My Story: Pain As A Teacher
I want to talk about pain. I want to talk about physical pain and yoga asana and becoming better teachers. I want to talk about my pain and I want to talk about all of us becoming more loving, helpful people.I want to share a piece of my story. I do this in the hopes of inspiring you to keep putting one foot in front of the other on your own unique path.It is a bright and windy day here in DC. The skies are a cloudless blue, and the sun shines relentlessly. It is a perfect fall day. I would love to be outside running around, but instead I am in a cafe starting at my computer, just grateful to be out of the house for the first time in two days.My best friends are in NYC shopping for a wedding dress for our friend Cat. I was supposed to be there, but I couldn’t go. I miss my NYC friends terribly, and I feel super sad about missing out on this.I am having a flare up of an old back injury and my whole world feels very small all of a sudden. I couldn’t teach on Thursday or Friday and have been RESTING RESTING RESTING. It feels sooooooo boring. {I bet you know the feeling?}I don’t think this will be a long term problem, and am hot on the trail of the culprit {an unstable SI joint}, but it brings back all the feelings of being injured from my teens and early 20s and I feel bummed.
I am also being reminded of everything my pain has taught me.
You know how when you feel stiff getting out of bed, or sitting down on the floor, and you say, in a silly way: “Oh god, I feel like I’m 90!”When I find myself creaky and achy my exclamation is always, “Oh god, I feel like I’m 19!!”As a dancer I was always in some kind of pain. Sometimes it was chronic, from overuse injuries like shin splints and achilles tendonitis. These were to be danced over. Sometimes it was extreme soreness from a new piece, choreographer, or style of dance. {This was DEFINITELY to be danced through.} Sometimes it was serious injury that I should have done something about but didn’t: torn hamstring, SI joint dysfunction, or rotator cuff injury. Then a few horrible/lucky times, the injuries were so bad that I was choiceless. Pushing through was not an option. One of these was the Infamous Torn Labrum Of 2006.As a result of that last big injury, the first two years I was a full time yoga teacher I had to walk with a cane and often teach from sitting in a chair. I was 22. That is a long story for another day. {I guess I will have to write it sometime, huh?}I have grown tremendously as a result of these injuries. The injuries I dealt with became a graduate thesis in self care, body work, functional movement patterns, and healthy ways of practicing asana. This means that I have had far fewer {if any} musculoskeletal injuries since I made a full recovery of my torn labrum in 2008. At 32 I have already lived in so many versions of my body that were injured or unwell. I have also had many times in my life that I recovered and built up strength and endurance and once again had a body that could do amazing things. This summer I had a pretty major problem with my thyroid that caused terrible heart palpitations, blinding ear ringing, and extreme anxiety. Even though I had no musculoskeletal injuries I could only practice the most restorative and basic asana. I couldn’t do inversions or backbends at all, and I wasn’t running, hiking, or going to spin class. {All things that I love.}Through the fall I have been slowly and finally feeling so much better and so much more like myself. I had a friend comment that is must have been so hard to not feel like my normal active self this summer. It was, but the dips don’t get me down too much. I have already done this so many times. I know I will get better, and I am, at 32, already deeply at peace with the rhythm of life that includes health and activity, and sickness and injury. This rhythm is part of the natural aging process, and this rhythm is also part of life because the human body is an amazing and sometimes delicate organism that needs to be paid close attention to and cared for deeply, regardless of age.My pain taught me {and continues to teach me} how to connect with and take care of my body, yet it had another, even bigger, lesson for me.
My pain taught me to see and understand the pain of the person sitting right in front of me, and it taught me how to take care of them.
{Having such a debilitating injury so young in my yoga teacher life matured my teaching dramatically.}Could our experience with our physical bodies support an ever-widening circle of awareness? Could it help us see that none of our pain {physical or otherwise} is unique? Could the ever-widening awareness help us see that my pain is your pain, and if you are hurting than I am hurting too?That is what physical pain has done for me, and I am forever grateful. {Even though I am also grumpy and uncomfortable.}If you are a yoga teacher, and you have been injured, or are sick, I want to encourage you to dive headfirst into this work that life is offering you. We can use healing our physical bodies as a practice ground for learning how to heal the pain of our students and loved ones. We can use our pain to make us more sensitive to the pain of friends and strangers and people halfway across the world. I’m talking here about the physical pain of multiple hip injuries, but your suffering could be the loss of a beloved, or it could be his divorce or her bankruptcy. Our hearts can break in so many ways, but could we see this pain not as an obstacle in the way, but as the very path itself?What can we do to help heal the terrible pain of the people of this world? {Right now my heart aches for Paris and Beirut and Syria and all the places terrorized by violence.} What can we do? Other, smarter people will have much more to say about this than I.
I’ll just say the one thing I know for sure: We can use our pain to learn to feel theirs.
We have the privilege of having the teachers and time and resources that teach us how to connect and care for our physical and emotional bodies. We can use that privilege to make ourselves strong enough, and resilient enough, to take helpful, healing action in an ever-widening way.
May we all be happy.May we all be healthy.May we all be free of suffering.May we all be at peace.Please share: How has your pain changed you? Love to you, my dear ones.