Inviting Better Outcomes

Imagine if there was a magic potion to prevent future calamities. Or a genie who could give you a spell to ward off discomfort and bad times. All your get-togethers with the in-laws would go swimmingly, you’d never lose your cool and regret it later, you wouldn’t keep repeating behaviours that lead to no good. That type of thing. For me, it would definitely involve not allowing my blood sugar to plummet which results in my general grouchiness and makes me tricky to be around.

Well, sorry to say I’m not here to tell you about any such panacea (dammit) but I do know some time-tested tools which will make your life smoother and for that matter the lives of your nearest and dearest. (I know, I’d rather the potion too).

As you may be aware, yoga is more than a set of physical poses; there’s also meditation, philosophy, mantras, singing, devotional rituals, all kinds of stuff. A common thread running through all is the understanding that self-mastery is probably the most important goal of life (because it is so fundamental to happiness and life well-lived) and yoga can get you there. All these different yogas are pathways to self-knowledge. Yoga is all about getting to know yourself better and becoming more autonomous, more in control of your thoughts, actions and habitual tendencies and consequently, your experience.

Okay, so back to the low blood sugar situation. Seriously, I’m hypoglycemic (my non-fasting blood sugar level is less than half the recommended fasting level) and when my glucose drops significantly I get really cranky, impatient and brittle, my body temperature drops and I find it difficult to concentrate.

My husband says that the three most scary words in the English language are ‘I need to eat’ when uttered by me.

We’ve had countless fights when I’ve been hungry and losing my grip. I remember once walking around Berlin for well over an hour looking at restaurant menus because my darling husband wanted to get a sense of our options while I was happy to eat at the first place we saw. By the time we ate I was close to tears, completely unavailable for conversation or pleasantries and entirely focused on getting food into my system. No Bueno. Let’s just pass over the issue of whether my husband was being selfish by frog-marching me around one of the coolest hoods in Berlin sizing up menus when I was in full blood sugar meltdown!

Since I’ve been like this my whole life so you’d think I never leave the house without a snack in my bag, or never let myself get too hungry, right? Wrong. I frequently get caught up in what I’m doing and don’t attend to my physiology or I forget to put snacks in my bag, or I simply let myself get too hungry because I don’t want to snack before a meal and ruin my appetite (anyone else remember that childhood directive?). I mean you’d think I would have paid attention when an Ayurvedic doctor told me seventeen years ago that the single most important practice for me was to have a protein shake every morning to stabilise my blood sugar. Did I start doing that every day? Well, no.

Indian philosopher Patanjali recognised the centrality of mastery over habits in his “Yoga Sutras,” a central text in the yoga tradition. He gives some great advice for the sincere practitioner looking to go beyond the drama, disappointment and suffering of everyday life. One of my favourite of the inner practices he prescribes for the yogin is cultivating the attitude of heyam dukham anagatham [Yoga Sutra II:16] which translates as ‘avoidance of the suffering that’s yet to come’. He’s saying that our job as yogins is to foster ways of thinking and acting that diminish suffering and lead to more ease and wellbeing.

When you change your mind, you change your life. Knowing this and implementing yogic tools for change takes your yoga practice from a physical workout to a transformational technology for self-optimisation and thriving, a life hack of sorts.

It comes back to self-awareness. When you recognise that your behaviour often arises from underlying thought patterns, you start to realise that to change the outer you need to change the inner, to get to the source. Physical yoga practice teaches us that subtle adjustments can have profound effects. For example, if you’re in a standing forward fold and your lower back and hamstrings feel tight, just moving your feet a little further apart will make it easier. By the same token, if I know that I’m less relaxed and present if I don’t meditate before teaching my zoom yoga classes, I can make my start time even 10 minutes earlier and allocate that time for my personal meditation. It sounds really banal and mundane and it is. Lasting change often doesn’t happen dramatically, it’s usually the result of consistent practice over time and when it comes to our regressive behaviours often we have to get to a certain point of suffering and crazy-making before we realize something has to give.

