How can practicing meditation and yoga can help to relieve the stress of caregiving?
A. Yoga gives you the actual practical tools for how to be in the largeness of all things, suffering or grace. A caregiver is in that state every moment, we’re talking life and death issues. It’s amazing because you can have all the greatest philosophies and rhetoric in the world, but what a person who your giving care to needs and wants is your presence. Yoga gives you the ability to be present without burning out, without feeling depleted or deprived, it lets you tap into infinite resources so that you can truly be present without depleting yourself at all. As a caregiver, burn out can come from creating an identity around who you think you’re supposed to be, who you think that person wants you to be and what you think the whole situation needs or demands. What yoga gives you is the ability to gracefully be present. Q. How does “having presence” help us to feel better? A. A lot of the problem is that caregivers can feel that they don’t have the strength to do it. Caregiving is a huge
