Rashadoesyoga

11/03/2024

October + November dump. 📸

Grateful for the little moments of joy, for training, nourishment, good conversations, and the people I get to share those moments with. 🌳🍂💕

07/14/2024

June + July photo dump. ☀️✨

An affirmation that sometimes little moments of happiness add to the total sum of our experience of life. Because happiness is a choice, yes, but it’s also a complex, multifaceted, and a very personal experience. We’re dictated by our moods, our genetics, our environment, our political and economic sphere, our rich (and often dynamic) life experiences, and a complex system of chemicals and neuron firing that goes on every single day. And while we might not always feel in charge of all these mechanisms, we can certainly be intentional in the things we do to bring more fulfillment, authenticity, and joy into our lives.

Here are some of my moments. ✨

02/19/2023

I tried to think about something original as to what keeps bringing me back to the mat. But the truth is, and reflecting back on the past few years, doing Jiujitsu makes me truly happy. And I believe how we feel internally and the level of contentment that we approach life with has a great deal to do with building good habits, keeping us consistent, and making us realize the agency that we play in contributing to our own happiness by actively reflecting on where we are and seeking ways to become more fulfilled in life—on and off the mat.

I always try to approach things with a deeper philosophy by asking myself, how will doing something contribute to the entirety of who I am, where I am right now, where I’d like to get to, and what obstacles and fears will it help me overcome?

Ultimately, Jiujitsu Jiujitsu didn’t make me happy because it’s some sort of a magical pill that fixed everything. In fact, it is a slow, frustrating process of getting frustrated and annoyed at myself for still having the same mental anxieties that I had before training.

But it allowed me to see that a great deal of our unhappiness lies in our own hands, and that at the end of the day, it’s up to us to take agency—or to let go of—whatever isn’t working.

It made me happier by allowing me new ways to cope with my anxieties by working with myself, instead of fighting myself, and failing to see all my progress in the process.

What mental blocks does Jiujitsu bring in you? 🧠🥋

📷:

12/05/2022

Watching everyone put on their best performance this weekend at ’s annual while cheering on for them was a privilege. I can’t think of any other sport where people want to tear each other down but accept victory or defeat with a hug.

When you’re surrounded with people who want to do better (and want you to do better), you become accountable to do better, regardless of your limitations or circumstances. This is a rare gift, I’d say.

One year of Jiujitsu has taught me too many great lessons. Some were physical, but way too many were mental, such as consistency, discipline, and showing up when we don’t want to. A cliché thing to say, but oftentimes the simplest lessons are the ones we need to learn and embody the most. I’d say the biggest lesson Jiujitsu taught me is to breathe under stress and not to be defined by any limiting labels or excuses I have in my mind about myself, an area I know I struggle with gravely. But even with my persisting anxiety, social anxiety, and emotional irritability, I’ve learned to push through things, show up, and roll. These emotions will always be out there and test me consistently, but so what?

I’m very grateful to have a healthy body that can keep putting in the work, and for this community that offers more than just a cool sport where you get to roll in your pijamas. 🥋

Thank you .ahmed for suggesting that I’d give it a go almost four years ago during yoga. 🤗

09/10/2021

“I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.” ~ Matt Haig

In the United States alone, su***de is the 10th leading cause of death, with approximately 47, 511 Americans who died by su***de in 2019 and 1.38 million su***de attempts.

08/19/2021

Seeking love doesn’t come with an instruction manual, and neither does understanding human beings, let alone people in a whole new city, in a whole new culture, and in the midst of a global pandemic where we've grown awkward about what we should and shouldn't be doing around others.

I learned that the best we could do in any situation, really, is to understand ourselves better—our wants, our needs, our desires, our fantasies, our vulnerabilities, our longings, our weaknesses, our melancholy, our history, and our boundaries—so that we are able to communicate those to the people we’re interested in investing our time with.

As I untangle my own trauma, I realize that as much as we must remember the details of what happened to us so that we can honour and own our stories; however, it is more important to keep refining the details of those stories by adding new chapters, characters, flavours, themes, settings, colours, plots, and lessons.

