When Yoga Hurts

This practice keeps teaching me things.

Somehow, some way, I decided my practice needed less focus on technique and more on how my body actually felt.  In Journey Into Power, which I'm reading as part of my teacher training, Baron Baptiste instructs us to do as much, but I'm happy to say that the idea came to me from my practice.  At some point in the last few months, my practice told me that a laser focus on how it felt was my next step.

I'm less than happy with the results.

I hurt.  

It's not hurt from my practice; rather, it's hurt my practice is revealing.  I have lot of hurt stored up in my body.  Specifically, deep in my hips and in my shoulder joints and in the muscles of my upper back.  I'd known about the back muscle stuff for a while.  I have the hardest time relaxing my shoulders, which may have been the impetus for my new emphasis.  I was tired of teachers pushing my shoulders down in Warrior 2.

The soreness in my joints surprises me.  Some of it may come from the fact that I'm not quite back in the practice rhythm I was in prior to Christmas.  I had been hitting the heated classes at Cleveland Yoga 3-4 times a week, and they are the most rigorous classes I have attended on a regular basis.  The "rigor=openness" equation isn't perfect, but in my case, I think I was more open, particularly in the hips.  Due to travel, I haven't gotten back into that rhythm post holidays yet, and my body is telling me I need to.  

But I don't think that's everything.  Baptiste talks about how our bodies carry around everything that ever happened to us, an idea he grabbed from the ancients.  Every hurt, every slight, every stress, and every REBUT has a home in our body, until we learn to let go of it.  I think of myself as a person with a good sense of my inner landscape who does a good job of avoiding repression.

And yet...

During Saturday's savasana I had a pretty deep conversation with the muscles in my upper back.  I told them they didn't need to hold all of my stress, that the rest of my body and my heart and mind and soul could help handle the load.  My shoulders weren't so sure.  They started talking about all the stuff that I could be worried about: my job, my relationship, my future.  They said that they'd been taking care of all that heavy stuff for so long, that I had no idea what I was getting into when I said I would take some of the load.  I left class pretty sad but grateful, because I felt like I understood some little part of me I hadn't before.

Hmm.