May is Mental Health Awareness Month

Citizen Yoga’s mission is to improve mental health and prevent suicide, and we live this mission every day of the year. In the month of May, we’re joined by national efforts to reduce stigma and increase awareness as part of Mental Health Awareness Month. This year, we’re focusing on our core value of support: how to give it, how to receive it, and how to build it into our everyday relationships.

In a conversation about the difficulty of building supportive communities, someone once told me: “Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be the villager.” Support is an ecosystem, not a one way street. There is a built-in requirement for reciprocity, for recognizing that we are not alone and that we alone cannot do everything. True support is as much about knowing when to ask for help as it is about knowing when to step up and provide. Support asks us to prioritize interconnectedness over selfishness. And in a truly supportive village, it means having better fail safes to prevent any individual from reaching an extreme level of personal crisis.

Over the course of the next four weeks, we’ll be sharing different perspectives on ways to support your mental health, including how to ask for help, techniques for real connection, how to be of service, and real efforts to prevent suicide in our community. We hope that every day at Citizen is an opportunity to practice being in supportive relationships and to find tools for alleviating any pain you’re experiencing in your life.

Can’t wait to see you on your mat. Be sure to say hello.