Sometimes we have something to say, but fear stops us. It could be the fear of hurting someone, or the fear that if we speak out, things will change. Maybe we aren’t ready to face the truth, or the consequences of talking about it, but love, honesty, growth and understanding, absolutely require communication. If you can’t tell someone how you feel, you’re in a relationship where true seeing and connection just aren’t possible.
If you’re a people-pleaser, this can become very problematic, because you may sacrifice your own needs to avoid making the other party uncomfortable, or angry or disappointed; maybe you believe that’s the only way you’ll receive love. If you aren’t indispensable to someone, what’s going to keep them around? That’s not connection or love, that’s you editing yourself so that you don’t rock the boat. That’s you trying to fit yourself into some projection you have about what you think they want. It’s also a form of manipulation.
If you struggle with this kind of thing, you may have a very hard time holding someone accountable when they’ve hurt you. Maybe you’re so hard on yourself when you screw up, you assume everyone feels that way (they don’t!). Not everyone berates themselves for being imperfect. When we’re insecure in ourselves, we’ll be insecure in our dealings with other people. The tendency in this scenario is to sell yourself, to be sure you do and say nothing that might upset or confront the other person, because then they might feel angry or disrespected, or over you. So you tiptoe around and try to be some perfect idea of what you think they want, which is awful, because it isn’t really you. Where are you? Where is that authentic, unafraid, open-hearted you?
When we don’t tell people how we feel because we’re afraid they’ll feel terrible for letting us down in some big or small way, we lose the opportunity for growth on both sides of the equation. When we tell ourselves to forgive before we’re ready to do that, we repress our own feelings of anger, and we deny the other person an experience they might have needed for their own growth. Haven’t you learned more from your mistakes than you have from those times when you got everything right? Sometimes in an effort to save someone from the pain of being accountable for their actions, we steal from them a struggle they might have needed. We all screw up sometimes, it’s part of being human. Your job is not to make everything okay for everyone all the time.
Recently I was talking to a friend I’ve known for years. He’s trying to work up the courage to have a painful conversation with his dad, but he told me he’s afraid of what it might do to him. He doesn’t want to upset his dad, but he does want healing. He wants closeness, but in order to get there, he needs to revisit the past with him. He told me he doesn’t want his dad to have to grapple with what he did, and I said that was interesting, because my friend has been grappling with it for years.
Secrets make us sick. I’m not talking about trying to surprise your best friend on her birthday. Those kinds of secrets are beautiful. Anything we do to make the people in our lives feel special and celebrated is awesome. I’m talking about the other kind of secret. The kind you push down so everything looks shiny on the outside, or the kind you sit on to avoid disappointing someone else. The truth wants out. In order to heal, we have to be able to look, and not just to look, but to see. Sending you love. Wishing you the strength and bravery to speak out and up when you need to, and sending you love,
Ally Hamilton
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We can never control what other people will do or say or want or need, nor can we control what life is going to put in our paths; our power lies in our ability to choose the way we respond to what it is we’re given. I get so many emails from people who tell me their relationships would be great, if only their partners would change some fundamental thing about themselves. You can’t make someone else change, or be happy, or kind or compassionate or patient, or in love with you. People are those things, or they are not. You might be able to inspire people to show up as the best version of themselves by showing them what that looks like yourself, but you can’t convince or bribe or manipulate a person toward growth.
One of the great gifts of an intimate relationship, and by that, I do not necessarily mean a romantic one, is that it constantly offers us the opportunity to grow; anyone you’re close to will challenge you to show up as your best possible self, for you and for them. That’s part of the joy and the pain of having people in our lives who know us and see us clearly. These people may be your parents, your siblings, your best friend, your children, or your partner. The most intimate and enduring relationship you’ll have in your whole life, though, is the one you’re having with yourself.
Few things in life feel worse than being rejected, misunderstood, ignored, misjudged or betrayed, but we’ll all go through moments when we feel at least some of these things, and maybe all of them. Sometimes when I write about these very human experiences, someone will comment that this is just the mind; it’s just our thoughts about these things that are making us suffer and if we didn’t identify with these thoughts, we’d be fine. That’s wonderful. If you’re in that place, you don’t have to read further. Most of us, myself included, will have to grapple with uncomfortable feelings and thoughts from time to time, before we can bring ourselves 
Becoming less reactive and more responsive is a huge part of the yoga practice. Learning to sit with intense sensation calmly can really be a life-changer; so many people move through the world as victims of circumstance. If things are going well, they’re happy, if things are not going as planned, they’re miserable. If someone says something or does something thoughtless, they’re sent into a tailspin. Life can, and probably will be an up-and-down experience if you don’t find a way to open to both those things that feel good, and those things that are disappointing, enraging, heartbreaking, or unexpected.
