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Therapeutic Yoga: How One Pose Can Get You Unstuck
Written by Lori Pollard
I have dabbled in yoga, meditation and various spiritual teachings now for about 10 years. Over the last 7 months I have become much more immersed and serious with my practices, so when I attended my first therapeutic yoga workshop recently, I was a little thrown off when I proceeded to bawl my head off during class. There was this faint, familiar voice in the back of my somewhat malleable mind saying, “There’s no crying in yoga!” One minute I’m feeling warm and cozy in a pose that for the life of me I can’t pronounce, and the next minute the ever compassionate instructor is placing tissue in my hand.
The pose that brought me to my knees, and in actuality opened me up, mimicked the experience of a mother’s soothing embrace that completely enveloped my entire body. In that moment of emotion I couldn’t have articulated what I was feeling, but felt it at such a primal, involuntary level that I broke down and just cried. Thank God, in therapeutic yoga the students stay in relaxed poses for a fairly long period of time, because I was able to compose myself by the time we sat up in what I call, criss-cross apple sauce pose. (The actual name has a lot of syllables that again, I can’t recall.) As I was grappling with embracing my unexpected emotional outburst I heard the instructor say in a very gentle voice, “That pose emulates lying on a mother’s chest.” I almost yelled out, “No way! That’s exactly what I felt!” Instead I pretended to act like this was fairly obvious, and tried to transition to the next pose without focusing too much on what just happened. This was difficult for me to do, because I was in such utter amazement that I could feel and long for something at such a cellular level, and have such a spontaneous reaction to, and at the same time I didn’t have the words to describe or explain what I’d just experienced. Did I mention that I have a Masters degree in counseling, and am a Life Coach? I’m rarely at a loss for words, and I’m pretty open to having emotional experiences for crying out loud, so what the heck was going on here? Again the small voice, “So, this is therapeutic yoga? No wonder they call it that.” (Secretly I was somewhat skeptical at first of therapeutic yoga).
For some time I have read, intellectually understood, and even embraced the whole Deepak Chopra- mind-body ideology, but until that moment, I had never experienced, or felt it in such a profound way. In that moment my body allowed me to open up, bypassing my mind through my heart to a place that I had been unable to reach with other therapeutic methods. My body said to me, “You just want to feel safe, loved and nurtured sometimes Lori. It is a basic human need.” My body also told me that even though my mother wasn’t perfect, I still longed for this woman, not just a mother figure, but my mother to make me feel loved and accepted just as I am. It took my healing to a much deeper level that transcended the need for words, judgments or labels. The truth is I didn’t need the instructor to tell me what I had just experienced, I’d felt it. I knew and felt it in a way that words could never penetrate. The thoughts that flew through my mind in brief wisps conjuring up images of my mother told me everything I needed to know, and it told me with a more profound intensity, because no words were required. It is the difference between someone describing the healing properties of massage, and actually feeling those hands on the places of your body that have been starving for healing and human touch. It is the difference between hearing a description of the ocean, and actually sitting on the beach smelling the salty air, the feel of moisture on your skin, and witnessing the vast, unrelenting waves crashing into the earth.
Like most of us, I have dealt with my share of blaming my parents and childhood for a myriad of my “unpleasant” emotions and attributes. Some of these I push away with disdain, and at the same time cling to, like my dark childhood friends. My friends solely because they have been with me for so long. Kind of like a bad habit. I think this is what the Buddhists refer to as ego. Sometimes I think forgiving ourselves is a much more daunting task than forgiving others, and yet those we need to forgive also need our forgiveness, and to forgive themselves as well. I believe that you and I along with the most hard hearted of people, down in the dark recesses of our souls have a fundamental longing to be at peace and free from suffering in this life. This is the great equalizer. Sometimes it is difficult to see with some people because they have such hurtful ways of going about getting that peace, but we have all experienced this at some point in our lives. We have all hurt someone out of our own pain and been hurt by someone in their pain. No one is exempt from this in life, and we have a choice when this happens to us. We can spiral into pessimism, depression, revenge, righteous indignation and martyrdom, or we can connect with our own pain by having compassion for ourselves, and those who have hurt us. Even if you have to physically separate yourself from this person for your own emotional/physical health, you don’t have to separate yourself from them in your heart. The Buddhists as well as Jesus believed that separation from others only leads to pain and loneliness. Unconditional love and inter-connectedness with others brings about peace and acceptance to everyone including oneself. I think this is because we have an inner knowing at our core that this is what we want and need when we are less than perfect, and it doesn’t matter that I may try to justify my behavior by saying, “I’m more this or that than you.” I am still imperfect, and I know it. I think this is what evoked such a strong emotional reaction from a single yoga pose. For me the culmination of meditation and spiritual practices synergistically became alive through movement in my body, miraculously unlocking the epiphany that on a fundamental level, my parents as well as everyone in that room, are all the same. No one was the bad guy, or the good guy. Just as I was struggling with letting go, and/or accepting the parts of me that I had no tolerance for, so was my mother’s struggle. Moreover, even with her flaws, and my blame towards her (some unwarranted) I still yearned for the experience of feeling safe in her warm embrace. I believe this is a truth that heals us all: We are unified by our universal experience of suffering, our wish to be loved and to be happy, and perhaps more poignantly- our opportunity and ability to connect with one another through these shared desires. After all, don’t most of us remember yearning for our teacher’s approval, silently crying out, “Notice me. I’m sitting quietly in criss-cross applesauce!”
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