Drishtis

I have now had an acupuncture treatments once a week for the past three weeks. I’m lucky enough to have a school of alternative medicine in my town (American Institute of Alternative Medicine). I knew they offered student acupuncture treatments, but I have never taken advantage of them before. But a friend at work who has had back problems about as long as I have (only hers are much worse) recently started getting treatments there, and swears by it. So I decided it was time for me to try it out.

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With my continuing back problems, I feel like I have a unique opportunity for the practices of non-attachment and renouncing the fruits of action. And yet, I am not doing well at this practice. I am impatient at every stage. I wanted the pain to stop. When I was no longer in daily pain, I was impatient to be able to return to normal activities like dusting and carrying without risking recurring pain. Now that I can once again perform those normal tasks I am impatient to return to a cardio and strength training fitness routine. Want, want, want! I am never satisfied!

But the body is never limitless; it always imposes limits on activities. Accepting this fact of human existence is one of the biggest lessons of the life, I think. It is why the yogis say that Corpse Pose is the most important pose to practice. We must learn the humility that there are limits to what we can achieve, and to the length of our existence.

My body has given me such a great opportunity to explore this knowledge for myself, yet I have felt that I am squandering that opportunity with my desire and impatience to return to health.

During my meditation Wednesday night I asked to accept my body as it is. I asked that I let go of the impatience and frustration, and be at peace with my body.

As soon as the meditation was over I found myself looking through the Cosmic Healing; book and found new healing meditations to try.  And yesterday I made an appointment for an acupuncture treatment next week. I made a promise to myself to schedule some sort of bodywork treatment (massage, acupuncture, etc.) for myself every Thursday for at least the next month. Understood in that promise is a commitment to stop feeling apologetic for the sensitivity of my muscles.*

So I am already making positive steps. On the other hand, I haven’t stopped complaining about the roundness of my belly or the tightness of my clothes yet. So I guess I have more work to do on accepting my body as it currently is. 

I include, as a reminder to myself:
 

*Massage therapists, as well as my chiropractor, are prone to exclaim “What did you do to yourself!” when they feel how tight my muscles are. This tends to make me feel like I should do extra stretching and relaxation before I feel like I can let myself get a massage. I have to accept that my muscles are simply sensitive and prone to tightness.

The qigong exercises I have been doing for the upper back and neck have made a huge difference, and I am rarely experiencing pain or tightness in the upper back. Now, however, my lower back is tight and achey. Dr. K says my spine is stabilizing, but the muscles still seem to be touchy and become sore easily. I did go ahead and order the accompanying video for lower back pain. I arrived yesterday, but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.

With my recent renewed interest in Taoist exercise and meditation, I felt drawn yesterday to look through Mantak Chia’s book Cosmic Healing, which I first read a couple of years ago. I have been doing some of his Taoist energy meditation techniques in my meditations lately, and I wanted to review them. And besides, it is nice to flip through the book every now and then. Chia packs a lot of information in a few pages and you never know when something will strike you as useful.

Cosmic Healing gives several qigong visualizations designed to open both the yin and yang chi routes that I will begin adding to my morning routine. Mantak Chia’s website also has several free videos. I am particularly interested in this Tao Yin exercise that looks like it would be very good for lower back pain.

Along with the Lee Holden lower back qigong video I just got, these practices will hopefully unblock my yin and bring as much mobility to my lower back as the upper body qigong practices have done for my upper back.

My elderly kitty, whose diabetes has been controlled for years with a special diet, now has a blood sugar sufficiently high that she has to go on insulin. The vet discovered this because she was drinking a lot of water while she was being boarded over Memorial Day weekend.  Last week was busy with several visits to the vet, a special trip to a pharmacy to buy (expensive!) insulin, and getting used to giving injections. And worrying over her health.

She has to receive injections twice a day, as close to 12 hours apart as possible. This means I can’t stay late in town to attend my usual meditation class, but instead have to get home so I can give my kitty her injection. I am teaching my partner to give the injections, but until he’s comfortable giving them, I don’t feel I can really leave him with the task.

This means I have had to miss my meditation class two weeks in a row now.  I can meditate at home, but I haven’t made it a habit to do so regularly, preferring instead the experience of meditating with other people at my weekly class. Why is it that when we most need to meditate, those very stresses of life that create the need seem to conspire to keep us from the practice?