What often keeps us stuck in our own narrative isn’t our incompetency to re-write a new story, but rather our deep-seated belief that our woundedness, disconnection, isolation, shame, and self-loathing are the only narratives we deserve.

As Marianne Williamson said: “It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

From my latest piece on Elephant Journal

I learned that shutting down my desire for love will help me move forward with life. A part of me despised the overly-attached, hungry for love, and sporadic self.

07/21/2021

How dare she? Who the f*uck does she think she is?

She is the black sheep, or the ugly duckling, as referred to in analytical psychology, of her family, and her culture, among her friend and her tribe.

Who she was didn’t make much of a difference in romantic relationships either. She was still, for the most part, the same person, despite her failed attempts to mask who she is, shrink herself, impersonate someone else’s character, and contort in any way possible to fit in—to receive breadcrumbs of love and admiration.

My latest on Elephant Journal

But for the wild, “difficult woman,” we must savour the sharp, dull aches of being other than who we truly are before we establish our own rules to play by.

07/12/2021

Further, by feeling we have the right to criticize and direct our uneducated hatred toward someone for having caused their national team to lose, what are we teaching our young boys and girls about defeat?
Do we want to teach them that we should never experience anything in life unless we’re always willing to 100 percent win? And if not, even if we’re gifted at something, that we shouldn't even bother trying? Or that if we’re great at what we do but succumbed under the pressure of performing, which is 99 precent of all professional athletes, that we shouldn’t channel our vulnerability and learn how to be great athletes despite our fears?
In the recent mental health outbreak of the tennis champion, Naomi Osaka, and the 90s pop star, Britney Spears, it is evident that our culture is festered with people who look at celebrities as some sort of Gods and not as normal human beings who, for the most part, experience normal human emotions that we all go through.
What is it with our unhealthy love-hate relationship toward celebrities? Is it our jealousy of their success that triggers what we will never be able to do? Is it our need to put successful people on a God-like pedestal that we can’t stand seeing them fail? Is it our hunger to have a daddy or a mommy figure whom we could look up to, but easily become subjects of our wrath if, God forbid, they ever fail to fulfil our own expectations of them?

My latest on Elephant Journal

Yesterday, I happened to watch the final game between England and Italy in the Euro Cup 2020 Championship.

07/05/2021

My latest piece on Elephant Journal about defying labeling, othering, and stereotypes. May it be of benefit:

"Beyond my skin color and cheeky eyes that gave some clues to parts of my identity, it did not matter that I was someone’s daughter, friend, or, maybe even, girlfriend. All that mattered was how people saw me based on their own projection of what I could be."

I was seen as the “Asian,” which was often associated with labels like

07/04/2021

The great philosopher (who was also my early introduction to the world of spirituality), once said, “This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”

Every spiritual text, whether theological, philosophical, or Abrahamic spoke about suffering. As if the early philosophers and so called prophets knew that pain and suffering are part of the fabric we call life.

In a lot of cases, the symptoms of what we call mental health crisis is reflected in an inability to enrage with the world, oftentimes, because it is just too painful to bear.

Modern psychology research explains that as evolved species, we are influenced by our genetics, environment, and relationships—whether with other humans or nature or the universe in its expansiveness.

And perhaps, and at least for me, the source of what we call “pain” comes from our inability to engage with the world, for whatever reason, but also from our focus on fear, pain, and disconnection.

In reality, it we want to engage with the world and be open and vulnerable, we automatically subject ourselves to disappointment because we are flawed humans. And many of us lack the awareness and empathy to attend to each others’ needs because we were rarely taught how to through our upbringing or our culture.

I don’t fully side with the hippie notion that life is all “love and light,” neither do I fully agree with the more pessimistic, Nietzschean Philosophy of nihilism.

I’d like to think that I am an optimistic realist. A view where I believe that there’s immense value in “love and light,” especially in the healing spaces. At the same time, I think everything and everyone around us exists in a dualistic state, one where good and evil both reside, sometimes equally, other times in varying degrees.

