Wellness takes maintenance
For most of my life, my body has stored its “stuff” in my upper body. Several years ago, this came to a head with a particularly savage eruption of TMJ symptoms radiating beyond my jaw into headaches, neck pain, and seriously misaligned shoulders. No matter how creative I was, my trusty yoga practice was not helping and sometimes even seemed to be exacerbating my discomfort.
Thwarted on my mat, I began to reach out to experts for help. I found an orthodontist who specializes in TMJ. He added a physical therapist to our team. I accidentally met a massage therapist who, unbeknownst to me, had kinesiology training. In addition to the soft tissue release of her massages, she taught me a set of exercises that, when I do them regularly, have an almost miraculous ability to keep my upper body in a strong and stable position.
In the care of these three professionals, my body healed. But the key to me continuing to feel good is me. If I don’t wear my nightguard and retainer, I am certain (I am too terrified to explore this) I would immediately destroy the delicate balance of peace that my orthodontist has created in my mouth. If I don’t do my shoulder exercises each morning, I start to feel crooked and then sore within a week.
Did you notice that I implied in the above paragraph that I know that stopping the exercises causes my body to revert to misalignment? Do you wonder why on earth I would ever mess with success by stopping? I sure do.
Mistaking feeling better for being better
When my son was in middle school, he was diagnosed with a chronic, treatable but incurable disease called Ulcerative Colitis. His case was particularly resistant to treatment, and he had to be hospitalized several times. During one in-patient stay at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), I had a conversation with a family social worker that I’ve never forgotten. She said that the main reason for relapse for adolescent patients was that they attributed feeling better to their illness being gone rather than to their medicine making them feel better and they – wait for it – stop taking their medicine. Sounds eerily like my own situation, right?
It turns out, this behavior is not limited to chronically ill adolescents or chronically busy adults who might (maybe) eliminate their physical therapy because they are looking to shave some tasks from an over-full day. It turns out that for millennia people like you and I have had a curious way of stopping doing the things that are good for them once the things that are good for them have made them feel better.
Yoga is a practice for the long-haul not the quick fix
When you dig into the fine print (or less “popular” verses) of the Yoga Suras of Patanjali, you will eventually notice the tenth sutra of chapter two. I say “eventually” because we tend to focus on the verses where Patanjali tells us what to do to quiet our minds so that our lives feel more manageable and even more enjoyable and fulfilling. In other words, we tend to be “all in” to developing and maintaining our practice when we are in “fix it” mode. Here he’s not telling us what to do. He’s telling us what not to do – he’s telling us not to stop practicing.
Like my shoulder exercises and my son’s medication regime, the key to long-term results is doing the things that work for the long-term. As I’ve written before, Patanjali is remarkably pithy. Because he says so much in so few words and verses, we can trust that everything he says is important. So, it would be a huge mistake to gloss over any of the sutras – which is absolutely the case with sutra 2.10. The key to the life-changing effects of a yoga practice is that the practice is life-long.
Even when you’ve “fixed” the things that inspired you to practice, keep practicing
While the details of your practice will evolve with your stages of life, the fact of your practice is meant to be a constant. Even when the reasons that originally brought you to your practice – whatever was hurting you, whatever was making you feel discontented, or whatever you had noticed about yourself that you wanted to change – are no longer an issue, you still need to practice.
This is true because all of these “whatevers” leave deep impressions on us. They are not “incurable” like my son’s illness. They are more like my old upper body misalignments that have been around for so long that my body just seems to view them as more normal than proper alignment. When left to its own devices, it simply slides back in that direction.
Practice is a way of sustaining continued growth and healing
Patanjali teaches that even when we think we’re free and clear of our particular “whatevers,” when we relax our vigilance, we will find ourselves sliding back into the pain, or the discontentment or the behavior that we’d worked so hard to change. Steady practice is meant to be a never-ending process. As is our journey toward wellness, wholeness and fulfillment. Even when we’re not sure what exactly it’s “fixing,” our practice is leading us onward toward more healing and evolution than we could ever have imagined when we first showed up.
“When you think you have it under control, you had better check again. These tendencies [the whatever that brought you to your mat originally] are often subtle, and the human mind has a way of avoiding the issues. Develop constant introspection and pay attention.”
“If you think you have it figured out, you’d better check again.” – Bhavani Maki translating and paraphrasing Yoga Sutra 2.10