Supporting yourself with Restorative Yoga

Recently after a yoga class, a student expressed frustration and confusion about a bum shoulder. Instead of responding with a sense of “let’s fix it!  Let’s align that shoulder! Let’s change your shape!”  I felt a wave of compassion.  It was as if, as the student used words to talk about the shoulder, the shoulder itself was communicating something to me.  The collarbone, instead of winging from the throat to the upper arm, was curling and narrowing in; and the head of the upper arm protruded forward.  Attempt this shape yourself, and see how you feel; to me it communicated: “I hurt, I am in pain, keep out.”  And yet the student was contemplating undertaking surgery – literally entering into and rearranging that shoulder with a knife.

Looking at my student, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that that shoulder was protecting something.  All I wanted to do was provide that shoulder with the comfort it seemed to be asking for. 

I suggested neither abstaining from physical activity nor strengthening the shoulder.  I suggested restorative yoga, propping the student in a still posture of increased openness accompanied by ultimate comfort and ease.  It seemed clear that the first step was not “fixing” the shoulder but supporting it, so it could let go, even for ten minutes, of whatever it was holding.

B.K.S. Iyengar has said that pain in yoga is a teacher.  He points out that pain in yoga, as in life, is inevitable, and that an important aspect of practicing yoga is to learn to discern pain that is instructive and can help us understand ourselves and our bodies better, and pain which is harmful and needs to be transformed.  When we experience pain in yoga, instead of just pushing through the pain, or looking for a pose that feels better, we investigate.  Is it yoga that is “causing” this pain?  Or is the pain already there. 

For as Iyengar points out in his book Light on Life, “when you begin yoga, the unrecognized pains come to the surface.”

So often we push ourselves to be better, stronger, more accomplished, bigger.  Instead of aggressively forcing yourself into a new shape, what would it be like to let your current shape find the support it needs to come to know itself better?  I love that idea of “start with where you are.”  Instead of pushing yourself into a new contortion, support your current shape to release and see what rises to the surface.

Back to my student, an ardent runner who turned to yoga as a way to stretch and strengthen her body in a different way.  She continued with resting her shoulder and exploring her pain by prioritizing restorative over more active forms of yoga, and cultivating more mindfulness of her inner body experience.  In this way she was able to discern that the pain in her shoulder did not go away through resting, and she started to understand how the pain in her shoulder was linked to pain in her lower back and hip, and to limited range of motion in her foot. 

In addition to following through with the shoulder surgery she had been contemplating, she saw a chiropractor to help her with foot.  As she worked out the scar tissue that had built up in her foot, she regained range of motion there, which changed her gait, made her low back and hip pain disappear, and supported a new posture in her shoulders. “Body awareness and mindfulness helped me understand that the restriction originated in my foot,” she says.  “By resting and getting to know my system, I could see how everything fit together, and I came back stronger and with a sense of inner vibrance.”