Dear Happy Friends,

Welcome to November.

As I walked around the neighborhood this morning (1st November), I was surprised how many people were out taking down their Halloween decorations. I started pondering about why we are so keen to take down Halloween decorations, but seem to have no rush to take down Christmas Holiday Decorations. 

I started to wonder whether it was the nature of the decorations. Some Halloween decorations are certainly scary, even morbid. Keeping skeletons, severed arms, werewolves and vampires in your yard at Thanksgiving would be inappropriate and totally out of context. They would likely cause fright to children and cause some neighbor complaints. There would be none of the joy of Halloween left. In contrast, I have seen many inflatable Santas and Christmas lights well into mid January.

My thoughts turned to the fact we can be a lot like this as humans in our life journey. We often pack away the bad things in our life as fast as we can. Tuck them away in metaphoric boxes, even when we have not had enough time to process them. Trauma, negativity, grief, sadness are all speedily boxed away inside us, almost as soon as they happen. We try not to think about them at all and don't work through them. We chose not to share them with others or even with ourselves.

In contrast, we are not hesitant to share the moments of joy and success and dwell in them as long as possible. We post happy photos on social media, we decorate our outside selves with the appearance of joy and just like the Holiday decorations which stay up as long as possible we encourage our outside selves to be colorful and seem happy as long as possible. This is undoubtedly not a bad thing to be positive and share joy but the hiding and storing of unresolved feelings can often cause self harm. 

Why can't we show this side of us ? 

Partly because of social norms. The social norms which seem to dictate that no one wants to be around the person who is constantly depressed or speaks of their worst moments. The social norm that prefers the friend who is cheerful and untroubled.     

But constantly being the 'Christmas decorations' when we really feel like the 'Halloween ones' is not healthy. The good news is yoga can help.