Hopeless And Yoga
Become Your Own Hero
What makes your life immobile? What is the thing or things that get in your way of embracing peace and joy? What are the peace and joys in life that you seek? When was the last time your gut was tied up in knots because you were confused and felt like there was no answer for you? When was the first time you noticed how deep your fear was ? When was the last time you smiled and it was real?
As you read through those questions, you might have answered some of them. Perhaps some of those questions are already part of your ruminations about yourself. The questions are really not a problem. Its a normal part of your life experience to question how your life is going, and to wonder about your experiences. The important part is how you feel about the answers to the questions. The answers can trigger your emotions in ways that can feel satisfying or produce a variety of feelings that are uncomfortable and get you no where.
Every moment you are participating in your life is a moment that develops your future. If you become dissatisfied with what it feels like to be part of your life in the current moment, emotions can get in the way of taking action to make changes so you can feel good about how your life is going. Your life moments go untended like a forgotten garden where the plants get choked out by weeds and there is no bounty to harvest.
When you are not participating in your life to make every moment the bounty that supplies nourishment to your experience, a discord of purpose can develop and you can get discouraged to keep involved with yourself. It just doesn’t matter anymore. And while you know this is a dreary place to be and feel, you find it a hopeless pursuit to change or fix.
No experience in this world has ever been cathartic without the willing participation of the individual. Life does not automatically bestow wisdom or growth on anyone just for showing up. – Elizabeth Gilbert
Hopeless
When I got stuck in my most hopeless time period in my life, I discovered that energetic undertows had a lot to do with it. That means undertows of emotions. The old emotional circumstances I had a habit of repeating or I had not completely resolved or healed poked their finger at me as if to mock my life. There were also previous emotional challenges resurfacing that I thought I had successfully buried so I would never have to feel them again. But here they were, alive and well. These undertows seemed to spread out and into every thought during that hopeless time. They damned my worthiness to progress into brighter emotional territory. It was like a sudden opening of my mental closet and having all the jammed in contents fall out upon me all at once. It was numbing.
I also found that when life becomes a hopeless feeling to engage in day after day, your vitality really gets used up for basic needs that keep you going. Things like eating, getting washed and dressed, or even combing your hair become tiresome. But you mostly realize there is no energy for moments of happiness, joy, or good feelings in general. They begin to get harder to find. Your energy and interest are not there for those moments like it used be. You might even seek care for depression and find that hopelessness is part of its symptom spectrum.
Besides finding out feeling hopeless is a grey sticky cloud that wont let go of you, what is hopeless? There are some things to consider from a professional mental health view to get the full picture.
Lets see what they are.
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Types of Hopelessness
The mental health field doesn’t make your hopeless feelings easy to know. There are a proposed 9 specific types of hopelessness that you can experience. But, when you are looking for answers to feel better , sometimes it can help to understand the various ways your emotional situation is viewed. I always say to myself that information is knowledge that can help form a plan.
From this article: No Joyful Expectation? 9 Types of Hopelessness That May Explain Why; Medically reviewed by Matthew Boland, PhD — By Sandra Silva Casabianca — Updated on August 31, 2021, you find out there are some specific types of hopelessness.
Psychology professors Anthony Scioli and Henry B. Biller published “Hope in the Age of Anxiety” in 2009. The self-help book develops around the theoretical concept of hope as a virtue, and how it may help you cope with common life roadblocks, including depression.
According to the authors, human hope is linked to these vital needs:
Attachment: a hope for physical proximity, intimacy and emotional bonding, and spiritual unity
Mastery: a hope for productivity and accomplishments
Survival: a hope for overcoming physical challenges, anxiety, loss, and fear, and building resiliency
The article goes on to say that having these needs fulfilled in your life gives you the feeling that these areas are good and you live your life from that positive view. If so, feelings such as “The Universe is kind and open; I’m connected.”, “Help is available; I’m empowered; I can rely on collaboration.” “Protection is obtainable; I’m safe and I can rely on myself.” may be more common for you
But if these needs are not fulfilled, and are compromised during development, those feelings of empowerment, support, protection and safety may be harder for you to feel positive about . As life goes on, it is easier for you to feel hopeless.
