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A Year Since Lockdown: Lessons The Pandemic Taught Us
It’s been a year since the lockdown was first imposed when the unknown and rather scary COVID-19 virus affected all our lives. It not only affected the way we lived and worked but impacted the way we behaved, thought and felt. Doesn’t it all still seem so recent ? While we continue to navigate the ongoing changes and challenges the pandemic poses, let’s pause and reflect at the year gone by. Let us create space for some of the lessons the pandemic taught us and some key takeaways. A year since lockdown and we learnt that… We are a lot more resilient that we give ourselves credit for Looking back at the year since lockdown can bring up difficult feelings of loss, change, uncertainty frustration, fatigue and so much more. After all, we had to rapidly change and adapt to an ever evolving situation. Working not just from but with home became the norm. Virtual learning became the mode of transmitting knowledge and information. Health care services also started being offered online. Moreover, Zoom meet ups and Netflix parties became a way of socialising. Did you ever think you would be able to adapt to such changes ? And yet here we are, still adapting, trying our best to be flexible and creative in the face of ongoing uncertainty. Doesn’t it just go on to show that we are a lot more resilient that we give ourselves credit for ? That despite the many struggles, we do have an innate ability to navigate stressors as best as we can. In many ways the pandemic seems to have redefined resilience or the ability to ‘bounce back’. The pandemic seems to have taught us that bouncing back does not need to be a huge jump or leap from where we are. It can be a small step in the present moment that simply helps us cope better. While we often undermine our capabilities, reflecting at the year gone by highlights the many small and big ways in which we have adapted individually and collectively. We need to rest to be able to feel productive The very first lockdown felt unique. It was new and created an unexpected break in our routines. But very soon we translated this break as a test of productivity. It suddenly became about reinventing ourselves. Little did we realise that the constant striving could also make us feel drained and tired. And so, the pandemic taught us that it is OK to rest. Rest does not have to be a reward, one that we give ourselves only when we accomplish a certain number of tasks on our to do list. Rest is something that we all need to be able to survive and thrive. It is required for the nervous system to regulate itself, to maintain adequate levels of energy and to recover. A key takeaway from the year gone by is that we don’t always have to strive to fill up our routines or fight boredom or be doing something. Instead, we can spend time with ourselves, engage in leisurely pursuits and rest knowing that it is important for us. We can build acceptance for what we cannot control One of the most challenging yet empowering lessons this pandemic taught us was that of acceptance. A year ago, we were confronted with having no choice but to accept that ‘this is what it is’ and that somethings were beyond our control. While in some ways we could influence certain aspects of the situation, a large part of it was out of our hands. It could not be ‘fixed’ and that we continue to be in this waiting period as the pandemic continues to unfold. In many ways we did start accepting the changed life as our ‘new normal’. Acceptance may not come easily, at the same time planting the seed for it does allow us to sail through tough times. So, while the pandemic does continue to impact our lives, recognising that we are doing what we can while the rest will continue to evolve may just help us feel more at peace ! Wishing that these reflections foster a sense of hope as we continue to ride through the highs and lows of the present moment ! This post has been contributed by Amrita Kajaria, counsellor and psychologist at Inner Space
Celebrate Self-Love This Valentine’s Day
Treat Yourself to Self-love Today and Everyday Love, romance, dating & relationships are some of the many buzzwords as we approach the month of February to celebrate as the greatest day of love Valentine’s Day. For some the run up to this day can evoke feelings of joy, togetherness and gratitude. For some it can bring up feelings of loneliness, painful memories, sadness and insecurity. For some it maybe a bag full of mixed emotions. It isn’t uncommon for the mind to navigate these emotions by getting lost in thoughts of self-judgment, blame and criticism. And while we imagine that this may lead us to finding a solution, it is more likely that we end up feeling more distant from the very joy we are seeking. So how do we inch a little closer to that sense of joy and love ? By directing that very love, care and support INWARD. So, this valentine’s-day take a small step to celebrate yourself, love yourself, care for yourself and be compassionate towards yourself. After all, “ You, yourself as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection” – Buddha Why self-love? Because as humans we are wired for connection, validation and support. We are geared to seek all of this externally. Any gap between our expectations and our reality can create immense distress. What we often forget is that this same connection, validation and support can be fostered internally. Honoring your wholeness- acknowledging your strengths and accepting the inevitable imperfections that make you human can foster a sense of safety and emotional wellness. Moreover, loving yourself first and creating a deep, internal relationship can have a positive effect in multiple spheres of your life. Better Understanding of Your Own NeedsSelf-love creates space for what you may be needing to feel a sense of meaning and purpose in life. It entails identifying what you need, prioritising them and engaging in relations and activities that truly feel right for you. Honouring Your CapacitiesHow