This sounds simple but it’s incredibly profound. Think about it: how often do you fail to do what you know you should do in order to ensure that your life is easier and that you can show up graciously for others?

Recognising your behavioural patterns and underlying thought structures takes some level of detachment and witness consciousness. Not for the fainthearted. And even when you do dedicated practice over years and years it can be difficult to see yourself clearly. It took me until I was well into my forties to finally realise that taking care of myself and not allowing myself to get over-hungry is actually part of my yoga practice and is Heyam Dukham Anagatham in action. It’s that basic. Not esoteric, not philosophically complex, not something that can be represented in a stylised photograph, simply a tool I use to reduce my suffering and that of everyone I come into contact with when I’m having a blood sugar meltdown.

How did I get to this point? Self-study and self-awareness, core yogic principles that can cause profound shifts towards harmony and reducing suffering. But also lots of meltdowns and a car parking snafu that resulted in our car insurance premium going up by $1,000 (low blood sugar affects co-ordination). This is deep yoga. You can do it too. You don’t even have to do formal yoga practice. Paying close attention to your habits and thoughts is a great starting place. I think that this happens naturally as we get older anyway, our inner lives become richer, we become more interested in the internal. We’ve seen enough of life, the good and the bad, to realise that there is something inside that nothing outside us can quite match. A place of refuge and repose. Everyone has it. Yoga is a way of getting there but not the only way.

If you want to start to uplevel your easeful life game, get curious about your own tendencies. You can set aside some time every day to journal or sit/lie quietly and just observe the contents of your mind, what’s going on in there?

Reflect on any unpleasant situations you’ve encountered or created lately and try and assess what went wrong, almost like a debrief with yourself. When you get clarity (and you probably already have a lot of clarity about your propensities, like many of us, you’re too old to get a fool’s pass) it’s time to assess if being stuck in behavioural cycles that cause suffering is worth it. At some point, it’s just not worth the drama. You know the hamster in wheel cliché, doing the same thing and expecting different results? It’s the same with our most basic behaviours and our thoughts. If you want better outcomes, you have to shift what goes before the outcome. A couple of years ago when I finally realised I had to be better about self-care and my responsibility not to let my blood sugar get so low. I started eating more protein, especially at breakfast and lunchtime. A mid-morning snack of a hard-boiled egg can prevent an evening meltdown. So simple and yet it took me until my mid-forties to get it.

You might think my blood sugar example is silly, so let me give you another one. Every summer I spend a couple of weeks with my in-laws at our lakeside cottages in Northern Michigan. I adore them, they are kind, generous and loving people. There’s usually around fourteen of us and we spend A LOT of time together. This is hard for me. I’m an introvert and they are mostly extroverts. In my family, if I wanted to slip away with my husband for a quiet meal one evening during family vacation time, no one would bat an eyelid. With my husband’s family that’s a no go. For years I found the trips exhausting and depleting and often got low grade sick. I just didn’t know how to take care of myself. Now I’m much better. I go for runs and make time for meditation practice or pre-cocktail hour naps. This way I feel full and have something to share when we’re all together. I’m also better at letting people know that I just need to be by myself sometimes. I got to this place after a lot of arguments with my husband and tension with my in-laws. I finally realised that if I didn’t prioritise my own needs, things would go pear-shaped.

None of this is sexy. The hard work often isn’t.

If you want to more masterful about how you live your life, you have to get really basic, come up with game plans. When you identify an area where you’re losing your power, step back a bit, try and go beyond the personal. What steps can you take to make sure this doesn’t happen again? How can you take care of yourself in situations that you’re going to encounter where you’re not fully in control? You’ll probably have breakdowns and backslides, that’s okay. It’s not about perfection, it’s about practice. But really it’s about setting yourself up for future happiness and success. You deserve that, we all do. I’m rooting for you and I know you can do it.

Dearbhla Kelly, August 2020.

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