A Reflection on Yoga and Mental Well-Being by Francisco González

Recently I came across the term “polycrisis” describing the current social moment, and now I see it everywhere. Somebody had to come up with a way to pack all the instability and chaos into a handful of syllables, and something about the term both captures and distances at the same time. It’s hardly surprising that we come up with a way to get some breathing room from the relentless onslaught of cataclysms: the icecaps are melting, politics is a runaway train, even where it’s not genocide, it’s a rain of bombs and bullets. 

It’s little wonder that my psychotherapy practice is filled with people in deep distress. I’ve been practicing for decades now and have seen a great deal of pain and challenge, but there is something different about the current moment that seems to have sharpened the suffering: a backdrop of uncertainty and fear, a feeling that the social foundation itself is in a seismic shift.  

Psychic stability and growth has never been a matter of “it’s all in your head.” In fact, it’s never all in anyone’s head. The environment writ large — our natural and architectural surrounds, the textured feel of place or the rough dissonance of displacement, the fabric of relations, the care of our closest intimates, the glance across the room, the ways we hold and touch and see one another — all of this is part of the environment that lets psychic life flourish or transforms it into a landscape of pain. And perhaps our most precious and intimate environment are the many layers of ourselves, starting with the body envelope, what yogic philosophy calls the koshas. 

It seems obvious to say that we live in our bodies, but the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott thought it was rather more complicated. Finding a way to get fully incarnated, to truly be in our bodies was a marvelous achievement, he thought, and he coined a lovely term for it: in-dwelling. What does it mean to find a true home in our bodies, not just a container for our thinking, but a hearth of energy and feeling and a refuge for the heart, a place where we can truly dwell?

For Winnicott, the answer is a receptive environment: the loving recognition of our most significant caregivers who provide a place for our complex and beautifully ordinary unfolding. This is not a rosy-hued, soft-focus affair. True reception in the Winnicottian fashion requires the sturdiness that can hold even our most tempestuous feelings. 

And isn’t this what yoga can help provide? 

Beyond the attention to alignment and extension, or rather, precisely because of that attention, what yogic practice cultivates is a practical pathway towards true in-dwelling. Prashant Iyengar writes about “kneading” the breath, mind, and body as a gateway to transformation, just as kneading oil, flour, and water in the tapas-oven transforms ordinary ingredients to the sustenance of good bread. Psychic growth is a similar process: when attended to and treated with care, the simple elements of our daily life, our everyday frustrations and contentments, extend beyond themselves into creative living.

 Yoga is fundamentally a practice of being with — of yoking or uniting. A being with others (whether in class or through the lineage of teachers) and with ourselves. A being with others who are being with themselves — all together. If the current environment of polycrisis pulls us apart, from each other and from our selves, dissociates us into alienation and dissociation, then yoga is a technology of the self that can put us back together again.  

This is the fundamental basis of a stable and satisfying emotional life. Trauma of any kind is a matter of too-muchness, an overwhelm that can shatter the psychic container. Sometimes the cracks can be mended, sometimes what is needed a new container. And how do we make minds and hearts that can bear to hold more? Only through and with others. 

The fact of the matter is that we are all cracked in some way (and yes, that is how the light gets in, at least sometimes). Maybe yoga is a way to span the cracks. To find the stretch and reach, the breath and fire that anneals, but also the patience and compassion that allows us to be — to dwell deeply — in the cracks and somehow feel held there. That is pretty good medicine. 

 

Francisco González is an Adeline Yoga student and about to enter Sadhana Studies. He has worked in the mental health field since the late 1980s.

“For the last 29 years, I have served as a psychotherapy consultant and psychiatrist at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco. As a psychoanalyst, I work with individuals, couples, and groups and co-direct a program in community psychoanalysis at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where I also teach and supervise. I have practiced yoga off and on as long as I have been a mental health practitioner (no coincidence) and was so happy to find a home in Adeline Yoga three years ago.”