Healthy Habits for Healing
Introduction
Last week I talked a little about what habits helped me heal and grow over the last few years of my life, especially the time before and after I got fired. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I saw the writing on the walls for years leading up to my termination. I knew my life was going to change dramatically, so I did what any good athlete would do to train for what’s to come so that I was mentally and physically the best I could be during this time of turmoil. In this post, I will be discussing how meditation, yoga and extensive trauma therapy has helped me through one of the darkest times of my life and how implementing these good habits has changed my life for the better.
Meditation
A few months before I was terminated, my company started to offer access to Calm Premium as an employee benefit. I had never meditated before and I cringed at the thought of spending minutes sitting in silence with my own thoughts and emotions. As a hockey player, I always valued the attributes of speed, power and finesse which was probably why mediation was never on my radar. Knowing what I know now if I could go back, I would have started a daily meditation practice a lot sooner in my life. During this time, I had severe anxiety which led to major sleep issues and other downstream negative effects. Once I started meditating a few times a week, I started to see improvements with my overall mental health. Once I realized how much better I was feeling by just taking a few minutes out of each day to sit quietly with my thoughts, I increased my meditation cadence from a few times a week to a few times a day. After about a month, I noticed that I was able to see colors more brightly, hear sounds more clearly and the anxious thoughts became more organized and less chaotic. Ironically, the more I meditated, the more I started to realize that the environment that I was working in was incredibly toxic and I began to accept what was to come. I would not have survived the months leading up to my firing or the months after my firing if it wasn’t for my daily meditation practice.
Yoga
Yoga is another tool that I picked up later on in life that I wish I would have found earlier. Again, as a hockey player especially at the Division I level, my mind was focused on strength training, conditioning and on ice training, not “soft” practices like yoga. During my college years, I considered yoga to be a softer form of physical exercise and that there were no benefits that came from it because you don’t feel like you’re dying when you are doing it. It is crazy to think that we were conditioned to think that a workout is only a workout if you bring yourself to exhaustion. Boyyyyy could I not be more wrong and more grateful that I was wrong! Today, I use yoga as my main form of physical activity along with walking. I like to think of yoga as a physical mediation. As you move your body through the various yoga poses, the physical, mental and energetic bodies are all targeted and challenged. Yoga is very efficient when it comes to working with the body and it is sustainable for the long term. As much as I love to throw around heavy weights and sprint on the treadmill until I almost pass out, this is a practice that I can carry with me through a lifetime.
If you are aware of the chakra system in Eastern medicine, yoga is one of the foundations for longevity. The difference I feel on a physical, mental and emotional level from the start to the end of a yoga practice is two fold making it clear that yoga is the perfect movement medicine for a healing mind, body and the soul because it incorporates all three of these aspects into its core. There is a reason an ancient practice like yoga is still around and heavily utilized today.
Therapy
I forgot to mention it in my last post but aside from meditation and yoga, extensive weekly therapy was needed to help me work through and heal from the turmoil. We can not control what happens to us most of the time, but we do have some control in the way in which we respond. I knew what I had experienced was unjust but I also knew that sitting here and only talking about how it was unjust and not doing anything about it would get me nowhere. There are different types of therapists and therapy practices out there but my therapist’s focus is trauma counseling more specifically the use of EMDR (see link below) with people who have experienced some kind of sexual violence or trauma. At first I was weary of the method but as I came to learn, the medicine will only work if you believe in it and if you buy in. It has taken me years to reprocess some of my worst memories but with a good therapist it is possible, you just have to stay open to the treatment and be consistent with it.
Therapy is not a ‘one size fits all” kind of thing. It works for some better than it works for others and some approaches work better for some people while it may have no effect on someone else. Finding the right therapist is key and the relationship between the therapist and the client must be safe and supportive. I am so grateful to have found my therapist years ago while working in Denver and to still be able to work with her via telehealth.
EMDR Therapy: What It Is, Procedure & Effectiveness
Conclusion
Mental Health has been a taboo subject for as long as I can remember. Even when it seems like mental health is at the forefront of discussions, it still feels like there is a stigma attached to it. It is especially hard when the circumstances of life do not seem to be in your favor. Think of life as a hurricane and you’re sitting right in the center of it. You can either sit in the middle of the chaos and focus on what you need to do to heal yourself or you can let yourself be swept away by the storm. Meditation, yoga, and therapy were three major tools, among many, that I had in my toolbox to help me better weather the storm and do it by staying true to myself. You may not have deserved what happened to you but if you transcend the pain and turn it into love then you’re in a better place than you were before.
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