Empower Your Pain

The other day I was talking to a yoga teacher friend of mine.  He was telling me about a prospective private client.  She has rheumatoid arthritis, so of course I came to mind.  What would you recommend, he wanted to know.  Would you do Forrest style core work? What about this technique? or that style sequencing?

My response might have been flippant.  Initially, and even though I teach heated power yoga for a living, I told him to keep this prospective student out of the heat.  We were in the process of cooking lunch, so I turned my attention momentarily back to stirring and checking temperatures, putting the meal together.  It was a warm and humid day in my Boston suburb and though my disease wasn’t terribly active in the moment, the change in season has made my mornings a bit stiffer than usual.  To put it another way, running my life at my normal speed was requiring a bit more focus that particular day.

When we finally sat down to eat, I changed my advise.  “The process of doing yoga as someone with a chronic illness is really about learning to understand pain.”  To which, my buddy replied, “that’s depressing.”  As someone who deals with pain as a jarring, acute sensation, that makes plenty of sense. But the outlook lacks a little finesse when it’s applied to a chronic. We chronics may wake up one day pain free, but the next day could be awash of fatigue or joints so uncomfortable walking to the bathroom is challenging.  As much as we can look for signs in the tea leaves or diet to explain away why it’s happening in the first place, pain is information.

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When we can take on sensory information, noticing the emotions that come along in tow, we can take stock of our emotional patterning.  For me, fear and anger have been a huge part of my disease processing.  Will I be able to do the things I want to do?  Will I be able to have the life I imagined for myself?  The chronic pain has made me angry or fearful that I wouldn’t.  Conversely, when I’m angry or experiencing a high level of anxiety in my daily life, my degree of joint pain does rise.  Now, when I feel pain in my body, I try to study it.  Holding myself, I acknowledge the pain in my body, feel it and watch it.  I can ask myself, which side of this am I on?  Because fear of course feeds fear, and anxiety is its own downward sort of downward spiral.

Acknowledge the sensation.  Take a breath.  Ask yourself, without that internal judge-y voice, what’s going on here?  And listen for the answer.