27/04/2018
WORKING WITH INJURY AND LOSS
Have you had to face this in your practice? Chances are, if you’ve been at the practice a while, you have faced it.
Injury had come to me before—bringing with it a gamut of emotions: frustration, sorrow, impatience. The fervent wish that things were different.
But those earlier injuries were small fry. The current one has persisted now more than a year, radically re-shaping and curtailing my practice. Forcing my hand.
It gets in the way of the wishes of my conscious mind and frustrates what I would “like” to do. It throws up roadblocks, and takes my physical practice down blind alleys which turn out to lead nowhere—or at least not the place I thought I was going.
Side note: every time a friend or a student has spoken honestly to me about their Yoga—and not everyone has the capacity to do this... in some people, that honest speech, especially about what hurts, is blocked—I’ve been struck by a sense of questing, searching, and some degree of inner pain in the person talking. Talking to others always reminds me that it’s not a easy thing to be alive. Wonderful—yes. Easy—no.
Mary Oliver says “Tell me about despair, yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”
Yet Yoga isn’t quite like that. Not all the time.
It’s not a talk therapy. It happens in the body, in the placement of things.
It’s a solo pursuit, yet we learn under the tutelage of a guide and teacher.
It is practised alone, yet we are often in classes.
It’s hard path when the body rebels. When pain persists, and uncertainty arises.
Long term injury or physical dysfunction can be a hard and dark time. It is isolating from those who can “still do”, and can be isolating from one’s own self, as each day brings a new pushback, or a different physical challenge from the body-as-form.
Lessons come in Vairagya (dispassion), and Santosha (contentment with what is).
Time stops being linear (“Aren’t you better YET?! ... Will you be better by next week? What’s wrong with you?!”) and takes on the quality of a wormhole: one burrows deeper and deeper into the fabric of reality.
Each new day, and what it will bring—physically, internally—is profoundly uncertain, unknown.
I could write a lot of easy words about "pain being a wonderful teacher". But they wouldn’t be honest.
For me to say, glibly, that pain is a guide (which is true) would obscure the tears, the moments of frustration, dejection, despair, confusion.
In writing here, I want to record truthfully what it’s like in the here-and-now: fourteen months in to an injury, and no sure end in sight.
The lessons are the same as they always are: what does this day bring? How can I take correct action at the correct time? How can I do what needs doing, and let go the rest? How can I both pick up the slack, and yet slacken the hardnesses?
None of these things are injury-specific. They are just Yog 🕉
But working with injury makes them extremely potent, apparent, deeply and keenly real.
A kind of internal demand for precision appears, where “correct action” in our poses or in ourselves is no longer just an abstract ideal, but instead a Pole Star for practice. One learns to ask:
What exactly is needed in the here-and-now? What is sufficient? What is too much?
Atha yoganusasanam ⚡️✊🏽
(Thank you to Marrickville Yoga Centre for the photo. It is of me practising a rope-supported backbend earlier this year amidst a busy workshop with Lois Steinberg when I found my body unable to keep pace with the poses given to the main class.)
