As last summer began, I paid the final month’s rent on a lease on a building that had been empty since March of 2020 because of the pandemic, and watched the yoga studio I had started from nothing and expanded into two locations, fade again into nothing. Back pain that had been intensifying over a few years had gotten to the point where it affected everything I did, from demoing yoga poses for my virtual classes to dragging around hundred-gallon stock tanks that needed to be set up for recovering turtles.
Then came a day, mid-summer, when I sat down on the ground for my morning ritual of feeding the squirrels and meditation, and I couldn’t stand up again. The pain was too intense. And I sat and cried and got bit by mosquitoes, grieving what felt like the loss of a practice that had kept me grounded through eighteen miserable months of pandemic and pain and change.
Who I am
But I suppose I should back up a bit. My name is Debbie Philp. I started teaching yoga fifteen years ago as I slipped out of the corporate world, and founded and ran, until last year, True North Yoga in Schroon Lake and later also Keene Valley. Over the years I taught a few thousand yoga classes and trained thirty other yoga teachers, who brought yoga into their communities. It felt like good work to be doing.
I opened True North Yoga the day after my family moved to Schroon Lake from New Jersey, following my parents and other family members who had become full time residents of the town we had vacationed in for decades. I loved living surrounded by woods and the lake, lots of nature.
Once I was established as a yoga teacher, I began to explore other alternative healing modalities and found Shamanic Reiki, a blend of shamanic practices and Reiki energy work. Shamanic Reiki emphasizes intuition and experience over adherence to learned techniques and systems of practice, which suited someone like me, who never really liked rules all that much. As I moved through six levels of training as a practitioner and then a teacher, we were encouraged to connect with nature above all else. Yes! More nature.
The deepening connection to nature, a desire to give back to the Earth, and a nudge from my helping spirits led to my becoming licensed as a wildlife rehabilitator a few years ago. I specialize in caring for injured turtles, but have seen my share of orphaned baby squirrels, opossums, chipmunks, and even one very grumpy pigeon.
To layer a bit more on, early in 2020, when the pandemic was still something that was happening in other, far away places, I enrolled in the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary program. I honestly can’t tell you why or what I was expecting. It was suggested to me and just sounded right at the time.
I was a part of a UU congregation in New Jersey and a member of their active CUUPS chapter. My spiritual identity since my early twenties has been one flavor or another of neo-Paganism, but since I was somewhat isolated geographically from like-minded folks after moving, I wasn’t feeling connected to anything really. Then the first year of seminary rattled my whole sense of what I believed and where I fit, and sent me into that summer break with the ongoing pandemic, increasing physical pain, and all that change, without anything firm underneath me upon which to stand.
From the Ground Up
I instruct yoga pose alignment from the ground up. Where do you put the parts of your body that touch the ground or the floor? In a standing pose, it’s the feet that create the foundation for the pose. If your feet aren’t underneath you in the right place and activated to create a feeling of rootedness, the rest of your body is going to collapse. Sometimes literally, as anyone who has ever fallen out of a yoga pose knows, which is everyone at some point in their practice.
When I translate that off the mat, I call it getting real with yourself. I talk to people about how important it is to have practices that ground you in the real world before you take off into trying to manifest big vision stuff. It can be hard for those of us who enjoy the mystical and floaty feelings that come with practices like yoga and Reiki to want to deal with stuff like personal finances and time management, but those are very necessary foundational things to look at. There are some practices, however, that can help us feel very present in the here and now without being overly mundane, and they all involve being connected to the Earth and nature.
Take Care of Your Body
I’m probably going to annoy some light workers by saying this, but I don’t believe that everything that happens to your physical body has a fix in energy practices. Allopathic medicine has its place even in a holistic approach to healing. So when I finally dragged myself up off the ground with an assist from the split rail fence, I made an appointment with my doctor.
While I knew I needed a doctor, I also went into the appointment prepared to advocate for complimentary practices to help with the pain. Luckily, that wasn’t necessary. We started with x-rays and a round of steroids intended to give my nervous system a break. Then I was referred to a chiropractor and an acupuncturist.
The x-rays showed what I suspected the issue to be: my mild scoliosis had gotten further out of whack, which was both pulling muscles and pinching nerves. The steroids did, in fact, reduce the pain to a more manageable level. Then the chiropractor started to put things back where they belonged.
Chiropractors treat neuromuscular disorders by manually adjusting your spine. You might have heard chiropractic described as getting your back cracked. It’s true that your spine might make a popping or cracking sound with an adjustment. It sounds worse than it feels, though, and made a big difference for me. After a few adjustments I could get up off the ground again.
