In Conversation with Yael Flusberg

How has what you’ve learned about resiliency sustained you during the pandemic?

This past year has underscored how resiliency is the twin flame of trauma. It’s possible to have one without the other, but it seems much more likely that they go hand-in-hand. 

We’ve known for a long time that some stress is good for us. Stress literally creates everything from pearls (as sand or a parasite irritates the oyster’s tissues) to our muscular-skeletal system (as biomechanical stress and loading reshape our bodies) to mountains (as geologic plates collide). 

Most of us have been taught that while our physiological and nervous systems are well adapted to acute stress, chronic stress is quite different. Chronic or toxic stress doesn’t let up; it goes beyond a bad incident. 

And what wrecks havoc on our individual lives, our capacity to form meaningful relationships with others and engage in collective action is our own learned and habitual responses that get us stuck inside the stress cycle—in states of overwhelm and depression or hypervigilance and overexertion.   

I fell in love with another definition of resiliency early on in the pandemic, one by Sir Michael Rutter, a child psychiatrist based in London. He says, “Resilience is an interactive process that involves exposure to toxic stress that has a relatively positive outcome for the individual facing it.” 

Embedded in this definition is the idea that it is adversity itself that sparks our inherent resilience. In other words, we need adversity—personal or collective—to show us what we’re made of. In this way, we can see resilience as less about individual superior functioning, but rather an ordinary adaptation given the right resources. 

This especially makes sense to me on another level. Since the bulk of trauma occurs within relationships, we heal and come back into resiliency in relationship to others rather than in isolation.   

As a yoga therapist, my teaching goes beyond poses and movements. Especially in a time of physical distancing, I’ve been fortunate that my work means creating space for people to understand and actively transform their relationship to their bodies, nervous systems, behaviors and beliefs. 

We’re still in the middle of this most challenging chapter of our collective journeys —in part because the pandemic has surfaced deeper issues that were made invisible by the trancelike state many Americans found themselves in for decades. So it might be premature to begin listing the silver linings. 

I feel grateful that my work in the outer world obliges me to continually engage in my own inner work, most importantly to question my perceptions and interpretations. The pandemic—and the stimulus checks we’ve received— have given me the opportunity to do just that. 

How have your writing practices and/or teaching changed in the past year? 

For the first couple of months of the pandemic, a Colorado-based poetry teacher and friend, Marj Hahne, offered free daily workshops. She is an especially gifted online facilitator and really helped me see how community can be had even over a screen. Going to these classes also made me realize that I needed both structure and community to jump-start what had been a very rusty writing practice. 

Like many people, I lost about half my work I had done pre-pandemic—including a weekly class that combined mindfulness and writing that I adored! The first few months I was hustling to find new ways to bring income into my family. I’ve always found that financial anxiety and creative expression do not mix. As I got my groove back, I was able to return to a more regular practice of journaling. Zoom workshops have truly been a lifesaver. 

I’m now participating in a yearlong trauma-informed writing circle. I don’t have a writing project or any goals around my writing yet—but I do trust immensely in the process and know that inspiration follows presence. So I continue to show up on a regular basis for my writing. 

How has the pandemic changed you personally, in ways either small or profound? 

I have always had a restless, wandering soul. Being forced to stay in place, coupled with participating in a yearlong psychotherapeutic training called “Compassionate Inquiry” created by Dr. Gabor Mate, I am more aware of my patterns of perception and behavior. Everything has been amplified by the pandemic. 

Before, I loved having a mix of work that necessitated both quiet days of home-based work and non-stop days out in the world to facilitate both ongoing classes and special workshops and training with a vast array of populations from yoga teachers to early childhood workers to activists to physicians to development professionals to high school teachers to lawyers to cultural creatives. I loved the novelty of working with new groups. 

I love dipping my hands in different honey jars, the ever-present possibility of cross-pollination. With the exception of working in person with those at the end-of-life, all of my work is now virtual, and it’s much more limited in scope. Still, we’re in the middle of the chapter, and I am old enough to know better than predict how I’ll be different by the end.