Hello pain. Let's go for a ride. · 29 April 2011
Pain without an energy signature. Or at least without a pattern I’ve seen before. Nerve nails, muscle rugburns, tendon ache, the way bone moans when it’s inflamed down to the marrow: understood. I’ve used that plus ten kinds of non-painful sensation to map the hard, soft, subtle and empty places in the spine. I have compared this map of my own inner body with the self-reports and of others’ interiorities. I have contrasted these subjective maps with the objective maps that science (from physiology to old Indian texts) provides. Suddenly useless research. The present pain defies the maps! I do not understand it, can not predict it, and am not in control.
To try to get control, I could go cause-jumping like usual. Or reduce it to a revisit from the pattern of 2007. I could wrap a lot of words and MRI tape around it to solidfy everything. But six days in, it honestly still feels weeeeird. It’s got a kind of foreign, impersonal "new car” smell to it. So… I’m driving it around as such. God knows where we'll end up.
I went through an injury and opening in the sacrum in Spring-Summer, 2007. I’ve thinned this blog’s archives, but some of the posts from that time are still up. In any case, yes, it was both. The “injury or opening?” question seems useless. Calling openings “injuries” is just the mind stuck in talky-talk beta state turning sensation into a problem. That’s what beta state does—it creates and solves problems outside the body. Beta state can wire a house, but it can’t wire a nervous system for shit. But, on the other hand, calling injuries “openings” is the dumbed-down devotional heart denying that yoga causes physical harm. Hello, a torn hamstring insertion or a torn rotator cuff is not an opening… it is not the kundalini ripping you a new nadi.
I’m saying both narratives are cliché. Ashtanga soap opera! Maybe there’s no point in talking about pain at all? Talking about pain just whips gooey formless sensation in to a “solid” suffering merengue. Continued talking about pain bakes that merengue to a crisp… and then feeds that ashen, toxic, high-GI confection to whoever is has the idiot-compassion to eat it. [EDIT: Meringue. See comments.]
Ok. Overstatement. Talking about pain patterns can be really useful. Great. But talking about patterns in certain ways can also solidify them and slow down their interesting, useful changes. This is because the way we talk when we talk about pain is mostly (1) inventing causal narratives or (2) amping up emotions, all while (3) not watching the breath. Maybe that’s totally necessary sometimes for getting protection—both from oneself and from teachers and intimates. But beyond that causal narratives and emotional amping do contract the mind-body around certainty and knowingness. Kinda hafta reify to protect. Having a body is like that. It’s allright.
Anyway. From the very beginning of my yoga practice, I’ve distrusted my natural tendencies toward the three patterns I just described. But now that I am driving around this New Car of mine (the all-new 2011 Ashtanga Painintheass), I notice a few attitudes that have changed since 2007.
1. I am more interested in taking personal responsibility for my body – not just physical, but emotional, subtle, energetic, etc, layers of my particular embodied organism. I am watching myself for projections, denial, avoidance, and blame, and looking for practical ways to take responsibility.
Even without stories of how I picked up this pain as others’ psychic or emotional flak (two such stories are available), I’m constantly tempted to disown it by either (1) getting all spiritual (so my “self” is some kind of transcendent awareness that sees my particular body as arbitrary) or (2) talking in the second or third person. Falling in to addressing a “you” when I’m talking to myself (see the glitch I left in above) is the easiest place to see displacement. It’s funny to contrast this with my all-out willingness to step up to the me-ness involved in my body’s sense pleasures—kale, kittens, dopamine swings—of course. My favorite things are part of my personality, right? No harm in that.
Voodoo Kumar (the ayurveda teacher I called Woo-woo Kumar until enough people heard me wrong that Voodoo stuck) talks about this like his teacher Osho. This is dualistic as hell, but try it. We all arrive on earth in a space suit of a certain make. As we ambulate the planet in this suit, sometimes it gets dirty or damaged, and that’s fine. But any tears or stains in the suit—that’s the owner’s doing. The suit isn’t a victim of circumstance. Its strange condition isn’t mysterious… but if it seems so, this is explained by the suit-wearer’s limited self-awareness. Before it is possible to fix the suit (i.e., before any healing can take place) the owner has to take full responsibility for it and for whatever harm it has sustained.
