday girl. In the midst of the ongoing hostilities in Gaza, we could stop and savor the moment in nature and in friendship.

Perhaps my most surprising and revelatory experience came when my friend Melila invited me to be in a listening circle with 12 Palestinian women from the West Bank and 5 international friends who support the Sulha project, a grassroots organization that works to heal and witness both Israelis’ and Palestinians’ experiences. It has been in existence for over 20 years. When it’s not possible for their groups to meet in person, Sulha gatherings take place on Zoom.

Because it was the tenth day of the war, we were forced to meet on Zoom. In the West Bank and territories, the women gathered in one house since personal computers are scarce, and other women in nearby cities and abroad found their way to a computer.

The Zoom gathering opened with each woman introducing herself, where she lived, what her circumstances are, and her history with Sulha. The atmosphere was one of inclusion and acceptance for each person on the call. The group members knew one another from previous meetings, so there was a sense of trust and appreciation for everyone in the circle.

To sit in a circle with Palestinian women who were trapped in the refugee camps and to feel their love for us and their lack of judgment and criticism overwhelmed me with awe and inspiration. To hear of their circumstances without blame towards us and gratitude for our presence might be the greatest teaching of my trip. The tradition of Sulha is to be present, witness, listen. 

During our gathering, I felt the power of showing up without having to explain, apologize, or wallow in my own personal guilt. That stance of precious abiding with one another is something I will carry in me going forward. And it was actually personally transformative. I never could have imagined what it meant to simply SHOW UP and be counted as a compassionate witness. 

I had the courage and state of mind to act in that moment because I knew the groundwork had been done and everyone was in agreement to offer our dreams for a better future together. 

During my time in Israel, I experienced many more opportunities to feel the open-hearted love and deep sense of connection person to person. Most often, when people in America hear about Israel, they only hear about violence, hatred, and aggression. New reports focus on military actions and failed attempts at reconciliation. I had the great good fortune of being present to kindness, compassion, and community. There are important organizations in the region that want to break the cycle of violence and find ways to meet one another and build trusting community. No one imagines we can get there without huge effort and imagination for a different path to mutual rights and co-existence. I support and continue to learn from these courageous change-makers and leaders, young and old.

Each one of these experiences I mentioned and so many more point in the direction of shared leadership. There are so many people you will never hear about or meet if you only are exposed to the narratives of US vs. THEM. No one has a simple answer, but my personal experience was possible because so many people on both sides want to create a different future than what the political landscape is presenting. I know I am not alone in wishing to create a reality of complexity, nuance, and imagination that allows sovereignty for both people. 

This blog is only my attempt to describe my very personal experience of sharing five weeks in my son’s home and with my beloved friends. I want to close it by sharing a special memory. When we were in the safe room at my son’s house during the first days of the war, one of my grandsons asked me if I was scared. He looked at me with his beautiful deep eyes, and my response was YES. He sweetly responded, “Safta, it’s out of our hands.” In that moment, I felt a deep sadness at this resignation, but also realized I will keep praying for a time when we do not feel helpless and without any hope for a different reality.

Addiction to Perfection is a book my teacher Marion Woodman wrote in 1982. It was the first book that introduced me to her work. When I read it, I thought I understood who the perfectionist is in me. And I thought I understood how she got in my way.

  It wasn’t until this past week when I gifted myself five days to paint that I became acquainted with the bully side of perfectionism. I am using the word “bully” because perfectionism has many colors. It’s not just about wanting things to look, feel, and be perfect. It’s also about the lack of tolerance and patience for the human experience, which is anything but perfect. When we confront the part of us that is so unforgiving, we have to face what is underneath that voice that won’t give us a break. 

  I think in my case that voice is some imaginary person I have created in my unconscious mind. She is able to be good at everything she does. She doesn’t need to learn slowly and doesn’t recognize the amount of courage it requires to learn something new. 

