| The Tale of the Reluctant Yogina |
| Written by Ruth Getter |
| Saturday, 11 April 2009 05:12 |
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Once upon a time, there was a woman who suffered from a strange affliction – she didn’t know that her body and her head were connected. She lived almost entirely in her head, and thought of her body as “that thing” that carried her brain around. She began to regard her body as her enemy. It limited her from doing all those important things she had to do – it got sick, it caused her pain. She would deal with these annoyances by taking various medications – and continued to work and function in spite of the pain. Then one day, in her late 50’s, she ended up in the Emergency Room of a local hospital. Her blood pressure was 200 over 160. The doctor who examined her was blunt. She said: “If you keep on doing what you’ve been doing you have three choices: 1) you could have a stroke, 2) you could have a heart attack, or 3) you could die.” The doctor gave her some medication to lower her blood pressure and told her to go home and think about it. She thought about the doctor’s 3 scenarios and she didn’t really like any of them. So she decided to take some time off from work to try to get better and figure out what to do. She rested for a few weeks, thinking she would feel better – but she didn’t – she felt worse than ever. It began to dawn upon her that just taking a break would not work – but that something fundamental obviously needed to change. Her daughter, who was pregnant with her first child at the time, was the catalyst: “Mom, do you want to live long enough to see this grandchild?” Well, that put things in perspective! She decided to leave her position, take early retirement, focus on what was really important in life – such as figuring out how to become healthy and well so that she could enjoy her grandchildren. And that’s when the journey began. She did a lot of thinking and soul-searching. Although she was considered to be quite intelligent, she realized that she had been exceedingly stupid about (at least) one important thing throughout her life. Her body was not just an inert vessel that held her brain – it was an important and vital part of who she was. She had totally disregarded what her body had been asking her for years: “Take care of me!” She never paid attention to or nourished it properly; she never even heard it asking. It was only when she realized that her brain wouldn’t survive anyway if her body didn’t, that she finally understood that perhaps she should figure out how to take care of it. Unfortunately, she did not have the faintest idea of where or how to start. For the first time in her life, she was at a total loss. She remembered the saying: “When the student is ready – the teacher will appear.” She knew she was ready – now she had to find a teacher. She decided to join a fitness centre and put herself in the hands of a personal trainer. Maybe he could show her the way. He showed her how to do various exercises, use a multitude of machines, and gave her a program to follow. She tried. She really, really did. But there was one problem: whatever she tried caused her intense pain. She was in such poor physical shape that even the simplest of workouts was agonizing. Everything hurt. She had been used to pain in her life (severe migraines, chronic back pain, etc.) but that pain had never been directly self-inflicted, and she had learned to live with it as a constant companion. In a very short time, she realized that this exercise program was not the way for her, and that she might in fact end up injuring herself. For the first time she actually listened to her body: “If this hurts so much, then perhaps it’s not good for me?” That in itself was a huge step forward. One day at the gym, she saw a list of classes that were being offered, and one of them was yoga. She thought: “Well yoga is supposedly very gentle – so maybe I’ll try a class and see if I can do that, without causing myself so much pain.” And that’s when the real teacher appeared. A teacher who taught her how to listen to her body, to work with it rather than against it, to slowly but steadily learn how to move it, to collaborate with it, to finally make that connection between her body and her brain. It was a long long process. At first, in her usual way, she tried to force her body into various yoga positions – until she eventually learned that “forcing” is not compatible with yoga – it was generally counter-productive. She had to take very very small steps at first, to unlearn all the bad habits she had developed over the many years of neglect. For example: the computer position – back arched, head thrust forward, shoulders somewhere near the ears. The way she stood – slouching to one side or another. The way she walked – unstable and unbalanced. The way she sat – hunched over and misaligned. She had to learn about breathing. She had never devoted a moment of her life to contemplating breathing – it was just something her body did automatically. But when her attention was drawn to her breathing, she realized how shallow her breathing was, how often she just held her breath, and how differently it felt when she concentrated on taking deep, regular breaths – and how that affected the rest of her body. She learned that most of her body was totally misaligned. She had to learn to how to plant her feet solidly on the ground, how to activate the muscles in her calves and shins and thighs, how to strengthen her abdominal muscles to provide a stable core, how to breathe in deeply, lengthen her whole body, release her tight shoulders, and suddenly feel stronger and taller than she had ever felt. The floor became stable underneath her feet, and she slowly stopped feeling wobbly. After a few years of group classes, she began to work with her teacher one-on-one. And that’s when the REAL learning began. Her teacher could guide her movements into balance, to show her how a subtle change can affect the whole body, to help her “let go” of all the tension and clenching that she had hard-wired into her body over all those years of neglect.
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