Body Wisdom

Since arriving in Nosara, Costa Rica, I’ve been going to the Nosara Yoga Institute for daily yoga practice. The institute sits on a pristine piece of jungle property that houses a large enclosed rancho for teacher training, an open air tree top pavilion over looking lush jungle and with a faint view of the sea over the tree tops for daily classes, apartments for visiting yogis and lush gardens and pathways everywhere. Lately my singing responsibilities have decreased due to the constant rain so my yoga practice is the only structure in my day to day life here. Four years ago in the middle of a difficult time in my life, yoga was the only thing I had in my life that gave me any solace. I practiced diligently for over a year until I noticed an ad for teacher training in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was January and I was living alone with our daughter Lucy in Carrboro, North Carolina looking at the winter before me with little enthusiasm. I decided to enroll in the training. At first I immersed myself and absorbed all of the teachings and energy like a sponge. I was the oldest and probably the most physically challenged student due to the fact that I had undergone hip replacement on my left hip six months before. At the same time I was devoting myself to yoga, my marriage continued to deteriorate, my husband unable to align his words with his actions and since it was my decision to stay in it and wait it out, I found myself living with more stress than I could have ever imagined. Even though yoga helped me to connect with an extreme amount of gratitude for all of the blessings in my life, I found that it sometimes made me feel more vulnerable. Halfway through the training we had a weekend off so I went home to spend the weekend on the Outer Banks. During a massage my therapist commented on my tight piriformis muscle and went to work on it. Two days later I found myself incapacitated with an extremely painful case of sciatica on my right side. If you’ve never had sciatica, give thanks- sciatic pain is so deep and so acute there is virtually nothing you can do to relieve it- it renders you in constant pain, uncomfortable and totally helpless. I was devastated. My yoga training and my beloved daily practice ended abruptly and completely. Did my body really need to try to trump the pain of my broken heart? Couldn’t I just have one pain at a time, thank you very much? It seemed so unfair, all I could do was sit, or lay down with my pain that remained debilitating for months and never really going away completely. I am thinking about this today because that old familiar pain has resurfaced, just a little bit, but enough to make me uncomfortable during my practice, enough for me to ask. “Should I be doing this?” and “What are you trying to tell me, pain?” I vacillate between believing that pain in the body is just that- pain as a result of working it too hard, over exertion, not listening and pain representing unconscious messages that are letting us know that we are off track, we have repressed emotions and feelings, unresolved issues. Hopefully, it will just work itself out without too much energy and attention. In the meantime I will listen and honor the wisdom of this body that has taken me this far.