11. The Sleeping Tortoise (Part I)

 Here in this body are the sacred rivers. 

Here are the sun and moon. As well as all the pilgrimage places. I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body. 

—Saraha 

I’m discovering that the body is a treasure trove of memory, emotion, and experience. It is evident that our bodies hold all of our life experiences and, under the right conditions, our cells release those memories into our consciousness. My yoga practice had been waking me up to hidden emotion and memory that had been lying in wait for years, and I was witnessing others journeying into the same process. 

Less than a year into my yoga practice, I was attempting a more advanced class where headstands were introduced. Curious about putting this new demand on my body, I was surprised when I effortlessly came to balance standing on the top of my head. Elated by the achievement, I was immediately flooded with a memory of a dozen years prior. I recall, as a preteen, regularly standing on my head in our hallway at home. I would rest with my legs in a V, one foot on each wall to keep my balance longer. I also did this on the stairs! After a moment or two, I would slowly lower my back onto the steps above and lie there with my feet elevated several steps overhead. Our kitchen was a large eat-in with space between the pantry and table for my full body to sprawl out, and I would catch myself mindlessly lying there any time the mood struck. The feeling of the hard floor beneath my body was comforting, and I liked the rush of blood that came with being upside down, so I did them both, often. Funny how just before the instructions that led me to the headstand, there had been no trace whatsoever of those long-forgotten moments in my recall. 

During Thai massage sessions, clients regularly report the surfacing of childhood memories as I move their limbs through a flow sequence. Most often it’s when I am standing on the soles of their feet. I’m told by client after client that they used to do the same to their dad. There is something about the nature of Thai massage that allows an individual to drop into a space of deep relaxation where memory is released easily, encouraged by the mimicking of the familiar body movements of Thai and childhood. 

In the early years of my yoga practice, the new body expressions had slowly released emotion from my cells. There was no conscious connection to specific memories for me at the time, but the emotion was familiar. It was uncomfortable, and stimulated a deeply intimate fear that was beyond my cognitive grasp. I could not access what exactly I was afraid of, but I knew there was something in my body working its way to the surface. It threatened to paralyze my practice by showing up only when I did yoga, making every part of me want to recoil from the act. 

During that time, as part of a team-building exercise with the clinic I managed, eight of us went to a local climbing gym. None of us had climbed before, and I immediately loved it. I loved that it extracted me from the emotional challenges my yoga practice had unearthed, and grounded me in the strength of my physical body. The hard-earned flexibility and strength that came from yoga paid off in getting up a wall. One of the massage therapists and I would later commit to weekly climbing dates. After about a half-dozen sessions, I confessed to her that each time the morning of our date came about, I secretly hoped she would cancel. An intangible anxiety took hold of me as I anticipated putting on the harness and squeezing my feet into the minuscule shoes used to ascend the walls of the gym. 

At first I saw climbing as a complement to my yoga practice. It allowed me to escape the emotional friction that had become routine during yoga sessions, a reprieve I needed. Very quickly, however, climbing began to stir the tapas, and it was harder for me to escape. In yoga, I could tuck myself into a corner and go through the intensity independently, mostly unnoticed. In the climbing gym, my belayer was constantly there, holding the rope and watching my every move to keep me safe on the wall. I felt overexposed and vulnerable. After my confession, my partner admitted to feeling the same, which only intensified our now collective aversion to getting to the gym. 

Making it up a wall, or holding some of the more advanced yoga poses, the body shakes and trembles as muscles battle between strength and weakness. Adrenaline mounts, signifying the growing intensity induced by the physical effort of the challenge. It feels as though hidden emotion and trauma are literally being shaken out of the cells. Muscles pushing and pulling simultaneously to keep in contact with the wall, or part of the body, in an effort not to slip. Every ounce of energy, will, and concentration is channeled into the project’s success. The goal is entirely based on an internal pressure that just keeps building until it reaches a breaking point. Whether it ends in victory or defeat, there will be a break. The outcome is contingent upon my own internal and mostly mental environment. I had been struggling with this concept for a lifetime. I felt, in my youth, like no one had my back, and I always had a push-pull between strong determination and resentment that my life was all on me. Climbing and yoga woke me up to the reality of this concept. At first it felt like I was fighting with myself over the success I desired and the strong pull to fall down and give up. It was harsh training—I felt like I had been at it by myself since I was nine. It angered me to have been thrown into the reality of independent life so early, and I was facing it through the silent internal temper tantrum of a nine-year-old. 

When the tantrum started to lift, and it took years, I began to find a quiet calm in my practice. Once the trembling of muscle begins to subside, the mind can rest confidently as it approaches the physicality of the most difficult task. There exists a space where everything else falls away and it’s just the body, the breath, and the goal. Every internal and external distraction has to fall away in order for one to completely drop into the body and command the mind to silence the narrative that keeps getting in the way. These are the deepest lessons of yoga: the cooperation of body and mind. A lesson that plays on repeat. Success one day does not guarantee it the next. Often, standing on my yoga mat in a balancing pose when my body begins to waver and I am knocked off center, I smile and think, “So this is where I’m at today.” My body did not get weaker since yesterday, when I held this pose without even a hint of tremor, but my mind—that’s a different story. 