We could ask, well, how do I know which I one do I see when I meet people?

Unfortunately, there’s no safe answer to that. Relationships, whether platonic or romantic, requiere courage and vulnerability, but also an openness to be disappointed.

And this subjects us to both pleasure and pain.

06/23/2021

"I don’t remember anyone ever telling me they’re happy I was born. I mean, people say so many things to me all the time. But for some odd reason, sometimes, the weight of these words feel hollow as the void I carry inside."

These are 32 of my favorite and powerful quotes to celebrate every year I have lived, laughed, cried, and breathed on this planet:

06/11/2021

Feeling grateful for (almost) living 32 years on this beautiful, broken planet.

It sounds cliché, but one thing that comes with age is definitely self-acceptance. People who were older than me used to say this all the time when I was in my 20s, but I just couldn’t fathom how we can be comfortable with growing old and wrinkled and not being as attractive as we once looked in our old photos.

But now, I somehow get it...

Part of maturity is growing comfortable in this vessel, the body, that continues to carry us through life, and being kind to it—whenever we can.

I reflect on how the hell, or should I say, why did I develop anorexia at the age of 12? What kind of messages fed into my psyche and told me that starving myself to the point of disease was better than eating that ice cream I was dying to eat?

And how did that insecure, 12-year-old girl turn into a woman who one day just said, “Enough of this bu****it. It’s time to leave.”

I am grateful for the inner person who carried me all these years, despite my not being kind to her. I admire her resilience and courage that helped me dip my toes into the unknown, despite how scary life always felt.

The hardest thing in life for me is to accept that no one will have the answer to my anxieties or fears or frustrations or childhood wounds that tell me, “Why did this have to happen to me?”

But I realize that it isn’t people’s job to fix what’s not theirs. Sure, they can empathize, help, maybe even be more open and kind. But I can’t force them to be anything that they aren’t ready to be. I can express myself or walk away.

As I grow older, I realize that the joys of life are simple. Like smelling the fresh grass and old trees on a sunny Friday afternoon. Like taking in the warmth of the sun after a long winter. Like watching the butterflies hop from one flower to another. And like accepting kindness from strangers, who later become friends, when they want to be kind, and not questioning their intentions or whether I do deserve their kindness or not.

Perhaps, the cure for my loneliness is in noticing these little details every now and then, and feeling the intensity of the happiness I feel. And just being.

06/06/2021

My loneliness mostly stems from years of repression by a culture that looked down on multicultural individuals with rejection and disdain. In a previous article that I wrote, I explored the idea of unbelonging from the narrative of a person who did not fit into society’s defined box of culture, race, identity, nationality, or political borders.

I was ruthlessly shamed for looking different, as if I could ever have had a say in my parents’ decision to marry and conceive a racially mixed child. I was made to feel ugly for the very reasons I did not choose. This has affected every major decision I have ever made, from selecting potential life partners to avoiding social interactions where I’d potentially be ridiculed based on my identity.

Where I grew up, there’s an ingrained negative stereotype against Asian-looking people, even while I mostly grew up holding a Middle Eastern identity, in the same way, some white Americans might look at Hispanics with contempt.

This shame has fed into every fiber of my soul, festering it with a pulsating sense of inferiority—to the point where I actually despised leaving the house to see people. I learned to shrink myself and live half the life I deserved by favoring isolation over potential pain.

I built walls and an intellectual identity based on the books I’ve read. I dissociated from reality and escaped into the lives of the characters I read about, delving into their problems and dramas and embracing them as if they were my own.

In psychology, this incredible coping mechanism is known as dissociation. It occurs when our psyches shut down as a way to prevent us from feeling the intensity of our painful emotions that we may not have easily survived.

Our coping mechanisms may have once helped us survive our pain. But to continue growing into the authentic people we envision ourselves to be, connect with others, build healthy relationships based on mutual trust and nurturance, we must learn how to put down our worn-out armours.

