Sunday, May 22, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Friday, May 6, 2011
Low Cost Yoga
Yorkville Studio @ 1629 York Ave @ 86th Street, New York, NY 10028 | Hot Yoga @ 132 E 85th off Lexington Ave
Yogi's Choice - Pay What You Can
New York Yoga, sensitive to the needs of those out of work or who cannot afford membership, has created Yogi’s Choice, as we believe yoga should be available to everyone.
Yogi’s choosing the studio’s new donation-based classes will receive instruction from a revolving roster of some the studio’s top teachers and fresh new faces including recent graduates of New York Yoga’s Yoga Alliance-certified teacher training program. Yogi’s Choice classes range from 60 to 90 minutes in length, and are offered at various times during the week at both studios Monday through Saturday. All donation-based classes are at an intermediate level, meaning they are perfect for all types of yogis from beginners to advanced-level practitioners.
Suggested Donation is $15 but Pay What You Can!
See You On The Mat
| York Studio | Hot Studio |
|---|---|
| Monday 8:25a – 9:25a | Monday 1:30 - 2:30p |
| Tuesday 3:05-4:20p | Tuesday 1:30p – 2:30p |
| Wednesday 8:25a – 9:25a | Wednesday 1:30p – 2:30p |
| Friday 3:05p – 4:20p | Thursday 1:30p – 2:30p |
| Saturday 2:50p – 4:05p | Friday 12:00p – 1:00p |
| Saturday 1:00p – 2:30p |
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Concrete Tornadoes: September 11 and Emotional First Aid
Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 41, No. 2, Summer 2002 ( 2002)
Concrete Tornadoes
LYNN SOMERSTEIN, PhD, RYT
ABSTRACT: I present the case of a Hispanic woman whose physical illness parallels the massive
destruction that she witnessed at the World Trade Center. I talk about my own feelings of terror
and how I try to deal with my private ghosts as I sit afraid and wanting to help. I mention the
longings we all have for powerful parents who can protect us and keep us safe.
KEY WORDS: parallel process; traumatized therapist and client; parental figures.
On September 11th only a few individual firefighters, police and building
managers had the knowledge and the luck they needed to protect themselves
or anybody else. The lines between helper and victim burned away as we
entered the whirlwind together and struggled to emerge from its maw. We
hungered for a strong benevolent parental figure to protect us in a time of
danger and help us tolerate and soothe feelings of guilt, grief, terror and
aggression.
“I was prepared to die,” one woman said to me. So was I, so I did the
important things, helping myself as I helped others, and told my friends and
families that I loved them. Work and loving connections were my solace. Action
defended my psyche and defined my soul.
As I write this in the beginnings of December we no longer feel like we’re
travelling near the crossroads of death, but many people continue to suffer as
old traumatic reactions are elicited by the horror of “America’s New War.” It’s
our task to hold onto ourselves as we join together to hold others.
“All those people, there were hardly any bodies. Where did they go? But
that’s not the worst. There is something else. This is linked to something
else,” said a woman I will call Norma. I met Norma in an emergency therapy
group that I helped lead. The group met in their workplace a few blocks away
from the necrotic rubble that had once been the World Trade Center. Members
of the group had been caught in the maelstrom and did not know what to
do or where to go. They wanted to be told, to feel held by someone who could
give directions, but the authorities were no help because they didn’t know
what to do either.
“Clear the area!” the policeman announced.
“Where should I go?”
“I don’t know. Just leave.” I can imagine how frightened the policemen were
themselves as they ordered people away and remained at their posts themselves.
In our work in the group we tried to comfort ourselves and to create new
bonds to hold one another and ourselves and to weave personal meanings in
the midst of violent meaninglessness. Norma broke down and ran away as
members of her group spoke about papers exploding from the WTC, papers,
memos and printed e-mail all splattered and covered with human blood. Two
of Norma’s friends followed her and I followed them, all of us rushing down
the hall together, symbolically recreating escape from the events of September
the 11th. I edged into the discussion, which was in Spanish, by asking for
“Un vaso de agua, por favor, dos, two glasses of water,” one for myself and one
for Norma. I followed Norma to a private office to speak to her alone.
Norma’s desk was placed catty-corner to a beautiful picture window that
looks out on the shiny New York Harbor, with no indication of the massive
destruction nearby. Norma is an attractive woman in her forties with long
dark hair that she wears pushed back. She had on a stylish embroidered
sweater set and a classic black skirt, but her worn shoes betrayed her financial
problems. She and her husband emigrated from a Latin American country
about twenty years ago. We spoke together in a mixture of Spanish and
English.
“Should I cry?” Norma asked me. “Do you cry?”
