Teachers and Other Helpers

Recently, I waded through the reams of commentary on a New York Times magazine article on the dangers of yoga-related injuries To me, the most sensible comments simply acknowledge that injury is possible in any physical activity (including sitting and typing, as I know from experience). Why should yoga poses be any different? What emerges clearly for me from all of this is that practitioners need to approach yoga sensibly and make sure they have a good instructor. I want my teacher, at the very least, to pay attention to how I am doing my practice and adjust me in the postures when I need it. The best teacher, in my experience, is also a coach who will encourage me to challenge myself when I am being fearful or lazy and remind me to be patient when I am pushing too hard, and who knows me well enough to tell which of those is right in the moment.

Over my years of practicing yoga I have also found that having the support of other helpers can make a big difference at key points.  For example, my chiropractor played an important role in helping me heal my hip injury and still helps me manage the imbalances between my right and left sides. I have also gone to an acupuncturist and a physical therapist for help with specific issues. Lately, however, I have been working with a massage therapist as part of a concerted effort to improve my posture. Aside from having a closed chest that pulls my shoulders forward, I have a tendency to raise my left shoulder and collapse into my right side. I know this has been a pattern for me at least since the age of ten or eleven, when my mother took me to a doctor to ask about it. The other day the massage therapist was honing in on the hard knot this tendency has created over the years in my left shoulder. The pressure he applied was very painful, and in the midst of it he said, “Focus on the time in your life when this pattern started and release it if you can.”

Without knowing it, I had prepared for this moment: for more than a year I had been doing a targeted stretch of my left shoulder muscle; and over a much longer time, I had reconstructed the history of my feeling that I needed to shoulder the pain of my loved ones. With my shoulder throbbing, I went back to the time when, for two or three winters, I spent a month or so with my grandparents. My aunt used to come to New York and take me to their home in Virginia by train. I remember the train’s sleeper car as a great adventure, but I was only two or three years old my first trip, so I’m pretty sure the separation from my family was traumatic. When I asked Mom about it a few years before she died, she said she had felt terrible about sending me off but she just couldn’t cope with three young kids. It was not until my college years that her mental illness was formally diagnosed.  Yet I imagine that, on some level, my little-girl self perceived the depth of my mother’s struggle and decided I needed to be strong and independent for her sake. That’s where I located the origination of the knot. I felt the sadness of that part of my life and also reminded myself that I no longer need to carry that burden.

The knot released and my shoulder relaxed. Whether this was a permanent fix of the problem remains to be seen. But it was definitely a step forward that, as hard as I work on my own, I could not have taken without help.

Hip Openers 3

During the time of my malingering hip injury I was traveling quite a bit, including to India, the Philippines, South Africa and other interesting places. I kept up my yoga practice to some extent on these trips, but when I got home there was always a recovery period. One day when my hip was giving me trouble, Kimberly said to me, “You know, you should really stop travelling and do sesame oil enemas if you want your hip to get better.” Welcome to ayurveda! I wasn’t having any of that, and I wasn’t ready to listen to what my body was telling me about the travel. It was exciting and the work felt important. But it was good advice.
My friend Chip Walker, a poet who practices and teaches at Yoga East, speaks to this experience:

Teachers guide

          patiently

Reach inside

          gently

Pull things out

          slowly

Expose the scars

          lovingly

Students get scared

Thinking that it hurts

That it's death

Knowing that it is

Teachers smile

         and stand back

         allowing room      for such a birth

Chip Walker, "Lineage" in Half a Mala: Threading Towards Wholeness (2011).

Hip Openers 2

“It’s the flexible side that gets injured,” Kimberly said as she adjusted my hips. “The inflexible side stays weak.” This was one of those moments when something said almost casually strikes you like a thunderbolt. You know it has hit home when the tears arrive. It seemed she had given me the perfect metaphor for the problem in so many of my relationships, especially my marriage.

