Resilience: Self Agency In Choosing How To Meet Life

Hi there,

Welcome to the second talk in this series where we're exploring how yoga helps us to build resilience or the ability to move forward when things are challenging.

Today we are looking at this concept of self-agency or sometimes we call it personal agency because it really is a very personal experience.

And we're building on what we talked about last week which was the big picture idea of growth mindset.

That's the overall understanding that things can change and evolve.

I can put effort toward improving,

Toward finding healthier patterns and growth is possible.

And then we step into this refining of that concept.

Self-agency says that growth and change is possible and I am the agent of change in my life.

So it is a very empowering stance to have within this process of navigating difficult things in our human experience.

So let's look a little deeper at what this concept of self-agency is.

And I really like the very broad idea of self-agency is choosing how you meet life.

We don't get to pick the weather,

We don't get to pick the terrain of this journey that we are on.

Those things are all kind of popping up in front of us as life unfolds.

But we do get to choose how we interact with those things.

Especially when we have the tools of yoga because it pulls us out of that space of automatic reaction and it gives us that bit of space in between where we get to intentionally choose how am I going to move forward?

How am I going to interact with this experience?

And there's a couple different themes that are going to come up over and over in this series.

Relationship.

Not just human to human,

Although that is part of it,

But really relationship with everything.

How do you relate to your yoga practice?

What is that back and forth?

How do you relate to your thoughts?

What is that relationship like for you right now?

And it's this understanding that within that relationship we get to make some choices of how to engage or how not to engage.

And there's a lot of power in that choice.

So choosing how you meet life and the experiences that pop up in front of you.

Choice is going to be the word that you hear me say over and over in this particular segment.

We can also think about this as the felt sense that you can influence your experience.

You can influence the shape of your life.

Not everything about your life.

There are absolutely things that are out of your sphere of influence,

But for those things that are in your sphere of influence,

You get to make choices that absolutely change the shape of your life and your day-to-day experience.

So we start to see that there's kind of these two different spheres.

What you can control or influence and what is outside of that.

That distinction is important because we want to understand which direction our energy is going toward.

We'll get into that a little bit later in this talk.

This idea of self-agency is an image that I talk about a lot,

Which is having your hands on the steering wheel.

The steering wheel of your life.

So we can't control what the weather is,

We can't control the terrain that pops up in front of us or the state that the road is in as we're driving forward,

But we get to make choices with our hands on that steering wheel.

Do I go left or right?

Do I follow this detour or do I go back the other way?

We get to make these choices when we stay in the driver's seat,

When we have our hands on the wheel,

And when we're seeing things clearly.

That's the relationship that we have with our life.

And when we talk about self-agency,

There is this connection to intentional choices.

Not just bumping around in life by accident,

But really putting some thought and understanding why you're trying to move in a certain direction.

Why is it important for you to make something happen?

And then,

Not just holding that as an idea or an opinion,

But putting it into practice.

Having a directed path of action.

This is what I'm going to do to shape my life in that sphere of things that are in my control.

So there's a lot of empowerment that comes from this connection to self-agency,

And like all of the things that we're going to talk about in the series on resilience,

It is not this thing that you either have or you don't.

It is a relationship that you build.

It is a skill set that you practice over and over,

And it becomes stronger.

It becomes more supportive.

So that's the process that we are working on here,

That practice.

And just as we start to move forward,

A little side note about the difference between control and agency.

With control,

I like to use the image of a clenched fist.

We are holding on so tightly,

White-knuckling it,

That we want things to turn out exactly the way that we want them to turn out.

It has to end up like this.

This is something that we're going to talk about several times here.

That is exhausting,

And things pretty much never go the way that we wanted them to go,

At least not perfectly.

That sort of control,

That clenched fist around your life,

Really can be depleting and very often leads us to this disappointment or this sense of mismatch.

The opposite of that being agency,

And I think of agency like the open hand.

It's the open hand,

If you were to imagine all of the different things that are within your sphere of choice,

Kind of sitting there in your hand.

You're not grasping at them.

You're not trying to force them to do anything in particular.

You're looking at them very clearly and saying,

Okay,

This is what I have in the landscape to choose from.

Knowing what I know,

How am I going to decide to move forward?

Compare that to the clenched fist of control.

I have to make it turn out this way or nothing.

It's a very different energy.

That shift from control to agency frees up a lot of energy,

And it's a recognition that no,

We don't have control over everything in our life,

But we do have choice somewhere,

And that's how we retain our power.

Let's look at how this shows up in these main areas that we like to look at.

First,

We're looking at our yoga or our meditation practice.

There's a lot of things if we go into,

Especially a group practice,

There's a lot of things within that room that we can't control.

