Do no harm

I was taking yoga last night and in the middle of class, the instructor said, "Do no harm. Start right here, with yourself."

It should be an unnecessary reminder for me, as I spend much of my time teaching working with people with injuries and structuring workouts to challenge them within the frame of their abilities but I get on the mat and just want to move to my limits. And it is different in a packed yoga class than a private session. The teacher structures the class for the group and can't possibly give everyone feedback all the time so we fall into the poses that we own and push a little to get to the ones we are learning and fall completely apart on others, moving to the rhythm of the class not our own rhythm.

I love yoga class, I love being in a class working within myself but sometimes it is hard to pull back where I need to or to even know where it is that I need to pull back. It's easy to get so used to doing something wrong that it's hard to know what it is that needs changing.

Last night, my quads and hipflexors were locked up and I had to keep my stance really short in lunges to keep from collapsing in my low back but the thing is, I love wheel (a full backbend) so even though I stayed conservative all night,  when we got to wheel, I jumped into it without being open enough for it and felt an old, old low back injury flare up.

On the next repetition, the teacher said, "Do no harm, starting right now, with yourself."

and finally, I got it. Not honoring where my body is, where I am in the moment but pushing to where I have been able to go in the past or where I would like to go in the future without listening to my needs at the moment is hurting me. I stopped and stayed with bridge pose, focusing on the hip extension to begin to release my quads and it felt so much better to come out of it and feel a little looser. 

This is what chronic illness has done to me

I am so used to being in pain and feeling tired, kinda feverish, and rather cruddy that when I get sick, I usually pass over it, thinking that it’s just a Lyme disease flareup. I never see my Lyme specialists anymore because I am getting better and better all the time but when I do get sick, I wait and hope for it will go away on it’s own because I am so used to thinking of sick as something that doesn’t pass, as something that I can’t do anything about. And because I have a horribly irrational fear of ever letting my regular doctors know that something is wrong with me. Not because of them, but because then it goes onto my record and the insurance companies know that I’ve been sick.

From my experience, insurance companies will quite literally ruin your life in order not to cover any health care and now I believe that having any medical record besides annual checkups and recorded good health is a liability.

So I’ve been having sweating through the quilts fevers and chills for the past couple of months had vague abdominal pain and I just ignored it or, when it was really bugging me, chalked it up to Lyme Disease.

Well, finally about two weeks ago I realized that this probably wasn’t Lyme disease but it took me until two days ago to realize that not only could I do something about it, but I would feel better too if I took care of it. So I did what I never do and saw a doctor. Bladder infection. Antibiotics. Bam. Easy!

I think that I keep coming back to this, but here it is again.

I started this blog when I was running a lot, thinking that it would be a good place to put down all the ideas I had while running but then I got sick, I got injured, I got sick, I didn't have time and each time I had to take a break from running, I also took a break from blogging. And often returned to running long before I returned to blogging again.

In the past nine year, when I hardly ran or blogged at all, something shifted and I began to understand that me, meditating was helping me while running. Me, doing pilates or training? Helping me to run. Me, writing and me, working and me, hanging out with friends is all a part of me, running as the running feeds the writing, readies me for meditation, makes me alert when I work. It is like, when I first started pilates a decade ago and I first began to really understand that if the wrist hurts, I should look at the alignment of the neck and that the ankle bone truly is connected to the hip bone only now I am understanding the holistic connection all aspects of my life feeding each other. As my understanding of this shifts, so has this blog. One, I am finally really excited about writing it because I know that I will discover things that are beneath the surface of my consciousness in my understanding of the body and healing and also, because what this blog is in my mind has shifted into an exploration of the interaction of the layers of physical and spiritual or energetic vitality. It sits at the intersection of all the work that I do: writing, pilates and reiki/qigong/craniosacral and I am really looking forward to understanding how they all feed each other.

Conveniently, this shift happened at the end of 2012 so I can commit to blogging at least once a week and feel like I have a fresh start to it.  I am looking forward to 2013 in such a big way!

the best book club ever!

We did it! We began our book club on movement and I am looking forward to taking my learning to a whole new level.

T. is a good friend of mine--she managed the first studio that I worked at in California and is still teaching pilates herself. We met up in the midst of the holidays and she brought up this idea of hers: to start a book club where we take the times to explore different movement modalities (like Alexander technique, Franklin Method, Feldenkris to name just a few), various healing techniques (Qi Nei Tsang, Ayurveda and Craniosacral, among others) and study anatomy in-depth. How much fun and how valuable!

I have done so much continuing ed since I started teaching pilates and personal training. I have taken four day human dissection labs at a chiropractic college, immersed myself in qigong for a year, spent weekends reviewing anatomy and physiology in an effort to understand chronic injuries and how to structure training sessions, attended pilates and mind-body conferences and, of course, taken countless pilates, yoga, capoeira, dance and gyro classes. From every class, I have learned so much about how to teach, about my own limits and places to push myself and about the body, health and healing but there is only so much that can be taught and learned in a week or weekend. And the idea of exploring on our own and getting deep into these topics is really exciting.

So we did it. T. and I met up today and went over our interests and what we want to learn to fold into the work that we do. Naturally, I am really interested in anything that will support my Craniosacral work right now and we decided to start with anatomy with a focus on the fascia. We'll be reading Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers first.