Four Practices to Help You Feel Better: reflections from my week at a yoga retreat
A couple of weeks ago, I took myself off to spend a week at a yoga retreat in the Bahamas. The retreat was at an ashram and along with lots of yoga, I did daily meditation and attended workshops on a bunch of topics, from mindfulness to forgiveness. I so often thought about you, always looking for things to bring back, like a mother bird flying around looking for worms to take back to the nest . . .
A couple of weeks ago, I took myself off to spend a week at a yoga retreat in the Bahamas. The retreat was at an ashram and along with lots of yoga, I did daily meditation and attended workshops on a bunch of topics, from mindfulness to forgiveness. I so often thought about you, always looking for things to bring back, like a mother bird flying around looking for worms to take back to the nest. The retreat was great for me and I feel changed by it - calmer, more steady and optimistic about the future.
So I’m bringing back to you some thoughts that originated at the retreat and also in discussion with the women in the current Hearts & Minds online divorce recovery group. Here are four practices for your reflection:
Detachment
Aren’t we all suffering because we can’t detach from our ex-husbands? Hasn’t thoughts of him colonized your mind, maybe tormenting you day and night if you’re in the early phases of recovery? Aren’t there hooks that keep you connected to him, ruminating about everything? Are you ready to untie those bonds?
There’s always a lot of ambivalence about detaching from him; it’s loaded with significance. It means that you fully accept that it’s over - and that’s huge. It may feel like you’re letting him off the hook. As long as you’re still grieving, in some cosmic way, you’re holding his feet to the fire, keep him responsible. And there’s a feeling of emptiness that you can avoid as long as he is firmly in your mind.
Detachment is a big task and cannot be accomplished in the early phases, but at some point, you’ll need to accept that it is over, release your grip and let it all drift back into your past. When you’re able to detach, you’ll free your mind and heal your heart. It means turning your vision from the past to your future. You can do that!
Resilience
We all have a natural bouyancy. When we sink to the bottom of the pool, we’ll naturally float back up. The body is programmed to heal - your cut finger will eventually be as good as new - it knows how to repair even without you doing anything about it.
Resilience means you have the capacity to recover, to bounce back. It doesn’t mean that you’ll bounce back right away as if nothing awful had happened, but it means that, in your heart, you know that you will. Eventually. It’s the expectation that this too shall pass - that you may not know what shape your life will take but you believe that whatever it is, you’ll be okay. You know you have the capacity to heal.
Rewiring
Rewiring means that you will need to challenge the thoughts that keep you stuck. This is where you shape some new neural pathways and fight against negativity. Science has shown that you can lift your mood just by changing your expression. When you smile even if you don’t feel pleased about anything, the body doesn’t know that the gesture is not genuine - the smile just naturally lifts your mood.
Another experiment showed that if you lift your arms in the air in a triumphant pose as if you’d just won a race, even if you don’t feel triumphant at all, you’ll be more likely to do well on a job interview than if you’d not. What you do and say, even if it’s not heartfelt, will bring you closer to those positive emotions. They rewire new neural pathways - it’s the “fake it till you make it” theory and it holds water. What you practice grows stronger.
So if an acquaintance at work asks how you are and rather than say, “miserable”, you say, “I’m okay” (even when you’re not), you’re making a cause to be one step closer to actually being okay at some point in the future. Just save the truth for those close to you who want to help.
Self-care
There’s a lot you can do to grow from this trauma but it means that you work on it in a consistent way and that requires self-care. I’d love to see you adopt some daily practices that will strengthen your spirit inch by inch. The effects of trauma get lodged in the body so you need to do healthy body practices to release it.
An example would be to do ten minutes of meditation every morning. If it’s too hard to sit quietly and focus on your breath, you can easily use an app that offers guided meditations of any length. If just sitting at all is too hard, how about a meditative walk around the block, where you notice the light, colors, trees, snow, whatever?
Other self care practices include yoga, t’ai chi, stretching exercises, singing, playing the piano, running - anything you do for yourself (you moms of young kids may need to get up 15 minutes earlier to carve out that time for yourself). It means putting some thought into doing something that you know is healthy for you, even if you don’t feel like it. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. Recovery comes in tiny increments and sometimes, you can’t see that it’s happening, but if you do something positive for yourself, it will add up and you’ll be headed in the right direction.
I hope these four concepts offer you food for thought (that mother bird again!) and that they help you access the hidden opportunity in what you are going through. You are being forced to work on yourself and develop self-healing and self-care practices that will serve you well no matter what you have to face in life in the future.
And, as always, let me know your reactions to all this below in the comments.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Do You Need to Forgive in Order to Heal?
Women have often asked me whether it is necessary to forgive their ex-husbands in order to heal and that’s a question that has stymied me in the past. But in researching forgiveness, I’ve come up with a fresh approach, complete with a healing technique, that can help.