How the teacher structures the class,

What yoga asana they choose to include or how they sequence that class,

What kind of music they choose to play or don't play.

That's not necessarily within our control if we're a student in that room.

Noises outside.

I live on a farm.

There are constant chickens and screaming goats and all sorts of things.

Those outside sounds are completely out of my control.

And then the third one,

Which is a very interesting one that often we will fight,

It's our thoughts.

We cannot control the initial thought that pops into our mind.

Our brain just creates it.

Boom,

Thought,

There it is.

Letting that thought be there,

The choice that we have is how we engage with that thought.

We can choose not to believe it if it's not a helpful thought.

We can choose not to feed energy toward it if it is a destructive thought.

So the thought is there,

Didn't necessarily have control over whether it showed up or not,

But we do have a choice in how we relate to it.

There's that relationship.

So once you're practicing meditation for a little while,

You start to understand you cannot stop your thoughts,

But we can create some distance from them.

We can get less tangled up in them.

And we can notice them from a space that feels a bit more neutral so that they don't have as much of an emotional charge as maybe they used to.

That's how we start to change that relationship.

So there's a lot of things in our practice that we do have choice over,

And this is,

I like to think of it like you are crafting your practice.

When I'm the teacher,

I'm up there giving you suggestions.

Maybe you want to do this pose.

Maybe you want to adapt this pose in a certain way or use a prop or maybe that pose is not in your practice today and you just throw it out completely.

That is all absolutely valid,

And I love handing that choice to people.

Using your practice as a place to practice self-agency because when we're on that magic rectangle,

That very controlled experience of our yoga practice,

This is the laboratory.

This is where we get to experiment and practice these new patterns.

So when you practice your self-agency and that choice,

What comes into my practice,

What doesn't come into my practice,

In the experience of your mat,

It gets a little bit easier to transfer that out to your life where things are more complicated and there's more factors that you're dealing with,

But it makes that transfer of skills more accessible.

Let me take this practice of self-agency with me to work.

Let me take this to my relationships,

To how I manage my family.

You can choose in your practice when you rest.

You can choose how to relate to the thoughts or the judgments that come up.

You might have a practice of reframing that you choose to use when an unhelpful thought comes up because they will.

We know that they will.

That never goes away.

We just change the way that we relate to them through our choice.

And it might be a process of choosing to have more soothing within your practice or to give yourself some internal encouragement when you're doing something that's difficult.

Maybe you didn't want to show up on your mat that day,

But you gave yourself a little push and you got there.

Choosing to reinforce that.

So there's some things that are outside of our choice,

But we get to decide how to relate to them and that's such a good exercise of self-agency.

So you can think about this as resilience through choosing the right adaptation for yourself and it keeps you intentionally engaged with your life.

Engagement is one of the things that we're going to talk about.

You can think connection,

Union,

Right?

It's a core concept in yoga.

Being connected or feeling disconnected.

That sense of choice will keep you feeling engaged and connected within your life.

And then there's this lovely trajectory that we are working with where self-agency,

These choices that we make,

Even tiny little ones in our practice or in our day,

Builds self-trust.

I'm listening to myself,

I'm making those choices based on what I need,

And that builds an internal sense of safety,

Which makes our nervous system really happy.

That's what helps us to drop into that space of safe and social,

That nice regulated experience in the nervous system.

Self-agency can create this pathway toward internal safety.

So let's look at how we can pull this into the concepts of yoga philosophy.

And these are some words that we've been talking about a lot lately.

They're showing up over and over again,

And I always say when something is repeating itself,

It's like life really telling us,

Like,

Pay attention to this.

This is important.

Here it is again.

So the first concept is viveka,

Or discernment.

In Yoga Sutra 2.

26,

It is uninterrupted discernment.

Tuning your mind into discernment,

All the time hopefully,

Is a means to end suffering.

So that's a big ask,

Or a big role to fill in our life,

But truly discernment,

This ability to see things really clearly,

It's almost like we're taking judgment and that heavy emotional weight that really pulls at the steering wheel,

Placing it to the side,

Clearing off the windshield to see very clearly,

Is there a mountain in front of me?

Is there a lot of gravel on the road?

How am I going to move forward understanding this is what's in front of me?

Clear vision.

That helps you to make the right choice.

So you really get to choose how to respond to move forward,

Instead of feeling like you're being shoved by some of your old patterns,

That reaction,

The automatic knee-jerk reactions that can be really strong.

Discernment helps us to step away from that and get a little bit of space to choose intentionally,

And that almost always steers us in a better direction.

Okay,

Without discernment,

There's a lot of confusion.