“Yes. I cry.” I hoped to help Norma feel less guilty and more connected to
her emotional life by giving her a piece of my own life as an example.
Norma described the events that she had witnessed. She had been leaving
the subway station near the WTC just as the world exploded. Norma has
epilepsy and has endured this condition in silent shame for her whole life.
Her attacks feel like explosions inside of herself. The chaos and doom that
she observed outside doubled the chaos and doom that she feels inside. She
was terrified that she would have an attack in the middle of this toxic whirlpool.
She saw people jump through fire to their deaths, watched the buildings
fall and walked through the black wind that rose up like a whirlwind from
the Underworld. Norma faced these stone tornadoes alone.
After a time everyone was told to walk north. Norma kept on walking in a
massive emigration of thousands of people until she met her husband on 23rd
Street and Third Avenue where he was waiting for her. “He saved me,” she
said, “I kept my eyes closed the whole time.” Of course, she really saved herself.
She is attached to the myth of a powerful parental figure that will care
for her and protect her from internal threats and outside threats as well.
Norma “kept her eyes closed the whole time”; she maintained denial in an
attempt to shut out the noxious vortex. She is a traditional woman and she
has cultural as well as personal reasons that prevent her from seeing that it
was her own actions that saved her. I think that she cannot face her power
and helplessness and the unbearable aloneness that is part of being in this
universe. She can’t face her own aggression either, just as I sometimes feel
shaken by my strength and vulnerability. We are all part of this upside down,
fulminating world together.
Norma is a strong, proud woman who accepts neither help nor pity. She has
survived, and does not believe that she deserves to feel anything other than
gratitude, but she is terrified, sorrowful and incensed. Norma believes that
only the dead are permitted to have strong feelings of rage, fear and sorrow.
Perhaps powerful feelings are safe only with the dead. She feels her own
feelings might cause an epileptic attack and kill her. She feels unworthy; she
should be punished for surviving and for leaving others behind. I wonder
about the parallels between her two trips north, the first from South America
to the US, and the second just now away from southern Manhattan and towards
Flushing, Queens.
“What should I do?” Norma said. “I pray. Do you pray?”
“Yes.” I said. Sometimes when I light the Shabbat candles, meditate or do
yoga I manage to act with intention. Sometimes when I listen to people in
therapy I hear them with devotion. That’s prayer. I usually take comfort that
everything is temporary, but then again, this temporary includes me and
right now I feel a little too impermanent and scared. That’s another kind of
prayer.
I thought how ironic it was that I was working hard to help Norma feel
that we had something in common so that she might talk to me. I spoke to
her in Spanish; I talked about the neighborhood that she lives in and the
number 7-subway line she takes to work. I know her route very well. Norma
thought we were completely different while I struggled to show Norma how
our lives touched, and inside I knew how much the same we were. We were
both in shock about the New York troubles, and that called up other horrible
memories and inspired paranoid thinking. Norma was scared to leave her
apartment. I was nearly as jumpy as I had been when I was a kid. I thought
about my emotional and physical emigration from my parents, who offered
me little protection and often put me in danger.
I wondered yet again, as I wonder over and over when I work with clients,
how I come to sit in the analyst’s chair. What makes me different? The work
that I did and do with my analysts, my supervisors, my teachers, my colleagues
is part of it. My unconscious has earned a Ph.D. My pens and paintbrushes
in my hands show me how to value and pursue my feelings, thoughts
and ideas.
Meditation and art and psychoanalysis have helped make space between
my experience and myself so I have a little wriggle room to look things over
and maybe play with them if I feel comfortable. Then I take that space with
me when I sit with clients and we talk and breathe together. Some days I
breathe in rhythm with their agony.
Later that day, after I had said good-by to Norma, I walked to the WTC site
with a friend so that we could see the destruction again. We could not believe
that this had happened; we were still in denial. I imagined a morass of lost,
severed souls, each trying desperately to realign dismembered parts of the
self with the shape of the world, in order to reenter the pool. The catastrophic
and savage deaths at the WTC seemed to me to imbue the entire area with
the stench of terror and meaningless violence. Where was the Great Pool?
Amid the acrid and sweet smells of burning people and burning matter I
detected the scent of incense, and followed my nose to a street corner where
Buddhist priests had set up an altar where they prayed and chanted to help
undo the terrible confusion and allay the fears of all those poor trapped, incinerated
souls. I imagined the dead following the incense, stroked and
smoothed by its scent, helped to find a doorway out of the Hell Realm.
Today I am back in my office with my clients. We are working together to
center ourselves and to make meaning so that we can include the world’s
awful pain and within it our own particular and private griefs. The ground
shakes beneath our feet.
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