A Space to Be, Separate Together (Lockdown Musings)

Safe and Sound (Keep Calm)

Lucy Maresh
“Keep Calm is useless advice unless you have a trained method for self-regulation and addressed your trauma history” (source unknown).

I love both of my “Keep Calm” mugs, but I think I need a third to complete the set.

The red mug is my go-to response – “keep calm and carry on”. What this means for me is: keep busy, keep useful, put on a brave face, ideally a smiling one, in fact keep smiling, keep going, keep doing…

This is COPING. I am a master of this.

So one day I tried the blue mug – “keep calm and do yoga”. It worked a treat. Yoga became a huge part of my ‘coping’ mechanism. I went to classes, got a mat (and then some blocks), bought a book, bought another book, went on a course, went on a retreat, tried another kind of yoga (and many more), enrolled for teacher training, and further training (and many more).

Yoga has kept me out of trouble for a looooong time now (just over twenty years!)

And somewhere along the line I realised I could stop DOING yoga, because it seemed to be ‘doing’ something to me. I was changing. I was starting to experience something which now I simply call ‘being’. I really was actually ‘keeping calm’ (sometimes).

This, I believe, is down to feeling safe and sound within my own body, within my own thoughts, within my own feelings. I feel safe to lie down and let myself ‘just be’. Yoga has been a long, slow process of gradually befriending myself – “warts and all” as they say.

I used to think yoga was the glue that fixed me back together after some difficult times.

Now I credit yoga as the lens through which I saw that I was never really broken. 

So where do I get the black mug?

This week’s resources:

A relaxing yoga class to smooth ruffled feathers, soothe anxiety and create feelings of safety and ease.
Guided relaxation practice for connecting with the body and its potential for healing.

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2 thoughts on “Safe and Sound (Keep Calm)”

  1. An inspiring post, Lucy. Thank you.

    You may already have come across: Never in the history of calming down has anyone ever calmed down because someone said ‘calm down’.

    Warm regards Joyce

    Sent from my iPad

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