Moving Towards Peace

A fly keeps buzzing around my office. Every once in a while I hear him hit the window, desperately trying to get out. I can relate with his struggle. I've spent a lot of my life trying really hard...and worrying I'm going to end up like that fly.

I no longer struggle that hard. At least not most of the time. In fact, for several years now I'd forgotten how desperately I used to push to make things happen, how worried I was that I somehow wouldn't "make it." And I'm not talking about "make it big." I mean, make it as in "I'm not sure I can get through this life, cuz this $h!+ is hard." Those worry thoughts had a lot to do with how I started life. Perhaps you can relate.

Recently life has been reminding me of those old worries. As one of my major relationships comes to an end, every aspect of my life has been thrown into flux. As I watch what I thought was the stable life I'd built completely dissolve in front of me, I am enormously grateful for Pema Chodron's words, "Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."

Chodron's words remind me that change is normal and natural, and that peace comes when I'm able to accept it. As a yogi, the next step for me is to pinpoint where I'm stuck, where I have difficulty allowing and accepting life's changes. I've been practicing in this way for a while, so I know that when life presents me with uncomfortable change--changes I don't want--I have a tendency to push. I want to force a solution, the opposite of what Chodron suggests. Sometimes my tendency to push works well for me. I push myself to get to the gym, to write a newsletter, to follow up with friends. Heck, it's Friday night and I've pushed myself to write this blog. But sometimes pushing has a down side--like when I push myself to overwork, say yes to too many projects, or to keep a relationship together when it's time to let go.

A lot of us struggle with this tendency. Many of my clients, regardless of age, talk about internal and external pressures to constantly be "productive." They view rest and downtime as lazy. Pushing too hard can come from societal messages such as these that impact us in adulthood. But it can and often does originate early in life when a child feels the need to prove their worth. Maybe they come from an overachieving or demanding family, and feel like they have to earn love. Or perhaps they experienced childhood poverty or instability. Watching parents struggle to make ends meet and living with scarcity can trigger feelings of insecurity that stretch into adulthood.

Pushing is one of six fundamental movements, as described by Ruella Frank a Gestalt therapist. The six fundamental movements are yield, push, reach, grasp, pull and release. Before defining each movement, it's important to understand some background. The movements that Frank outlines were first conceived as the satisfaction cycle by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Psychologist and trauma expert Arielle Schwartz describes these movements as "neurological actions" that underpin patterns and ways of being we adopt as we develop. You can read more about how the fundamental movements apply to yoga therapy in our upcoming book Yoga Therapy for Complex Trauma, which will be released by September 2025.

As the name describes, these movements are fundamental to our experience of being human, and thus they occur very early in life. Frank says the movements are expressed in how a baby communicates wants and needs to the caregiver, how the caregiver responds, and how the baby reacts in turn. This interactive dance between child and caregiver evolves over time, and helps or hinders our sense of self, our relationships as a whole, our feeling of safety in this world, our beliefs that we have the capacity to be happy or our belief that life (and others) are out to get us.

The Six Fundamental Movements

1) Yield: Yielding is less about movement and more about relaxation. Think of a baby resting in the arms of a parent--awake but relaxed. It is often referred to as relaxed alertness. Yielding occurs when we are able to fully surrender our weight into gravity. If you do yoga, you may have experienced total yielding in savasana, relaxation pose.

2) Push: The fundamental movement of push helps us become more independent and create healthy boundaries. For instance, a toddler pushes with their arms and legs to become more mobile--sometimes first to crawl, and then eventually to walk. Pushing increases the child's mobility, and therefore independence. Along with physical independence, children at this age also exert more psychological and relational independence by saying no. Chataranga (a yogic push-up) is a great example of push--both arms and legs push the earth to maintain this strong pose.

3) Reach: Reaching is about curiosity and a desire to connect. A baby reaches for its favorite toy, bottle, mother. Reaching also happens visually. A healthy yield allows us to feel safe and stable in the world. A healthy push allows us to feel independent and able to make boundaries. A healthy reach allows us to relate with and connect with our world, and others in it. The reaching action in Warrior I is plain to see in this blog's cover photo.