  So to be specific, in this painting retreat, I was enjoying the part of me who knows how to play, and I was enjoying how my intuition and energy flowed on the canvas, but I had very little ability to self-critique my work without going overboard into annihilating and destructive thoughts about the areas in which I have much to learn. 

  What excites me about painting is the joy of putting color and line on a canvas. I haven’t been doing it long enough to develop much technical skill, and that’s fine, but it means that I need to learn a lot about what is missing from my work and what will make it stronger and how to find the right team of teachers to help me get where I want to go.

I do have mastery around the work I’ve been doing for 40 years as a bodyworker. I started in 1979, and I knew it was going to take me a long time to get to a place of mastery. Even now, although I feel masterful in my work, the joy is in the process of discovering more and more every day. 

  The addict who needs perfection allows no room for mistakes, which in fact is part of the creative process. To quote the writer Raymond Carver, “You have to be able to recognize a gift when it comes, and mistakes are a part of it. Sometimes mistakes are the best thing that can happen to you in your work.”

  I’ve found that addiction to perfection is connected with shame. Perfectionism goes hand in hand with shame. If you examine something you feel ashamed about, beneath the surface is often an expectation that is a close cousin to perfectionism. 

  Imagine, for instance, that you are in a relationship with someone who is really important to you and you do something that is truly clumsy and does not take into consideration the other person’s feelings.

  At first glance, it might not appear to be specifically connected to perfectionism, but to not accept that relationships are about human beings navigating this imperfect world that puts so many pressures not only on ourselves but on the relationship itself.

  That drive to not hurt another person, to not be insensitive or step on another’s toes, is perfectly understandable, but relationships are often messy, and it’s in the mess that we learn to trust one another.

  So I ask myself these days, when so much disruption and disintegration is happening on the world’s stage, how can we be more gentle with ourselves and the ones we are closest to.

In looking back on my recent experience of painting with a group of professional artists, for whom their craft and their passion continues to excite them, I have realized that I don’t have to know everything or be good at everything. I don’t have  to have a finished work of art every time I put my paintbrush to the canvas. 

  In fact, the reason I am intrigued by this process is that I don’t really know what I am doing and I am excited by that. Now, I have to stay with the excitement and not be frustrated that the “success” of the product is not as readily accessible as I might want. And maybe my concept of success has to be reevaluated.  I invite you to think about what makes you feel alive today and engages you fully. That was the success of my week painting. For one week, the only thing I really cared about was color, line, light, and process, and that made it a successful week. I hope you can relate to this and, if so, feel free to get in touch and tell me how your creative journey is serving you right now.

In today’s world, distraction is everywhere. The way we multitask often works to our disadvantage, pulling us in multiple directions so that we’re never fully present in either place. I notice how easily I get distracted, and I realize that the quality of my attention is directly tied to whether I am centered in my body and emotionally aligned. Cultivating this presence is an ongoing practice.

In the Alexander Technique, we learn to give ourselves energetic direction. But in our daily lives, it can be as simple as turning off your phone or leaving it in the car when you’re in a class or with a friend. Everything around us—news, consumer culture, social media—competes for our attention.

Chris Hayes, in his book The Siren’s Call, shares a powerful moment: He was reading a bedtime story to his daughter when the phone rang. In that instant, he asked himself, Twenty years from now, what will matter more—the story I read to my daughter or the phone call I took?

To create a safe and grounded container for ourselves, we must learn the difference between holding our energy—honoring the power of who we are—and unconsciously dispersing it. A simple technique is to breathe into the edges of your body, rather than letting your energy dissipate outward. Breathe into your feet, connect to the earth, and allow yourself to receive its energy.

Know when you are checking out. Recognize what it means to leave your body. Distraction is, in many ways, a form of dissociation. In a world that constantly pulls us toward fragmentation, learning to stay present is one of the most valuable practices we can cultivate.

Find a place where you can be in nature and allow the smells and the sounds to penetrate the muscles of your back body. With each exhalation welcome into your heart the beauty of where you are.

