Sometimes even the best laid plan needs to be laid to waste
When someone you love has dementia you learn quickly that how a day is going to go is completely and totally out of your control. You have a choice. You can go with the wildly irrational and unreasonable flow, or you (and your loved one) can suffer mightily. Through the years of my mom’s illness, I stubbornly dragged her onto the “struggle bus” more often than I’m proud of.
One night in particular illustrates this well. My husband and I had planned the perfect (we thought) outing that required no memories, just pure enjoyment of two things my mom had always loved – Christmas and plants. We’d purchased tickets to Longwood Gardens to see the Christmas lights.
All afternoon we teased the outing to build up excitement. After an early dinner, we all went our separate ways to get bundled up. My dad had laid out my mom’s outfit ahead of time to avoid confusion. The wheels fell off the proverbial bus when my mom balked at the clothing he had chosen, refusing to put on the unfamiliar extra layers. The “bus” spun out when, despite knowing better, I went in to “help,” and made things worse by trying to reason with her. Now she was furious about being talked down to.
Emotions are the only thing that “stick” with a person with dementia. This is complicated by the fact that they cannot remember what they’re mad about – they just know that they’re supremely ticked off. In other words, there was no way that my mom was going to forget that she was mad. Nevertheless, my husband and I persisted. We were determined to take her on this outing. “It will be fun!” we kept saying. “The tickets were expensive!” we kept thinking.
Well, the evening was expensive, but it was not fun for any of us. My mom’s rage continued as she refused any outerwear as we all put on coats and hats. Her tantrum shifted gears almost immediately as she began to get cold. Suddenly, it was my poor dad’s fault that she didn’t have a coat. She blasted him with mean comments until he took off his coat and zipped her into it. The only Christmas lights we saw were on the way back to the car. As we drove away, reeling from the disaster of an outing, my mom, now warm and cozy in the backseat, said, “Wasn’t that fun?”
Finding balance between effort and ease is difficult
In The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a yoga asana or posture is said to require both shtira and sukkah – steadiness and comfort, or effort and ease. (YS 2.46) I want to reiterate that we need both. Too much effort can be harmful. Too much ease will be ineffective. Students find out very quickly that effort is a more familiar path than ease. Most of my students’ natural impulse when they encounter tightness or limitation is to deem it “bad” and to push against it to get looser. This is exactly what I was doing when I kept pushing us to Longwood Gardens.
Ease asks us to accept our reality. This is what I was not doing that cold night with my mom. In a forward fold on a tight day, ease would have us keep the forward fold shallow or bend our knees. Doing so asks us to wrestle with our ego – “I have been practicing long enough and hard enough that I shouldn’t have to bend my knees anymore.” Doing so asks us to wrestle with desire – “I really really want to be able to take a forward fold with straight legs.” Doing so asks us to wrestle with aversion – “I really really really do not want to have to bend my knees like a newbie.” Ease, it turns out, is not easy.
Balancing effort and ease in any yoga posture can be challenging, but the practice is good for us. Each difficult posture mimics a real-life stressful situation. By choosing comfort within our steadiness, and ease within our effort over and over again on our yoga mat, we train our nervous systems to stay calm and steady when faced with stress or discomfort our life off the mat.
Allowing yourself some ease can involve outcomes you never considered
We also train ourselves to stay open to and accepting of different outcomes than the one we had planned. In our forward fold, this means we at least entertain the notion that the posture might look different than we’d like it to look. On the night we took my mom to Longwood Gardens, I could have balanced my effort to get my mom to the gardens with the possibility that my “perfect” plan may need to fall by the wayside. If I’d allowed it to do so, we might have enjoyed a lovely, easy evening in front of the fireplace rather than the long, cold struggle I chose for us instead.
If you are anything like me, remember that it can take a long time and a lot of unnecessary struggle before you begin to trust the mere idea that ease is a critical ingredient to find in any difficult situation – let alone before you are able to actively look for it. Keep practicing. The yogis promise us that it is possible to get to the point where your response to stress is (at least sometimes) to soften and accept rather than to work hard (and harder) to change things. Each time you find a little ease increases the likelihood that you will choose it next time.
If we manage to choose to add a little ease to any situation, when whatever it is that we’re facing is over, you and I might be able to say, like my mom, “Wasn’t that fun?” without the people around us groaning.
PS The above photo is of another change of plans. My mom had been afraid of being on a boat for decades and always refused invitations to go for a ride. By the summer this photo was taken, she had forgotten that fear and came with us for a ride on the lake. It was a very happy afternoon.
The physical postures of yoga should be cultivated with the two qualities of steadiness and ease. YS 2.46