Nearly four years later, I am still exploring the meaning of this metaphor. In the first instance, however, it touched deep-seated feelings of being a victim of what I saw as my husband’s problems, the root of which was – by my diagnosis – depression. I felt that the anxiety and depression that often beset me were the injuries caused by his inflexibility, his resistance to change. Suddenly the various strategies I was using to remain open minded, patient and loving with my husband, while taking care of myself as best I could, seemed misguided, like the impulse in my poor left hip to over-rotate and compensate for tightness on the right. This view of things started me thinking and talking about moving out of our home, and this led about a year later to a six-month separation.

The trauma of that experience prompted me to reevaluate the whole victim thing, along with many other aspects of my life. The process has been both difficult and rewarding. Now my effort is directed toward finding a workable balance between flexibility and strength, in my relationships as well as my hip joints.

Hip Openers 1

Nicki Doane from DVD cover

I have found that, in the context of a regular yoga practice, an injury can be a blessing in disguise. During my years of doing morning mysore at Yoga East, I have had a few, but the main one was a hip injury in the summer of 2007. It appeared initially as a bad back – embarrassingly, I had to limp out of a weekend workshop with Nancy Gilgoff. The back felt better quickly; the hip did not. My chiropractor at the time looked at an old x-ray and pointed out that I have what seems to be a structural constraint on how far I can internally rotate my left hip. I had overdone it in yoga, he said. I would have to start using blocks, for example in parivritta trikonasana (revolved triangle), and just learn to accept my limitations. Kimberly and Karen helped me keep practicing and my injury started to heal. Then, on a long trip for work, it got worse and developed bursitis. Ouch!

That hip stayed sore throughout the winter and early spring of 2008. I kept using my blocks and being cautious about poses that called for the dreaded hip rotations. There’s nothing like pain to focus the attention! My big breakthrough came in another workshop. (One of the outstanding things about Yoga East is the amazing teachers Kimberly is able to bring to the studio.) This time it was Nicki Doane and Eddie Modestini. One of the signature aspects of their Maya Yoga system is the extended series of lunges they use for hip opening. It was incredibly hard work – and, a revelation, afterward my hip was pain free!

This experience was a turning point in my practice. For at least a year, I added the lunges to my opening sun salutations on a regular basis, and I still do some form of hip opener almost every day, with lots of beneficial effects. More important, my focus shifted from trying to do each pose of the Ashtanga vinyasa series “correctly,” to feeling how each pose is asking some part of me to open, strengthen, lengthen, or whatever. It seems to me, looking back, that this was the change that sealed my commitment to yoga and made the practice noticeably start to shape my body in positive ways.

Shoulder-pad Bettye/Yoga Bettye

Our younger daughter Kate is an artist and has been doing interesting drawings all of her life.  When she was about four she drew a portrait of me that had two flat ovals on either side of my neck.  I was amused but also horrified to find out these were my shoulder pads!  I had finished my degree and gone to work full time right after she was born, and my professional look, complete with shoulder pads and helmet hair, was her image of Mom.

Much later, the ever-observant Kate pointed out that there was far more than the look of “Shoulder-pad Bettye” that was, thankfully, behind me.  For the first fifteen years of my career, I was part of a small consulting firm that wrote organizational histories, mostly for corporate clients. I completely bought into the mindset that people who put in “only” 40 hours a week were not serious about the work.  My aggressive driving style was finely honed in a two-hour-plus commute – I cringe to remember it. Eventually I took on a management role along with the book writing, did neither as well as I wanted, and contributed my bit to a dysfunctional organizational culture.  I left that job with a bad case of burnout and strong motivation to make some changes in my work and personal life.

There were lots of things to work on in yoga: the painful chronic tightness in my shoulders from stress, bad posture and bad desk ergonomics; the frozen hips from too many hours spent sitting at a desk or in meetings, cars, buses and planes; and the constant jaw clenching, from (I now see) too many truths left unspoken.  Releasing those physical tensions and changing the underlying patterns that created them became a project for the rest of my life.  Needless to say, it felt good when Kate, home from college, took note of my efforts and re-anointed me “Yoga Bettye.” She still gives me helpful feedback on my style as well.

Left side-Right side Dialogue

One of the most useful tools I have encountered for getting perspective on the different sides of me is Voice Dialogue or “parts work.”  It inspired me to imagine this conversation between my right and left sides (see December 1 post).

