Nina Zolotow - Yoga for Times of Change : Practices and Meditations for Moving Through Stress, Anxiety, Grief, and Life’s Transitions

Dearly beloved

We are gathered here today

To get through this thing called life

Prince Rogers Nelson, from Lets Go Crazy

After weeks of oppressive gray clouds and unending drizzle, Cambridge, England, was beautiful that summer day. The sky was a glorious blue, Midsummer Common was a glorious green, and the tidy flowerbeds were in full bloom. My one-year-old daughter was bouncing up and down in her British pushchair, smiling and laughing as she pointed a chubby finger at the baby ducks and the family of swans that were swimming slowly down the River Cam. I, on the other hand, had tears streaming down my face and didnt care who saw me crying in public. Id had another sleepless night, and no matter what I didgoing for a run when my husband got home, hiring a sitter so I could go to a weekly yoga class, taking a break with a night out with my new Canadian friendsmy insomnia was relentless and my weight was continuing to drop.

Moving to England when I was five months pregnant had been hard for me. Id left behind a full-time job as a technical writer and documentation manager and a circle of friends in Boston for life as a resident alien housewife in a picturesque but very provincial university town where I knew not a single person and where everyone I met, whether through the university or in the town, saw me only as a young mum. But recently my situation had become even more challenging because my husband, Brad, was looking for a permanent job and was talking about moving somewhere else newagainand to places where I had no wish to liveinstead of returning to California, where wed both grown up. I felt trapped because while I didnt want to split up our family, I also didnt want to move somewhere else where I felt like I didnt belong. Then my father had a life-changing stroke, and my parents, who had been living for the last year in London, moved back to Los Angeles to figure out what was next for them. Thats when the insomnia started.

When I finally went to see my family doctor, as my daughter sat at our feet playing with my wallet and keys he said, Im not surprised. His office was across the street from Cambridge University, so hed seen the same situation many timeswife of a postdoctoral fellow or graduate student, baby in a foreign country, blah, blah, blah. The bottom line was that I was having a nervous breakdown, and he ultimately diagnosed me with agitated depression.

Thanks to a combination of therapy and medication, I recovered from my breakdown and my marriage survived. But I was left with so many questions: Why had this happened to me? I wasnt against change and uncertainty, so why was I having such a hard time dealing with it now, for the first time? Was there anything I could do to prevent this all from happening again? And who was I now when I had turned out to be much more vulnerable that I had ever imagined?

That was the beginning of my personal journey to understand changehow to adapt to it and how to accept it. I tried more therapy, I read books about emotional illness, I took up swimming, and I studied creative writing. It wasnt until years later that I learned that something I had already been doing for exerciseyogaheld the answers I was looking for. I didnt find those answers, though, by just going to weekly yoga classes. It was only when I started studying yoga in depth, practicing yoga regularly at home, taking special workshops with a variety of teachers, and reading both modern and ancient books on yoga that I learned how I could use yoga to help myself and then later on to help others as well. Thats why Im writing this book now, with the aim of making it as easy as possible for you to learnall in one placeall the wonderful things I now know about how yoga can help during times of change.

To deepen my understanding of both human nature and why yoga is so powerful for helping us adapt to and accept change, I decided to branch out in my studies, delving into human physiology, brain science, psychology, and even human evolution. I didnt have a curriculum to follow, so I created my own. For a number of years, I read many books and articles, and even consulted directly with various scientific experts. I was fascinated to see that many contemporary scientific discoveries support the original observations about human nature that the ancient yogis made, and this background was very helpful to me in understanding the why and the how of yoga, along with the what. So Im including some of that background here in this book, along with all the information about yoga.