D’oh! Practicing Mysore style with injury.

Sometimes in yoga, people call having an injury “an opening”. It sounds pretty wanky, as if it should be received as some kind of blessing. But I get why. Injuring yourself is a forced change of perspective. You are forced to confront the current limitations of your body. You have to innovate and come up with new ways of doing the same postures. You’re given the opportunity (whether you like it or not) to rest your body and to actively heal.

Practicing the same sequence of postures every day, and then hurting myself, forced me to look at a lot of poses in a completely new light. A few weeks ago, I took up running in an attempt to keep up my cardio fitness while the lockdown was in place, but also as an energy burner for someone who wasn’t used to sitting around inside.

I improved my fitness, but somewhere during all that running up and down hill, I hurt myself. I refer to it as a “jarring” of the hamstring attachment somewhere high up. I have no idea what it was but it hurt like hell. It gave me a limp and made walking hard, and running impossible. When it first happened, I didn’t take it seriously, which meant my attempts to maintain the vigour of my practice ended up making it quite a bit worse! There’s lesson one. When you hurt yourself, don’t make it worse through sheer pigheadedness. 

When the “worsening” happened, I decided to back off. If I was going to heal properly, I needed to rest! So, I shortened my practice. I made notes of postures which caused me pain, and I found alternatives or skipped them altogether. A lot of the rolling and inverted postures at the end of the Primary Series really tugged at my injury, so I stopped doing them for a while. This was hard for me to accept, because it had taken me SUCH a long time for me to even get good at those poses – so I generally practice them religiously to try and improve.

The injury gave me a new appreciation for the standing sequence. After I became competent at those poses, it became easy to dismiss them as “not challenging” or not as important as the rest of the series. The nature of these poses is that they strengthen the legs and work on balance – something I really needed when I injured myself. Accomplishing the standing poses each day became a delight which I relished. 

Even a small injury such as this changed my perspective of the primary series and renewed my appreciation for the Mysore style method of practice. I can easily see how someone could become discouraged when injured, feel self conscious or unable to attend classes. If they had a regular practice, the frustration might mean they stop practicing altogether because of the distress caused by not being able to do something you once took pride in.

With the Mysore style method, there is always room for modification. I’m not normally someone who takes advantage of it – but injury will make you realise how important that really is. The ability to rest, skip and modify poses was what allowed me to keep up a daily practice. For 3 weeks, I couldn’t even walk without a severe limp, yet I was practicing yoga for over an hour every day. This helped me psychologically deal with the injury and allow myself to heal – something I have always had trouble with.

This small period of healing and learning would not have happened without the unique nature of the Mysore style method in which I have been taught. I’m healed now! And my practice is better for the opening.