The acupuncturist took over the pain management part of my treatment. You probably know that acupuncture involves inserting very thin needles into strategic places in your body. It’s part of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the needles are placed along energy channels called meridians that are believed to control the flow of life force energy, or chi, in your body. While it is nice to have my chi balanced, contemporary acupuncturists have learned that many of those points stimulate nerves, muscles, or connective tissues, which can improve your body’s own painkilling mechanisms. How ever it works, acupuncture relieved my pain. And the hour I spent on the acupuncturist’s comfortable table was the most relaxing of my week.
I have no doubt that feeling the stress of everything that was going on exacerbated my back pain. I also have no doubt that I would have needed to address the root cause, the spinal misalignment, at some point, but I don’t think I would have learned such an exquisite lesson about self-care if it had happened another way.
Take Care of Your Emotions
Physical needs met, I needed some emotional care. I believe mental health care is the most overlooked form of self-care. It was reported that, during the pandemic, 40 percent of adults had symptoms of anxiety or depression. Social isolation, reduction or loss of income, grief from losing loved ones, fear of catching the virus or bringing it to at-risk family members – these can all bring on anxiety or depression on their own. For two years we’ve been piling them on.
I felt it too. Good things were happening: my youngest graduated from high school, my first grandbaby was on the way, but I had also seen the demise of a business I had spent 12 years building, my wildlife rehabilitation work was the busiest it ever was and with that came many heartbreaking losses, I was experiencing chronic pain, and even the good things had pandemic downsides – my son had completed his senior year remotely, and my grandson would be born without me there in the hospital to support my daughter and to welcome him into the world. Combined with the general pandemic stuff, it would have been hard to not feel depressed.
It’s not easy to choose a therapist. I could go to a doctor or practitioner with my sore back and not have to reveal the depths of my emotions. But sitting with a stranger and telling them all the bad stuff going on and crying in front of them – that’s pretty uncomfortable. And when you add in some outside-the-box spiritual thinking and a tendency to choose squirrels over people as meditation partners, well, they’ve got to be the right therapist.
At the lowest of the low I gave in and scrolled through the list of names of therapists that were in my insurance network, looking for the right one, reading their bios, staring at their pictures, waiting for an intuitive hit that said “this one.” The hit did come about three pages in, and I called and left a message with a shaky voice. As scary as it was, it was the best thing I could have done.
What I have learned from my therapy experience, which is ongoing, is that care for situational depression and anxiety is about learning coping strategies and having someone who will just listen. My sessions are some counseling, some cheerleading, and sometimes even an opportunity for me to share what I have discovered to be working for me, which might be things that will benefit her other clients. I really appreciate the collaborative relationship we have.
Take Care of Your Spirit
I started with physically getting my feet back underneath me, then worked through the emotional trauma so I could stand taller, and then I needed to address the conundrum of my spirituality. I began my second year of seminary excited about what we would be focusing on, like writing ceremonies and services, but completely unable to articulate what my spiritual beliefs were. I was struggling with big questions: Who or what is God? Which column of religious tradition do I fit under? What box do I check?
My religious upbringing was Methodist, and my brother is a Methodist minister. He is currently serving a church in Kingston, right there by Woodstock, home of my favorite tie-dye and incense shops. It’s funny, actually, that in our twenties our spiritual paths went in very different directions but then met up again thirty years later. In fact, my brother was the one who sent me looking for interfaith seminaries after doing some community work with interfaith ministers and thinking they were “Deb’s kind of people.”
I look back on the childhood that we shared on the south shore of Long Island to see how that divergence of paths happened. My dad loved his boat and thought church was important in the winter, but insisted on the first warm Sunday that if God had wanted him to sit in church He wouldn’t have put the ocean there. So we got a mix of Sunday School and playing on beaches that were only accessible by water, where the wildlife was generally unbothered and therefore plentiful. There were summer nights when smacks of luminous jellyfish – yes, smack is one of the collective nouns for jellyfish, and my favorite – when smacks of luminous jellyfish came into the bay and we swam through them. We pet horseshoe crabs and shared lunch with shorebirds and were taught to delight in and be respectful of all the wild beings. And somehow when it came time to choose a path I felt the magic in nature and my brother found it in religious texts and now we both do both.
But last summer? I wasn’t feeling the magic, just despair and a sense of being completely untethered. Once I was physically and emotionally ready, I gave it some thought and remembered to approach my spiritual alignment just like I aligned a yoga pose – from the ground up.
First, I got back to the squirrels. As soon as my back had healed enough to be able to get up and down, I went back to the split log I had taken from the woodpile as a makeshift meditation bench and sat. At first the squirrels didn’t come – I had abandoned them for a few months and they had moved on, I guess – but after a couple of weeks they were back, ready to receive a morning snack and keep me company as I worked my way through some practices that helped me find the magic again.