Love is not about control; that might seem obvious, but sometimes it’s good to get really clear on that concept, because we’re all only human, and when you love someone, whether it’s your child or your parent, your partner, sibling, or best friend, you become vulnerable; there’s no point fighting that reality. You have a body with an unknown expiration date, you have a gorgeous heart which is capable of incredible love. Human beings are designed to need each other, and to reach out, so loving is part of the equation, as is the inherent exposure to loss and suffering that go along with loving. We never know how much time we have, or how much time anyone else has. We never know what will happen next.
The two things that are most likely to cause trouble between family members, partners, close friends, colleagues, strangers, and pretty much anyone who interacts with anyone else, are assumptions and projections. We all have our experiences, and they shape the way we think about things, people, and the world at large. They also inform the way we respond to the data coming at us; we can only know what we know, we can only have the frame of reference we have. A big part of maturing has to do with the awareness that your way of seeing things is only that — your way — and with the understanding that your frame of reference may be severely bent, the glass may be distorted or warped, and you might need an entirely new prescription.
The tendency to look around comparing and contrasting our lives, accomplishments, and troubles against someone else’s is not always easy to break. Those feelings of being on the outside looking in, of thinking other people seem to be having an easier time, of wondering whether we measure up, can be brutal. I get so many emails from people in pain; people who have a dream they don’t pursue because some voice inside doubts they could ever pull it off.
We all have our moments when we don’t show up as our highest selves; choices we’d make differently, given the opportunity to choose again. Times when we were tested, and failed in our efforts to handle it well. We have people we’ve hurt, hopefully unintentionally, but also sometimes because we were young and thoughtless, or careless or selfish, or simply didn’t realize who we were yet, or the ramifications of what we were doing. Most people, given the chance to talk freely and safely, will tell you they carry shame around something. It could be the way they parent sometimes. It could be the way they show up in relationships, or don’t. It could be around a specific incident, when they had a choice to make, and regret their course of action. It could be that something happened to them and they feel broken or ugly or marred in some un-fixable way. This is life, this is being human; it isn’t easy, it isn’t always pretty, and sometimes we need help in order to see things clearly.
We tend to think of “home” as the house or apartment where we grew up, and “family” as the people with whom we share a bloodline; those people who were in that house or apartment before we got there. See also: those people who were supposed to love us and protect us and nurture us. When it works out that way, it’s ideal and such a gift, but it doesn’t work out that way for so many people.
Awareness can be incredibly liberating; if you’ve found yourself participating in an unhealthy relationship with someone — your partner, your close friend, your boss, your landlord — and you feel “hooked”, try to figure out what’s happening. Chances are, something deep is being tapped, some very old wound, something from your early history. Don’t think in terms of gender, think in terms of the quality of the interaction, especially if you notice a pattern of interactions that cause you pain when you look back on your life.
Attachment to a particular outcome and fear of abandonment are such huge issues for so many people. This is only natural; we love people with our whole hearts, and we want to know they’re ours to keep. We want to know our children will grow up safe and happy and healthy, and that they’ll still want to hang out with us long after they don’t need us to drive them around, or read to them, or make their lunches for school. We fall in love with someone and want to count on that happy ending. We want things to go the way we want them to go, and we think if we just try hard enough we can bend life to our will, but every day we’re reminded this isn’t true or possible.
A couple of days ago I received an email from a man who’s in agony; last week he had a terrible fight with his father. He’s been working for his dad for years, in the family business. He started over the summers when he was in high school, and went right to work full-time when he graduated from college. He and his dad have always been close. His dad coached him through Little League, cheered him on through high school, and never missed any of his college games. They went camping in the summers, and skiing in the winters.
Most of us struggle with control and attachment to some degree, thinking if we just try hard enough, we can get life to bend to our will. We start dating someone and want this to be “it” before we even know the other person, before they know us. We’re ready to have a baby, and expect to get pregnant on the first try, or the second. If it hasn’t happened by the third month, we start to get upset. We have our plan, and life needs to get with it, right? Or we want our kids to do well, but maybe our idea of well, and theirs, is different. We want to be promoted, we deserve it, but our boss is a fill-in-the-blank.