Since I published Runaway Husbands in 2010, women have asked me from time to time whether they need to forgive their husbands in order to heal. It’s the one question that has stymied me because forgiveness didn’t really enter in to my own process after my husband left. It’s not that I either forgave him or not. It’s more that I came to understand why he left in the way he did and then I stopped really caring.
But I know for many, the hurt continues on long after the offence has been committed and we are always looking for ways to heal. So when I was preparing workshops to present at my recent divorce recovery retreat in Mexico, I decided that it was time to tackle forgiveness because I know it may be important to you.
I found two streams in my research on forgiveness. The first involves the idea of turning the other cheek. It is defined as follows: Turning the other cheek is a phrase in Christian doctrine from the Sermon on the Mount that refers to responding to injury without revenge. This passage is variously interpreted as commanding non-resistance, Christian pacifism, or nonviolence on the part of the victim.
This path would require the person who is hurt to step back from a typical reaction in which she might want to even the score, access justice or make the perpetrator hurt back in equal measure and instead, she would have to accept and integrate what people are capable of, and, in the interest of peace, just take it.
A step further along the same lines is when I hear that a woman is trying to pray for the one who hurt her. Both actions, turning the other cheek and praying for the perpetrator, put the power back in the hands of the victim who, although victimized, is not going to be beaten down, but rather, chooses to take the high road.
Women who have attempted to go this route have mentioned how hard it is. The hurt is so great that although they pray for him, their hearts are not in it and then they not only feel badly about him leaving, they also feel badly that they can’t forgive in this way. If they are unable to actively forgive him through prayer or acceptance, it just complicates the process of healing.
The second stream is different. It focuses more on softening the hurt that the woman feels inside rather than actively trying to transmit forgiveness to the one who hurt her. In this sense, I think that the word forgiveness is misleading. What she will be doing instead is closer to developing detachment, distancing, letting him go, and then moving on to self-love and self-compassion.
Michael Beckwith, the spiritual leader from Culver City, California, contributed these thoughts in the excellent Netflix documentary called HEAL: Every authentic spiritual path has some teaching around forgiveness. All forgiveness is self forgiveness because the resentment I may hold towards another or the unforgiveness or the rancor, all of those thoughts are happening within me. Even if someone did me wrong, I still have those thoughts – those thoughts are affecting me. They’re affecting my body temple. They’re affecting my blood chemistry, affecting everything.
He went on to say: So when I begin to forgive the so-called other person, I’m releasing resentment, anger, animosity. I’m releasing all that unforgiveness so that actually, I’m forgiving myself. Now, it doesn’t necessarily let the other person off the hook for whatever they did, it has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with me.
The goal of this approach towards forgiveness is to drain away the pain you feel inside. When you no longer feel the hurt, you no longer feel the hate, and isn’t that a feature of forgiveness? The focus is on healing that internal pain and then naturally, you’ll no longer care enough about the person who hurt you to wish him ill. As author Wayne Dyer wrote: Forgiveness is a process. A choice you have to make over and over, every day until you're free of hurt. Forgiveness is not something you do once, you do it over and over. It’s an action, a choice. Decide that you don’t want to live with the effect of that anymore.
I know what you’re thinking: “Great! Now how am I supposed to do that? Heal the hurt? If it were just a matter of deciding to do it, I would have done it by now!” Of course, you would have! But this stream of thinking about forgiveness does offer some strategies and they go something like this: When you are aware that you are suffering hurt thinking about the person who hurt you, close your eyes and get in touch with your breath. Start breathing regularly and deeply and when your start to relax, visualize something - a place, a person, a pet, a memory - that brings you peace and joy. Stay with that image until it fills you. Feel it! And then take a few more deep calm breaths and open your eyes.
At first, it will be hard to do, almost impossible. But if you continue practicing this meditative “thought replacement”, you will get good at it and eventually, you will soften the hurt until it melts away. It’s a technique of replacing the hurt with appreciation for something precious and for the beauty you still have in your life. It’s something you can actively do - it’s within your control. And it’s both free . . . and freeing!
So do you need to forgive in order to heal? No. You need to heal in order to forgive.
Think of something troubling and then try the breathing technique and tell me how it goes in the comments below.
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Take Care of Your Body, Take Care of Your Soul
I know that most of us don’t give our bodies a second thought until they start to complain. Taking care of your body is the same as taking care of your soul. It’s appreciating the wonder of human life and nurturing it. It’s something you can do no matter what shape you’re in. Just start from where you’re at.
Alrighty! This is going to get personal, with an emphasis on “person”! My other blog posts have dealt largely with your emotions, thoughts, beliefs and feelings; this one focuses on your body. Remember your body? That mass of cells you lug around with you all day? Well, now it’s time to give it a little lovin’!
