My World View Always Changes After Yoga

But it amazes me how anxiety makes me second-guess my need for the anxiety antidote

Just before my yoga class today, I was drowning in anxiety.

It’s not the first time I’ve doubted whether I should attend yoga class while I’m feeling anxious. The anxious part of me hesitates and questions if it might be better to power through some more work instead of going to do yoga.

For decades, I read stacks and stacks of personal development and self-help books. I scribbled notes and passionately discussed the ideas with others. However, despite my best efforts, I didn’t feel like I made lasting changes.

Even when there were improvements, I downplayed them and dwelled on any frustration.

Why?

Because I didn’t understand how my body’s emotional chemistry remained fixated on life’s frustrations.

Where Did My Frustration Stem From Anyway?

This is where things get interesting.

My continuous negative rumination though out my lifetime, as I’ve discovered, stemmed from unspoken resentments rooted in past relationships with individuals who were classic toxic narcissists.

Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work was instrumental in helping me understand the chemistry and neurology behind my emotional patterns. And more importantly, he teaches how to intentionally alter those emotional patterns.

Yoga, for me, is where my personal change happens. It’s the ideal place for me to practice applying the science that Dr. Joe talks about.

There’s a world of difference between knowing about yoga or meditation, and actually practicing them. Talking about mindfulness and actually doing it are two different things.

For my own part, I don’t do well in following a yoga app at home. I get distracted, I only get a few minutes in and am busy with something so I never really work up a sweat. I need a guided yoga class for an hour.

Then I really get the benefits.

And I could never meditate well before yoga for the same reason. My anxiety and frustration ruminations were so loud in my mind, I would never actually sit long enough to get to the benefits. But after a hot yoga class, my mind was then calm enough that I could do the 30-minute guided meditation with Dr. Joe.

As I meditate and as yoga helps me clear the toxins from my body, I can identify that I felt oppressed in my youth.

The Abused Becomes Self-Abusive

As my form of rebellion against what I perceived as abusive behavior in my youth, I was ‘failing’ at things in order to ‘get even’ for being mistreated.

As my understanding of how untreated PTSD may develop into narcissistic patterns and as my awareness of the stages of gaslighting grew, a floodlight of understanding was thrown on the experiences of my youth.

I found that my thinking and my feeling were caught in an endless loop: my inner voice was speaking to me in an abusive tone, and I was defiantly refusing to comply simply because of the tone that my inner voice took with me.

What a trap!

Frustration and resentment caused the passive-aggressive failure, bringing more events of frustration, delays, and missed opportunities — mixed with the occasional catastrophe.

This new understanding began to expose the roots of my maladaptive, self-defeating passive-aggressive strategies.

One of my lifelong issues has been a passive-aggressive approach to completing the regular chores in life.

Take, for instance, something as mundane as dental hygiene. I recognize now that the emotional reactions around ‘reminding’ me to do this daily routine were so disproportionate and offensive that I simply refused to brush my teeth as a way of passively protesting what I felt was abusive treatment.

Decades later, I am kind of embarrassed to admit that.

This maladaptive passive-aggressive reaction extends far beyond just dental hygiene. Keeping my kitchen clean, doing the dishes, the laundry, and bookkeeping — these tasks not only lacked the emotional support of self-love but had been paired with resentment and victimhood.

Routine habits of self-care were bogged down by my passive-aggressive power struggle between ‘my caustic inner voice’ and ‘the good wolf’ within me.

My frustrations were born from my inability to assert or articulate boundaries when they were transgressed. But yoga has been instrumental in helping me recognize my own abusive self-talk.

Cultivating Self-Love

There has not been a place where enlightenment sparked, and I just ‘got it’ from then on. The key, I find, lies in deliberately speaking narratives of self-love, intentionally practicing, rehearsing, and feeling the emotions that come with it.

At first, I only have success in bringing up those feelings at the end of a yoga class, and after a time I started to gain more skill and began integrating these feelings into daily routines.

I needed reminders. Often.

But here’s the revelation — by attending yoga and not allowing anxiety to dictate my actions, I create the brainwave patterns where self-love resides and can flourish.

When I combine the conscious effort to rehearse mental movies at the end of yoga class, I can I reach into my subconscious and wire in the emotions of satisfaction and accomplishment to these healthy daily activities.

For me, it takes a hot yoga class to overcome the high-beta brain state so I may bridge the gap between knowledge and feeling.

The conscious breathing and physical exertion in yoga serve as conduits to quiet the inner critic, clear my body of the chemicals of stress, and actually rewire the neural pathways to a habit of better-feeling emotions.

Knowing about yoga and meditation is not enough. I must do the yoga class before I can shift my emotions away from anxiety and self-doubt. My anxiety will actually make me rationalize why ‘I can skip just this yoga class and get a few more things done…’

Knowing this trap ahead of time makes it easier to silence the doubting voice that tells me to skip the very treatment that helps me so much. Besides, taking action with the right emotional energy seems to transform the quality of my work.

To those struggling with anxiety, I extend an invitation to explore yoga as a companion to your studies and meditations. Yoga is much more than an exercise; it is unique in the way it combines breathwork, mindfulness, and surrender to shift your brainwave state.

So let’s breathe, bend, and build a life interwoven with self-love and conscious living.

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