R: So why are you always so uptight?

L: Well, maybe it’s because you are always so weak and unsupportive; I have to do all the work of holding things together

R: What exactly do you have to hold together?

L: Well, there are lots of things in Bettye’s life to be controlled and managed.  I keep her on the alert for any weakness she might show and keep her working hard to be all that she can be.  And, I may say without bragging, I have been doing this for over fifty years now!  When she was a little girl she took care of herself when her mother couldn't cope. She was nothing if not independent. And just what have you done all these years??  You are the lazy side, the underachiever!

R: Hey, all those years she had to work so hard to take care of herself, I provided relief.  I helped her relax, take it easy, acknowledge how hard it was just to function with so little mothering.  I encouraged her to escape into reading and daydreaming to keep her spirit alive.  You would just be work, work, work all day!  Why couldn’t you just relax?

L: Because, what would happen if she relaxed?  It’s scary to think about it!  All the hurt and anger could just flow out and make other people feel bad. She would be critical of her mother, she would be -- worst of all possible things -- selfish!

R: That does sound scary, all right; I wouldn’t like it either.  I guess that was also what kept me in the more passive mode, distracting Bettye and always taking the easier path, not wanting to risk making a big effort and failing. 

L: Yes! Without that, she might have begun to think critically about the situation.  She might have stood up for herself much earlier than she did instead of rebelling secretly and self-destructively with her mediocrity in school and her smoking, drinking and partying in high school and sleeping around in college.

R: Well, she was just so unhappy. I mean, starting with the move to a new city in the middle of sixth grade, it seemed like she was always carrying the weight of her parents’ unhappiness—her mom’s depression and dad’s alcoholism.  Remember that chiropractor who did the kinesthetic diagnosis on Bettye’s shoulder – on you! – and named the underlying emotion as grief for her father at the age of sixteen?

L: Yes, I remember that, of course

R: What I’m beginning to think is that “shouldering” their pain was your way of keeping Bettye from feeling all the hurt and anger from their failure to parent her fully.  They were too caught up in their personal dramas to pay attention in the way a child needs.  So you got her caught up in their drama as well, to explain and justify what was really very hurtful.  She took on “the tragedy” of their lives as she used to call it.  In fact, she became more and more consumed by it as her own life was most miserable, in her college years, when her parents seemed most out of it in relation to her unhappiness at being where she was.  Remember how her dad even accused her of being selfish for trying to transfer, because she wouldn’t be able to go home every weekend like she was doing??

L: Oh, god, I remember that only too well.  But look, what was your role then?  Maybe she would have actually gotten into one of those other schools if she had gotten straight As that first year.  But no, she only did well in the courses she liked that were easy for her.  And she spent all those hours in the butt room playing bridge.  Then, after stupidly giving up the chance to go abroad for junior year so she could do the honors program, she procrastinated and bombed her junior honors paper and abandoned it altogether.  So the whole underachiever thing just followed us through the entire time.  What a mess!  Not that anyone but us even cared by that time, or perhaps ever did!

R: Hey, don’t get so discouraged.  This is the past we’re talking about, right? 

L: You’re right.  Now, if Ijust learn to relax more and you suck it up and pull your weight, we will all be in great shape!

R: There you go again, Miss Uptight.

Imbalances

One of the physical characteristics that present challenges to me in yoga is the unevenness between my right and left sides.

For example, my left hip is much more open and flexible than my right hip, so stepping forward out of downward dog with the right foot is more difficult, and landing both feet together when jumping forward is impossible.

In the midsection I have a tendency to sink into the right side, so that I have to consciously lift that side to do balancing postures successfully and to keep my right leg from sagging in shoulder stand.

My right arm can get lazy in downward dog.

In contrast, my left shoulder tends to stay locked in a slightly scrunched-up position and has been that way for most of my life.

I know this because when I was in grade school my mother took me to the doctor, alarmed because she had noticed my shoulders were uneven.

The doctor said there was nothing to do about it – that was just the way I was. I had forgotten about this episode until 2002 when I was in a workshop for women making career transitions and one of our coaches, walking behind me, pointed out the unevenness.