I have been able to keep up a yin yoga and qigong practice to some extent, and that helps, but isn’t a substitution for meditation.

I may not be able to go to meditation class tonight, but I promise myself that I will make time for an hour of meditation this evening. I truly need that quiet space for myself, especially now.

Towards the end of April I did some house cleaning in preparation for having a few friends over. I straightend and dusted a couple of rooms, working for about an hour and a half.  Just that little bit of work exhausted me, and left my shoulder and upper back muslces in pain for several days.  It was then I realized that, while the rehab exercises the chiropractor had given me, and I had been faithfully doing twice a week for months, had done their work in strengthening my arms, legs, and lower- and mid-back, they hadn’t targeted my upper back, leaving those muscles (mainly the upper fibers of the trapezius), vulnerable. Less than two hours of house cleaning and I was out of commission for two days! Yikes!

I immediately added stretches for the upper back into my daily stretching routine. I also began searching YouTube for gentle exercise for the the upper back. I wanted something similar to the yin yoga I have been doing that has been so much help to my middle and lower back.

I stumbled a video of Qi Gong for the Upper Back and ordered it. I have been working with this video several times a week for the past three weeks, and I have found it to be gentle enough for my underused muscles not to cause me pain. I have liked it so well that I think I may get his qi gong workout for the lower back, too.

But has my new qi gong and stretching routine strengthened my shoulders enough to allow me to return to normal activities? YES! Last weekend I was able to complete a pretty heavy reorganization of my closets. It was fairly vigorous work that took hours to complete. I had been wanting to do this reorganization for months but couldn’t because of my back pain. My shoulders were a bit sore for the next couple of days, but nothing worse than typical muscle soreness (DOMS).

It has been a long road (six months since I started chiropractic), but I am so glad to finally be able to do normal activities again!

Yin yoga has also been my primary practice for the past month. In yin yoga, you hold gentle floor poses (seated, prone, or supine) poses for several (2-5) minutes. Holding the stretches for so long encourages my muscles to really just kind of melt into the pose. It seems to be a magic bullet for my back pain. The long-held stretches are doing wonders for keeping my back muscles relaxed and the spine healthy. I am almost completely pain-free most days.

Recently I have added ujjayi breathing with breath retention to the yin yoga practice: breathing in for 8 counts, holding the breath in for 4 counts, breathing out for 4 counts, holding the breath out for 4 counts. In this way 2′45″ (the current length I am holding each pose) takes about 10 breaths.

It is said that the real purpose of the asanas is to prepare the student for meditation. That certainly seems to be true of yin yoga. Sometimes in this practice, I find my mind disturbed with unrest. Not full-formed thoughts exactly, but a jitteriness or prickliness that is hard to describe. Maybe “mental white noise” comes closest as a description. I find myself irritated at the music I’m listening to (I often play Pandora’s Spa Radio station), wishing I could get up and skip forward to the next song. Unrest.  

I have experienced similar sensations at times when I meditate.

Then sometimes when I’m doing yin yoga my mind is calm and untroubled, peaceful and relaxed. This I have experienced many times during meditation.

One thing I would like to do, but haven’t found time for, is meditate for at least 40 minutes after my hour-long yin yoga session. I bet that would make for a nice, deep meditation. I had hoped to do that last night, but traffic was slow and I got home later than I expected. I’m not sure I’ll have time tonight, either. Soon, I hope.

As I left my chiro appointment yesterday…my back full of trigger points, Dr. K told me…I wanted nothing more than to relax into a session of yin yoga. I just wanted to relax into a pose, not thinking about how I should push into the stretch or how long to hold it, but just let myself be in the pose. As I haven’t done yin yoga in months, I set my interval timer to two minutes per pose, so as not injure myself in a pose held too long. I also made sure to avoid certain poses like twists or cobra that I though could have stressed my back.

Afterwards I felt emotionally tender. Yin yoga can do that. Today, though, I feel great. My mind clear and intelligent, my emotions hopeful and positive, my back more at peace than it has been for days.

I meant to go to meditation last night, I really did. The last couple of times I’ve gone the hard plastic chairs have irritated the trigger points in my back. Lying on the floor does the same thing. Obviously I should cultivate the ability to meditate sitting on a cushion, without a chair. But…not there yet.

