A funny thing happened as I was writing my resolutions to stick on the fridge…I started realizing how much grief I’m carrying around for the last year. For what I’ve lost, for what others have lost, and of course for all the senselessly, needlessly lost lives. It’s very sad.
Being a 41-year-old man from South London, I literally can’t tell you the last time I cried. Occasionally some water will come out of my eyes during a movie. But men, I think, are particularly bad at processing grief: a cultural phenomenon, I’m sure, not a biological one. Culture says we don’t get to process our feelings of grief with deep rounds of heaving sobs. And I think that’s unhealthy.
Don’t worry. I’m not proposing that we all have a cuddle for me to get out my feelings.
But I do enjoy talking with other chaps about our feelings, sometimes. Particularly the tough stuff, over a cup of tea. It’s always remarkable to me how many fellas have been darkly depressed and even suicidal, for example. Particularly when on the surface, it might look like they’re doing very well. Just sharing those difficult feelings in the same space can be a really positive thing for the world, I think. Without necessarily judging what a person should do about them.
As a bloke, yoga is a particularly good way for me to make room for difficult emotions. And to process and move through them in a healthy way. I have this dream of a yoga studio attached to a restaurant where I serve nice, nourishing food and run “talking cure” clinics for men to just get together in a circle to talk about their feelings, to process our grief together and move forward more purposefully. In the meantime, I’m making do with phone calls with old friends.
I guess I’m just sticking a flag in the ground, that it’s alright for us to have some difficult feelings about 2020. That doesn’t make us weak or anything. And it’s better to acknowledge them than stuff them down where they’ll stew up more bad stuff into the future.
Anybody got any sage? Because I’m ready for the next year already!
M
p.s. I’m teaching on Tuesday night at 6 p.m. at Stanton Street as usual. And you can check out my archive of free yoga classes here!