2. I’m more up on how projection and transference work. Human beings are little opinion-tornadoes. We throw our energy around and suck it out of others. It’s old-fashioned psychoanalysis—getting really tough feedback from someone whose energy is clean—that shows me this best.
I am still an opinion-tornado, but psychoanalysis sensitizes me to the especially stupid part of myself that wants to project my body-pain on to you. Sympathy-fishing is really human. So is outright energetic sabotage that happens on a level subtler than psyche. Most people seem wired for it. At the moment, I’m interested in the really dark side of us all that wants to find kernels of our own particular suffering in others, either as a way of getting it out of ourselves or just not feeling alone. It’s kind of a beautiful weakness because so tender.
But it’s also stupid. Incredibly stupid; and we’re stupid when we fall for it. When there’s pain, sometimes the sheer intensity of it—and the urgency and desperation it can generate—makes it easy to see projection and transference at work. With that highlighted, it gets easier to give people space. To not onload the shit they want to displace (which is not nice for anyone), and to spare them our own shit. Energy awareness, yo!
3. My perception of the physical difference between anguish and body pain is a little more clear.
4. I might not hate pain. I do dislike suffering really a lot. Suffering is the combined product of pain and resistance, and that’s something I pretty much want to go away for everyone and every thing for ever. (So sue me: don’t some people or prophets you admire feel the same?)
But pain—raw, non-narrative, present sensation—is this something to hate?
The year before SKPJ died, I tracked down Mark Whitwell and started asking him to hang out with me. He has a really strong transmission from both Krishnamacharya and UG Krishnamurthi, and at the time ashtanga was hemorrhaging shakti in internecine warfare. I didn’t want to do a practice that had lost its transmission, and Mark renewed my faith and connection to the tradition by telling me I was vata-imbalanced, trying to get to god by “works” instead of grace, and generally beating myself with the right-handed path. That ashtanga was obsessive, isolating and ungrounded. He was right for that dark time, but I still didn’t believe him when he said that pain is a nuturing force. What a bunch of freaky Krishnamurthi horror.
But yeah. Maybe pain could be a nuturing force. Maybe letting pain run a certain course—especially if I’m not hurting myself on the level of muscle and bone and psychological structure—maybe it’s got something to give. And not just “character.” Rather: awareness, balance, actual nervous system change, I dunno. And I won’t know unless it actually does leave something I didn’t know to look for.
Something that has not changed from 2007…
I get on the mat at the same time as usual, for the same amount of time as usual. There’s just no question. For me, this is because I’m still testing out this method—my organism is a case study, that’s all—and I don’t want to screw up the science. I expect 10-20 more years of using this method before I can say whether it works.
Practice is something that’s done for a long time, without interruption and with devotion. That’s a weird, obnoxious thing to say, but what else do you expect from a mythical shaman with a thousand white heads and a halahala distillery?
Anyway, daily practice has built up a bunch of triggers to shift my focus in to contemplative awareness of the inner body’s rhythms. Sitting alone and watching my pain is pretty easy once I push the usual buttons.
Tuesday, the shape of practice was entirely unrecognizable as ashtanga. The pain was nauseating and felt like it filled the room. At one point, I lifted my arms and blacked out, collapsing to the floor. That would have been perversely enjoyable if I could congratulate myself about how hardcore and intense I was acting. But it wasn’t hard or intense. It was… unglamorous, tiresome, absorbing, and vibratory. The pain literally felt encouraging. If I had opened up to discursive thoughts during practice, they would have included: Hello, if this is a taste of my worst nightmare, maybe I can let go of some of the primal anxiety. Also, wait, my body is more spacious inside and out than I realized. And damn, that nervous system packs a punch. Nice work, nadis!
Today, during a crumpled Utthita Hasta, I felt an influx of the feeling and ability in the occiput, soft palate and inner jaw that I’ve been striving for the past 3 years. And striving is the right word… I have been somewhat obsessed with Rudra Granthi. For now, I feel like I can knuckle down for a fast “comeback” to go back to what I think is normal. And, by contrast, I can also let this pattern do its thing more gradually, on the off-chance that new developments I want (even though I have no clue what they are) may come.
