Pain
Am I really going to write about this? This controversial, slippery, nuanced topic…. Yes. Yes, I am. There are so many routes of discussion on this topic, but I will attempt to stay in the neighborhood of one. In the yoga practice, pain comes. It does. A completely painless lifetime of practice is unrealistic to say the least. Pain is a dialect in the language of the body in it’s effort to communicate with the mind.
What I want to focus on here and now is navigating your practice while experiencing pain. To get on your mat or not to get on your mat - that is the question.
As a student I was taught to do the practice no matter what. Don’t rest. Don’t avoid postures. Practice through the pain. Yes, I practice Ashtanga and I am aware of the reputation that can follow the Ashtanga method due to this very topic. But the idea of practicing through pain has been widely misunderstood by students and almost as widely misrepresented by instructors. Ashtanga does not ask you to ignore the pain you are receiving and shove your body into the most contorted version of the asana you can. This is dangerous and completely antithetical to what a yoga practice should be. What it does do is ask that you steadily meet yourself on your mat, day after day, through every fluctuation, transition, and evolution. As your body shifts from feeling amazing to feeling horrible, visit with it. Get to know its mood swings, attitudes, and beliefs. As a teacher, I urge my students to come to class if they are feeling pain, even and especially if it is a sensation that they would like to label “injury”. Sometimes there is a legitimate injury - often this is obvious immediately, due to intensity, type of sensation, inability to move, etc. Sometimes it takes exploring what is possible to be able to identify what is not.
Practicing through the pain is a means of investigation, a way to develop inner awareness and build skills. We get on our mat, visiting the familiar postures, with a deeper level of mindfulness. When the mind/body communications system is active, via the nervous system, with messages of pain, we can use the sensations to guide our approach, our methodology, alignment, muscular effort, breath, mental patterns and emotional reactions. When that sensation of pain arises, we can pause, breath, make small adjustments to change the sensation. Less pain now? Has it shifted to tension rather than pain? Soreness now? Completely gone? Ok, now we have experienced that in this position, if I make this adjustment, I have less pain. Perhaps that means that this is the appropriate alignment, approach, etc. Perhaps it is a matter of recognizing where your true stopping point is, what the honest expression of the pose is for you in this moment. (Don’t let what you want to do take over for what you can do.) Now you have learned something! If you continue in this way, day after day, you learn more and more details about the correct method of achieving the movement you want with less or no pain. Eventually the injury heals, or the strengthening processes, or the transformation is complete and in the meantime you have developed a new movement pattern, new strengths, and new inner awareness.
If, on the other hand, a pain arises in the body and you take that as a signal to rest, stay off your mat for a few days, etc. Pretty soon, if it is not an actual injury, the pain will subside and disappear. You will feel better, ready to get on your mat. After the first day, or week, the pain will return. Why? Because you are practicing in the same way, with the same patterns, same alignments as before - the same way that caused the pain in the first place. You gave your body rest, enough time for the communications system to go offline, but you didn’t learn anything new. Nothing changed. This cycle will continue to repeat until either you decide to give up the practice, or you really really hurt yourself, or you finally decide to get back on your mat, even when it hurts and figure out how to do the work in a way that hurts less.
On the flip side of avoiding pain is ignoring pain. With both tendencies, release your urge to self-judge. Sometimes, it is true, you get on your mat and realize that there is very little asana possible with the sensation you are experiencing, and making adjustments to approach and alignment have very little effect. If you tend to over-do it, push too hard when your body is experiencing a shift, opening, or strengthening, it is important to recognize it, check yourself, and choose rest. It is ok to rest. Rest is also a part of practice. The longer you practice and investigate the sensations that arise, the feedback from your body, the easier it is to identify the situations where practice is most beneficial and also those times where rest is required. You are learning the language of your body. Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know and learning doesn’t happen when you stay in bed.
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