When In Doubt, Yoga

    I love to run and play with our dogs; in general I think I have a playful spirit. I'm finding, thanks to a recent encounter with Ginger, that my body is lagging behind my spirit though. Last month I was throwing a stick around in the yard with Ted, the youngest member of our pack, and I didn't see Ginger coming at me. Ginger is an eighty pound Rhodesian Ridgeback that at first glance appears to be one solid mass of muscle. She hit my shins so hard it sent me flying into the air and, as gravity dictates, I came down hard. I lay in the grass where I'd landed for a few moments stunned, then I started to laugh. The dogs had gathered round me, all of them looking guilty. I think they know where their meals come from and were trying to make sure there would be no retaliation come dinner time. It was quite comical until I tried to get up, then I was confronted with the reality of my age. You just can't take a hit like that at fourty-six and expect to come out unscathed. I could tell my right hip, shoulder, and knee were all out of wack, so I headed in for some ibuprofen and to take inventory of my injuries. I was stiff and sore, but all in all it didn't seem too bad. I tried for three weeks to “yoga through” the pain, taking ibuprofen each moring and each evening. I continued to walk the dogs, and tried to stretch it out, all in the hope that things would pop back into place given some time. Things didn't pop back into place though. What happened was that I had a migrating pain on my right side. First my right hip hurt, then the pain would morph into what felt like a pinched nerve in my neck, then my sciatic nerve felt tweaked, then the muscles on the right side of my spine began to seize up, and then I came to an epiphany that many of us “hippies” who profess we don't need pharmaceuticals or doctors often come to: God gave us doctors for a reason, stop being an idiot and get some help. I may not be an idiot, but I am still a hippy at heart, so I chose acupuncture.

     At first I thought about going to the chiropractor, which seemed like the natural choice given my symptoms, but the voice inside my head is loud and acupuncture is what it was telling me to do. So I made an appointment with Lester, an acupuncturist who came highly recommended. As is the holistic practitioners custom we sat and talked for a bit before the exam began. He took my vitals by looking at my tongue and observing my pulse, then he had me hop up on the table to check out my back. As he examined my spine he asked again how the injury had happened and I told him. He responsed that I could have told him I was hit by a car and he would have believed me. I had five vertebrae out of alignment. (Note to self: You weren't being a baby.) He then began soft tissue manipulation by gently pressing down on the vertibrae that had come out of alignment until they eased back into place. As he moved down my spine he explained that the muscles on the right side of my spine had begun to seize up to hold the vertebrae in place so they wouldn't slide any further out of alignment. As he continued to push and prod at the vertebrae in my spine he asked more questions. How long ago had the injury occurred? I told him three weeks ago. He was surprised and made the following observation, “My guess is, if you hadn't been doing so much yoga in the last three weeks, you might not be able to walk right now.” I love it when the universe affirms my choices were right. Our lives are cyclical and I'm in a cycle of transition. I'm finishing grad school and Jayne, my only child, is applying to college and will be leaving home in the fall. When change occurs I have a hard time trusting in my inner voice. I doubt my own intuition, yet I knew that yoga, even injured, was the way to regaining my health and I'm glad, at least on some level, I was able to hear and act on this guidance even through the doubt.