The Dance between Joy and Pain

Mansukh Patel & Rita Goswami - The best-selling guide to emotional mastery.

Background articles

1. Origins of The Dance Between Joy and Pain

2. 'I Lost My Job!' - How I coped, using the Dance Between Joy and Pain

1. Origins of The Dance Between Joy and Pain - Mansukh Patel and Rita Goswami

Introduction

Body Heart Mind approach

No strangers to The Dance between Joy and Pain

Growing up as a young girl of Indian culture in Kampala, Uganda, Rita Goswami describes how she could tell the state of the country’s politics by whether there were military tanks parked outside her house when she woke up in the morning. Her parents lived in the diplomatic zone, and their house was very close to that of the rapidly rising General Idi Amin.

Eventually, the Goswami family fled the country for the UK, bringing Rita there just 6 months before the ruthless dictator came to power.

Growing up in Africa brings you close to the raw fabric of living and dying, and so Rita was no stranger to the rise and fall of emotions long before she met Mansukh at Bangor university in the late 1970s.

Similarly, Mansukh grew up in Kenya’s Rift Valley, enduring the often bloody turbulence that continued in the aftermath of the Mau Mau uprising. One morning he and his parents paid a visit to an outlying farm – to find everyone there slaughtered. Mansukh gives vivid recollections of how his parents used their knowledge to help him overcome the effects of this and other traumatic events in many of his film documentaries, such as Avenues of Love and his series on the Bhagavad Gita.

With these backgrounds, plus their clinical experience, as well as the Dru tradition inherited from Mansukh’s parents, Rita and Mansukh had collected an enormous array of practical, self-help approaches for overcoming emotional pain by 1995, when Mansukh began the 6-week Eurowalk 2000 journey from Auschwitz to the UK.

By the end of the journey, the book was written and being laid-out, ready for publication several weeks later.

Six months later the book was reprinted, and its Dutch translation moved swiftly into the top ten sellers within the Netherlands market.

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2. 'I Lost My Job!' - How I coped, using the Dance Between Joy and Pain by Mansukh Patel and Rita Goswami

Many people have given us stories of how the Dance Between Joy and Pain has helped them overcome trauma or suffering.

Here is one of them, in which the author, a social worker from Wales, UK, explores how the techniques in the book as well as others she has learnt from the Dru background gave her the strength to overcome the pain she experienced as a result of losing her job.

Almost paralysed by the news, her first response was to take a weekend out, desperately searching for ways to deal with this crisis. She spent several days at the Dru Course Centre in North Wales, and kept a chronicle of her efforts to overcome the pain. Eventually, after the weekend had passed, so had her emotions. As she describes at the end of this article, she was ready again, if not eager, to get on with life in her normal joyful way.

The pain came one Friday when the contract for a job that I had done for 5 years was not renewed. My ego was hurt, but also, with a family to support, I was worried about funding my children’s education.

Here are the techniques in the order in which I used them. It was a process, like peeling off the layers of an onion – when one emotion evapourated, another lay beneath.

1. Firstly, re-reading the first chapter of the book, Understanding the Dance, helped me to adopt an attitude conducive to moving forward – especially pages 8,9,10, 21. Also the Dru Gita, Book 2, P 84, para 1. and Book 3, Ch18, v66.

2. My mind kept replaying the moment that I was told the news. I used the Tree of Transformation to call my power back from that moment (from the Dru Yoga Teacher Training Course).

3. I then became aware of the pain of rejection, and so used the Joy and Pain Book (p 159), the Gesture of Innocence

4. For fear of the future – worrying about my loss of income – I used EBR 5 from the CD,

5. Resentment against the people whom I felt had caused me pain: I used the Gesture of Compassion (p130) and the Mirror Image (p132)

6. For coping with the uncertainty of the situation, I used the chapter on Crisis in the Joy and Pain book, especially the Salutation to the Four Directions with its affirmations.

7. I regularly felt depression/gloom, and for these, the Su Breath (p171) really helped.

8. Tiredness and despondency – Surya Namaskar really helped (Stillness in Motion book)

9. I also used Cutting the Illusion.

Prayer and meditation certainly helped, but I found I needed to dissolve the overpowering emotions first, before I could concentrate on either.

I worked on myself during the course of the weekend. The speed at which emotions dissolved seemed miraculous. The mudras are especially helpful because they can be used almost anytime. By Monday I felt my usual joyful self.

I did notice that negative emotions can recur depending how I think about the situation. The phrase, ‘I have lost my job’ is fatal! It was necessary to sit in meditation, and re-script what I say to myself and other people – e.g., ‘I’m looking forward to a change. This is an opportunity to do something new,’ etc.

I recorded the whole process in the hope that I can use this experience to help someone else.

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