I did, in fact, pack an armload+ of soft cushy pillows in the car, intending  to meditate resting against them, then leave them in the meditation room so I don’t have to carry them in again.

But it didn’t work out. I think Wednesday is just a bad back day for me. I do PT at the chiropractor’s on Tuesday afternoons, and by the end of Wednesday I can be feeling tight and sore. At least that’s how I was last night. I decided not to do anything that might aggravate my back further, and went home instead. I was disappointed, but I can certainly meditate at home where I will be more comfortable.

On the plus side of life, I have consistently been doing my morning pranayama practice for the past week, and I’m loving it! I am not a morning person by nature. It often takes me a while to get going in the mornings. But with just 15 minutes of energizing breathing before my morning shower, I feel awake and  clear-headed. I feel less need for caffeine to get going, and my energy level remains high for the first half of the day. That’s a habit I really want to continue to make time for, if I can.

The pranayama class I gave two weeks ago seemed to go well enough. The new person who was there has come back to the weekly meditation classes (led by the usual teacher, not me) for the past two weeks. So at least I didn’t scare her away! I still have a few nerves when I teach, though. It’s not nervousness that I don’t know what I’m talking about or what I’m doing - I definitely do. I think it’s more that I’m a strong introvert, more used to listening than being the center of attention. Teaching takes a different kind of energy than I’m used to. I want to keep at it until it feels comfortable to me.

What’s really not being comfortable for me right now, though, are the hard plastic deck chairs in the room where we meditate. My back is still very sensitive. When I meditate at home I sit on a soft cushy couch with multiple soft pillows behind my back. (I have been sitting on an exercise ball at work, which takes pressure off my back and helps a lot). Yesterday I took one of those big cushions with arms into the meditation room, set it against the wall, and sat on the floor with a pillow under my butt. I still couldn’t get comfortable! I couldn’t meditate. Lying on the floor isn’t good, either. Anything hard against my back hurts.

I have one more idea. If I could bring some sort of soft cushion to lie on, I might be able to meditate on the floor in Savasana. I do have such a cushion, a twin matress topper, that just might work. As long as I can carry it tucked under one arm. I draw the line at carrying multiple armloads of cushions and pillows, as I end up just feeling silly. I can meditate perfectly well at home, though I do like meditating with other people, so I hope this works out for me.

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My schedule has been a bit wonky the past couple of weeks, leading me to need to get to work a bit earlier. As a result, I have stopped my morning pranayama practice. I am not a morning person; I find it difficult to get going in the morning. The past couple of weeks it has been particularly difficult to get going. Well, this morning I did a bit of energizing pranayama, and what a difference it made! I hadn’t realized how much my morning breathing practice was helping me to be awake and happy in the mornings until I stopped. It may make me an extra 15 minutes later to work in the mornings, but if I can afford it, that extra 15 minutes is really worth it.

I was able to find an hour to meditate the evening that I wrote my last post.  Meditation really does make everything feel better. 

I have also decided to add Alternate Nostril Breathing to each of my pranayama sessions. It’s supposed to balance the right and left halves of the brain, so maybe it will balance my moods, as well. And, for now at least, I’m not performing the bedtime internal retention pranayama. I think I need a rest from it for now; I’ll try it again later. Hey, I made it 10 days.

This evening I teach the second of my classes on pranayama. Last month I taught Pranayamas for Cleansing and Energizing.  Tonight I’m teaching Pranayamas For Calming. My source material for today’s class is almost exclusively B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light On Pranayama. I love the precise, detailed style of his writing.  Occasionally he spices the text with metaphorical description, such as this gem: “As a jug is filled from the bottom to the top, so fill the lungs from their base to the brim.” I am very reminded of the style my massage textbook, which asked the masseur to “knead, as a baker kneads dough (J.H. Kellogg, 1903).” 

During the meditation following last month’s class on energizing pranayamas, I found myself battling thoughts and emotions, and never felt the nice drifty meditation space. I also heard from one other person that she had trouble sleeping that night. That makes sense, since the pranayamas we did that evening were pretty focused on pumping the solar plexus; we probably stirred some stuff up.  Good to know. The next time I teach I won’t do as many of the energizing exercises all in one night, but end with several calming pranayamas.

My meditation after today’s class focusing on stress-relieving pranayamas will hopefully be more peaceful.