No person goes through life without any sensation of pain. Dealing with pain is one of Yoga’s foremost duties. A sound practice often helps us alleviate the physical pain, but also gives us tools with which we meet the pain in our minds. When I was in my twenties, I broke my ankle badly (I’ll spare you the embarrassing details of how the accident happened) and subsequently spent two years and seven operations reconstructing the ankle and became quite an acrobat with my crutches. After that I spent 25 years protecting this joint, to the point that the right leg became atrophied. As I was getting used to the pain, it enhanced my protective instincts. I never walked down a staircase step by step, always left leg, then bringing the right to join. I never landed on my right leg if I were in nature.
Enter yoga, some 20 years ago, on the advice of Kristin, my daughter, and I developed a whole new attitude to what I used to call my bad leg. I remember my first teacher, Martine Richards in Brussels, who said “Tout le monde a des petits bobos”. Everybody has something troubling them, of bigger or smaller proportions. Mine was indeed not very dramatic, but it did rule my life with the recurring pain, and the feeling of the joint like a rusty hinge which needed oil, made me miserable, sometimes.
Firstly, yoga made me realise that the leg needed strengthening, rather than protection. The foot had lost its muscles and the calf was weakened. Above all, my mind had to be reset to a new kind of trust towards this limb. One-legged balance poses were torture for the leg which had spent the last decades in the corporal equivalent of a cage. It hadn’t been let out in the real world for so many years and had to readjust, like a pampered pet rabbit left to fend for itself in the wilderness.
It took several years of hard and regular work on and off the mat, to create a more equal system between my two legs. It’s an ongoing process. I can’t let go, and have to keep up my practice, but I no longer suffer from pain in the ankle and it’s only when my ego gets in the way that I quietly complain about my limitations, as the rigidity of the right ankle creates.
I share this personal story because I often think of how grateful I am for the new lease of mobility and the profound sense of self-knowledge that yoga and breathwork gave me. Yoga is not a quick fix, but the long and arduous job is hugely satisfying, and maybe, maybe it makes you a better person, at least a less grumpy one who has a few tools to deal with the pain.
If I started yoga to alleviate physical pain, I continued, because it worked, and now find that it makes me more resilient in other contrarian situations of life as well.
Warm wishes from an autumnal and sunny Brussels,
Emily