Guest Blog Post by Yoga Teacher Melanie Toth That So Helped Me Know I'm Not Alone During This Time, or Ever

What’s social distancing like when you’ve already been living at a distance? Or how much more isolated can I get? 

When we could no longer avoid coronavirus coverage, my husband and I joked that if we had to be quarantined, our lives wouldn’t change that much. We joked about how our child-free work at home lifestyle already social distances us on a regular basis. We joked that we’d be so good at this. 

I, for one, have quickly learned that I am not good at this.

I’m starting to think this is precisely because isolation is so easy for me. I am starting to worry about how much more isolated I can let myself get. As I witness so many people reaching out and finding creative ways to support themselves and their communities, I am freezing up and I’m starting to wonder who else feels this way.

I isolate myself a lot on the regular. I don’t need a highly contagious virus to motivate me to stay home and steer clear of people. Rather, I need my life to force me out into the world, so I have a chance to interact and connect with others. This, I am sure, is a boat I share with many other introverted, empathic, anxiety-prone people who regularly work at home. Yet I haven’t talked about it with anyone, because where does this fit into the conversation? What value is there in adding my ‘poor me, I’m freezing up as I shelter in place’ voice to the cacophony of confusion?

The only value I can discern is this: 

I want to tell you if fear makes you freeze, you are not alone.

I want to tell you if social distancing has sent you deeper into an already deep state of isolation, you are not alone.

I want to tell you admitting the isolation hurts as much as it helps is the first step towards finding ways to feel better.

I want to tell you that to feel better, we must first allow ourselves to actually feel our difficult feelings. 

So many people are struggling right now and just acknowledging the enormity of it is profoundly painful. School closings alone are huge disruption to so many lives. Parents are figuring out how to be teachers; teachers are figuring out how to teach remotely; young children are figuring out they live in a precarious world that can change in an instant. Everyone is figuring out what the hell to cook for dinner. 

There is so much fear, frustration, panic, sadness, and overwhelm alongside so much love, cooperation, comfort, hope and expansiveness. We are being reminded daily of the truth that being human means having the capacity to experience beauty and horror, side by side. It’s a lot to take in; who could blame us for not wanting to feel our feelings?

When I stay in my house, I don’t have to feel it, at least not as much. It’s still there, of course, but at home, I can choose to look away. I can choose to dull my senses so looking doesn’t hurt. I can numb myself with food and TV and alcohol and pot and sleep (which I am sad to say, is not much different than what I was doing before this latest coronavirus came along).

But when I’m out shopping for groceries, the tension in the air in palpable, the face masks and empty shelves and dark store windows a constant reminder that we’re living in a new world. It’s hard not to panic and start buying things I know I don’t need; it’s hard not to cry.

The creation of a new world may be the best outcome of COVID19, but first we must live through the failure and dissolution of the old one. We must collectively go into the cocoon and be dissolved so we can emerge new and better. We must go into isolation in order to be transformed. 

What a hot freaking mess. 

And I don’t mean hot mess as in you wake up with bedhead and smeared mascara and your partner still thinks you’re hot; I mean the kind of hot mess you’d find at a garbage dump on a steamy summer day, the heat of decomposition rising in waves off a mountain of trash and debris. 

I don’t think there’s any way for transformation to be anything but a hot mess.  

So how do we leave behind the caterpillar lives we’ve been crawling through and trust that we have the capacity to grow butterfly wings and rise? 

How do we manage the very real physical, mental, emotional and energetic growing pains of transformation?

How do we let it all flow through us so the holding of it doesn’t weigh us down?

The thousand-foot view of our situation is starkly simple: adapt or die. 

Acknowledged or not, this has always been the thousand-foot view of our situation on Earth: evolution or extinction, your choice. The great opportunity of this moment is that so many are finally waking up to the reality that we can consciously engage in our own evolution; that we can choose to intentionally evolve our consciousness. 

The evolution of consciousness is something yoga philosophy has a lot to say about. As a yoga teacher, it would be so much easier to just write about that. But this yoga teacher is having a hard time just getting showered and dressed on a regular basis right now. (Confession: I was having a hard time with that way before COVID19 came to town; social distancing is just making that, and so many other things, so much harder.)

When I am teaching, I have a reason to shower, dress and leave the house. I have a reason to not smoke pot during the day. I have a reason to stop thinking about my own pain and minister to someone else’s. I have a reason and a way to connect with other people.

In short, when I am teaching, there is a reason for me.

Serving my students gives me purpose, and this can be a terribly tricky double-edged sword. It’s easy for me to get off on helping others and so much easier to help my students than to help myself. I am addicted to the feeling of purpose and usefulness that come with teaching, and I think I always have been, ever since I started teaching my stuffed animals when I was five years old.  

What I have been coming to understand for a while, and what is impossible to deny during this time of not teaching, is how much I have used teaching as a spiritual bypass in my life.

Here’s what our Wikipedia friends have to say about spiritual bypassing:

A spiritual bypass or spiritual bypassing is a "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks".

When I started teaching in 2013, I taught four classes in my first week, and I hadn’t even finished my training program yet. Soon after graduation, I was teaching up to ten times a week, sometimes more. I was terrified of hurting people and self-conscious all the time, but I was committed to teaching as much yoga as possible so I could get better at it. I made a promise to myself that I would say YES to every teaching opportunity that came my way and for years, I did. What I didn’t understand when I made that promise was that saying yes to serving others was another way of saying no to my own needs, a way that I had been cultivating since I was ten years old.

You can find Mel on Facebook at @meltothyoga. Lucky you.