Identify a piece of music that invites your body to move. It can be big movements or movement in a chair but moving is very important for our brain health as well as our oxygenation.

Lie down on your back and allow all the stress from your face, ribs and belly to melt into the floor.

Make a date to have a cup of tea or coffee with a friend, with no agenda other than to be with one another.

Whenever your heart feels heavy, look inside for what you are thankful for. Try doing that every morning or evening. Keep a gratitude journal next to your bed.

Try at least one of these simple practices everyday and notice if it helps you keep a larger window of appreciation in your daily life. We often feel that we need an hour or two hours for self care, but these mini practices can support you in the never-ending to-do list. 

If you enjoyed this, stay tuned for our mini course Body Dialogue to Nourish the Nervous System!

We live in a culture that values what we do more than who we are. We often burn the candle at both ends, and live fast-paced lives to make ends meet. Given the human situation of living in this period, people are constantly bombarded with sensory input.  This sensory overwhelm creates feelings of fragmentation, dis-location, disembodiment, dissociation, and disconnect. It can lead to addictive behaviors in an attempt to self-soothe and self-medicate. The result is a certain kind of despair and grief. 

When you are accustomed to a way of life that keeps you busy, preoccupied, and responding to external environmental clues, it is hard to recognize when your body/mind/psyche is overloaded and dysregulated.

Body Dialogue is my response to this condition. It is a feedback system. It is the conversation we are having with our bodies all the time, whether we are conscious of this or not. The practice of Body Dialogue teaches us how to be responsive to our inner conversations so that we can fine-tune our energy, thereby allowing us to know when we are in and when we are out of our own vibrational integration.

When things become too chaotic, too charged, too emotionally disturbing, it throws the body-mind system into what people who study the nervous system are now calling dysregulation—which means that in our feedback system, some part is running ahead of another part. Perhaps our mind is so busy that we’re in the future rather than the present. Perhaps our heart is so sad that it’s pulling us into despairing thoughts and painful scenarios. Whatever the cause, the result is that our feedback system is out of balance. The parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of our nervous system cannot do their job.

The reason the Body Dialogue team created this course is to help us establish a scaffolding for the day. What practices can we employ throughout the day to reinforce an inner center that is steady, responsive, and grounded.

Look for our new course Body Dialogue to Nourish the Nervous System coming soon!

I had never heard of the Alexander Technique until June Ekman, who taught children’s theater at Sarah Lawrence, took us to New York City to meet her  Alexander Technique teacher Judith Liebowitz. It was 1970, I was 20 years old. I had decided that I could no longer be a performing artist or dancer with all the physical and emotional obstacles that kept getting in my way. Having studied at the Martha Graham school for almost a decade, I had lost the ease and joy of being in my body and dancing spontaneously. Going into dance classes felt like a trial by fire. I was plagued by self-doubt and self loathing. I would never be good enough, I thought, to be the performer I wanted to be. I was Addicted to Perfection and my mind was preoccupied with self-defeating negative thinking. No matter how hard I tried, I was in a battle with my body, my weight, and wanting approval from all my teachers. Going to dance class was no longer a solace or a refuge. By 20 years old, I had lost all hope of being a performer and decided to find modalities that worked with the body that allowed me to get joy and pleasure again from moving. I found Tai Chi Chuan, Aikido, and improvisation with a teacher from Europe named Katya Delakova. She understood how destroyed I was by the regular dance classes in the dance department at Sarah Lawrence. She offered her classes through the Phys-Ed department and understood my passion for movement and music. I felt welcomed in her “Phys-Ed” class. The other place where I felt I could express my creativity was the children’s theater which was more like physical theater than traditional stage acting. So when June Ekman took us to her teacher in the Alexander Technique, I was doubtful that she could help me. I figured she was just another dance teacher that was going to try to make me into something I was not. Instead, after she worked with me for 20 minutes, putting her hand on my neck, spine, and head, I remarkably went from being breathless and rigid to finding my center of gravity and my torso in a completely different alignment from what I knew as a modern dancer. Her hands were so gentle and her directions were so clear. She told me what to think and how to find ease in a body that was chronically in pain and repeatedly in conflict with it felt like being a dancer. Judy gently put her hands on my sternum and helped me to release that pushing forward posture of the ballet dancer and simultaneously she gave me a gentle length in the back of my skull to help me locate what it felt like for my torso to be over my legs. When she took off her hands, I was at a loss to what miracle she had created within me, but I knew in that moment, if it took me the rest of my life, I was going to understand what she just gave me in twenty minutes. She gave me a new reference point for how I could feel in my body and my mind. 

