When I first wrote my book ‘Peaceful Hearts’, I titled it ‘Wild Hearts’.
It came from the idea that wild hearts can’t be broken, even if they feel that way. Someone later looked at my book and was very adamant that hearts can’t be broken. I’m pretty sure she was too young to have been in love, or to be a heart surgeon or a trauma councilor.
Is it possible that our hearts are broken over and over and then mended again and again? Maybe this is the uniquely human experience. Like the Japanese broken pottery Kintsugi tradition, put back together with gold. Not only is the vessel stronger, but it becomes more beautiful with every golden seam.
Could our broken hearted moments be opportunities for metaphorical golden repair? Our opportunity for light and strength to fuse us back together?
To be able to celebrate the repairs, we need to practice the repair process. As we do so, we can only get better at it. Regulating ourselves back to a peaceful state is a skill we can be constantly honing.
I used to spend more time and energy on my disregulation. I’d think more dis regulating thoughts, worry, blame, concentrate on what was wrong, why it was wrong, the unfairness, the woe. I had long explanations, and if I didn’t, I would spend days wondering where I went wrong and generally get myself to feel worse and worse. I thought this would help me to feel better, I also had the notion that if I figured it out, I would never feel depressed again. I truly believed that there was a fix and I had to find it. I could then stop making giant life errors and be in a constant state of peace and happiness. I read a lot of self help books that promised exactly that.
I wrote Peaceful Hearts because I lived with toddlers. They tend to run through all their emotions over and over all day long. Some amount of time would be spent helping them regulate. I saw my daughter-in-law, a yoga teacher, remind her little ones to breathe when they were upset. This helped us all. Everyone in the room would start paying attention to our own inhales and exhales.
I wished I knew about breathing when I was younger. I learned the power of breath in my yoga classes, and had the ideal to spread this magical breathing tool to everyone, yogi or not, by creating a simple bedtime story.
It’s interesting how it’s expected that babies and young children melt down, then as we get older, emotion is something we expect should only be positive. It is a sign of maturity to control our behaviors, I support that, but I think it’s less helpful to expect older children and adults to never have negative emotions. We all do. Is it helpful to pretend we don’t or shouldn’t?
My new thinking is that getting knocked out of balance by emotion is normal and will keep happening for as long as we are alive. People, situations, weather, traffic, every day there are potential triggers. Every moment we meet the world in a different mood.
Better to accept dis-regulation and then start moving toward a more comfortable state as soon as possible. This makes way more sense to me now. Peaceful Hearts is a book about regulating the self through less positive emotional states by breathing consciously. It was meant to be read over and over. I didn’t know the terms regulate and dis regulate when I wrote it, but it works. Its what I wrote it for. Same with my new book Beatrix Butterfly. Butterfly-breathing is another breathing technique for regulation.
Peace Kit 