The first, and probably the one I work with the most, is mindfulness. I learned mindfulness meditation from yoga teacher Cindy Lee, who combines Tibetan Buddhist practices with yoga. She taught me that, rather than shutting down my connection to the outside world while I sat, to instead open to all of my senses and be present to everything. In the movie Peaceful Warrior, based on Dan Millman’s book, Socrates, played so well by Nick Nolte, tries to teach Dan mindfulness and tells him “There’s always something going on.” And that is what my morning meditation practice, outside with the squirrels and the birds and whoever else shows up, is about. Just sitting, opening all of my senses to what is happening in nature around me.
That’s what all the wild beings are doing, you know. The squirrel who is noshing on a peanut is listening to the calls from the trees and watching for changes in the shadows and feeling the vibrations of heavier beings walking on the earth.
We humans can do that too. We just usually aren’t mindfully present and often think there is nothing going on. But like the Socrates character said, there is always something going on. Even in the most urban environments, there are bugs and birds and mice and others waiting to be discovered.
The next practice I brought back into regular rotation was Metta, the Buddhist loving kindness meditation. I find that, especially in times when I feel isolated, either physically or spiritually, loving kindness brings me back to a sense of connectedness. The way I practice is with simple phrases which I can easily remember – May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, may you live with ease. I send loving kindness to myself first, then someone I love, then someone who is challenging to even like, which got a workout during the last administration, then to someone neutral, bringing to mind a person I had encountered during my day-to-day life but didn’t know, really. Finally, I send loving kindness out through the threads of the web of life to all beings. When I do that I say “we” because I am a part of the interconnected web. The practice invites us to recognize the divinity we all share, which I see as love in its purest form, unaffected by the traumas of living, and the essence of all beings.
There were a couple of practices from the Jewish tradition that I learned about in the first year of seminary that felt right for my reinvigorated spiritual work. The first was hitbodedut (hit-bod-e-det), or spontaneous personal prayer. When I first tried it out, I called it “talking to God.” The idea is to be alone and speak to God about whatever is on your mind. I’m not doing the practice justice in the way I am defining it, but I found it resonated with me when I tried it for the month I was learning about Judaism.
When I brought it back, however, I was struggling with who God was and didn’t feel like speaking to a deity I wasn’t relating to. But one day, sitting outside being as mindful as I could while a red squirrel dug through my coat pocket for the last peanut in there, I started talking to…I don’t know, nature? I just started telling the trees and the rocks and the squirrels and anyone out there who was within earshot all that was on my mind and heart. It felt good just to express what I needed to, without judgement, but it also triggered a months-long contemplation about who I was talking to.
The other practice that came from studying Judaism in first year was awe. Awe is reverential wonder, the practice of seeing God in everything, discovering hidden layers of holiness, to recognize the relationships between all beings and God. Funny, because I’ve been doing some reading about ecology and it is also about those relationships, and one thing I concluded from digging into science a bit is that a lot of wonder and awe comes out of studying things. This is particularly true for me with nature, especially the animal beings.
Shamanic Reiki offered me other practices to work with to get my feet back underneath my spirituality, including channeling energy from the Earth to the cosmos and the cosmos to the Earth, expanding my energetic boundary – call it my aura if you’d like – to incorporate all that exists, and, a simple favorite – making offerings to the Earth for everything received. I fed the birds as an offering, and made sure to say thank you when I filled the feeders.
Saving Turtles
But the greatest offering I made was being of service to the Earth and, when all the other practices helped me stand up again, I remembered why I do wildlife rehabilitation. My seminary dean asked me how taking care of injured turtles relates to my ministry. There is definitely that offering, giving back to the Earth for all I am given and reciprocating for all the careless things humans do to harm other beings, but when I looked at all of the practices that were part of my self-care I realized that I desire to share the wonder – the awe – I feel when I am sitting outside, being mindful, connected. I want you to experience the pure love that is the essence of all beings and to love nature on that level.
And I want to save all the turtles. Not just the broken turtles that make their way into my rehab, but all the turtles. And their habitats. And the wolves. And their lands. I want to save us, all of us, all the beings. All the amazing biodiversity that exists everywhere, that “something” that is always going on.
Our seventh principle gets us part of the way there. Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Respect is good, to keep us from doing intentional harm, and recognizing we are a part of that interdependent web tunes us in to the ripple effects of our actions.
But the rest of the way is love. I want you to truly love existence in the deepest, most spiritual sense you can imagine. Because if you love that deeply, you will fight with all you have to save our wonderful planet and every being on it.
And it is there that I found my spiritual footing. And with self-care I stood up, physically, emotionally, and spiritually ready.
And now comes the hard work.