Everyday Yogini

Even after years of practicing Yoga, I am skilled at the art of ignoring my body. Which is evidenced by my shoulder injury recently while practicing. This is also evidenced by my recent and amazing binge of all things pizza and dessert, which has led me back into a health crisis. Seriously.

I had a follow-up endoscope on Friday, so the doctors could see how the opening between my bile duct and duodenum is healing up. Well, it’s not. It is still very inflammed and I’m still experiencing intermittent pain. To add to the love, I have an ulcer in my stomach. You see, my body can yell and scream and I will whistle and cover my ears (and keep drinking coffee with pastries).

Again, my dear body is working so hard to teach me how to best live fully. In order to actually be in this moment, I have to be willing to listen and respond to what I hear. It requires a level of honesty, surrender, and respect (for myself) that is unprecedented for me. The only thing that helps diminish the pain I experience is being extremely careful with what I put in my body (which I am decidedly opposed to). I am working with a nutritional counselor as well as listening closely to what my body is saying.

And it’s working. Now that I’ve been eating nothing but whole foods and no coffee for a week and a half, I feel a lot better. The tests don’t line up with that (obviously), but they will. I believe in my body’s ability to heal itself. Some days it’s hard to muster up enough love for myself to continue with this, but I have motivation outside of my own self, thank goodness: Erick and Clara. I have found myself over the last year, increasingly distracted by pain or alternatively, eating pastries and drinking lots of coffee. Of course there has been some Yoga thrown in, but my inner experience has been this crazy pendulum: pain —– comfort self with food ——— pain ——-comfort self with food. There hasn’t been an abundance of emotional energy for Clara or Erick.

So, for now, I am gluten, dairy, soy, and coffee free. By freeing myself from these yummy, delicious things, I am (relatively) free from pain. I am also learning to drop into the discomfort in my body instead of trying to wiggle away from it. I am learning to surrender and breathe and let the pain tell me it’s story. The irony is that the more I learn to stay with the discomfort, the lesser it becomes. The more I learn to stay with my body, the more I am able to stay with Clara and Erick. I feel more awake to my life than I have since we left Colorado.

May you be well. May you all be skilled in the art of listening to the lessons in your lives. May you find yourself awake and filled with boundless gratitude for your gifts.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Mindfulness, Nourishing our Bodies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.