My latest piece on Elephant Journal

Research also suggests that people who are lonely tend to pick up on negative environmental cues more profoundly and, therefore, on signs of potential rejection.

05/04/2021

I grew up holding onto my past, allowing the stories that once took place to define me. I created an entire identity out of my narratives, and I often fear that I wouldn’t be able to recognize who I am if I were to let go of my trauma.

Who would I be without my trauma?

What stories would I be able to tell if I let go of the pain?

Will I find the same inspiration to write happy stories as I once found my muse in writing sad ones?

Will I be able to connect with happy people in the same way that I feel deeply connected to people who are depressed, sad, anxious, on the verge of insanity?

The answers to all these questions are yet to unfold…

It is said that in order to feel the love we so long for and deserve, we must first learn how to grieve the love we never had. I don’t think I allowed myself to grieve the past 31 years enough. However, I am finally allowing myself permission to demolish my own thick walls.

Taking an active step to leave the environment that broke me and implanted within me deep roots of shame was a huge first step. It made me realize that despite the enormity of my anxiety, fears, and trauma, I was able to escape what felt like a death sentence.

Sharing these stories of shame, pain, and tiny victories was another milestone, as the spell of shame is broken the more we write about our dark, mud-steeped secrets.

My latest piece on . Link in my bio.

05/02/2021

For the longest time, I have denied my own experience because I was grateful for the life I had, as I always will be.

But why should being grateful go against integrating or accepting the parts of our childhood that we lost and will probably never have? Must we all end up in drug and alcohol addiction or bad s*xual relationships or as master f*ck ups, the way our culture stigmatizes all abandoned children, before we actually seek help?

Looking back, I believe there were two reasons why I never ended up in any of these dark alleys. First, I grew up in a conservative society that was shielded from all types of narcotics and s*x, as they went against the values and the religion of the culture, and, second, I learned to develop a perfectionistic and dissociative type of persona that allowed me to bury myself in every intellectual field I was able to step my foot into.

Until, one day, the perfect, well put together persona, with the good head on her shoulders, has become my default, altar ego with which I meet the world.

My latest piece on . Link in my bio.

05/01/2021

"When the pain seeped in, I honestly thought I was losing my mind. My vision started to blur, my head started to spin, my breath became shallow, and I almost forgot how to breathe."

My latest piece on Elephant Journal. May it be of benefit to whoever is struggling under the silent muffles of complex trauma.

https://www.elephantjournal.com/2021/04/i-lived-with-undiagnosed-complex-trauma-for-years-i-never-knew-it-existed-rasha-al-jabi/

04/28/2021

The world is slowly decaying, and we desperately need compassionate leaders who care and can lead and transform with empathy.

Many empaths feel that they aren’t equipped to handle positions that require leadership, lest they feel burdensome by the enormity of these great responsibilities.

But I’ll leave you with this one thought: if we can already see the consequence of a world where narcissists are put into positions of power, imagine what the world could be like if more empaths were given the same power. That potential can be ours if we can only claim it.

As the great, late Maya Angelou once said:

“I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.”

04/27/2021

So, where does that leave me? Where does that leave you? Where does that leave the rest of us empaths?

The intention in sharing my experience isn’t to sound condescending, or for anyone who identifies with being an emapth but is on a different path to feel disheartened. It is meant to explain that personality tests aren’t set in stone, neither are psychology theories or our biology, mind, and behavior.

Our brains are incredibly capable of changing according to the recent theories in neuroplasticity. And in return, these incremental changes in our minds can have tremendous effects on our bodies as well as our behavior.

Saying that all empaths “should” live life according to the limitations of their biology or experiences, without the ability to explore life differently or go beyond, is equivalent to saying that all siblings will end up with the same abilities, given that they came from the same parents, were raised under similar circumstances, and received fairly equal opportunities to grow. Even identical twins, however similar, end up with different characteristics.

We are each unique and are exploring our own paths. But we’re ultimately looking for a similar meaning, purpose, and a way to contribute to the bigger existence, whatever our perception of it may be.

My latest on . Link in my bio.