Life is a contact sport, there’s really no way to get through it without injury, and it isn’t something to “get through”, anyway. If you can embrace the experience of learning and growing, life can be piercingly beautiful even when it hurts. We all make mistakes, take a wrong turn here or there, fail to show up the way we’d like to sometimes. Wrong turns aren’t even wrong, unless we’re knowingly hurting someone else, in which case we have to look at when and how we’ve lost respect for ourselves. Short of that, as long as there’s growth, we’re doing it “right”. It’s going to be a total mess sometimes. Did you ever clean out a house or a garage, or even your closet? Sometimes you have to pull everything out so you can see what you’re dealing with; you have to make an even bigger mess so you can start to clean things up. Of course we all have choices we’d love to make over again, and differently; a few things we regret, even if we learned a painful but necessary lesson. This is called being human.
If you want easy and comfortable, forget about intimacy, because in order to be truly known by another person, you have to be willing to be honest, even if that means shining light on some part of yourself that isn’t fully healed. If you want to be understood and seen, you have to be willing to show yourself, and in order to do that, you really want to feel safe.
Frequently when I’m teaching, I’ll see someone “force a pose.” I can talk until I’m blue in the face about the transition from bound side angle pose to bird of paradise, for example, I can emphasize the importance of a long spine, a top shoulder opening toward the sky, and of course, the ability to breathe with ease, and undoubtedly, someone will start hopping their back foot forward, even though they’re hunched over, grunting, turning purple, and can in no way begin to really stand on the standing leg. There are many reasons I’ll shut this down. Obviously there’s the risk for physical injury–straining the low back, compromising the bound shoulder, stressing the hamstrings of both legs, but there’s also the emotional injury.
Years ago, not long after I’d moved to Los Angeles, I took over the regular classes of a very popular teacher at a very busy gym in West Hollywood. The other teacher had moved back east, and I knew a lot of his students were bummed out, so I went in understanding I’d have my work cut out for me. After a few weeks of dealing with that understandable “I’m-not-sure-I’m-gonna-like-this” energy, things were good and the vibe in the room was awesome. We were having fun, people were focusing and breathing and sweating and laughing. We had a good thing going. Except for this one guy. He always stood in the same place at the front of the room, and he was there like clockwork, three times a week, but he was hostile to me, frequently shot me dirty looks in class, and often shook his head at something I’d said. Sometimes he’d even roll his eyes. I wanted to talk to him about it, but he always arrived right before class, and took off right after. I figured he was there because it was the only time-slot that worked in his schedule.
Sometimes our expectations of ourselves are completely unrealistic. If you tend to be a perfectionist, if you fall into the Type A category, I really feel for you. I often joke that after twenty-plus years of yoga practice six days a week, I’m a 93% recovered Type A personality, 97% on a good day. I spent years beating myself up, and I can still fall prey to that tendency if I’m feeling tired, tested, or vulnerable.
Sometimes the pain we inflict upon ourselves is worse than any other pain we face. I know so many people who grapple with self-loathing, who feel shame, guilt, despair and rage because they’ve made mistakes and don’t know how to make things right. An unforgiving internal dialogue is a painful and relentless prison, and sometimes it seems the key is somewhere far, far away.
Any living thing you feed will grow and strengthen, and anything you starve will die. This includes relationships. If you don’t put any effort or energy into it, it won’t sustain itself, and that happens all the time; that’s why our divorce rate is so incredibly high. A relationship is a living, breathing thing that exists in the space between two people. It’s a third thing, a singular creation that could never have occurred without the intersection of two particular lives.
Nowhere is our stuff more likely to come up than in the context of an intimate relationship; anytime we’re really baring our souls to another person, trusting and opening and revealing and hoping that we’re safe, that we’re choosing wisely. You really do want to take your time when it comes to giving your heart to anyone, that’s a precious gift, and not something you want to do recklessly, or because your hormones are raging, or you’ve been waiting to connect deeply with someone, anyone, for a very long time. Longing to be seen, understood and held is understandable, but this isn’t stuff you can rush or force.
There are certain things in this life that are so heartbreaking it’s hard to know how to process them; where to go, what to think, how to breathe. Sometimes we suffer losses that are so knifing, all we can do is try to find a way to move forward, to open, to feel joy, to have hope again. When we’re in the midst of heartache like this, just getting through is enough. Grief is personal, there’s no certain time limit or formula, you just allow yourself to feel whatever you need to feel, and to ask for and accept help when you need it. If you’re lucky, you won’t have to ask, because you’ll have people in your life who know how to show up for you.