When I was in the hands of my Alexander teachers, particularly when we were on the table, I viscerally felt a rebalancing of my Nervous system. I didn’t know then what I know now of the relationship of the vagal system to breathing and to the balance of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. In 1979, the field of somatic education was just beginning. How was my teacher able to get these results by simply balancing my head on my spine and giving up that chronic tension in my neck, torso, and legs? The tension in my body was so constant that as soon as she released my contracted muscles, I felt both totally free and at the same time pulled back to my old patterns. It wasn’t a quick fix. 

F.M. Alexander, the creator of the Alexander Technique, studied his own body for 10 years in the mirror in Tasmania. He was born in 1869 and died in 1955. His method to achieve a reeducation of the body required him to work hands-on with his students and by working in this very practical manner, he developed certain theories that allowed students to relearn basic activities such as sitting in a chair, walking, and moving through space by orienting the mind and the body simultaneously. He did not consider the Alexander Technique a body work technique. He believed that if we used our mind to direct the energy of the body by telling the neck to be free so that the head could balance on top of the spine, this could allow a coordination of the whole torso so that the organic posture that we knew as children could be re-membered and reclaimed. 

Alexander understood that education needed to be more than just delivering information. Although he was a Westerner from Tasmania, he was discovering through his hands what the Eastern traditions knew for thousands of years, which is the unification of body, soul and breath. Although his work was not taught as a spiritual practice, his findings were in alignment with Eastern wisdom. He understood that in the West we were living in a split between the mind and the body. 

I embarked on a decade of Alexander lessons with teachers all over Manhattan, until finally in 1979, having just given birth two months ago to my first child, I enrolled in classes to become an Alexander Technique teacher at the American Center for the Alexander Technique. With each session, I got a little closer to understanding the mystery of how alignment and using the head to balance the spine could be achieved. With each session, I tasted what ease and lack of obstacles in my body felt like. And in the language of the Alexander Technique, I had an understanding of what he called “the means whereby” you achieve conscious control over your body rather than habitual control. 

When I had that experience the first time, a huge recognition of what I had lost in all my years of dance training, and what I longed to reclaim overtook my entire emotional being. It was as if someone handed me back a piece of my life that I had lost. It was not simple to give up all the habits of holding, pushing, tightening muscles to achieve the dancer’s body. All I wanted was to feel that ease and freedom that I found after each session. Week after week, I’d go to my teachers and allow them, both on the table and in the chair, to guide me out of the rigidity that was blocking my flow into an organization that I experienced as a child from my early life in Maine. I recognized that these teachers were guiding me in a direction that I was not able to do for myself. So I diligently showed up each week, believing that if I continued to apply the principles of the Alexander Technique to my mind and my body, I could recreate the ease, joy, and playfulness that I knew as a child. 

Somehow, in my pursuit of being a performer and trying so hard to be what I thought others wanted me to be, I lost who I was. Even when I was introduced to dance techniques that were connected to this flow, because my body had become so distorted through my weekly studies at the Martha Graham school, I couldn’t sustain or trust the movements of more lyrical choreography like Jose Limon or even my Afro-Carribean teachers. 