This was the mental instability that was trembling during the dissection of Fable. She roused the deeper parts of me that were ready to come forth for examination. 

A third of the way up the wall, I am overcome with resistance. I’ve scurried effortlessly up this same ascent before, but today it’s rattled me so badly I can feel tears rising, threatening to fully expose me right here and now. I’m angered by the threat, and suddenly my aversion to the emotion stirring inside me is propelling me deeper into the task as a way to avoid what’s inevitably going to spill out. My partner is thirty feet below, calling up the wall, “Do you want to come down?” Her voice sounds so sweet, and I can’t tell if she’s being sincere or condescending. 

It makes me want her to drop the rope in such a way that I come crashing down right on top of her, destroying both of us at once. 

I recollect my determination to reach for the next hold. The only way I can get my hand on it is to lurch upward, powered by a guttural grunt I cannot believe came out of me. I hate being seen, despite being desperate for it. The grunt is both uncharacteristic and utterly satisfying. I continue up the wall hold by hold, making quite possibly more noise than I have ever made in my life. I cannot stop it from coming out and I don’t give a fuck who is watching. I am going to conquer this wall. My plan, as I finally arrive at the top, sixty feet above the floor, mostly unseen, is to sit here and have a good cry. With my hand curled over the top of the wall and my forehead resting against it, blinded by emotion, I hear a voice beside me: “That was fucking incredible!” 

I am all at once startled, shocked, and sunk. I had been completely unaware of the guy on the track beside me who had watched the entire scene play out from above. I’m not sure which is greater in the moment: my embarrassment at having been seen or my upset at not being able to leave all the emotion up at the top of the wall. 

Soon after, I sell my shoes and harness, and return to the solitude of yoga. 

At eighteen, I experienced my first obvious encounter with the primitive wiring of the human nervous system. It’s 2:00 a.m. and I’m walking alone on a dark, deserted road in a rough part of town. Less than a block away from the safety of a brighter, busier street. I quicken my pace as my chest begins to pound at the realization that a car is slowly inching toward me from behind. My heart urgently shunts blood to my muscles so I can get the hell out of there. My lungs dilate to receive the increase of oxygen brought by my heaving breaths. Suddenly I am taking in movements and shapes beyond what is right in front of me. My liver is releasing glucose for energy, and digestion is halted. I am making complex decisions about my next move in record time as I run, literally, for my life. Full of adrenaline, I abandon the safety of the bright lights on the street ahead, making the bold decision to race across the train tracks where the deserted rail yard could swallow my screams if I were caught. It’s the right choice. The car can’t follow me here, but it’s waiting for me on the other side of the tracks when I emerge. I duck into a used-car lot and weave through the parked cars while keeping an eye on my pursuer, who is still sitting in wait. I know I have to keep moving and thankfully I am a master of my neighborhood on foot. I come back up to where the car is stopped and run past the rear bumper and into the maze of houses connected only by foot paths, and the occasional parking lot. I make it home safely without seeing the car again.  

That was probably one of the true times during my existence when an automatic cascade of biological events in my body saved my life. Before the consciousness of threat fully took hold, my body was already in flight. There was no lengthy conversation between my heart and my liver, it all just happened. As a species, we are hardwired for survival. 

The same heart-pounding experience would visit me on occasions when I felt nervous, worried, or inadequate. As I learned more about the nervous system, I questioned why I was being launched into a state that should be reserved for actual threat and not an emotional perception. 

Remembering the poster of my now teacher—the one who enticed me to the discipline of yoga—I want what I thought I observed in that image: mastery of not just the body, but the mind and emotions. 

In yoga, I was actively learning how to monitor my internal environment. This allowed me space to process my thoughts surrounding the sensations that arose as I twisted, stretched, and made impossible demands upon my body. In life, my heart would no longer pound at the thought of threat. I was gaining objective perspective. Slowly, with practice, the wiring initiated by my various emotional traumas loosened its grip on my nervous system. I was beginning to see the value in action over reaction, and more importantly, the moments between a stimulus and my response were expanding. 

Yoga taught me how to manage discomfort—physical and emotional—through my body. 

In 1999, I didn’t know there were different styles of yoga and I was fortunate enough to walk into a practice that was active. My internal environment was chaotic, and if I had been forced to lie still with my thoughts in a restorative variation of yoga, the tapas would have been unbearable. Having to navigate sensations of stretch and strength while deciphering right from left gave my mind a wonderful reprieve from my emotional challenges. There would come a time when I could tolerate stillness, and the slower practice felt comforting. This balancing of energy and ease is something I need to remind myself of regularly. Knowing when to persevere and when to rest is a constant work in progress as my body and mind fight it out. 