Ashtanga is really good with the paradox that Shinzen says shows up in every spiritual practice—the question of when to bear down and when to let nature run its course. This is because just getting on the mat in the morning and going through the motions takes care of a lot of bearing down. In the context of really clear method, once there’s a sort of “do your practice and all is coming” take on it, grace pretty easily comes in all the empty space the structure holds. Why dismantle that structure as soon as its straight lines get squiggly? It doesn’t matter what it looks like.
There may be no opening coming, no grace. Just pain and chaos. My mind may always manufacture something to hope for, even on a barely-conscious level, even if all that I’m hoping for is equanimity. For now I’m curious enough to set aside the option of mandating my body to calm this down and risk the most scary possibility—that I won't learn anything from this pain at all. This leaves me smack in the middle of a big don't-know mind, with a nervous system ping-ponging in indescribable, untrackable sensations. For now, not at all a bad place to be.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, beta state
, having a body
, science
, spirituality
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The Australian philosopher Ronald Scott once came to a similar conclusion.
Fascinating, thorough, insightful and nerdy. At your best. Thanks for that.
Posted by: s · Apr 29, 09:11 PM · #
The Raft of the Medusa.
Posted by: catygay · Apr 29, 09:27 PM · #
Dear Owl,
“ Talking about pain just whips gooey formless sensation in to a “solid” suffering merengue”. I imagined you struggling through a Latin dance number, rather than baking a delicate French confection. It made me smile.
Posted by: Wombat · Apr 29, 11:22 PM · #
Oh god – salsamerengue! That’s funny… I was just doing an homage to the dearly departed “Meniscus Merangue” when I wrote that, and chose to correct his spelling. I tried to learn both salsa and merengue 15 years ago in Costa Rica. That’s where I got the (almost dead) story that I am a kinesthetic dunce.
But maybe this is a dance of pain, Wombat… more of a flamenco. With duende. For no reason other than the flood of flamenco images surging forward (I lived in Granada in 2002, getting intimate with the roots of the older Empire onto which I’d transfered my guilty-leftist American angst) here is Garcia Lorca talking about the holy intrigue of Andalucian spring in 1936. Mysterious hybrids everywhere.
They say the hatha yogis were related to the gypsies. In any case, they share really similar social histories up until the 1900. David White (something about that photo says AYSB to me, Loo…) writes about that.
Speaking of apparently, but totally not, irrelevant asides, s, do you mean the Detroit intellectual Ronald Scott, who filmed interviews with everyone from Alex Haley to Eartha Kitt in the late 70s? It’s all here Otherwise, I don’t know who you’re talking about.
Someone who doesn’t usually read here wrote a very concerned email telling me to trust science and go to a doctor. Thank you. I do trust science. I am a scientist, in the western academic sense. I also agree with the "If it hurts, you are doing it wrong" school. But that's for students learning the practice from weekend workshops... the mantra is about muscle and bone and such.
This post is not a cry for help or negative attention. It’s a creative expression of uncertainty.
Did anyone who has a relationship with this blog feel a lot of sympathetic pain for me when you read this? Obviously, I’m darker and more pissed off than usual, but if I elicited pain in you, either I have a lot more analysis to do (well, that’s true in any case, heh), or we need healthier boundaries in our relationship. :-)
This pain is not coming from physical structure. I saw a really skilled craniosacral therapist Thursday to ensure that. It is also not a kundalini crisis. I can self-assess that and met with my subtle energy teacher on Tuesday to double-check. So... thank you so much for your care. I will enjoy it in quieter ways and hope those of you who are experiencing judgement about a deficit of self-care you imagine me to have will really give yourselves a hug. From me. Love to you.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 30, 10:01 AM · #
Corrected link for Ronald Scott: from the linked page, click "Browse," scroll down to "Host," scroll down again to "Scott, Ron."
Just realized I miscorrected Meniscus Merangue. Polite Wombat.
Merengue is the dance only. Meringue is the confection. Eh, A, E, I ... entropy everywhere.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 30, 10:04 AM · #
No, the Australian Ronald Scott.
