I hurt my back. In a gentle yoga class. During the first pose.
The irony continues…
I carved out the gift of this single yoga class from a busy week spent at The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health.
The irony doesn’t end there…
I was at Kripalu to assist at a Let Your Yoga Dance teacher training program–where I danced day and night–without a problem. It was only when I stopped, sat down, and reclined, open-hearted, over a delicious set of cushions, that I was hurt.
This irony suggests an invitation more than an injury, doesn’t it?
But a month later, the invitation is still hurting.
Bending over backwards is the mind/body connection that comes to mind.
But wasn’t I bending for myself?
I made a special request to fit that yoga class into a tight schedule. I rushed to make it happen. I couldn’t wait to surrender to it. And yet, even after I felt the alarming twinge in my lower back, I refused it.
“This posture is great,” I said to my back. “Come on! Enjoy it.”
And when my back continued to complain?
“What’s the point of taking the cushions out now? You’re already hurt.”
So maybe I wasn’t so much bending over backward–for myself–but bending over backward for… busyness?
Assisting at Kripalu had an alarmingly familiar tempo to previous life incarnations; ones that I consciously left behind: from managing a family of origin to managing a restaurant, to managing a classroom and then a succession of non-profits.
Ironically this new role held none of the responsibilities that once weighed me down, and it also included meditation, hugs and organic food.
So what was wrong with me? Hadn’t I made enough progression? Couldn’t I tolerate a few days of intense scheduling given the obvious benefits?
Apparently, No. I arrived to opening night with an impressive fever blister (my first), and shortly after developed a full-blown migraine.
The most outstanding irony in this entire drama is the fact that I didn’t have to be there; and I couldn’t even blame it on money… I was volunteering.
(Kelly. Kelly. Kelly.)
Once I returned home, that silly, gentle-yoga, first-pose, invitation continued, until I was forced to attend to it with a myriad of practitioners: from chiropractic, to massage, to naturopathic.
It only felt worse.
Finally, I succumbed to bringing it where it belonged: the psychotherapist.
With her guidance, I take myself back to the reclining pose on the soft cushions at Kripalu, and realize that I WANT EVEN MORE SPACE, more than this yoga class, more than this mat, more than this open-hearted pose.
This hunger for space has been a constant throughout my life–as the oldest of 8–parentified by alcoholism–orphaned by divorce–driven to exhaustion at work.
But the truth underneath my desperation for space is that I don’t want to give up on anything else to have it. I want the joy of assisting, the gift of a family, and the delight of professional pursuits.
What I need to learn how to do is this: Occupy the space I need, ALL the space I need, in the midst of it all.
With this realization, the pain in my back grows louder and louder, until I want to crawl out of my skin and become spineless.
The familiar reclining chair in my therapist’s office becomes so uncomfortable that I am forced to move to the floor while she carefully guides my attention to the story behind the pain:
My grandmother appears. Not the one I adored. But the one I abhorred? Because she was mean? And fat? (obese really.)
Energy moves from my right side to my left side, and then wraps around my belly where this grandmother’s dark and heavy pain is lodged inside of me.
This is where my doctor placed his hands last week to contrast the muscular differentiation between this and my thighs. “Your weaker abdominal muscles may be contributing to the vulnerability of your lower back,” he suggests.
But here’s what I heard:
“You hurt your back because you are fat and lazy and out of shape.”
(Yet another invitation masked as injury/as insult.)
“I don’t want to connect with the energy of this grandmother,” I say to my therapist; but even as I say the words, and realize how afraid I am of this journey, I know that it is my next frontier.
I pick myself up off the floor and climb back into the chair, reconnecting my heart to my lower back; surprised to find that my spine suddenly feels like a source of support again instead of agony.
My mind flashes back to Kripalu, to the ritualistic closing of each demanding or vulnerable or evocative Let Your Yoga Dance training session: We circle up, wrap our arms around the bodies touching ours, and take turns whispering into one another’s ear:
“I’ve got your back.”
I stand to say goodbye to my therapist, and I smile as I walk out her door, whispering to myself:
“I’ve got my back.”
Two Owls Calling 