Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

lifts. How it does that is mostly up to the
local
consciousness or intelligence in the muscles and nerves of the arm. If we had to know the muscle kinesiology and structural dynamics to do this, we would not get very far. Take a moment and extend your arm firmly out to your side—you are putting your self-consciousness strongly into your arm. Now remove this self-consciousness completely and let the arm drop and hang at your side as if it were dead. This experiment demonstrates how energy and awareness move into and out of different areas of the body. We take this ability for granted, but when we have injuries, it can be severely compromised.
    Normally when we want to raise our arm, turn our head, or twist our torso, we simply think and the movement follows—the local intelligence carries it out. But when there is an injury, the local intelligence can literally seal off an area of the body and prevent movement, to protect itself from further injury. We might say “head turn right,” or “torso turn right,” and after a few inches, either from pain or actual inability to move, we cannot go farther. The local consciousness says, “Hey, I listened to you before and look what happened! Now, say what you want, I’m protecting myself. Push any more, and I’ll yell really loudly.” Injuries can create self-perpetuating feedback loops that exacerbate and aggravate the problem. For example, a person might have a slight nervepinch in the neck from moving or sleeping incorrectly. The impinged nerve causes local tightness and tensing. Then, in turn, that tightening further irritates the nerve, causing more tightening. However, when we cooperate with the body’s intelligence, moving slowly and sensitively, listening and responding to the feedback, the body guides us and lets us in, accelerating the healing process by bringing back circulation and mobility.
    When I say there is no such thing as pain, I want to communicate the importance of not lumping all pain together into one homogenous entity that we resist. It is much more useful, and accurate, to see that pain is an entire spectrum of information and a language of the body, acting in a similar way to sound or music carrying entire spectrums of information. What we call pain really refers to a myriad of messages that can inform us and our practice as we learn to understand its communications. Sharp pains can mean “Stop!” Dull pain can mean to go slowly and breathe as we move energy into new areas. As I learned to listen and understand subtler levels of information from my injury, I began to see how these inner messages literally guided me to adjust my movement’s subtlety and showed me the way to heal myself.
    I remember the feelings and excitement of learning this inner process. In the morning I would awaken stiff and immobile from my back injury, and I would get moving with gentle forward bends and embryo positions. Then I would do a seated, Half Forward Fold, moving into it very slowly and holding the pose for ten or fifteen minutes on each side, surfing the edges of stiffness and flexibility. If I pushed too far into painful areas, my body would yell and cause me to slow down and recoil. This short-term feedback guided me and the intermediate-term feedback of feeling good afterwards confirmed the healing benefits of the movements I was using. Sometimes I experienced setbacks, which I realized were also part of the learning, healing cycle.
    I recall having a great “ah ha!” and realization in spinal twists. I was still doing twists as instructed by my first Sivananda teacher—witha rounded back and not much internal, dynamic energy. This rounded form actually hurt and pinched my spine. But by listening within, I noticed that when I lifted my chest and spine as I twisted, and when I created internal leverages and torques by pressing and lifting with arms and feet, my pain not only subsided but was released. The body literally showed me how to recreate space in compressed lumbar vertebrae and relieve the nerve pressure and impingement. This inner process of listening to and working with the body’s intelligence can be used and applied in every asana.
    I began to experiment more on my own to help my back and improve my practice with sequences and alignments different from what my early teachers and swamis instructed. I learned to do forward bends and twists to release and balance after backbends and to keep the spine extended and open in many poses. The