Winter Ice Fear of Falling and Yoga

by Baxter

Road to Giverny in Winter by Claude Monet

Despite the fact that I have lived in California near the temperate ocean for the last 14 years, I still vividly remember the scary, slippery winter days when I lived in the Midwest in icy conditions. And I remember slipping and falling on more than one occasion. Perhaps because I was younger at the time, I avoided significant injury (except for that one ice-skating party my freshman year in college that started at midnight, when I fell while showing off and broke my arm—was there beer involved?). And as I’ve watch the national weather reports the last few weeks, I have seen icy conditions in the forecasts for a good part of the country. For many adults as they age, especially if they are not very physically active, icy conditions are enough to keep ‘em indoors for days on end, until the ice abates. Seems a shame! I wonder if there is any benefit yoga could provide to boost the confidence of those in such chilling circumstances?

As you probably have already guessed, yoga can definitely help on many levels. It can restore your confidence in your physical abilities, as you get regular with a practice geared toward the outdoor icy reality.  It can improve your strength if you have not been working your body out as of late, especially in the legs. Your standing balance can get better with targeted work in certain yoga poses. Yoga can improve your chances of getting up off the ground if you happen to go down, something we have written about in my post Transferring and Yoga Wisdom from Jane Fonda as “transfer” ability. And as many of my students have reported back after the fact, yoga can even can help you to “fall better.” Finally, if you are stressing out about falling on the ice before you even leave the house, some focused easy meditations can keep you mentally and physically relaxed as well as improving your concentration for when you step out the door and into that new, shifting reality of the winter wonderland (see Stress Eating and Healthy Eating Meditation Practice—you could use a different mantra, such as "healthy walking," for the second meditation).

Tell me more, you say! Let’s first talk about the strength, flexibility and agility that you need in icy situations. First off, you need strength and agility to feel your feet are under you and grounded to the earth, even if they might start to slip. And if you begin to slip, you’d like the strength, flexibility and agility to self-correct if possible. In modern yoga, practicing many of the basic standing poses, such as Warrior 1 and 2 (Virabradrasana 1 and 2), Triangle pose (Trikonasana), Extended Side Angle pose (Parsvakonasana), Standing Backbend, Wide-Legged Standing Forward Bend (Prasarita Padottanasana) to name a few, will allow you to start to address the strength and flexibility aspects beautifully.

Extended Side Angle Pose

Doing some simple Sun Salutations and Moon Salutations will crank up your agility skills by not only moving your body dynamically, but also making bending down to the ground and being on all fours familiar, should you still lose your balance on the ice. You could almost think of it as practice falling!

Poses with two bent knee poses, such as Powerful pose (Utkatasana) and Squat or Garland pose (Malasana), done both dynamically—in and out of it with the breath—and dropping as low as possible and holding the pose, are great poses to prepare you for a slip.  How so? Well, at the first feeling of a slip on ice, if you remember to bend your knees and not lock them, you can start to “sit down” toward the ground as opposed to tipping over like a falling tree. Sitting down is much less impactful (less injurious, perhaps) on the body than tipping over. And if you do find yourself sitting down from a slippery fall, you’ll have the strength, from having practiced these squatting shaped poses, to more quickly and successfully right yourself. In other words, you will be good at transferring down and up again. (See Featured Pose: Powerful Pose for detailed instructions on how to do the pose.)

Powerful Pose

And if you really want to advance things and improve your balance, you can start adding in one-legged yoga poses to the mix in case you slip and one foot happens to stay on the icy earth. Tree pose (Vrksasana), King Dancer (Natarajasana), Warrior 3 (Virabradrasana 3), Half Moon (Arda Chandrasana), and Standing Hand-to-Foot pose (Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana) will take you in all different directions with your legs and your spine, so again, you may feel more familiar with suddenly being in those positions in slick conditions. (See Featured Pose: Warrior 3 for three different ways to practice Warrior 3.)

Warrior 3 Pose, Easy Version

I can also assure you that my students who have fallen and lived to tell the tale (with minimal injury) reported back that they have the definite impression that their regular home practice and class attendance contributed to their ability to “fall well.” They reported that their reaction time seemed faster and that they had the ability to choose how and where to fall. And often they began to fall and “caught themselves” before actually going all the way down—save!

Now, I can hear some of you saying that this is all fine and dandy, but what I am I to do today? It’s icy out there now and I have been sitting on my butt for years. Well, there is no time like now, especially if you are not going outside today anyway, to start your new yoga home practice today. And the way things are playing out this winter, there is likely to be more ice in the weeks and months to come, so your future pay-offs will be huge by practicing one icy day at a time, beginning now. Go!

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Email and the OCD Fear of Saying the Wrong Thing

Email was like a miracle. I went to graduate school in 1993, and one of the perks was an email address. Since making phone calls filled me with dread, email was like getting released from jail, or pardoned. I loved its asynchronous nature whereby I could send a message and the other person would read it without my having to witness it, or respond to it in real time, and vice versa, when I received an email I could spend as much time as I needed to get my response right.

Of course, my OCD loved email, because I could delay actions that caused me great anxiety, like spontaneous speaking, but slowly I began to realize that email had its own set of anxieties. Email didn't erase my compulsion to making sure I didn't say the wrong thing, and most likely strengthened my fear of making a mistake. Writing email consumed a lot of time, because the using the "Send" command began to feel full of trepidation. Once I sent my email, I couldn't take it back. Pieces of messages would pop into my head, as I retraced all the nuances. I dreaded this reconstructive process, because it aggravated all my fears of saying something wrong, every time I listened to my own message in my head.

Responding to email was exhausting. The written word has a permanent quality, an inflexibility, especially in email where there isn't tone of voice(I certainly didn't know anything about "smileys") or facial expression, and I interpreted emails as if they were a holy text. What does this mean? What should I say in response? Will this correspondent think ill of me? But I chose email to communicate 90% of the time(7% consisted of real paper mail, which in a pre-computer era, involved lots of rewriting, and discarding whole pages if I made a mistake in expression, and the other 3% was on the phone under duress).

I chose email even when I started to realize that in some cases I would save a lot of agonizing by calling the person, but even though I could see that the email would turn into a convoluted dance of "Did I say the write thing? Have they gotten it yet? Why aren't they responding? I really need to know the answer to this question. Am I going to have to call, and then they will think I'm weird for emailing and then calling?" I started fearing opening my email, because of anticipating negative responses to my messages, and the longer I left a message unopened, the worse the anxiety became, until I assumed that it must be dangerous to open my emails, or why would I be so scared?

One of the exposures I did in OCD therapy was opening messages right away, especially ones that I was afraid of. I gritted my teeth the whole time, but I'd seen how my anxiety escalated the longer I waited. I also practiced writing "inadequate" responses--short, quick, unrehearsed. Which, actually is what email is--somewhere between formal letters and phone calls. I'm never going to be a person who enjoys talking on the phone(unlike my friend J. who enjoys phone calls so much that even if calling was less efficient than looking up info on a website, would still call, just to talk to people), and like Miss Manners I do agree that the phone ringing is not a "command" to pick it up--I can decide when to take calls--but I need to keep an eye on the OCD which will find a million ways to avoid saying the "wrong thing" as if we can definitively ensure that, as much as we might want to.

Related Posts:
Telephone Phobia: Fear of Making Phone Calls
Ritualizing in my Head: Retracing
Verbatims