When you hear the news of a horrific tragedy, you immediately turn within and imagine what it feels like for all those involved. You think about how everyone must have been feeling – happy to be out in the sunniest and warmest days of the year after that brutally long and cold winter, simply enjoying the day – and how you were doing the very same thing at the very same hour.
You think about the victims, their loved ones, and all of the inconceivable fear and pain.
Your mind is occupied by these thoughts for days, as you grapple for meaning, of which there is none. As you contemplate your own place in the world, which seems so insignificant.
Everything is amplified when the tragedy takes place so close to your own home. A place you’ve been to dozens of times before, a place you’d never dream of housing such horror.
And eventually, just like a virus that invades your system, it flushes out of you, becoming less and less rampant. You resume your daily routine, less and less inhibited by the consuming thoughts and unanswerable questions.
Does this sound like you? It sounds like me.
When I heard about the van attack in Toronto and learned by the hour how horrific the details were and how many lives were taken, I had physiological reactions: increased heart rate, upset stomach, cold hands, lump in throat.
Like a moth to a flame or cold hands cradling a hot drink, I am drawn, enveloped by this surge to feel, to acknowledge, and to express.
Maybe that’s why I find yoga so helpful – it forces me to address and acknowledge how I’m feeling, as everything comes out on the mat: frustration, anger, sadness, balance, calmness.
I know it serves nothing to dwell, but I guess you could say I often do – the senselessness and unpredictability of it all being the most difficult to look past.
Not being able to comprehend things or have answers looks hollow. Perhaps my feelings and emotions are ways of filling that void because I know it’s something that’s genuine and real, something that comes from a good place in contrast to something that came from a very bad place.
But being shaken does not mean being broken.