SARAH WOLF | WRITER, READER, GAMER
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My Inner Worlds
Yesterday I took a workshop taught by Billy Batten of Bikram Yoga Wilmington, hosted by Raleigh Yoga Company. I have now been practicing yin yoga for four weeks and continue to love it. Bikram is the next step for me, and I wasn’t sure what to expect from the afternoon’s training. I was the only one there who had never taken a Bikram class. Thinking the workshop was for people like me, a total newbie, I was a bit surprised to see folks there who have decades of experience in this method. I chose to feel special for being the only true beginner out of a room of eighteen yogis.
Billy said Bikram yoga is for the broken, physically or emotionally. I’m doing yoga to help with my spinal pain (see post here), and I can always become more emotionally healthy (see post here). Bikram uses the body to change the body, an empowering tool. He asked us why we come to yoga. If the reason is to look good in our poses, we can lose our motivation. My intent is to relieve the constant pain in my upper neck that gives me headaches and blurs my vision, as well as deepening the connection with my body’s knowledge and understanding. I’ve ignored the body’s quiet song long enough.
After the workshop I moved into the regular yin yoga class, which had more people in attendance than usual. The studio has been open for just over two months, and I’ve been spoiled by classes with only a handful of students. I can sometimes get overwhelmed by a crowded room and will avoid situations where I know there will be a lot of people. But this is yin yoga. I breathed and allowed the energy of everyone there to softly flow within my imagined space. Yin embraces discomfort, and I had an opportunity to be vulnerable inside a packed room. The class felt short, which tells you how good it was—the hour flew by. During an intense hip pose, I finally let go and cried through the pain that’s been in my left hip for some time, hindering my gait during walks. I had a chance two weeks ago to cry it out during Saturday yin, but I didn’t want to sob with a medical doctor on the mat next to me. Yes, I have my unfair prejudices.
In final savasana (“corpse pose”), I allowed the tears to fall and relaxed into the posture. Towards the end of it, I saw in my mind’s eye a circle of concrete blocks beginning to crack, transforming into living flowers. It was a beautiful image, and I feel the flowers are within my strengthening body. They aren’t there yet, but I have a picture to use each time I go to yoga—I’m transforming concrete into beautiful blossoms.
Thank you to Billy for sharing his wisdom, and to Laura and Susan for inviting him into their studio. I’m grateful to be a part of Raleigh Yoga Company’s growing practice.
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Our bodies are expressive, beautiful, and possess an inner working where we feel little control. From my earliest years I have been sensitive. As a kid I would lose consciousness from the pain of an injury when one of my siblings might only shed tears. Frankly, my body told me a lot of things I was too young to handle, so I learned to shut off communication. It worked…sort of. My body felt the dismissal. Its feelings went unheard, its knowing unacknowledged. So thirty years ago this summer, we had our biggest fight ever. My teenage self stopped feeding it. What sane person would stay in a relationship where one partner decided the other would get as little as possible? We were head-to-head—me liking the size two jeans after spending my childhood as the chubby girl; my body slowly being destroyed in an attempt to remain functioning. While I’m intensely stubborn, I get it from an expert. My mom. The anorexia got to a point where she wouldn’t pretend I was still healthy, and her “food is love” weapon battered my self-hate until I finally started eating. The problem didn’t go away. It just got elusive and hid in socially-acceptable dieting and obsession over imperfection. Fast forward to my early marriage years. Thankfully I couldn’t starve myself after Matt and I spoke our vows and forged a life that was ours. That didn’t stop the self-hatred, but I didn’t see it as such until many years later. I obsessed about my weight and ruined our first vacation as a married couple. I had told myself in the months leading up to our Southwest excursion that I would be happy if I lost two pounds. Well, I didn’t lose the two pounds, mainly because my body didn’t have two pounds to lose. Sure enough, I wasn’t happy. But it was my own self-realized doom that cast a pall on our trip. My body wanted to be on better speaking terms with me. It’s forgiving like that. Around the same time I experimented with the weight-happiness ratio, it tried to tell me I was in a dangerous situation. I had a (short-lived) job where sexual harassment was the norm in the office environment. I developed unexplained allergies requiring drugs that would knock me out for an entire day. The pattern became work two days, eyes swell so badly I couldn’t see, take mega antihistamines for one day, go back to work for two days, recover with drugs again over the weekend. Repeat on Monday. After a few weeks of that, even I couldn’t ignore the cadence of my body urging me to get the heck out of that place. One of the guys had targeted me as an interest. There had been “bad stuff” that happened to two ladies who worked there, allegedly by this guy (and I believed them). Did I really need my body’s reaction to be as dramatic as it was? Obviously. I’m glad it kept me safe when my rational mind wouldn’t connect the dots. I’ve grown in gratitude for my body. Each year or two brings new enlightenment. This past winter I noticed I still have waves of self-hate flowing underneath my day-to-day activities and thinking. I’ve gifted my body to a yoga practice focused on yin, hoping it will still speak to me in those soft whispers after all my years of neglect. This is the third week of yoga, and my body has begun allowing me to hear those secrets it carried for us. I’m sorry I’ve made her hold our feelings without my support or love. And I’m grateful to have this chance to reconcile.
I’m two weeks into my burgeoning yoga practice (the word instructors use instead of “workout”). The first session blew my mind. Why did I wait so long to begin what my body has been screaming at me to do for years? The new studio near my house offers two types of yoga: yin and Bikram. I had never heard of either, but yin practice grabbed my attention with words like fascia and soft tissue. Over five years ago my back spoke to me using pain. “Something isn’t right and we want you to pay attention.” My friends referred me to their awesome chiropractor, and my incredible employer gave me a high-end office chair for ergonomic back support. The news from my chiropractor wasn’t good: adhesions, no cervical curve (i.e. the curve that everyone has in their neck is not in mine), unexplained anomalies that made sense when I remembered how many times I fell as a child and knocked myself unconscious with a blow to the back of my head. The situation worsened in May, 2016 when a car ran a red light in downtown Raleigh and broadsided my beloved Camry, not ten minutes after I’d had a chiropractic adjustment. In shock and feeling like I’d just wasted $50, I called the chiropractor’s office hoping they might take mercy and give me a free visit. The assistant scheduled a full workup for the next morning, and that started my painful five-month path to recovery. However, I didn’t return to the pre-accident interval of spinal manipulations. In January, 2017 I visited the chiropractor at least once per week and decided three weeks ago that this is not how I want to live the rest of my life. Did I need to reach that point to become open to yoga’s appeal? Maybe. I’m a financial person and paying $50 per week has gotten old. I’d rather pay $100 per month for something that leads to a healthier, stronger future. Getting my spine cracked doesn’t change the underlying tissue that won't hold the vertebrae in place. Two weeks ago while I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, Matt—my super-loving husband—searched online and found a newly-opened yoga studio near us. The following morning (because we game ALL DAY) I clicked the link and decided to give yin yoga a try that afternoon. The website’s use of words that my chiropractor repeated for years drew me in. I didn’t know that adhesions could be released in a yoga posture over time. I thought I was stuck with them for life. Yin yoga is my doorway to a new me, a rebirthing of who I can be.
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