Welcome to Your Mortality!

by Nina

“New scientific studies allow us to predict who will die in their lifetime.” —Caitlin Doughty

A while back I wrote a post Meeting Death at the Front Door, in which I said I believed that truthfulness (the niyama satya—see The Second Branch of Yoga) will help you face your death and die the way you want to, and will enable you to help your loved ones as they die. Facing death is not usually a fun topic to write about, but considering what I had learned from helping both my parents die, I had decided it was important for me to address the topic.

Notice I said that facing death is not “usually” a fun topic to write about. That’s because yesterday I was delighted to discover that there is a young woman out there, Caitlin Doughty, a mortician by trade, who is not only on a similar mission to encourage people to face death honestly but who is actually using humor to spread the word. I became intrigued by her work when I heard her being interviewed on Fresh Air yesterday about her book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory.

Although she wasn’t exactly cracking jokes during her interview (which I only heard part of), I liked her right away for her straightforwardness: 

“Death is going to happen to you — whether you want it to or not — and you're never going to be completely comfortable with it. But it's an important process, and please consider facing it.”

But Terry Gross mentioned Doughty’s videos and how humorous they were, so I went to her website to check them out. The first one I watched was her welcome video. Wow, she uses such a great mixture of wit, humor, and directness to get her message across—I had no idea that death kills so many people in the US alone. Welcome to Your Mortality! (I'd link to the video on youtube but can't get to it for some reason.) So, in general, I recommend her work, and in her other videos she has a lot of “death answers” for “death questions” that you might also have.

But what does all this have to do with yoga? Well, first of all, we’ve been writing about the klesahs lately, the five afflictions that cause human suffering (see Attachment (Raga) to Our Ideas About Ourselves and Attachment to My Face). One of the klesahs is abhinivesah, which B.K.S. defines in Light on the Yoga Sutras both as “clinging to life” and “fear of death.” So I think the work of someone like Doughty, who is helping to dispel some of the fear around death by answering common “death questions” and encouraging people to face their own mortality, helps us cultivate satya (truthfulness) in the face of abhinivesah (fear of death/clinging to life). 

But really I decided to write about Doughty because of something surprising she said during her Fresh Air interview. After being asked by Terry Gross whether her job as a mortician—and being around so much death—was stressful, she admitted that it was:

"Not only are you dealing with the dead bodies, you're dealing with the incredible sorrow of the families and the fact that they can get very mad at you. ... They're angry that somebody has died and they're looking for somebody to take it out on."

But then she went on to say something like (and I’m quoting from memory now):

"I do take good care of myself. I have a therapist, I do yoga…."

Yes, Doughty is not only practicing satya (truthfulness) to combat abhinivesah (fear of death), but she also does yoga, which I take to mean asana, to support herself in her work. And, of course, we here at YFHA all know how an asana practice—the combination of exercise and time spent focusing on mindful movement, with hopefully, some relaxing practices added into the mix—can help people deal with difficulty and stress and to support them in the important work they have committed to.

You know, I never expected that I would become such a dedicated yoga practitioner. Yoga practice was not even something I chose intentionally—it was just the most convenient exercise class for me at the time. But after I kind of fell into yoga, I slowly began to realize how much it was helping me. And I eventually began to understand that it was exactly this combination of a yogic attitude toward life and an asana practice to fortify my body and my nervous system to help me maintain that attitude that I found so compelling. So here I am, still practicing—and writing about it—after all these years.

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Welcome to the Blogging World Self

Why am I doing this?

Because I need a vehicle to express my migraine experiences. I know I can't be the only person out there who is suffering from constant migraines.

Why am I seeking an outlet on the Internet to journal and write about my migraine experiences?

Because I figure it's "greener" than writing on paper and easier than going to my local hospital support group for headache sufferers.

What is it that I hope to gain from this?

I hope to find other people who live happy, successful, productive lives to help encourage me to keep hoping and striving.

My Story...

I've had migraines for most of my life that I can recall. I remember as a child having these debilitating headaches on one side of my head and not being able to see "normally." When I hit puberty, a doctor suggested that I probably have what are called "migraine" headaches. Until I was about 19, I didn't seek treatment for my headaches; I just called in sick to work, missed school or tried to just tough it out.

From about the age of 20 until last December, (with the exception of some bad months and recovering from a closed head injury) I had about a migraine a month or so - maybe less sometimes. But starting December 18, 2007, I've had a constant daily migraine of varying intensity. It hasn't stopped. I am stuck in a migraine loop. I can't work the job that I had, I can't live the life that I know. I am disabled at 28, but I am exhausted living this painful existance and am going to do all that I can to get on with my life.

Eventually - I would like to look back on this time in my life and think about what a learning opportunity this all was. I also hope that maybe I can help someone else who is suffering from migraines to know that they aren't alone.

So that is my story.

Yoga and Dementia Welcome News

by Nina

A Rainbow at the Dam by Melina Meza

"Dementia Rate Is Found to Drop Sharply, as Forecast”

Now that’s the kind of headline I like to see! Yes, an article in the New York Times this week Dementia Rate Is Found to Drop Sharply, as Forecast announced the results of two different studies that showed that the incidence of dementia—in one case in England and Wales and in the other case in Denmark—was declining. And the reasons for this are very exciting to us here at Yoga for Healthy Aging.

“Yet experts on aging said the studies also confirmed something they had suspected but had had difficulty proving: that dementia rates would fall and mental acuity improve as the population grew healthier and better educated. The incidence of dementia is lower among those better educated, as well as among those who control their blood pressure and cholesterol, possibly because some dementia is caused by ministrokes and other vascular damage. So as populations controlled cardiovascular risk factors better and had more years of schooling, it made sense that the risk of dementia might decrease.”

So what they are saying here is that, along with being better educated, controlling blood pressure and cholesterol can help prevent dementia. And that means yoga can help. Foremost, yoga’s stress management tools can help you keep your blood pressure low. As I discussed in Chronic Stress: An Introduction, living with chronic stress can cause high blood pressure. So practicing stress management (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga and Stress, Your Health and Yoga will help you keep your blood pressure in check as it benefits your health in many other ways. Stress management can also help you maintain a low cholesterol diet by reducing stress eating and giving you more willpower to stay away from high cholesterol foods (see Yoga, Stress and Weight Management and Healthy Eating, Stress and Self Control). Healthy eating is also fostered by mindfulness (see Meditation and Healthy Eating) so if staying away from high-cholesterol foods is a problem for you, a meditation practice may be helpful.

For me, yoga even provides an ongoing education. Yoga philosophy is food for my intellect as well as providing inspiration for living my life with greater equanimity. Why, just this week I learned a lot from Ram’s post Hindu, Hundism and Yoga, and the week before I learned from writing my own post Modern Yoga and Hinduism. So if yoga philosophy and history are of interest to you, a whole world of new knowledge and intellectual stimulation awaits you.

The New York Times quoted Dr. Anderson, of the National Institute on Aging, saying:

“With these two studies, we are beginning to see that more and more of us will have a chance to reach old age cognitively intact, postponing dementia or avoiding it altogether. That is a happy prospect.”

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