“You must be carrying the weight of the world on that shoulder,” she said. “Ha, ha, ha!”

As I have been seriously working on these mind-body issues over the past few years, I have realized she was right: that little girl is still inside trying to be strong for everyone.

And, as if to compensate, there is a more passive, weaker side that takes over in many areas of my life.

I have learned that, in order to progress without injuring myself in the physical practice of yoga, it is best to accept and work with the limitations my body presents.

In much the same way, I am working on accepting these contrasting aspects of my character and the ways they have shaped my life, even as I try to relax one and fortify the other.

A biographer of Henry Adams (Patricia O’Toole,

The Five of Hearts

) comments on the sadness in the fact that Adams directed the insights he gained from self-reflection only toward self-improvement, not self-acceptance.

I don’t want that to be my story.

Morning Mysore

Starting to learn backbend with Kimberly

Three great things about morning mysore

1.The teaching: For most of my time at Yoga East, every time I showed up for morning mysore class I was rewarded with the attention of either Karen Rafferty or the founder-director of the studio, Kimberly Dahlmann.  It’s impossible to calculate the value of the steady stream of guidance, support and encouragement they provided.  When I was ready to try something new or more challenging, or when I needed to accept where I was and stop pushing for awhile, they pointed that out.  When I was hurting in body or spirit, they showed me how to work with the pain.  They taught me how to breathe and how to use breath in the practice.  All this was in addition to thousands of adjustments to bring greater alignment, openness or ease into the postures.  Thank you, Kimberly, Karen and all my morning mysore teachers!

2. The community: Morning mysore class is busy these days but there is a fairly small core of practitioners who have been coming to this class regularly over the years.  This group is an important community for me even though we don’t talk much or know much about each other’s lives outside of class.  The closeness I feel is in the unspoken support of being together day after day – just being present for the struggles and the triumphs as we each work to evolve our practices.  It’s definitely one of the things that keep me motivated to get up early for yoga.

3. The morning ritual: Since Ashtanga vinyasa yoga works the internal organs fairly intensively, it’s best to come to it with an empty stomach, bladder and bowels.  This has meant I couldn’t just roll out of bed and onto the mat for morning mysore.  I have always been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person but most of my adult life have used the early morning hours for work.  Instead, for the past seven or eight years, on yoga mornings, I have taken time over my cup of tea for spiritual reading and reflection. Eventually, a daily meditation practice evolved out of this routine.  I doubt I ever would have gotten there without the pull of mysore class on weekday mornings.

My Journey with Yoga

I have practiced yoga for the past fifteen years, the last nine at Yoga East in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  This period, from my late 40s to my mid-60s, has been eventful: the end of one career and journey into another; a house move and the beginning of the empty-nest phase of parenting; the death of both my and my husband’s remaining parents and a six-month separation that seemed a near-death of our marriage; his retirement; and another career change for me.  These events along with many others have created the context for my journey with yoga, which I think of as a kind of pilgrim’s progress to adulthood.

The journey has not been about yoga but about facing and moving beyond the baggage of childhood and youth and learning how to deal with the present on its own terms.  Yoga has not been the only source of support by any means.  Study of Buddhism has been an essential accompaniment.  Other spiritual reading and self-help books, readings and teaching from my professional fields of organizational learning and dialogue and a couple of rounds of therapy, as well as conversations with family members and friends who have, at different times, been my teachers, have all been important.  I would like to work through how these different sources have interacted and how (if at all) they have become integrated in a consistent perspective.

At the same time, yoga has been central in a couple of ways I would like to explore.  One of these is the tangible fact of regular practice.  My first yoga teacher conveyed to me the aspiration of daily practice. I have held that as the standard even through times when it was far from the reality, and it is stronger than ever now that my definition of “practice” has expanded beyond the physical postures.  The other is also tangible but subtler.  It is the body-mind connection, specifically the way in which the subconscious is embodied and accessible through the body.  The combination of physical movement with aware breathing in yoga practice has made it, for me, a powerful tool for working through the physical to the psychological and vice versa. In this blog-journal I would like to reflect on the experience that led me to this realization and the benefit I have gained from it along the way.