I used to think I’d be “done” at a certain point. If I just hit a few milestones and managed to make good choices, if I just had a small amount of luck, then the changing and shifting and sometimes agonizing uncertainty of it all would cease, then I could just live out my happy ending. The milestones looked like graduating from a good college, finding something to do with my time that was fulfilling and would also sustain me, meeting the right person and having a family. I figured if I managed to do any or all of that, then I’d be happy and my life would really begin.
Many of the feelings we’re going to experience in this life are not comfortable — rage, grief, shame, fear, doubt, jealously, envy, loneliness, bitterness, feelings around being betrayed, abandoned or neglected — none of these are easy feelings. Sometimes we’re in so much avoidance around this stuff, we flee. We keep ourselves insanely busy, or we numb out all the time, or we cling to a false reality and insist those who are close to us do the same. None of that works, assuming you want to be happy and at peace.
When I was seventeen I began dating a man who was twenty-one years older than I was. My parents tried to stop me, but they have nineteen years between them, and even though they divorced when I was four, I was positive my relationship was different, because I was seventeen and thought I had all the answers. My previous boyfriend, who had been kind and sweet and awesome in every way, also tried to stop me, but he had moved across the country to go to college, and the truth was, I was heartbroken. I felt abandoned, even though he was talking about Christmas break, and calling every day. No matter; he’d left, and it stirred in me something old and raw and completely unhealed. So I let this guy who was so much older come at me with his cars and his boats and his private plane to his house in the Hamptons. He had a terrible reputation for cheating on everyone he dated, and I signed myself up for the task like I’d be able to fix that. Also, something inside me was believing the idea that I was the kind of person someone could leave, so who cared, really?
I think there are two essential questions to answer if you want to be at peace in this world–what are your gifts, and how will you share them? If you want to feel like your life has meaning, and you want to feel a sense of purpose, that’s at the heart of it. Giving feels good; to feel like you have something to offer that is of value, creates a state of inspiration and gratitude. It lights a fire under your a$$. It could be as simple and profound as the love you give to the people in your life. I don’t know of anything, really, that feels better than giving from your heart, with everything you’ve got.
Sometimes a big part of learning to take care of yourself has to do with the ability to say no when necessary. There are so many areas where this comes into play. If you say yes to everyone all the time, you’ll find you have nothing left for yourself. You can only run on empty for so long; at a certain point you’ll need to replenish your tank if you want to have anything to give. If you neglect yourself for too long, you’ll end up feeling resentful and angry, and playing the role of the martyr, as if other people are creating your exhaustion and despair. It could be that you have some idea that your value as a human being, as a friend, as a family member or partner has to do with what you can offer to other people, and that you, showing up just as you are, could never be enough. That unless you’re doing something for those you love, they’re likely to abandon you or neglect you or stop seeing you. One of the best feelings in life is to give freely from your heart, and to give because you want to, and not because you’re expecting something in return, or because you want credit for the good you’re doing, but if a relationship is totally unbalanced, where you’re doing all the giving and the other person is doing all the taking, that’s simply not healthy.
Sometimes, in an effort to feel secure, we strangle the life out of a thing. For many, many people, facing the reality that anything living is in a constant state of flux is a hugely uncomfortable task. Nature is teaching us all the time, though. The seasons change, the leaves fall off the trees, the branches are barren and then the buds appear and the tree blooms again. Flowers grow and blossom and fade from whence they came, and new flowers spring up. You, yourself are always changing, shifting, evolving, growing; so is everyone else you know. Your body has an unknown expiration date, so does everyone else’s. We won’t know for sure what happens after this until we exhale for the last time. If you want to hide from the vulnerability and constant motion of this experience, you’re going to need to find a huge rock, earplugs and something to tie around your eyes, too.
Opening to your feelings, even if they’re highly uncomfortable, is the only way to release them. Anything you deny, run from, or repress absolutely owns you, and any of those actions–choosing ignorance, fleeing from what you know to be true, or taking most of your energy and using it to push down what has come to the surface–will isolate you. You can’t turn to anyone because you’re not willing to face things as they are. No one can comfort you, because you aren’t dealing with your pain, you’re avoiding it. You may be desperate for relief, but if you’re 