Natural Disasters and Emotions

The other day, while listening to people at work, I thought, what happened to us, what we felt at that moment, the choices we made as a result of those feelings, and the events that developed after that actually affect us just like natural disasters.

What effects do natural disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, and fires have on our bodies, just as our resentments, our enthusiasm in the flood of emotions caused by our joy when we are very happy with an event, or the fires that wreak havoc in our bodies when we get angry at an event?

We live through these events in that moment and without understanding their effects, without understanding what and how they affect the body, we save what needs to be saved, and then return to the way life should be as if nothing had happened.

Whereas, when there is a hurricane, rescuers, those who take care of the injured in the hurricane, health services, and those who help people for those who are deteriorated, destroyed or dispersed appear first. Afterwards, aids, financial aid, rebuilding to repair the broken, broken, spilled….

We, on the other hand, try to go on with our lives without repairing what needs to be repaired, looking for the lost, ignoring what will be rebuilt.

It’s been a while since my mom came out of a coma; she’s currently filling her time in an institution between a hospital and a nursing home. These days, I started to realize how exhausting it was to see her in a coma and to live by connecting via facetime every day and comparing my mother’s today with her yesterday. My mother’s personality, motherhood, and stance are definitely not the same as her current state. I realized how difficult and time consuming it was to accept this reality. While I am happy that my anger towards my mother is over, not being able to fully experience my mother’s loss of some kind, causes an anger on one side and sadness on the other which takes me away from myself. Sometimes I tell myself that thinking this way is selfish, I get angry at myself saying “you don’t know what she must be going through”. All this confusion makes me forget to eat, sometimes to have trouble getting out of bed.

I decided to do something for myself this evening by gathering the classes I have given from this month into one day. I am a person who likes movement, when I moved I used to deal with changing places, moving, renewing all my belongings. Nowadays, I try to realize what is happening in my body with movements such as yoga, fitness, pole dancing.

I walked home after yoga class and thought about what my body was telling me during class. Dhanurasana – Bridge is about looking forward, into the future. I noticed my short stay in the pose. Or Salamba Sarvangasana – I felt a brief cramp in my left foot and leg in poses like shoulder stand on the mat. My long stance in Halasana, my comfort in being with myself, the peace of being alone in my solitude…

I wrote it all down on a piece of paper and then opened it up Iyengar’s book, read its effects on my psychology, over and over again in the chakra books, I listened to what my body said to me, I understood its language, sitting on my balcony in silence.

We think we know and understand ourselves… We describe to get rid of those destructions easily as courage, whereas understanding what happened to me in those destructions and learning to rebuild myself after those destructions, as my therapist @drmeltemkavcarsırmalı says, helps us to get out of the struggles we think we have lost by getting wiser.

Try looking at your successes and failures, your losses, your gains, and the choices you made at that given time with this perspective… Namaste!