The one piece that seemed missing in my Alexander training was what to do with the emotions that would come up as a result of reconnecting to the old Janice. There was no room in the Alexander Technique sessions to make sense of the grief, shame, despair that often would arise in these miracles of movement and release. I never felt despair in the sessions, but three days later when the magic would wear off and I didn’t know how to apply F.M. Alexander’s directions to my habitual patterns in my nervous system, I realized that I needed to continue to look for help with the parts of my body/mind/psyche that were still being controlled by the trauma of my early childhood.

It took me over a decade of study and then teaching the Alexander Technique to understand what was missing. Being a diligent student and practitioner, I continued to search to find how to integrate this newfound freedom that often blocked me from finding the ease on my own without the help and guidance of a teacher. So even though I was doing Tai Chi, yoga, and other forms of body work systems, I continually was asking myself, how do I work and successfully deal with the trauma that is still in my nervous system and in the tissue of my body? 

Although the Alexander Technique was not a complete solution, it offered me a reference point and a daily reset as I continued to investigate tools to help me deal with my early childhood trauma and patterns of fear that resulted in constriction.

Navigating the Aging Body is learning how to become intimate with one’s breathing patterns and habitual tension.

Breathing is an autonomic function of the nervous system. When we stop breathing, we stop living. The brain receives a message that the body is low on oxygen. That message goes to the diaphragm and tells the diaphragm to do its job. Ideally, when the brain gets the message that the diaphragm needs to go to work, we exhale the air that is being held. The diaphragm then ascends into the ribcage, emptying the stale air in the lungs, which allows a more full breath to be taken in. 

But If the diaphragm is weak from lack of activity or trauma, its capacity is limited, and we resort to our accessory breathing muscles, which are in our chest and upper neck. We are not able to truly get a good breath.

Your breathing is as unique to you as your fingerprint, because it depends on the muscle tension in your torso, what you do with your jaw,  how your tongue rests in your mouth, what kind of lower back position you hold yourself in and, most importantly, what is the health of your diaphragm. After all, the diaphragm is your main breathing muscle. 

What’s one thing you might do to allow more room for your breath?

For more information on my upcoming e-book, Navigating the Aging Body, sign up for my mailing list here.

When your body is aching and your mind is in chaos, it is so difficult to actually trust the tools that can help you and serve you. Sometimes I think it’s our emotions that hijack our trust. 

I have been practicing Alexander Technique since 1969 and have learned that it’s a process that’s so subtle and often so simple that I forget it’s also a great a tool I can rely on. You can rely on these tools, too.

F.M. Alexander understood that if you repeat directions to yourself such as “I’m going to allow my neck to be free” or “I’m going to allow my spine to lengthen and my torso to widen,” those directions can replace unhelpful thoughts such as “My hip is hurting, my back is out, I can’t get a breath.” 

When I trust my Alexander directions, I am reminded that I can use my will to make choices that are good for me, and not fall down the trap of thinking  “I’m never going to feel better again.”

My sitting practice is another tool that helps me when my mind is flooded with negativity and anxiety. Sitting meditation doesn’t come so easily for me, because I would prefer to be moving than sitting still – but, precisely for that reason, I practice mindfulness meditation in a chair.

I’ve found that sitting quietly and watching my breath, noticing what’s happening in my mind, focusing on awareness and not the end result I hope to achieve—all these relate directly back to the tools I have learned in the Alexander Technique, which is not to focus on what I want but where I am. 

Because both of these practices focus on the breath, I have a sensory experience of feeling expanded in my subtle body and relying on the simple decision to slow everything down. 

I’m writing this during a time of seasonal change. It’s in the air. Summer is ending, and Fall will soon be upon us if it isn’t already. Maybe because of our long conditioning that this is the time for school to begin – the time when vacation is over and work beckons – I can feel a resurgence of my old habit of needing to speed up and push beyond my limits. This is a process that will be with me for my whole lifetime.

If I could truly learn to trust that these tools are reliable and my best friends, then my body and my mind do not have to be a battleground but a place of benevolence. 