often do you beat yourself up for not being the perfect partner ? For not having the ideal relation ? For being single ? What results is a feeling of shame, guilt and unhappiness. With a little bit of compassion towards yourself you are likely to see that in the here and now you are doing well. You are also more likely to replace the harsh judgements with curiosity for why things are the way they are! Setting Compassionate BoundariesA little bit of self-love and self-care can go a long way in creating compassionate boundaries with your loved ones as well. You are more likely to preserve your own energy and protect your relations when you are kind to yourself. Kindness towards self also creates space for compassion towards our loved ones. Loving Others AuthenticallyIt is common notion that you can only give what you have and yet there can be times where we expend a great deal of energy loving others without directing some of it to ourselves. While this may help in the short run, it can evoke feelings of insecurity and exhaustion in relationships. Give yourself some of that kindness and care and you arelikely to experience your relationships with a lot more authenticity and joy. How can you love yourself? Self-love can be grown, cultivated and nurtured through simple actions that can foster greater emotional, physical and mental well-being. Here are some ways in which you can engage in small rituals to forge a loving connection with yourself this valentine’s day. 1) Forgive yourself for one mistake that you may have made. Remember to err is human. Forgiving yourself can actually redirect you to new efforts. 2) Recognise your strengths and give credit to your unique qualities that make you, YOU. 3) Compliment Yourself by tell yourself something that you would like to hear the most from others. This can look like telling yourself ‘I love you’, ‘You are doing well’ or even hugging yourself. 4) Practice self-affirmations. This can look like telling yourself “I may not be feeling good about myself, but I can do one kind thing for myself”; “I am feeling frustrated and I am building my tolerance for it”. 5) Practice simple self-care, taking time out for yourself, ensuring you are eating well and getting adequate rest. Give yourself the permission to step back, start over and relax! Here is wishing you a lot more love, joy and connection this Valentine’s Day!
Dealing with Anxiety in the times of the Coronavirus
Historically, a pandemic seems to have occurred once in a 100 years, roughly. That means, for most of us alive today, this is a completely new experience! We have had little experience with a situation like this. What does this bring about? Uncertainty, change leading to more change, unexpected change bringing about anxiety – anxiety about getting infected, family getting infected, anxiety about pay cuts, lost jobs, about having to stay home. Sometimes, the lack of activity and distraction can even bring up stored emotions or past hurt. Dealing with this can be difficult. We’ve tried to put down some ideas about how one can deal with this: Working through Anxiety during a Pandemic – What it could mean for you Recognize and Reconcile: ‘What you resist, persists’ In a situation like this, the mind and the whole psyche wants to push to feel in control and on top of the situation. Expecting yourself to feel in control will only worsen your irritability and helplessness. The first step to any kind of mental peace always starts with recognition and reconciliation. Recognize deeply that you needn’t fight your feelings. While you can take all the precaution needed, recognize that it is understandable to feel anxious, worried, bored, restless and uncomfortable. This situation is uncomfortable for every single one of us. Taking some comfort in the fact that your feelings are valid and understandable can do a lot to ease your emotional burden. Observe and Breathe: The mind is like Velcro. It pulls attention to its thoughts and what’s more, it tries to beat one thought with another. Very often, you will see that one thought leads to another and before you know it, you’ve spun a web of stories about the situation, how bad it is, what you could have done to prevent it, how so and so is responsible and so on. Most of us don’t recognize that we have an option to ‘watch’, or ‘notice’ the mind, without necessarily engaging too much with it. The mind has its own nature and its own wiring. No matter how much you know consciously that worrying is not of much use, it continues to have thoughts and thought streams of worry. What you can do is, instead of trying to beat one thought with another, just observe that thoughts of worry have come up, that it is natural for this to happen, and gently come back to the present moment. You can return to your breath or to any aspect of the present moment. Learning to gently let go of chatter and rest in the moment is immensely valuable in a situation like this. Accept: Seeing this word might trigger irritation at the beginning and that is understandable! Contrary to this initial reaction, accepting the moment does more for us than we typically imagine. We think of acceptance as passive surrender, but that’s not the case. Acceptance is an active recognition that – this is what it is. This situation is what it is. Pushing and pulling, fighting your feelings is only going to worsen it. Acceptance allows you to work with what is, than what is not. It brings down stress and hypervigilance and clears your mind to work and support yourself best in this situation. As I often tell my clients when they are in a similar space – ‘half your energy is getting spent on resisting the situation mentally.’ Once you allow yourself to accept the situation, you start generating energy to truly support yourself through it. It gets easier here onwards – these three steps are difficult, and most of you who have already been through this would agree that to reach acceptance is the hard bit, once you’re through with that, the rest becomes easier! Access the Calmer Side of the Brain: The limbic system is the part of the nervous system that is responsible for the fight or flight response, and for anxiety. It’s job is to alert you so that you can protect yourself. However, because as human beings we have the function of thinking, we get stuck in the anxious mode. Letting go of thoughts for a while and consciously calming down gives you access to the calmer side of the brain that has less extreme, more realistic ideas about the situation. Look for the Hidden Treasures: Every situation has something to offer. Even seemingly dull, boring situations like these have something to offer – maybe it is opportunity to deeply introspect, maybe it is opportunity to reflect and develop some part of yourself that you haven’t been able to, maybe its just about developing some comfort with doing less and staying with yourself; or about doing your workout through household chores! Whether you know it or not, you are constantly learning and growing through situations. Once you see this, you will be in a more joyful and less negative space. Connect, connect! You must have seen enough information on social media about how social distancing does not have to mean disconnecting. In fact, it could actually mean connecting in a whole different way! Just getting time and space to have deep conversation, to really observe and get to know your family or roommates better, notice and savor the little things and we don’t get the space to savor otherwise! Rest and Rejuvenate: More space and less stimulation have been seen as the essentials of mental health. They have also been seen as the bedrock of creativity. Most of us live our lives being bombarded by stimulation and information. We constantly do and rarely get space to just be. While it is understandable that this is a bit of a prolonged break, it still is a break unlike one you may not have had in a long time. Use it to rejuvenate. Explore the things you were never able to do while you were constantly outside. Once you get comfortable with doing less and with being with yourself, your need to constantly distract
Coping with Anxiety Using Mindfulness
Anxiety and coping with it consumes a lot of energy for many of us. If you are prone to anxiety, you know that it feels like a continuous buzz in the mind, with streams of thought about alarming situations, how they could be dreadful, how they can be prevented and what if you can’t prevent it. Then, you live in a constant fear of certain things happening, or not happening. Either way, you are perpetually stressed. How can mindfulness help here? How does anxiety continue and how can training your attention to be in the present help? Sadia Saeed, who is a Clinical Psychologist and a Mindfulness Teacher, answers these questions. She explains what anxiety is from a neurological point of view and then explains how mindfulness training helps in coping with it. https://youtu.be/ppo65BKgqZs
Inner Space Turns 9 – Reminiscing 2019!
Inner Space Turns 9 today, 26th December. As always, it is deeply satisfying and humbling to be a part of so many lives. We feel lucky and very grateful that we get to deeply share and process something very human with everyone we meet, over and over and over again, whether in a therapy session or in a workshop. What kept us Ticking in 2019? Everyone loves good work and we are no different! Each year brings with it its own flavor. Here are some things that we loved doing in 2019! Therapy and more Therapy Well yes, this is the foundation of all our training and work. Most of us from the team have had some therapy experience even before Inner Space began in 2010, but this keeps us ticking all the way! Just to be a part of people’s lives in a free flowing, intimate way, where they share themselves as they are and we meet them as we are, is an abundant experience! Working and Interacting with NGOs This year, we did a lot of work with NGOs. We were overjoyed to facilitate mindfulness workshops for the Antarang Foundation team and the Apni Shala Foundation team. We also aligned the social-emotional learning curriculum of Apni Shala with the mindfulness principles of compassion and non-judgment, for 18 Municipal schools. This was a new, fun experience! Any work with children calls for more creativity, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Previous slide Next slide We also continued our therapy and mindfulness work with Kranti, an NGO that rescues and rehabilitates children of sex workers. We have been working on personal and trauma therapy with them for many years now and they now are an integral part of many of our mindfulness workshops! Our New Mindfulness Course! In addition to our 8 week mindfulness course (we did 4 courses this year!) and our mindfulness retreat, we were very happy to begin a new program – The Breathing Happiness Mindfulness Program for children! This has been in the pipeline for long but picked up steam after our work with Apni Shala. Our child counselor Shubhra Mehta facilitates this program. It was surprising to see how effortlessly the children took to the practice. We began a meditation circle for those who have attended our programs and wish to keep up the practice. We also now have regular guided meditation sessions on Thursdays. The more there is meditation, the happier we are! It gives us a lot of joy to watch people grow more peaceful and joyful as they meditate Previous slide Next slide Workshops for Organizations This year, we worked with Mindfulness for Engineers and their families at Tata Power, mindfulness for women at Asian Paints and Mindfulness for Leaders at Motilal Oswal and Microsoft. We also conducted a mindfulness workshop for young employees for Endurance International Group. It is wonderful to see more organizations explore this practice and explore the benefits of mindfulness for their workforce. Previous slide Next slide With this, we close this year and look forward to whatever 2020 has in store! Deep gratitude to each one of you, for all your love and support. Wishing each of you wellness and happiness in the year to come! Stay well, stay happy!
