Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

and my back began tightening up. Not thinking clearly, I lay down, but as that cooled me off I tightened up more and the pain became excruciating. I foolishly went to the emergency room and was shot with muscle relaxants and prescribed painkillers and strong anti-inflammatory medications. For a month I had to stay in bed and could hardly walk. One day a teacher I had trained came to visit and said he had a great idea for my healing. I asked him what that was and he replied, “Why don’t you try yoga!” I had to contemplate the irony of getting the insight I needed from my own student while I was lying in bed, and not using the knowledge I had passed on. I stopped the medicines and started one of my greatest learning experiences.
    Initially, the pain limited me to only the simplest of poses and I could not bend much at all. Most curious to me was how some of my muscles did not seem to function at all, even though they had a range of motion. For example, in order to pick up something off the floor I had to use the wall or a chair for leverage and support in order to bend over. My body could bend over, within limits, but didn’t have the strength or ability to do so on its own. I began to experiment as I moved up and down with the aid of the wall to see what was going on with the related nerves and began to understand subtle levels of my body’s intelligence, pain, and feedback system.
    I realized that there is no such thing as one kind of pain. I saw, instead, that pain is a language, an entire information system. When we resist pain, and lump it into one category we label “pain,” we miss the many layers and nuances of information being conveyed. Pain is one of the voices of the body’s intelligence. Pain is necessary and defines thelimits and the edges of strain and injury. Some pain sensation messages demand us to “Stop!” while other messages tell us, “Yes, do more of that, but go slowly.” In fact, pain encompasses a whole spectrum of physiological information that actually begins with our first stretching or moving sensations in the muscles and increases in intensity until we near our maximum range of motion, at which point the sensations become very intense and we call them painful.
    You can experience this range of sensation and information in many movements. For example, take a moment and do a seated forward bend. Slowly start bending forward while paying careful attention to the sensations. At first these sensations may be quiet or subtle, but notice you receive information from them. As you move farther forward, you will feel more muscular resistance and probably what you could call a pleasant stretch. If you pay careful attention to this, you will notice it is actually a very similar feeling to a lower intensity of pain—that it feels like
a good pain
. Continue moving farther into the stretch and, as you near your maximum range of motion, the intensity increases rapidly until it actually becomes unpleasantly painful and even commands you to stop! You can try the same thing in most any movement, such as by simply and slowly rotating your head in one direction and listening to the sensations and feedback.

Local Intelligence
    As I watched and worked with my back injury, I noticed that every morning I awoke with pain and a lot of stiffness and could barely bend forward. Something in my muscles seemed to fight me and resisted any attempt I made to bend forward or to twist. I noticed that if I would move very slowly into a forward bend, holding it a long time, often for twenty or thirty minutes, these fighting, resisting muscles could be
coaxed
to relax and let go, and eventually I would be able to move fully into the pose. More important, by doing these long forwardbends, the pain and tightness would be dramatically relieved.
    I began to explain this to myself and actually experience it with a metaphysical, but fairly accurate, concept. The body organism has many levels and layers of consciousness. For example, there is our self-awareness and self-consciousness, the consciousness in the muscles and organs, the metabolic intelligence, and the consciousness in cells, nerves, and groups of muscles. I will keep this concept sufficiently simple for this example without debating or defining the ultimate nature of consciousness. I will call presence, thought, and awareness
self-consciousness
. Self-consciousness tells the body to act or move. To raise your arm, you merely think it and, voilá, the arm