4 & 5) Grasp/Pull: Grasp and pull are usually presented together, because they often occur in concert. After the baby reaches for a favorite toy, grasping and pulling happen almost simultaneously. Through these two actions, we bring the external world closer to us. Many partner poses require grasp and pull, such as double boat or elevator.

6) Release: The classic satisfaction cycle has five movements, whereas the fundamental movements has six. The sixth movement is release. In many ways, release is the same as yield. When a baby is satisfied with playing with a toy, they release it, sometimes tossing it unceremoniously to the side. When I flop down on the couch next to my dog and sigh, I am releasing the effort and tension of the day. Savasana is a good example of release after practicing yoga asana. So is stretching the limbs out in all directions after doing Eagle Pose.

Moving Towards Peace

I first noticed my overly active push a few weeks ago when I couldn't sleep. My mind was crowded with so many worry thoughts. What's going to happen next? How do I deal with the overwhelm of so many aspects of my life changing at once? Do I ask for help? In the darkness, I felt tightness in my chest, a knot in my stomach, constriction of my breath. I noticed I was almost pushing the bed beneath me.

So I breathed. I breathed in and out slowly. Without trying to change it, I breathed awareness into the knot in my belly. I felt all the points of contact between the bed, my pillow and my body. I let my body soften into these points of contact. I remembered my two mantras, and alternated between them. This series of practices is my own personal yield ritual. Though I continue to have restless nights like this, when I do these practices, I get to sleep almost every single time.

For me, once I began regularly practicing my yield ritual, I noticed my push strengthen. On a physical level, I've felt more motivated and enthusiastic about doing yoga asana several times a week either on my own or with my awesome teacher Jeanie Manchester. And over the months, I've regained strength and flexibility that I'd lost for a while. On a relational level, I've gotten a lot better at making gentle but firm boundaries with others. This has allowed me to cut out a bunch of projects that were scattering my focus and energy, and adding to my nighttime stress.

Cutting out the excess projects and obligations has now cleared the way for me to reach more effectively for the goals and priorities that mean the most to me right now (and figure out what those are!). I feel more present, energized, less frustrated and more at peace. I've also reached out to friends for help, and felt so relieved and supported when they willingly stepped up.

I am very much at the beginning of a long series of changes on the horizon. I've yet to grasp and pull these changes towards me. June is packed with workshops and webinars I'm co-hosting with other amazing yogis and mindfulness experts. I have to buy a new house, and move. I'm continuing to campaign as the launch of our book Yoga Therapy for Complex Trauma approaches on August 21, 2025. I'm prepping and planning for our big book launch party at the beautiful Ladron Cellars on September 6, 2025. (If you're a Denver local, please come join us for an elevated evening!)

Yet in the midst of my life's tumult, I've also had moments of release. For instance, last night I laughed so hard with those supportive friends who are helping me out. As one of them said, "We almost fell over from laughing so hard!" It was true.

The other day before meditation, I read another quote from Chodron that really spoke to my present life situation: "The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes and opens." The shared experience of laughing with this group of women, every one of whom has been through pain and heartbreak different but equal to mine, is the "sweet" that Chodron refers to in her quote.

All of us have experienced disruptions in our fundamental movements, either early on and/or later in life. We feel stuck, incomplete, unsatisfied and out of sync. The point here is not to think that learning the fundamental movements will smooth out all the rough spots in life, or ensure that we never feel stuck or unsatisfied again. Instead, the point is to use the fundamental movements to discover where we've lost our flow with the rhythm of life--including its changes--and then use the movements to reenter that flow.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we believe that if we just get the right group of friends, land the dream job, date or marry our one true love, we'll be set. But living a satisfying life is not about trying to freeze-frame the good and vanquish the bad. It's when we surrender our belief that we've earned life on easy street, when we release the idea that we can permanently fix ourselves or our lives, that life becomes satisfying, mysterious, outrageous, and even peaceful.

Want to experience the fundamental movements for yourself? Try the following yoga sequence:

Also, try our yoga video Yoga for Stress II, and see if you can identify the fundamental movements in each of the poses!