CONSOLATIONS FOR THE MODERN PHOENIX
Our Blog
Letters to the Modern Phoenix
Our Belief
To us, life is a garden- a place to grow things and to grow ourselves. Anyone who has ever attempted to cultivate a plant knows that it comes with unique challenges.
Some of these challenges have solutions- actions in the short-term or long-term that can change an outcome, while others don’t; these are the ones we at the yogarchy care about- the challenges in the garden of life that we have to “manage and bear”.
We bring no solutions but we believe that “managing” does not have to be completely miserable. A quick online search will show you many good sources and suggestions to help you and we will toss in our thoughts too, in time.
But first, let us figure out if you belong here.
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Step 1: You Must Have A Garden
This part is surely the easiest because you don’t have to do anything other than be born to get this. Your life, a result of your parents, is an inherited, garden with challenges. So, check.
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Step 2: You Must Have Mild-to-No Success Growing a Curiosity Tree
For some curiosity is easy. If being open within and to your challenges comes naturally to you, thanks for visiting but this is not for you. Kindly navigate to the close tab ‘X’ icon on your browser for this tab and click it.
For our new curiosity gardeners, the yogarchy included, this is one of the toughest plant species to nurture to maturity and you know it. You keep trying with little to no success because a very tiny but sure part of you believes that doing nothing is not really an option.
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Step 3: You Preferred to Fight Change Until Recently
If you surrender gladly and energetically to transformation, once again navigate to your friendly ‘close tab ‘x’ icon and click it.
Yes friends, there are people who surrender joyfully to being ripped apart by the process of change.
The rest of us fight against it with a fierce devotion. But something changed recently. We don’t fight anymore because we physically cannot. We know we are forever changed and changing and it feels awful, but we do not resist because we are exhausted. Bless our hearts.
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Step 4: You Must Love To Wallow
Yes, that’s true. We encourage wallowing and self-pity at the yogarchy.
Despite well meaning comments like “Don’t feel sorry for yourself ” and “Other people have it worse”, you really wish it was acceptable to wallow and feel sorry for yourself. Wallowing comes naturally to you and you wish it was normal.
Although we DO NOT offer solutions. We do offer suggestions. But, only after genuine comfort with wallowing.
Visit our Wallowing Center to get started on your wallowing journey.
What are Consolations?
Letters of comfort written for the different shades of strength within us.
Who is a Phoenix?
One who is surprised to find himself or herself reemerging after challenges.
How can The Yogarchy help?
Like a comforting book on a bookshelf. We use words to soothe.
Learning to soothe and be soothed is an ongoing process
“That I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from my bookshelf- felt akin to an instance of religious grace.”
Jonathan Franzen
What are Consolations?
First lets talk about wounds. Wounds are healed by the body’s internal natural resources, and when they cannot be, the outside world intervenes. Maybe we visit a doctor. Get some tests run, fill a prescription, or if its mild enough break off a leaf of our aloe plant and harvest its gel.
Think of the aloe gel, how it cools injured skin. Perhaps think about what it is like to take the gel in-between the fingers and smooth it over a healing burn.
The aloe does not cure the wound just like a hug does not fix a hard day. It uses some powerful properties of water and some other slick components to nurture and bind the injury.
Aloe, hugs, words are consolations. They can bind to our emotional and mental wounds, creating a buffer between ourselves and the environment. Giving us a little something to anchor to as our mentality adjusts to and heals around our reality.
Who is a Phoenix?
The phoenix is a popular symbolic bird of strength especially because it perseveres in an effortless type of way. This effortlessness is called destiny. The phoenix is destined to be completely destroyed by fire, turned from its red, yellow feathers to grey dust, yet re-form and rebuild itself, multiple times over its life time.
We are not geneticists so take our words with a grain of salt. But we are going to take a leap in genetics and give destiny a biological equivalent. We will say that the gene that causes the phoenix to burn, is the combustion gene.
For the mythical phoenix, this gene only turns on every 300 to 500 years. Thus, the dramatic burning is rarely witnessed by others, but is a given in the life of the phoenix.
Imagine that the combustion gene begins to turn on every 100 years, then every 50 then every 30, then every decade, then every year, eventually monthly, till it dwindles to burn by the hour.
The phoenix has no choice in the matter. It will be reborn. It will certainly survive- that is not in question. But with no time to rest and live between burns.What would be the state of our fearless bird?
If you have found yourself having to recover quickly only to take a hit again and again and are questioning if your capacity to heal up and stand intact against your unique challenges, or if you find yourself surprised that you are still standing, laughing, being. This is for you. Welcome!
Even the Phoenix needs to be comforted
One should not, in any case, attempt to make a virtue out of one’s limitations.”
― The Unconsoled
Consolations are for the inconsolable
“One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it”
Joyce Carol Oates
How Can The Yogarchy Help?
Remember that we believe in gardens. Lets expand that. We believe in gardens within gardens, consider a garden of different species of basil within a garden of herbs, nested in a garden of vegetables and continues to expand from the specific to the general.
In this way we think that the garden on life contains other gardens: gardens of friendships, gardens of creativity, gardens of physical activity, gardens of mental activity etc. We are co gardeners with you, we are specifically interested in contributing to your garden of words, the words you use to think and and express yourself, the words that describe feelings.
Think of us like the aloe plant- we are neither medical nor mental health practitioners. We are the desert plant growing in your pots. We are the over-the-counter medication not prescription grade so tread carefully.