We are trying to see how to steer forward,

But it's like somebody smeared Vaseline all over the windshield,

And it is incredibly hard to figure out where do I steer,

This way or that way,

I can't tell,

Because I don't have that clear vision of my life.

So a lot of these practices are about wiping away what is clouding our vision so that we can see clearly.

Now in this process,

Something that we talked about last week that really has some good carryover so we can kind of refine our relationship here,

Is the two wings of the bird,

Abhyasa and viragya.

And you can just think of that as effort and ease.

And discernment helps us figure out where do I put my effort,

Knowing what is in your sphere of control,

Steering your effort in that direction.

Very often,

We can get stuck in these patterns that I call fighting reality.

If you've ever had something difficult happen in your life,

And your brain just fixates on it shouldn't be like this,

It shouldn't be like this,

This isn't the way that it was supposed to go,

That wasn't supposed to happen,

It is your brain fighting reality,

And it is so draining.

So through lots of different practices,

We start to move back into that space of really seeing things as they are,

Even when that is painful,

Even when that is not the way that we wanted things to be,

It's coming to that place of,

You might call it radical acceptance,

Seeing life exactly as it is.

And then with that clear vision,

You can then figure out,

Okay,

This is the landscape in front of me,

Where am I going to decide to put my effort?

Where is it going to be useful and effective?

Because fighting reality is a very draining way to direct your energy.

We've all had that experience,

I know,

I find my brain doing that very regularly.

So taking back that control to steer where your energy is going,

And then the second part of that is the letting go,

The viragya,

The non-attachment to the outcome,

How challenging that can be to put effort in the direction that you want to go,

But then to also have that open hand of saying,

I'm not going to grasp and white knuckle my way to try to make a particular thing happen.

I'm going to leave that space for things to evolve.

That can be so challenging,

But also a bit freeing,

Right?

Coming back to viveka as this means to end suffering,

Letting go of that resistance of the way that things are happening.

So very important to understand,

Because sometimes the brain can go in a different direction.

This is not passive resignation.

This is not like,

Well,

Then I'm going to give up.

That's the opposite of what we're working on here.

So watch for that,

Because sometimes there can be a really deep pattern,

Especially in our society today of over-efforting,

This like rigid experience of effort.

And then if it doesn't go exactly the way that you want,

Give up,

Throw it out.

It's done.

It didn't work,

Right?

That's such a narrow path that is very often not going to work out the way that we want it to.

So many of these concepts that we work on in this series are about expansion,

Of giving yourself more room,

Giving a little bit more space around the experiences that you're having in your life,

Seeing what that feels like.

Okay,

So that's a little guidance from yoga philosophy.

Let's look at psychology.

So where is this rooted in psychology?

There is this concept called locus of control.

You can think about it as like the center point of how you steer your life.

And it can kind of fall into these two categories.

There's a lot of gray area in between,

Of course.

But to simplify the concept,

If you have an internal locus of control,

You believe that you have self-agency,

That you can make choices,

That you can build some pieces of your life.

Now,

If you have an external locus of control,

You tend to feel that things aren't controlled externally,

You know,

Maybe by your family,

Maybe by the government,

Like all of these different systems around you create the experience of your life and you don't have the ability to shape it.

Okay,

So two very different experiences of where control exists.

In reality,

It is a mixture.

It truly is both.

We have control of certain things.

Some things are created by the systems that we exist in,

Absolutely.

But if we get too fixated on the things that we cannot control,

It is disempowering.

It really takes the wind out of our sails and we'll start to disengage with life because it feels like,

What's the point?

So there are these concepts in psychology.

Learned helplessness is something that can come up if somebody puts a ton of effort into things and just constantly has these brick walls in front of them.

Eventually,

They're going to stop putting effort to protect themselves.

It's a very protective pattern,

Learned helplessness.

It can also lead to an experience of freeze or shutdown or the emotional experience of just feeling despair.

So when we stay focused on those things that have been problems,

That have been failures,

Where things have not worked out the way that we wanted to,

Especially if we have that rigid white knuckle grip on what we wanted the outcome to be,

It can really be disheartening.

So we go in that direction of saying,

Okay,

How do we make this a little bit more expansive?

How do we find the room around the edges?

We know that when we focus on the things that are within our control,

It lowers the experience of anxiety and depression.

It results in people wanting to persevere more,

Even when things are very difficult.

They will continue to try and to try to find that way around the obstacle.

I always think of my friend Debbie who says,

There is always a workaround.

She always says that and she's a person who has done some things.

She says,

There is always a workaround.

That is perseverance.

It also results in improved stress coping and improved emotional regulation.

We don't fall into that vortex of negativity.

That starts to get really heavy and downwardly focused.

So it's staying engaged with choice and action.

But it is this clear understanding.

