A teacher of mine says that pain doesn’t exist if you are living in the present moment because pain is either a reaction to a past event or an anticipation of a future event. He says, pain is our reaction to a stimulus and we can learn to have control over our reactions, therefore, we can live without pain.
I see pain as a teacher. For me, low back pain means I am out of alignment in my body or my core needs to be strengthened in order to take some pressure off of my back. I’ve torn both my hamstring attachments over stretching in a yoga pose and the pain I felt then meant I needed to stop being so competitive and to take it easy on myself. Pain is an indicator that we are out of balance. The root of muscular or acute pain is normally pretty easy to pinpoint. A doctor can take an x ray and tell us we have a broken bone or we can have an MRI and plainly see that a torn ligament is behind the anguish we feel in our wrist. It’s much harder, however, for our minds to comprehend or explain the pain that accompanies an illness. Our eyes can’t see the root of cancer or what’s causing our fibromyalgia. The best we can do is make educated guesses with the help of science, technology and past experience.
Yoga states that disease begins in the mind. With this understanding, we can agree that most illness is borne out of emotional imbalance. Over time, constant stress wears down and weakens our immune system making us susceptible to getting sick. One of the biggest killers in the US is heart disease. If we take heart failure and look at it from a yogic perspective, the root of the issue is going to be some kind of closing off of one’s heart to love. Those of us who have experienced being in love, know that it can be sheer bliss and utter despair, both types of emotions elicit physical responses in our bodies. When we go through a tough breakup, it feels as if our hearts are physically being ripped out of our chests. As human beings our nature is to experience and express. In American culture, showing emotion can be seen as a sign of weakness, and even in our own concrete jungle, being weak is the surest way to die first. So we experience the heartbreak and rather than express the emotion, we stuff the hurt down inside us. This ball of emotional hurt is then banked in our muscles or organs impeding their natural processes until we find a way to physically release it. Once our bodies manifest symptoms of disease, typically, the problem has been held in our emotional body for some time. Yoga is a beautiful way to clear old issues out of our tissues. Working with the body on a physical level while also calming the mind and focusing on the present moment allows us to release certain things we may be holding onto that are no longer serving our highest good. This is why a lot of people experience bouts of crying or spontaneous laughter in yoga. It’s the body’s way of letting go and it feels so good to surrender. Remember, surrender does not mean giving up, it means allowing ourselves to let go of the struggle. Surrender opens us up to receive God’s grace.
Getting caught up in the busy ness or ‘business’ of life enables us to dismiss our own needs in order deal with the pressure of external responsibilities. It takes conscious moments of stillness or meditation to dive inward, look around and do the deep internal work it takes to release sometimes long held unhealthy patterns of thought and habits. Most of us think it’s selfish to take so much time to ourselves, but in order for us to heal, we have to have an understanding of how to stop the cycle of self-destruction, clear out resentments, regrets and past wounds. Pain is the messenger. When we heed the call of our bodies and change our attitudes and belief systems we become our healthiest, happiest, pain-free selves.
Take action to relieve pain by sitting down for a 3 to 11 minute meditation first thing every morning. Check in with yourself and make sure what you are doing with your life makes you feel happy and fulfilled. If you’ve never meditated before and could use some help getting started, check out a beginner’s mediation workshop in your area. Check out a restorative or yin yoga class at a local studio. Bonus points for trying out kundalini yoga, ‘the yoga of awareness’ which incorporates breath work, asana and meditation to strengthen your glandular and nervous system.
Happy meditating 
xoxo
Parvati
