Welcome to Lotus Love. The official blog of Opening Lotus Yoga.
I will offer occasional , brief and hopefully insightful prose to inspire your journey of opening to the deepest aspect of your being as you navigate this experience we call life. Blog topics will vary from the practical elements of how to create optimum health, energy, and well being as well as the esoteric territory of expanding consciousness to its universal dimensions. Who is this directed to?? Anyone connected to the inner desire to awaken in this lifetime. We are not the yogis of the monasteries, ashrams or caves. We are the awakening yogis of the urban and suburban environs. We work jobs, raise families, participate in community and practice our spirituality in a variety of ways.
Let me share the inspiration of why this now? 5 months ago, March 2012. I suffered a back injury doing heavy yard work. Being a yoga teacher, I immediately accessed every posture I knew to help alleviate the pain and immobility I was experiencing. I sought my chiropractors help who initially thought I had sprained my sacrum (being hyper flexible, that has happened before) but as the initial injury and pain morphed into months of bone shattering sciatica, I sought the medical route to determine the specifics of this injury. In July , an MRI confirmed a herniated S1-L5 disc with nerve entrapment (thus the sciatic pain).
Here I was, with a full teaching schedule , unable to move in any reasonable way without pain. I was literally stopped in my tracks. what to do?? nothing but cope with the pain and start over.
Like a baby learning to walk, I took one day at a time to reclaim my health. In the acute stage when movement was problematic, I belly breathed relentlessly to calm my nervous system and manage the pain I went 33 days without sleep to any measureable level. If there is one sure way to create mental imbalance, going without sleep is a surefire path. I meditated on healing mantras like Ra Ma Da Sa, I opened to a dimension of awareness that had been elusive to me previously. What was the portal?? PAIN. Acute, searing, mind blowing pain.
I had often read in Buddhist references the potency of pain as a teacher. No one consciously invites pain to your door, but inevitably just by living, you will encounter some level of pain. How you respond to that pain is the difference between whether you suffer or awaken. The pain energy can be an amazing focusing agent. When in pain, the mind cannot focus on much else. Your capacity to process thoughts, language and day to day communications becomes quite impaired.
The benefit, you go in to the pain. You actually stop trying to resist the sensations by contracting your body and mind and breath by breath enter the center of it.
I realized this 'injury', this event was not just a landscaping' faux pas'... It was the tipping point of my body~mind having been overloaded with emotional, stress and yes... pain from the past 8 years of my life.
The pain had come home to roar. The trigger ?? Loss. Loss of what? My mother passed July 24, 2012,
An amazing woman of spirit and love. My middle son was suffering a relapse of his mental health stability and my eldest son had relocated across country,a happy move but nevertheless a change. This trifecta did not cause my injury, my inability at the time to integrate all of these experiences created the pressure that my body sought to release.
So in retrospect, all of these challenging events were gifts. We can look at the difficult challenges of life as opportunities to grow, heal and expand rather than contract, close and suffer.
I heard a quote" You are born twice. Once when you mother gives birth to you and again when your mother dies and you give birth to yourself".
Pain has given me the opportunity to birth myself into a deeper space. I am healing, not in pain, and grateful for all of these experiences. Yes, ,even the bone shattering pain. May your experiences of pain be portals to peace!
Namaste
Anne