RIP
Posted by: s · Apr 30, 10:42 AM · #
Owl, your post didn’t cause me concern or sympathetic pain. There was no despair or denial, just curiosity and openness.
And if I was worried, I wouldn’t have mentioned the vowel entropy. :)
Posted by: Wombat · Apr 30, 01:24 PM · #
Owl, I feel something tremendous when I read your blog. In the case of a pain this profound, maybe empathy is the best word. The response comes from my stomach and the back of my heart.
Thomas Merton, in Asia (journals a month before his death by electrocution): “The disciple, blindfolded, is led to the east gate of the prepared mandala. Blindfolded, he casts a flower on the mandala. The flower will find his way for him into the palace. Follow your flower!”
And this time of year, you have so many to pick from. So keep throwing them into the mandala of your various and far-flung readers, and each of us will have the reaction(s) suited to our characters (including the beloved and indispensable MahaMellifluous Catgay).
Posted by: Sara · May 1, 07:20 AM · #
Ha. Me too:
http://sabblogtical.blogspot.com/2011/05/sabblogtical.html
Posted by: David Shapiro · May 1, 09:51 AM · #
Loving sabblogtical! Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Karen · May 2, 11:52 AM · #
Hell yes I’m feeling sympathetic pain. God my back hurts…..
Kidding. Sort of.
Posted by: LIAshtangini · May 3, 05:41 AM · #
Hey. I seem to have a problem commenting here lately, whether because the posts are so juicy I want to reread them first and never do, because of my failure at the book club (grimace), because I can usually only view the blog on my phone, or because I get tricked by the preview pane and never actually post it! Here goes again…
Thank you for the best summing up of the injury vs opening question I’ve seen. Both narratives are trite! Also ‘pain = resistance + suffering’ is very neatly put, I’m not sure whether I’ve seen that before or whether it just seems that way because it feels obvious. Those were the things that struck me on the first reading.
The second reading I was struck by how very odd it is to refer to oneself in the second person. I do that sometimes, it will be interesting to observe under what circumstances? And the part about pain projection. We’ve all had headaches, but no one will ever feel another’s headache. Yet still we try?
But what shocked me on the second reading was the image of you blacking out and falling down in pain in surya namaskar. Holy shit! How is it I kind of forgot that, and left it six days to come back and see how you are? Maybe because you end with ‘not at all a bad place to be’. In any case – a pretty clear proof that you didn’t project your pain onto me! :)
So you wrote this six days in and now it’s fourteen… I hope you are in less pain, although I know you are not suffering :)
Love xx
Posted by: susananda · May 7, 01:46 AM · #
Hi :)
I just taught a led primary—the one that’s been taught by a revolving door of teachers in that slot before me. When I started, it would take more than two hours of technical instruction and afterwards I would be destroyed from all the emotional labor of keeping the room calm through the mindfuck of learning ashtanga yoga in a led format. Basically, for 9 months the class was a big workshop. Today, the group got all the way to Mari B on the count before any physical level instruction was needed, and so we continued to upavista. So I could put my awareness into generating focus, not content-rich, betastate talkytalk. It takes a lot to teach this practice in the led format. I wasn’t one of lucky ones who learned primary from scratch in a Mysore room, but damn, that is a wonderful way to engage with it.
My email is down today. Feels nice. But incidentally, please note that I am closing down my west coast .edu email account permanently, and want to use the east coast .edu account only for university affairs. Otherwise, gmail it is! Please drop a line to either of the .edu addresses if you need the gmail one.
David Shapiro, Professor Sir! Welcome. Great to see you. I hope you feel better soon. Sorry to out you, but (aside) his blog is terrific!
Susan, S, Sara, Sonya, Wombat… more soon! It appears I have a date with a cherry tree in the arboretum RIGHT NOW. The “explosion” occurred today, oh yes! (Ann Arborites seems call the day the earth turns to vibrating fecund warmth and the flowers jump out of their buds “the explosion.”)
People downtown in sandwich boards say the world ends on May 21. Well then! I’m glad we got to experience another explosion before the latest apocalypse.
