I always welcome change, but I can honestly say, my body is affected by it, all the same.
My younger son moved home fom college last week. There is always chaos in that transition. First, the laundry room becomes a huge dumping ground for 7 loads of wash which takes more than a week to clean. Then there is the friends coming and going at all hours of the day and night. And then there is the raids on the refrigerator. The television in the “man cave” lulls me to sleep at night. And the front door outdoor light is on for half the night, shining into my bedroom.
Of course, this is transition time: that time before he actually gets a job and starts working, like the rest of us. Once he gets a schedule, things will settle down considerably.
But I have noticed that with this change, I have started getting my hot flashes again. It started off last week with just a couple during the week, but last night I had at least 3-4 episodes while sleeping.
One thing I have gotten really good at, in the past few years, is identifying my dysfunctions early and starting to work on ways to minimize or get rid of them all together. A few years ago, with hot flashes, I would have gone to the doctor for a pill to take, and I would probably not have identified stress as the contributor to them. I didn’t understand that there was an underlying cause for whatever was going on in my body.
My acupuncture therapist was the one who helped me to understand what was making my body unhealthy. When I started seeing her while I was in a ulcerative colitis flareup, she explained to me that this was an auto immune disease that was probably caused by years of not properly digesting my food, which is a common trait for school teachers who only have ten minutes to eat lunch and no time to digest their food. And we really didn’t get a handle on my colitis until we learned that it was triggered by my allergies, which is also an auto immune disease. Once we started treating my allergies, my colitis went away.
When I started having many hot flashes last fall, while planning a trip to Europe, my acupuncture therapist told me that hot flashes are often triggered by stress, which affects our hormones. she started treating me for the hot flashes, and within three weeks, they were gone. Of course, the stress decreased as well, as we traveled along Great Britain with no worries.
In yoga, we also spend some time listening to our bodies. We check in to be sure everything is feeling all right, or identify any issues or concerns that we might have been ignoring. We pay attention to these areas in class. We are gentle with them, working with them, and supporting them lovingly, as we move from pose to pose. Through yoga, we are able to offer ease to areas that are causing pain. We accept that this is the way things are, for now at least. We know that things can change again.
So when we have transition and change in our lives, we recognize it and the affects on our bodies and minds, but we also realize that life won’t be like this forever. That helps us to relax a bit, through the change. “This, too, shall pass” is our mantra. We take a deep breath and move forward.