Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

Chapter 9 ); I was moved and learned a lot. For our arrival the lepers put on a joyous dance in a dusty courtyard between their mud huts. There wasn’t a lot of funding for their facilities and they slept on hard cots and wore torn rags. Many had dreadful scars and were missing limbs, fingers, or toes. I was shocked to notice that though they were all reduced to the same lot in life, they still segregated themselves according to caste and their former stations in life, much to the chagrin of their caretakers. The swami explained to me that much of the loss of body parts and the other horrors they suffered happened from loss of sensation and pain caused by the disease. The victims would not know when they injured themselves—they would not feel it—and therefore they suffered frequent infections and gangrene. Loss of pain actually makes us very vulnerable to further injury. Pain announces and guards the edges of our limits.
    I saw something similar when visiting a methadone clinic with a therapist friend. She explained that many addicts mask or cut off their physical and emotional pain with strong depressant drugs like heroin. She also said many of the patients were very abusive to loved ones and further damaged precious relationships. Numbing their pain and damping down their physical-emotional feedback system led to self-destructive behavior. I began to realize that pain, within reasonable limits, was a friend we needed.
    One time in Northern California, when I was about twenty-five, a friend and I were hiking in the rolling green foothills. We came into a beautiful glade and saw several horses grazing on the spring grasses. We were both experienced riders, but obviously not experienced enough, because we thought it would be a great idea to jump on one for a ride. When we slowly walked over toward the horses, several trotted away, but we were both able to hop on a lovely, golden mare. My friend sat in front trying to guide the horse by holding her neck and mane. Themare trotted around a bit, then all of a sudden noticed the other horses had moved far across the meadow to the other side of a ravine and she took off at a gallop. As we approached the ravine, we realized she was going to jump, and my friend panicked and jumped off. I was thrown and landed flat on my back. I could hardly move, but slowly made my way home. This was my first big injury and the beginning of a long process with my lumbar. I recovered in a couple weeks but my low back was more sensitive afterwards.
    During my first year of yoga study, I practiced asana daily for ninety minutes, often morning and evening. I worked hard at it and within a year or two could achieve even the most intense backbends, twists, and forward bends. The Sivananda organization I was involved with and its head swami in America paid little or no attention to sequencing, structural dynamics, alignment, and physiological principles of kinesiology. The greatest emphasis of instruction was given to just achieving the postures, the more extreme the better. Attention was mostly paid to the metaphysical and spiritual side of the practice. I advanced quickly and often, after long periods of sitting for lectures on cold mornings and evenings without a chance to warm up, I was called on to show difficult backbends like the Full Bow, Full Wheel, or Handstand Scorpion to large groups. I was also taught the erroneous concept that it was necessary to lie down and rest for a couple minutes after performing each asana in order to “get the benefits.” After barely warming up, this caused us to cool down repeatedly. We questioned the physical safety of this procedure and were told that we were doing mystical or metaphysical practice and therefore normal physiological principles didn’t apply. Soon I began to develop back pain, pinched nerves, and other problems. I asked for guidance, but got no satisfactory answers, and was only told to rest a couple of days or to massage myself. The problems worsened. As I traveled around the country and to Europe giving demonstrations to groups and on television, my back would often lock up for days afterwards.

There Is No Such Thing as Pain
    One cold winter day, about 1975, as I practiced in my living room while feeling a bit cold and tight, a friend came in and asked if I would lift him up and give him a back adjustment. As I lifted him up into the adjusting movement, I heard a crunch and felt a pinch in my low spine. Slowly the pain increased