I can feel stress in the bodies of my clients. The muscle tone of a severely stressed person holds a different quality than a “normal” muscle does. Instead of small areas of tension within a muscle, the entire muscle will feel like a solid block, with no palpable difference from one area to the next. I have observed this over the years in my own body too. Old injuries commonly flare up during times of increased mental tension. I have learned to use my body’s cues to recognize when I am emotionally taxed. Mentally I might feel fine, yet when my eye has been twitching for weeks, or my lower back pain flares up for no apparent physical reason, I know to look deeper. 

Physically, I do not believe in “No pain, no gain.” But I know that pain is complex, emotional, and exhausting. It demands that I feel and explore, because not doing that just prolongs the suffering. Pain is, however, an important part of healing, so how do I decide when pain is okay and when it’s not? 

Pain requires a different type of dissection. It provides an opportunity to be present with myself in an attentive way. I cannot truly look into sensation without discovering something about myself. It’s hard work.  

My journey through sciatica would be the first of several bouts with physical pain I would experience. Having rejected the surgical fix and failed at physical therapy, due to laziness and perhaps a lack of proper education in the matter, I resigned myself to a life of pain. When I started doing yoga at twenty-six, I simultaneously began working in a clinic, where I sat for much of the day. Initially I thought the yoga was forcing my old injury to resurface, but I now believe it was the hours of sitting with poor posture that my body was not accustomed to. 

To explain how pain in healing works, bend your index finger at each joint until it coils completely shut. Now imagine if you tied it up in this position—how long do you think it would take to straighten out at the end of a day and how painful do you think it would be? This is exactly what I was doing to my spine in the office chair. It would be stuck for hours in a slightly bent position, and straightening up at the end of the day was excruciating. This is the pain of healing. We have tied knots into our bodies through habitual posture and poor patterns that become chronic—sometimes for decades. It is going to be painful to undo those knots. Do you choose never to use your index finger again because it’s too painful and scary to straighten it? I doubt it, but this is what we do to all the knots we don’t see. We allow pain to stop us from proceeding because we believe that pain is bad. It took me a year to straighten out through yoga. I practiced through pain and intense emotion, including fear, and managed to emerge realigned. 

But hang on, the story does not end here. 

When I began working as a massage therapist, I had been pain-free for fifteen years. I thought I was done with my back troubles. But they began again almost immediately. Long days leaning over the massage table irritated the spot where my muscles had been weakened from the chair in the clinic all those years ago. My life was incredibly busy. I was teaching a five-hundred-hour yoga teacher training, while managing a sinking yoga studio and seeing twenty massage clients a week. 

I would wake up at 5:00 a.m. to go to the studio, teach for two hours, then head to my office, where I would treat clients until 5:00 p.m. By the time I got home I was exhausted. The details of running the studio would be managed in the small spaces I had between clients or on the weekends between social engagements and yoga classes. I learned early that I had to shut my email down at 5:00 p.m. if I didn’t want to lose sleep over a stressful situation that would inevitably arrive in my in-box just before bed. 

The teacher training invigorated me, allowing me to share what I had been learning about the body through yoga, dissection, and massage. I never wanted to own a yoga studio, but the owner was practically giving it away and I wasn’t ready to abandon all I had created in that space. There were a few years remaining on the lease, and he was desperate to get out. My program had been very successful in a short time, and he saw it as a way to free himself. In some ways, I was the best person for the job, because I knew how to stretch a dollar. Without any capital of my own, I pulled the studio out of debt and deepened my own understanding of the body through the training of new teachers. 

The day I met with the lawyer to sign over the corporation, she skilfully—without saying a negative word—made me see what a bad idea this was for me. I sat with her for less than thirty minutes. It was the best three hundred dollars I ever spent. 

Looking back, I see that the capital I invested in the studio was my body. 

My yoga practice during that period was tired and discouraging. I understood for the first time what it meant when students said they didn’t have time for practice. I was always of the opinion that you had to make time. I still believe this, but in order to make time, I would have had to sacrifice sleep or the work that paid my personal bills. The studio was not making enough to pay me, and I was too tired to see a solution. My practice was mostly restorative in nature, so I could support my immune system and need for rest. I was unknowingly making my back pain worse by stretching the areas that needed strength. On occasion, out of frustration, I would do a vigorous strengthening routine that only resulted in more irritation. I couldn’t get a good grip on the necessary balance that would support my healing. 

By the time I was free of the emotional burden of studio ownership, I had endured three and a half years of pain. Every. Single. Day. I decided to get serious about it. Using all of my knowledge about the body and movement, I designed a yoga practice targeted at strengthening my lower back. I created strict guidelines that I stuck to with unwavering commitment. The first was learning not to overdo—or underdo—my effort. I had been teetering between these antagonistic forces unsuccessfully for three years. 

This meant when I was tired I would do it anyway, and on the days I was full of energy, I forced myself to hold back. I remembered that, fifteen years earlier, the pain got worse before it got better, and prepared myself for that reality in order to not give up. Patience and persistence had already rewarded me in the early years of my self-dissection, so I would need to call upon those qualities again. 

It took me six weeks to come through the other side. Wellness, I have found, is much like disease: an accumulation of action and inaction.