Ghosting in Relationships
“I was seeing someone I met online. We went on a few dates and things seemed to be going well. All of a sudden no calls, no texts. I never heard from her again” Sounds familiar? Hinge, Bumble, Truly Madly, Tinder and other dating apps now make it easy to quickly wade through choices of partners since many alternatives are available. We can spend our evenings swiping through profiles without considering them as real people. At first glance, this can make us giddy with excitement at the unprecedented number of options. However, this also means that people have now become reduced to text messages and online posts. This can lead to some significant negative consequences. One of which includes ghosting. So, What is Ghosting? Ghosting is when an individual, a friend or a romantic partner, abruptly stops all contact. All communication ceases. This would naturally lead the “ghostee” to experience a host of negative emotions that include shame, hurt, anger, sadness and guilt. Since much of our conversation now takes place through online mediums, ghosting has become extremely easy. According to a survey conducted in the west on about 800 participants between the ages of 18-33, 80% of millenials have responded saying they have been ghosted at some point in their lives. Dealing with Ghosting in Relationships If You Tend to Ghost If you tend to ghost, you don’t know how to handle the emotions that would come about if you expressed how you really feel. You may feel guilty, but after engaging in ghosting repeatedly, you may become less sensitised to the feelings of the other person, as well as your own feelings. You may they may wrongly believe that this is a way to spare the other person even more heartbreak by expressing yourself. This could mean that you have difficulty dealing with stressful emotions and you may need support for this. Chances are that you feel stuck. This is can be a difficult experience to deal with. You may feel like the only way to deal with all this with minimal pain is to ghost. However, not only does this leave the other person with scars, it also leaves you stressed in the long run. You may choose to keep yourself distracted from it, but it is never easy to live with the guilt and even shame that could arise deep down. Then, you have to keep distracting yourself from it and wear a facade as though ‘nothing is wrong’. What Can You do? Ghosting or feeling the need to ghost can be an opportunity for introspection. Perhaps it is hard for you to be assertive. You may have difficulty expressing your feelings or saying no. You can use this experience to reflect if you have a tendency to drag relationships to a place where you feel like ghosting is the only option that is left. If you have having difficulty dealing with this, you can also seek help and have a discussion with a friend or a therapist. The best thing to do for all parties in a scenario like this one is to be honest with the person and admit that this is a relationship that will not work and the reasons behind that decision. This signifies a feeling of respect and compassion for the other person. It also leaves both of you with a greater sense of closure, which is important to move on healthily. If You Have Been Ghosted Ghosting can lead to an experience of various unpleasant emotions for the person who is on the receiving end of the ghosting. You can feel disrespected, especially after investing time, energy and financial resources into meeting and getting to know someone. You can also feel hurt, angry, embarrassed. This can take a toll on one’s self esteem. You may feel unwanted and would sometimes look back for evidence of what they did wrong or which actions may have driven the person away. Ghosting becomes difficult to deal with because you are looking for answers to questions you may not have answers to. You are left with no opportunity for clarity and closure. If you have been ghosted, it is essential to keep in mind that this is not necessarily indicative of a shortcoming of you. Chances are that other person probably has difficulty dealing with tough emotions and tends to avoid difficult situations. What Can You Do? Try not to blame yourself or engage in multiple attempts to reach out. Instead, you can speak to your friends or family about the incident. Take some time out for yourself to recover and recoup. Be wary of loops of brooding. Brooding can start as a supposed search for answers but can leave your mood a lot lower than it was to begin with, and with no answers. Instead, you could check in with the body about where the difficult feeling is. Whether it is anger, hurt, sadness or fear, or even a mix of all, you can sense it in the body. Just ask yourself where this difficult feeling is. Stay with it for a bit. Breathe into it. You can also support it physically by gently placing your palm on it. All this, not to make the feeling go away, but to direct attention to where the hurt actually is, rather than to thoughts and spirals of brooding. To give support where it is due, in a way. You can also reach out for help from a mental health professional if it gets too difficult. A lot of healing is possible if things are processed rather than just stored. This blog post has been contributed by Liz Cyriac. Liz is a counseling psychologist and worked with us for a brief while. Some inputs are by Malini Krishnan. Malini is a psychologist and works with adults in individual and relationship therapy at Inner Space. Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin-in