Hopelessness feels different for everyone, but Scioli and Biller suggest there are nine pure forms of the emotion.
These nine types of hopelessness can be grouped into three categories:
alienation, forsakenness, and lack of inspiration
doom, helplessness, and captivity
powerlessness, oppression, and limitedness
The article goes into detail about each of the nine types so if you want more explanation about them go the to the link here.
The important thing to know about feeling hopeless though is that you CAN change your feelings to those of being hopeful. You can change how you process your thoughts that bring on the feeling, or keep you stuck in the feeling. You can feel better about your life!
Changing Hopeless
When dealing with emotional angst, yoga and meditation may not be your first idea as a way to fix or improve how you feel unless you already have an involvement with them. But mental health fields continue to acknowledge that both are a terrific way for patients to improve mental health to get better. The paper “How Might Yoga Help Depression? A Neurobiological Perspective,Patricia Anne Kinser, PhDc, WHNP-BC, MS, RN,1,2,* Lisa Goehler, PhD,1 and Ann Gill Taylor, EdD, RN, FAAN1
states that :
Current research supports the idea that various yoga interventions can help participants improve self-reported perceptions of stress and well-being42–47 and decrease self-reported depression, dysthymia, and number of episodes of major depression.
And from this Harvard article Yoga For Better Mental Health, June 12, 2021, it says:
All exercise can boost your mood by lowering levels of stress hormones, increasing the production of feel-good chemicals known as endorphins, and bringing more oxygenated blood to your brain. But yoga may have additional benefits. It can affect mood by elevating levels of a brain chemical called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which is associated with better mood and decreased anxiety.
Meditation also reduces activity in the limbic system—the part of the brain dedicated to emotions. As your emotional reactivity diminishes, you have a more tempered response when faced with stressful situations.
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So you might be starting to understand why I view the effects of practicing yoga and meditation as a perfect part of your self help process for sorting though your feelings while guiding you to create changes that are right for you. They keep you participating in your life even when you want to turn away from it. Aside from science that is providing framework for how both meditation and yoga can help you, I find they are also beneficial because they can create a safe, non judgmental space for you to feel your emotions and understand the purpose for them. Yoga and meditation also help you connect to yourself on a spiritual level that buoys up your resolve and peaceful acceptance by helping you make friends with unwanted emotions. When you can do that, your suffering from experiencing them lowers and can go away altogether. The top down, bottom up effect of yoga is a remedy that can work.
Here is an interesting diagram with explanation below it for you from this article
Depiction of our model for brain substrates by which yoga may mitigate the effects of both “top-down” and “bottom-up” stress effects on allostatic load. In response to breathing and postural feedback, prefrontal cortical areas (PFC), notably VMPFC, modulate stress-responsive brain regions including the amygdala (AMY), hippocampus (HPC), and hypothalamus (HYP), to improve hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity, autonomic balance, and inflammation, reducing drive on bottom-up stress pathways. Meditative/mindfulness aspects of yoga encourage positive coping mediated by PFC structures including DLPFC and dorsal ACC, thereby reducing drive on top-down stress.
If yoga and meditation are being shown to restructure how your complete stress pathway responds, including it everyday in your recovery process is a smart way to change feeling hopeless.
As you get started, it might be tough to engage in at first. Your motivation to take action may just not be there . It can feel too hard to create an action. Its possible to experience thoughts like “Nothing works for me” “I don’t believe I can get better” “I did it once it didn’t work”. Hopelessness can trap you in its emotional lethargy since there can be layers of healing to improve how you feel. Start with short sessions. Even 5 minutes a day can help you build up to a full practice before you know it. The important part is to stick with it! Yoga and meditation are processes that help recondition and heal your nervous system and its pathways. It can take a few months to notice anything. The results are incremental and build to noticeable change. The part you will really like is the changes are long lasting. And that is how you become your own hero.
"the brain and peripheral nervous system, the endocrine and immune systems, and indeed, all the organs of our body and all the emotional responses we have, share a common chemical language and are constantly communicating with one another."
Dr. James Gordon (founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine)
I would love knowing if you have felt hopeless and how you coped!
Until next time,
Love Laughter and an Undivided Life.
Mariangela
