You Say Injury, I Say Teacher.

Dear Fellow Rabbits:

Here’s today’s huge lesson for the taking:

Injuries are great teachers!

Since I broke my foot a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about injuries and the role they play in my yoga practice. I’ve had the opportunity to examine the “advice” I give my students and take some of my own medicine. Yes, at Yoga One we do walk our talks!

As I settle in to a slower pace, and elderly people with walkers go zooming by me, limitations and fears have had an opportunity to pop up. Oh no! I can’t shop for shoes! What if I gain a ton of weight because I can’t exercise?

Beneath the surface of the limits and fears, I am re-learning what I’ve always known: EVERYTHING has the potential to be my teacher (if I let it!).

Injuries are great teachers, if you pay attention to them. You hear teachers intoning this in class and it’s true – even random injuries (is there such a thing as a random injury?) can lead us to a greater understanding of ourselves.

As teachers, we see people get injured for several reasons:

• Sometimes we (not the Royal “we,” but the literal “we”: teachers do it too) push too hard or totally ignore and override our body’s experience, sensations or messages.

• Sometimes we aren’t present, period. We aren’t in our body. Instead we’re lost in thought, lost in space, disconnected from the laws of physics and our surroundings and then… the proverbial “accident happens”.

• Sometimes you are in the wrong place at the wrong time and a piano falls from the sky. (However, even falling pianos are NOT random events).

Regardless, an injury has the potential to teach you some pretty cool stuff.

Resistance Is The Roadmap To Ease

Notice your reactions to your injury. An injury is just another yoga pose. The thoughts and resistance to being injured are what are really interesting. They contain a secret message. They’re a virtual treasure map with clues to help you find the gold and move to a happier and more fulfilled YOU!

Ignore your thoughts and you will get injured over and over (I repeat, there are no random falling pianos. In fact NOTHING IS RANDOM). The universe, like a patient and loving parent, LOVES for us to learn our life lessons. It will keep sending them over and over and over, in bigger and more attention grabbing forms because it knows what’s best and wants you happy and whole.

An injury, like our asana practice, propels us outside of our comfort zone. It disrupts the comfort of routine, interrupts business as usual and puts us square in the face of our “autopilot”. When we’re living from autopilot, we hold assumptions, judgments, notions, ideas, opinions and rules as truths (and we hold them even closer than our breath). Injuries are a way that life taps your shoulder and begs you to look at your truths and think again.

To move beyond autopilot, start by looking at the instant messages kindly provided by your resident ego:

• “Man, I’m an idiot.”
• “What was I thinking?”
• “I always do something stupid.”
• “I’m getting old.”
• “I’m not good.”
• “What will ______ think?”
• “I knew I couldn’t do it!”
• “I knew I wouldn’t be good at _______.”

These thoughts are the default/unconscious stories we live by. The ones that run our life and we hope (Pray?) we can keep under the table. Getting present to these repetitive notions gives us a platform to move in a new direction.

Moving Beyond Injury And Into Learning

Exercise your right to choose what to do with your reactions. There are basically two time-honored ways to deal with reactions and resistance. The first, and by far most common practice, is to try to out run or ignore resistant thoughts through the following, though not limited forms:

• Overeating
• Drinking Alcohol
• Shopping
• Starting a diet
• Change of scenery
• Change of job
• Change of partner
• Change of hair color/style
• Your version here:_________________________.

As you no doubt guess, these methods, while often entertaining for a limited time, are often expensive and utterly ineffective for lasting change. When you add together the cost of therapy, new apparel, plane tickets and divorce attorneys, expensive barely describes it.  A year later, you end up with the same issues, an empty bank account, and cursing yourself.

Less expensive and far more effective is the second method: Facing it!

You think these thoughts all the time anyway, so you might as well stop and listen and grow… up!

For a moment – a real and actual moment (i.e. don’t just read through this) – sit still and let your thoughts come.

No censoring! No explaining. No rationalizing (as in “I don’t think this all the time,” because of course, you do think this all the time, you just aren’t hiding it as well at this moment).

Take your time, because you probably have more than one or two of these thoughts, then write them down.

When you’re done, (and there’s NO reason to hurry unless you enjoy pain and don’t mind repeating your life lessons a lot) look at them one by one and ask yourself: “Is this true?”

Just sit with the thought, don’t try to “think” your way through it and see if it’s true.

Your heart knows if it’s really, really, REALLY true that you’re a complete and total idiot, or if you just “think” so.

Personally, I worried that breaking my foot was going to ruin my family’s summer vacation. I sat with that thought and had to admit I didn’t know how it was going to affect our vacation.

Instead, I’ve discovered breaking my foot is actually a blessing. I’m going way slower than I have in YEARS. I spend my days curled up with my sons, a good book… or my husband!

I am in no hurry to do anything. I watch and actually SEE my sons surf, or skateboard.

I have to ask for help (HUGE for me, “Miss Independent”).

This injury has helped me become more connected to people. I am really happy!

Enough about me. What about you?

What are some of the “rules” you see your life and the world through? Go through the exercise of sitting quietly with your truths, then decide, once you really look at them, if you still accept them as “truth.” You can always re-adopt them if you change your mind.

By the way, you don’t have to wait to get injured to let life be your teacher. I bet you a box of yogi toes that one of those repetitive thoughts is lurking right below the surface and you’re listening to that nonsense. Any time you feel anything other than your natural state of “pure joy,” Just stop. And listen. And decide if you believe what you’re thinking.

Socrates put it this way: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

You have thoughts. You are not your thoughts. Unless your thoughts have you!

Namaste,

Alice