Yes,

Some things are absolutely out of my control.

And I see that and I acknowledge that.

And so here's our yes,

And there are things that I can choose,

Even small things in my day to day life.

Let me put energy toward the places where I have choice.

That is empowering.

That is uplifting.

And it helps to feed that sense of perseverance that this is difficult,

But there is always a workaround.

Thank you,

Debbie.

Okay,

So as a side note here,

Internal locus of control is not a pathway towards self-blame.

So watch for that pattern.

If there's a lot of heavy negative self-assessment,

Sometimes this movement toward focusing on what you can control and what you can choose becomes an experience of looking back at your life and going,

Oh,

That was my fault.

Oh,

I did a terrible job at that,

Right?

Looking back with that really heavy emotional charge is almost always not constructive.

Looking back,

And we're going to talk about healthy ways of self-reflecting very soon.

Looking back to learn,

Looking back to inform our choices moving forward,

Helpful,

Constructive,

Absolutely needs to be part of this process.

So just be aware that that might come up.

Here's a graphic that I have in the virtual studio that you can look at in a little bit more detail.

But it's really just a couple pieces of understanding what is in my control,

The boundaries that I create,

My own actions,

The goals that I set for myself,

Where I direct my energy,

How I speak to myself and others.

When I think about that before I speak,

That can be in my control.

Things that are outside of my control,

Like what other people think of me,

Their opinions,

Other people's choices,

The outcomes of my actions,

Not always in my control.

So it's understanding these two spheres exist and they interact with each other.

If we stay focused on the things that are not in our control for too long,

It's really draining.

We go through this process of redirecting.

Where is my control?

How do I use that to find my action step forward,

Even if it's the tiniest step that builds resilience?

Okay,

So as we look at how self-agency shows up in our day-to-day life,

This is a very important reminder.

You know,

As we talk about resilience,

It doesn't mean being strong all the time or like putting on a brave face,

Even when you feel like you're falling apart.

It is not playing this role.

And actually,

When we're truly resilient,

It means that sometimes we can let ourselves fall to pieces.

That is part of being human.

Sometimes things just shatter us,

But we don't stay there.

We pull ourselves back together.

We soothe.

We work on the process of healing the things that were hurt and finding a way forward.

That's what really builds resilience.

It's going through the ups and the downs,

Not pretending that the downs don't exist.

And when we go through that,

It builds trust.

We know that we don't have to avoid the problems.

We know that we don't have to avoid the difficulty because we have the tools to navigate it.

We can go right through it.

Okay,

So it's trusting that even when things are uncertain or something that you've never experienced before,

You'll figure it out.

I trust myself to figure it out.

Patterns to watch for in your life.

When you feel really stuck and your brain starts to tell you things like,

It's never going to change,

It's always going to be like this,

Wave that red flag.

That is not helpful,

Constructive thinking.

When you start to blame your external circumstances for the way that your life is,

Again,

We're And that is going to feed that experience of being stuck or feeling stuck,

Complaining a lot,

Always outwardly focused.

All of these things are patterns that disempower us,

That take away that sense of energy,

That sense of influence.

So be really aware when you see that going on in your brain,

In your energy,

You can step back and go,

Oh,

Okay,

These are not helpful patterns.

These are not constructive patterns.

How can I shift my focus and my energy toward things that are in my control?

Even in tiny ways that can be such a big shift when you're going through a difficult experience.

One of the things you can ask yourself,

Here's a really nice self-inquiry question,

Is where in my life right now do I have more choices than I've recognized or acknowledged?

Sometimes we don't want to look at them because we know it's going to be hard to do.

So we kind of tell ourselves,

No,

That's not in my control.

As a little bit of avoidance from doing the hard thing.

We all do that sometimes.

But part of discernment is clearing that windshield,

Looking at it clearly and saying,

I have some difficult terrain in front of me.

It's not going to be fun or easy,

But I know this is the path that I need to be on.

Let me move forward.

So when things feel hard,

Asking yourself,

Where is my choice?

Even if it's a small,

Small thing.

Even if it's just the relationship of how you are engaging with the difficult experience in your life.

Even if it's just saying,

You know what?

This circumstance in my life is so challenging right now.

I can offer myself internal reassurance.

I can speak kindly to myself as I navigate this difficulty.

And maybe that's the thing that's within your control.

Okay,

So that's self-agency,

This skill that we are constantly strengthening,

The ability to direct our energy toward what we can control.

We're not ignoring the things that are out of our control.

We're absolutely looking at them clearly.

But we're also recognizing that putting our energy in that direction is not going to be fruitful.

What can I work toward right now?

What am I trying to build?

Let me focus on that.

That's how we move forward.