Adore Yoga Blog

“You’re never happy,” my father said to my grumpy 8 year old self. He’d spent all morning painting a wooden toy box for me, only to be told that the colours weren’t right. 

My father was frequently exasperated by my childish ingratitude. Nothing anybody did for me was good enough, I always wanted more (“give you an inch and you’ll take a mile” was another phrase that was frequently directed at me).  

As I grew older, I became increasingly contrary and took great pleasure in scandalising teachers at my conservative high school by taking a radical position on everything from school uniform regulations to the dogma of our religious studies class.

There was nothing about the world that didn’t need changing and nothing about my life that couldn’t be improved. I was the anti-Pollyanna, the opposite of that fictional paragon of childhood who could find a reason to be glad about absolutely anything.

Finding fault with the world (and oneself) is a perennial adolescent indulgence, but I never seemed to grow out of it.

I first learned about Samtosha, Patanjali’s second Niyama, while studying to become a yoga teacher. Samtosha means contentment and Desikachar’s description of the benefits of applying this principle is compelling:

“The result of contentment is total happiness. The happiness we get from acquiring passions is only temporary. We need to find new ones and acquire them to sustain this sort of happiness. There is no end to it. But true contentment, leading to total happiness and bliss, is in a class by itself. ”

It certainly seemed like a skill worth cultivating, but I was at a loss as to how to make myself contented. As with my first encounter with yoga, when it helped me to recover from an undergraduate melt-down, it took a crisis to teach me one of the most important lessons of yoga.

Soon after graduating as a yoga teacher, I fell pregnant with my first baby, Ruby. I was determined to have a ‘yogic’ pregnancy and birth and that meant daily yoga, meditation, Ayurvedic food and a wholly natural home birth. Everything went well until the labour itself, a 36 hour marathon of pain. Rather than compromise my ideals and go to the hospital I stayed at home and toughed it out, a decision that left my ideals in tact, but my body in tatters.

The combination of exhaustion and adjusting to life as a new mother proved overwhelming and when my partner gave me a post-natal depression check list from beyondblue.com.au, I ticked all but two of the criteria.

As a yoga teacher, I knew how effective yoga was at treating depression and anxiety – I’d even completed an assignment on the subject as a teacher trainee.  But there were no specialist yoga classes in my neighbourhood and I wasn’t up to doing a regular class. I went back to my study notes on yoga for depression, searching for practical ideas to help me move away from the fear and claustrophobia that had gripped me.

I cobbled together a personal practice, combining gentle movements with some yoga breathing exercises. I diligently did my daily practice and while it did bring some relief, I still felt helpless and desperately unhappy. 

One morning while feeding Ruby, I started to cry uncontrollably. Why was I feeling this way? I had everything that anyone could wish for. How could I be so ungrateful? I wanted to talk to somebody, but my depression made me feel insular and unable to communicate. I decided to put my feelings down on paper and ‘write it out’, so when Ruby had finally fallen asleep, I turned on the computer and opened a new document called “Things I’m grateful for”.

At first it was hard. I found it impossible to feel good about anything at all. Then I typed “Ruby.” Of course I was grateful for my perfect, healthy baby. Then I typed “Kevin,” recognising the unstinting support and love he provided. As I looked at those two words on the page, I realised that I didn’t have to make myself feel ‘good’ about anything, I simply had to acknowledge gratitude for the people and things around me. 

I began to type more quickly, acknowledging my parents, friends and students. I looked around me and understood how lucky I was to have a comfortable home in a safe, peaceful and beautiful country. Friends, family, home, the hibiscus in the garden, the food in the fridge. The list of things to be grateful for grew longer and longer until the baby started crying and it was time to stop. As I turned off the computer, I promised myself that I would add at least one item per day to my list of things to be grateful for.   

Some days it was easy to fulfil that promise – Ruby slept well, the sky was blue and friends looked in to see how I was. Other days, when the baby howled all night, bad weather kept us in the house and I felt lonely and isolated, I had to read every single item on my gratitude list several times over before I could dredge up a single extra thing to be thankful for.

But the discipline of going back to the list every day made a difference. Like a regular yoga or meditation practice, the simple conscious, ongoing effort gradually changed how I felt. I began to spontaneously experience gratitude in every day life and was less susceptible to knock backs. I felt positive and more resilient. 

I still use the gratitude list now; it’s the perfect antidote to self pity. Before having children, I often gained extraordinary insight into my own good fortune through overseas travel. There’s nothing like a trip to a Mumbai slum to put your petty worries into perspective. I don’t travel so much these days so the gratitude list is an important reminder of how lucky I am and why I have so many reasons to be cheerful.