These things appear to be cyclical…
x
Posted by: (0v0) · May 7, 09:55 AM · #
Had a bike accident Wednesday night – impressive split lip, scrapes and contusions, but nothing more serious. I had been translating a detective novel all day with lots of pistol whipping. Blood running down the chin seemed somehow appropriate. In their very comfortable van/ ambulance, I laughed with the pompiers who wanted to make sure I knew I still looked nice. (I love France.) I look like I’ve been in a bar fight, and that’s an interesting face to have in a place where people actually look you in the eyes, but that’s another post. Shaken for a few days, I went and practiced in my normal room this a.m., still a little sore and swollen. First day in 2 years: no sign of right hip injury or left groin agony. My shoulders were open. The pelvis was aligned. Pain didn’t offer an opening, rather a detour (?) A Work Around? In any case, it’s all kind of funny, as in “funny, strange.” Definitely interesting. This is not meant as a a sort of “Fight-Club” antidote: body checks to the cement. Heal well.
Posted by: knl · May 9, 05:02 AM · #
No, no, a good point well made.
Masculine pain stemming from masculine injuries – busted noses and blown knees, for example – is just Siva-nature re-asserting itself over insidious Shaktility. The pussy-stroking and emotional wobbling that emanates from hip, loin and S-I complaints is just displaced broodiness which, I admit, is an unfortunate consequence of loitering too long in the lower, fundamentally prostrational, stratum of this practice. So be man and get with the arm-balances.
Don’t expect any sympathy from the women, either. I remember when Siva came back to the celestial crib with a raging sore throat. Did he get any larynx lullabies from our higher-realm honeys? No, just caustic chants of, ‘Man ‘flu! Man ‘flu! Man’flu’...
Ok, so we aren’t always as attentive as we might be to the discomfitures of the divas but come on, two Wongs don’t make a right.
Posted by: catygay · May 10, 04:27 AM · #
Thank you for sharing these very raw truths, and this:
“When there’s pain, sometimes the sheer intensity of it—and the urgency and desperation it can generate—makes it easy to see projection and transference at work. With that highlighted, it gets easier to give people space. To not onload the shit they want to displace (which is not nice for anyone), and to spare them our own shit. Energy awareness, yo!”
is something I recently came head to head with, I realize more and more how much responsibility we need to take for our selves (and others) in life and practice. Space is key.
Posted by: RG · May 18, 01:41 PM · #
Susananda.
Injury or opening… such a dumb question, right? I don’t know how ashtanga got stuck on it.
It is true that I blacked out and fell down lifting my arms over my head for surya namaskara. I also broke out into a profuse cold sweat on the floor of my bathroom at 4:30 in the morning. The only other time that happened, it was from extreme pain. Ordinarily I don’t sweat at all – maybe 1-5 drops on the mat for advanced series at room temp, so the sweat was freaky. I think that happened due to pain, but I forget.
Was there pain? What did it feel like? I have COMPLETELY forgotten. It’s so hard to understand pain that’s not there.
I stood up from the first backbend in 6 weeks today. Felt something in the S1-L5 disk react, so won’t try it again for a while. The sacrum has moved again (as it did in ’07), and I simply don’t understand how to operate at the edges in this new place. I do miss the bends, but hot damn the bliss in the skull has been sufficient distraction from that.
An energy healer and a psychic craniosacral therapist said that the skull bones have shifted. Dunno. But some days it feel like champagne bubbles are coming out of my ears. The whole idea that there’s a diaphragm at the base of the brain (just like the other four inside-body membranes below it) sort of makes sense, suddenly. There is a rising release there, some times. Related: karnapidasana is my new crack. Articulating the skull with roving knee squeezes, all from the perspective of pratyhara.
But also, I spend a lot of time lately just excruciatingly aware of the little demon of tension hiding out beneath my right jawbone the way a troll used to live under my right shoulderblade and many people have strange company shielded beneath the flats of the hipbones.
Posted by: (0v0) · May 22, 03:41 PM · #
I wonder why it’s the men who get so much displaced broodiness, eh? And you say making peace with your inner woman is a problem. Pish. But there’s something to that other stuff, by way. Siva and that net in the throat. So, blue is beautiful?
RG in Buffalo. Hi. :-) MAVYN represents!
Posted by: (0v0) · May 22, 03:46 PM · #