No matter your size, your age, your health condition, your financial issues - your body needs you. Take care of your body, take care of your soul!
And talking about soul - how are your feet? “Hello, feet! Thank you, feet, for everything you do for me!” When was the last time you paid some attention to your feet? Scrape away those calluses. Lovingly trim those toenails. Soak your feet in a lavender foot bath. Put on foot cream every night when you get into bed. Massage those hard-working muscles and tendons (do feet have tendons?). Give those toes a kiss!
Okay, now how about that other hard-working part of your body, your spine? How to keep your spine healthy? Every time you pass through a doorway, use it as a reminder to straighten your spine. Sit up straight when you’re working at the computer. Exaggerate it. Do some gentle twists. Turn your head left and right, up and down - gently! - and release the tension at the top of your spine. Swimming, yoga, if you can, is great for your spine’s mobility.
Talking about swimming, oh! Your lungs! Take care of your lungs! Big slow breaths. Fill those babies up! Expand and breathe, especially when you’re in nature. Conscious breathing is the quickest, easiest and cheapest way to calm your body down. Don’t take it for granted!
Does your dentist know your name? When was the last time you went? C’mon, are you really flossing? Are you brushing for two minutes twice a day? Hey, are you using your night guard? My dentist suggests that I go for a check up and cleaning every six to eight months but you’ve got to go at least once a year. Your teeth have to last a lifetime. I try to take good care of my teeth - I’m very attached to them.
Eyes - get ‘em checked every two years. Wear your sunglasses in the sun.
Skin - sunscreen - I’m particularly looking at those of you who live in sunny climates. Use sunscreen on your face and arms every day when you are in the sun. I’m bad at that.
No one is hydrated enough. I know I certainly am not - it’s amazing that I’m still alive! I’m sure you need to drink more water. Get those liquids in you - just chug it down if you don’t like drinking - but make sure it’s not sugary. Unsweetened herbal tea or water, water, water. The rule of thumb is to drink half your body weight in ounces a day - so if you weigh 160 lbs, try to drink 80 ounces.
And while we are on the topic of sugar, the body is a funny thing. If you’re used to eating a lot of sugar, you feel like you can’t live without it. But when you reduce your sugar consumption, it doesn’t take long for the body to say, yeah! I don’t like things that are too sweet. The body adjusts. You’ll be surprised how your quickly your tastes will adjust once you introduce simple healthy food, like salads or roasted vegetables into your diet on a regular basis. You will really start to enjoy them!
Okay - we’ve covered feet, spine, teeth, sugar, what’s next? How about how you present yourself? Do you need a haircut? If you color your hair, how long has it been? Is it time? What about those nails - do they need a little TLC? Trimming, shaping, maybe a dab of color. Are you making an effort in how you dress? You knew I’d get there eventually! Go look in your closet - are your clothes the right size? Do you get out of those sweatpants or leggings occasionally? Have you stopped wearing makeup, tweezing those eyebrows, if you typically do?
Now, very important, your bra. Admit it, you haven’t bought a new bra since Nixon was president! Are you wearing the right size? If you go to a lingerie shop, they’ll fit you properly and you’ll know your size. Most women don’t and are wearing the wrong size.
Do you do self-breast exam? If you don’t, ask your doctor how to go about it or watch a reliable educational video. Do you have regular gyny exams? Keep yourself healthy.
Hello, my muscles! I remember you! I used to run and jump and do cartwheels a looong looong time ago. Well, don’t do cartwheels now, but you need to challenge your muscles to keep them strong or make them stronger. How do you do that? By moving. If you live in the country or a suburb, you probably drive everywhere. Time to put your sneakers on those well loved feet and start to walk.
If exercise is not your thing, you can embrace walking. Start slowly and increase the distance and speed over time. Commit yourself to walking and it will make all the difference in your muscles. You can even walk outdoors somewhere in nature and feed your soul at the same time! If walking is not open to you, think about some exercises you can do that will stress and release your muscles. What is the next level that you can take it to?
I know that most of us don’t give our bodies a second thought until they start to complain. Taking care of your body is the same as taking care of your soul. It’s appreciating the wonder of human life and nurturing it. It’s something you can do no matter what shape you’re in. Just start from where you’re at. Even small changes make a huge difference. The more you are in touch with what is going on inside your body, the easier it will be for you to manage anxiety and depression. Unite your mind and body and watch yourself glow!
I’d love to hear what you do to take care of yourself. Leave a comment below!
Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.
Hi! I’m Vikki and I'll be your guide in your recovery process from Wife Abandonment Syndrome. I’m a therapist but also an abandoned wife like yourself and I know what it feels like. I want to help you not only bounce back, but to discover a new you in the process.
