Guest Blog: The Serenity Prayer Revisited

I am honoured and excited to share the teachings of the many incredible yogis and life enhancing leaders. My first guest, and dearest friend, Joani Mortenson and I have a long history of deep friendship and co-Teaching/Training.  This week she offers her beautiful insights this week on the wisdom and balance. Joani is an ERYT 500 Teacher and Trainer, 350 Hour Certificate in Ayurvedic Science, has a Masters in Social Work, a Masters in Dance and Movement Therapy,  and is currently studying Herbalism. Her work is integrative, inspired and deeply nuanced with her brilliant compassion and intellect.
Big love
​Jay

---

Exploring and Orienting Towards Wisdom & Balance: Serenity Now
​By Joani Mortenson

I am excited and honoured to be guest blogging for Jay’s Wisdom Wednesdays. 
 
Allow me to begin by sharing the two concepts that underwrite my offering:  
1)Wisdom: I operationalize this term to mean the dynamic nexus of knowledge and experience. I do not mean “culmination” because that suggests a landing-place, an outcome, a closed container. Rather, I believe that wisdom, like ourselves, is always evolving, expanding and growing. Each new experience, each turn of the wheel, brings us to a new understanding. Thus wisdom, like our breath, is not done until we are done. I believe this construction of wisdom lends well to the cultivation of such qualities as humility, curiousity and a growth-oriented mind-set. Wisdom is moving. 
2)Balance: I am exploring balance in the same way that I lead it when teaching yoga classes. For me, balance is not a destination, rather it is a conversation that our bodies are having with time and space. Likewise, psychological balance, emotional balance and spiritual balance are ever evolving and constantly shifting with the tides of life: effected by seasons, daily rhythms, and environmental influences. I have stopped thinking of balance as something to achieve, as a place to finally arrive at, and instead have come to appreciate balance as something to be shaped moment to moment, movement to movement. Balance is a path. 
 
I have been thinking about balance a lot lately, precisely because I have been feeling ‘out-of-balance’. When I am unbalanced, I am especially vulnerable to emotional dysregulation and if I am dysregulated long enough, that will often trigger disordered eating. Having been through some major changes in the past year, I have put on a lot of weight. I am carrying extra body weight that reflects psychological weight because I have trained myself through years of practice to respond to stress by leaning into food as comfort, as distraction and as an attempt to unconsciously control what is happening around me rather than processing it. Ha! Control is such an illusion. 
 
Wisdom and balance are arts of becoming. This blog is my attempt to, as Mark Moss says, “show my receipts”.  
 
In an act of self-kindness and self-advocacy, when I am in awareness of feeling unbalanced, I am practicing meeting that feeling with compassion and strategy, rather than passively being swept by the waves. One of my strategies is to ask myself two questions: 

1)Who do I want to be in this moment?
2)How do I want to feel?

These questions have led me to creating a mantra for balancing the need to eat for function with another need: to shed grief-weight without imposing pain and suffering through dieting or being cruel to myself. My logic is that if dysregulation leads to mindless eating, then what would help me to achieve more regulation, more balance. 
 
I started by chanting the Serenity prayer while walking my dogs. The Serenity Prayer was written by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1951. It is a beloved prayer of 12 Step groups, and I hoped because it is used to help folks deal with the demons of addictions, that it would serve me in working with unconscious behaviours that draw me out of balance, like binge-eating. 
 
I offer the familiar first stanza or excerpt from the original prayer:
 
God, Grant me 
The serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
The courage to change the things I can, 
And the wisdom to know the difference. 
 
I found this prayer useful to remind myself of what aspects of my life that I have direct influence over. The prayer also helps me to consciously decide that what is beyond me, what I can choose to shed like a snake-skin. However, it was not quite enough to be in direct alignment with my values or my current interests. I decided to personalize the prayer by adding two new verses that feel more individualized and inclusive. As a pantheist, I am drawn to see God in nature and all things, in multiple expressions, so I decided to add verses that widened the God-centric version of the original prayer. 
 
Goddess, Grant me Empathy towards my own embodiment, 
The desire to discern my own needs, 
And the capacity to communicate my needs with myself and others. 
 
I strategize that the antidote to any act of mindlessness, like I have been doing with food, is to bring in awareness, acknowledgement and action. In order to process the grief I am feeling, I choose to become aware of my shifting needs, and be more skilled at communicating those needs with myself and others. For this self-nurturing behaviour, I call on the Goddess, the feminine aspect of the Divine in order to be fully in my own body, assessing my needs and being honest about that. The Goddess helps me nurture my own boundaries and achieve balance through self-trust. 
 
Finally, I wanted to practice the Shamanic arts I have been learning by invoking an even wider frame of the Divine; to include nature spirits (Devas) and appropriate to my grief, my ancestors. 
 
Devas and Ancestors 
Guide me towards 
The awe and wonder of my everyday lived experience, 
Deepen my connection to the more than human world, 
And enrich my every relationship. 
In awareness, acknowledgement and gratitude. 
 
Elizabeth Gilbert says “You must participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings”. To this, I shout enthusiastically with a fist-pumping “Heck Yea!” I am participating in my own wisdom formation as I explore and orient to this season of my life that is marked by grief and change. 
 
Wisdom is the daughter of Balance. For me, Balance is the Mother of all practices. Balance happens when I am attentive, attuned and being accountable for my experience by moving towards who I want to be and how I want to feel in each moment. Wisdom is birthed when midwifed by practices that nurture resourceful skills and honour personal experience. 
 
Metta for your own journey. 
 
Heartfully, 
@joanimortenson