Holy Bones, Part I · 24 July 2007

Monday a teacher knelt by my mat and told me that nobody understands.

I felt so understood.

This teacher has worked with thousands of practitioners over the decades, so if he says the shift in my skeleton is something nobody understands, that’s something.

“You can’t even talk about it because nobody understands, I know,” he said, kneeling there. Then he told me that out there somewhere, an old friend is doing advanced practice on a shifted sacrum same as me, and after a year of holding out, his has just suddenly self- corrected. His friend says, “I don’t understand it. It’s just getting better.”

So, that makes three in the community of understanding the non-understanding of the shifted sacrum.

I haven’t had much to say here or anywhere the past four months that this complex has been upon me, but now that the demon in my low back has diminished from a self-replicating beast to one single, cowering little shit, I realize the time to write about this experience is growing short. I hope.

So for the next few posts I’ll write about this a bit, in an effort to reclaim the sacrum from the realm of the unknowable. In case it’s helpful to anyone, I’ll torture out of myself some documentation of the physical (for some reason, discussing my own physical practice bores me very much). But, apart from my suspicions about the first and second chakras, which I am not going to discuss, most of my reflections due to this injury have to do with the uses and misuses of body awareness, and the possibility of finding bliss in the presence of pain.

Of all the parts of the skeleton, it’s easiest to spiritualize the sacrum. The holy bone, the house of the serpent, the primitive remnant of a tail, or the super-evolved pyramid-tip of the plumb line that roots the spine. And I won’t say I haven’t experienced this injury as a kind of stitch in the spirit as much as a pain in the ass. But ashtangis easily get carried away spiritualizing our injuries—looking for stories to explain them, looking for blame-takers, seeking “the” solution. And the limited sense that one never quite knows what she thinks about something until she can put it in words, I suppose it’s useful to write about this topic even though part of me would prefer to let it all pass into vague remembering… at least until a new turn of the bone brought it all rushing back another 5 or 15 years from now. Maybe, too, this will be useful to someone else out there in the community of the non-understanding of the understanding of the shifted sacrum.

It is hazardous to think of the body as a self-correcting system. The body dies, after all. And yet damn if it isn’t also the vehicle for discovery and for bliss and for awakening; and I’ll be damned if when treated with indulgent, loving patience it doesn’t self-correct. Humans create our own pain very often, but we are also healing ourselves all the time. It may be what we do best.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , spirituality

Comment

1. Seriously, a trip to a really good osteopath can be very enlightening. It’s amazing how everything links together, you might find it’s due to something that you would never have considered. Like my wrist injury being caused by a vertebrae shifting.

   Posted by: CJ · Jul 24, 05:44 PM · #

2. I love to read about physical aspects of practice: perhaps just an interest in mechanics… But then I wonder: is the physical closer to “real” than our mental/emotional constructs? No matter, I suppose. Looking forward to hearing more on this. The way Ashtangis talk about their travels (mental or physical) reminds me of how climbers talk about theirs: it’s a way of helping others get some info on the climb, with the clear caveat that YMMV.

   Posted by: karen · Jul 24, 08:59 PM · #

3. Well you’ve successfully passed along the non-understanding of the non-understanding of the sacrum thing. Now we’re all as perplexed as you are. Or were.

   I notice that some things get shifted by the work and it takes adjacent things a while to catch up. Maybe you found your way to a period wherein some bit started moving independantly of some other bit that previously sat adjacent to it and preferred that everything should stay put.

   It’s good to know your mula is almost dhara again. Or your dhara mula.

   Posted by: Carl · Jul 25, 06:46 AM · #

4. The body, and the experience of having a body, is most simply put a mystery. We, and I mean all “experts” from Johns Hopkins neurosurgeons to ROC acupuncturists to chakra-spinning reiki healers, haven’t got a clue 90% of the time. We all are prone to “narrative fallacy” and personal bias from “experiential” learning, that is, the anecdote. And as injured humans, on whatever level of injury we can imagine – gross, subtle or causal, we want names, answers and actions. We crave them in the worst way. We are essentially addicted to such purveyances. If we are lucky, we may learn something from the Maha teachers Injury & Illness. If we are supremely blessed what we will learn is compassion.

   As Van Morrison so beautifully sang, “let go into the mystery”.

   Of course, and in a cynical vein, its really hard to bill for a mystery.

   Posted by: e&sj · Jul 25, 07:09 AM · #

5. I’m interested to hear what you have to say about the sacrum. I’ve had this really weird pain — ache — energy — something — in my sacrum for a few months and I have no idea what’s going on.

   Posted by: Yogamum · Jul 26, 06:03 AM · #

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