My personality is passionate and fiery, and I have spent most of my life looking outside myself for approval. The decision to strengthen my inner reflective practices allows me to grow and age with more curiosity and less fear of failure. 

Nothing is more important to our health and well-being than how we breathe, and also probably nothing we take more for granted. 

Breathing is an autonomic function of the nervous system. When we stop breathing, we stop living. The brain receives a message that the body is low on oxygen. That message goes to the diaphragm and tells the diaphragm to do its job. 

Ideally, when the brain gets the message that the diaphragm needs to go to work, we exhale the air that is being held. The diaphragm then ascends into the ribcage, emptying the stale air in the lungs, which allows a more full breath to be taken in. 

But If the diaphragm is weak from lack of activity or trauma, its capacity is limited, and we resort to our accessory breathing muscles, which are in our chest and upper neck. We are not able to truly get a good breath.

I learned this physiological explanation of what happens when we breathe from my teacher Carl Stough, who developed his understanding of breathing after decades of practice with trauma survivors, asthmatics, and people with emphysema. 

Carl began his work as a voice teacher. He corrected some of the misunderstandings that are commonly taught around the efficacy of breathwork and created the term “breathing coordination.”

In my practice with Carl Stough, I learned the movement of the diaphragm is a little like the movement of an octopus, in terms of its fluidity and responsiveness. There’s nothing else in our body quite like it. It’s an almost magical mechanism. However, the diaphragm cannot function maximally when the body is in extreme tension and restriction.

In my own practice, I also witness how stress, including the demands of work and too much time spent on our phones and computers, can result in a weakened coordination of breathing. My practice has taught me that, in order to assert our desire for a more responsive breath, we need to slow down our hectic pace of life. 

What’s one thing you might do to allow more room for your breath?

A number of people have told me they find themselves feeling depressed as this new year begins. I know I have felt that way. It could be because of what’s going on astrologically in the star alignment– that we’re just very sensitive right now under the Cancer moon  – or it could be that the latest events in our legislative branch of government have been disturbing and also confusing. 

But I’d like to offer a slightly different point of view about depression. I think that word doesn’t really cover the feeling that a number of us are experiencing. I think that what I am actually feeling is a sense of overwhelm and a quality of despair. 

In other words, we may be asking ourselves, does it matter what we do? Does it matter if we choose this party or that party? This action or that action? This step forward, this step backward? We’re wondering what we can do to make a difference in this world right now, and that sense of powerlessness and heaviness in our hearts can be translated as depression but I think it’s a different emotion. 

For me, I think it harkens back to some very early childhood experiences, when I saw what the adults were doing around me, and I knew that if I had power, I might make a different choice. 

As children, we didn’t have that power. So perhaps what we’re feeling is a similar powerlessness that comes from not being the person on top or the person who gets to make decisions or the person who’s going to have an impact in the world. So we feel like our behavior doesn’t matter. 

But I think it’s exactly in these moments that we have to draw on the practices we’ve been building over the years. In particular, some of the practices I developed during the COVID pandemic are the practices I need to draw on now, even though I now have the ability and the facility to move around. 

It is our dream life and the choice of how we express ourselves that will make all the difference right now. For instance, this morning, when I went to the farmers market and spoke to the vendors, I knew that my dollars would make a difference to their lives. I was not powerless then. Or when I call a friend who’s having a hard day, and I listen to her, and we take the time to really feel into our hearts, we know we’re not powerless. 

We only feel powerless when we face obstacles that feel insurmountable, the stories that appear in the world, perhaps of politics or maybe even bigger family issues that we’re facing. 

So today I’m writing you to say let us choose to bring our heart to another person and to bring our soul to each moment so that we can fill our lives with goodness, and we can fill our interactions with caring.

Then our lives are about contributing – in the small ways that make a difference – maybe one person, maybe two, maybe groups of people. If I live from that place every day, I don’t feel depressed. I feel empowered.

A Short Basic Breathing Practice.
Begin by laying flat on your back, with your feet flat on the floor, and your knees bent.