Session 2: Awareness

+ Introduction

Welcome back!

I want to congratulate you for taking the first steps on your journey to full and complete recovery, and being willing to develop a relationship with your body/mind system. I’m going to use some terms in this course that you may not be familiar with. For example, I will ask you at times to ‘tune in’ to your injury, or to the frequency of sensations around it. These are terms of convenience that talk to the nature of your individual experience. The words themselves don’t really matter. What they point to is what matters. What your actual, personal, direct experience is.

Any injury has a particular story around it, and some of it is written in your body. In other words, there is a frequency, or set of psycho-emotional feelings, tied into it, and as you explore the body in all its miraculous variety and depth, you have an opportunity to grow as a conscious being beyond your expectations. It’s different for everyone. The important thing is that you are allow yourself to be aware of what’s going on inside so as you work with the injury, as you work with the pain, you can let the mental and emotional baggage around your injury fall away. This will happen quite naturally as you reprogram your system.

We won’t go too much into the mechanics of all this in this series, though. You don’t need to grok the intricacies of how psycho-emotional conditioning is stored in the bodymind to get the benefits of yoga; the reconditioning happens in the background.

So you’ll start off with a little anatomy, and then some simple exercises for self-practice. Thank you for caring about yourself and your life.

+ The Body As Observatory

The spine is the central part of our body/mind system, which is itself the vehicle through which we perceive reality. Think of the body as a telescope, through which the world is perceived by an astronomer (you, the awareness that perceives).

It really, really helps to have your telescope, your working body, in optimum condition.

Because this is a course focused on dealing with the root of pain and developing a working relationship with our mental/emotional system, with all its complexes and interrelationships, we must know structurally how the spine works.

The spine is the central part of our body/mind system. Even the jargon we use to talk about the body refers to how important it is: it’s not called the ‘central nervous system’ for nothing.

The spine can move in any of five ways: contraction, expansion, rotation, flexion, and torsion. Now, why is this important for us to know? Because everyone’s spine is a little different. And because as you continue to work with your body, instead of against it, you will notice that different movements are associated with different emotional frequencies.

This is a bit of a subtle point that might not make sense right now, but don’t worry if it doesn’t connect quite yet – direct experience will make it clear.

Remember the feeling of that smile, or the laughter you shared with someone? That was an expansive feeling. In the same way, we can twist the truth to fit our own narrative. There are contracting emotions, and etc. As you move through the videos and exercises, pay particular attention to the flavor of the tension in your spine. To the frequency of sensation that you are working with.

Chances are that your problem involves at least two of these, depending on the nature of your issue. The only way to develop something is with experience, so start finding the limits of your movement. Don’t go past them, just nudge close to them. Pay particular attention to when comfort approaches pain.

A slight, dull ache is what you’re looking for, in the case of a ruptured disc, for example. A pinched nerve that when activated sends hot pokers shooting through your body will have some serious fortifications around it, in the sense that the muscular system will actively try to defend you from it without your conscious consent.

The body doesn’t want to feel pain: that’s why it hurts. What you want to do is understand where you can move, without pain, and to find out where the danger zones are.

Depending on the nature of any injuries, chances are they begin with the spine. And if you have a spinal injury, chances are that involves at least two limitations of the spinal movements associated dependent on contraction, expansion, rotation, flexion, or torsion.

The only way to develop something is with experience, so in the coming asana sequence we’re going to start by finding the limits of your movement.

Don’t go past these limits, just nudge close to them. As you move from posture to posture, pay particular attention to when comfort approaches pain, or when a certain focal point in your body is highlighted for attention.

+ The First Sequence

This first sequence is a check-in.

Approach it with sincere desire. We will rapidly increase from here. As you move forward through the videos and exercises in the asana courses, pay particular attention to the flavor of the tension in your spine. To the frequency of sensation that you are working with. Compare its movement and state to the previous exercise.

As the vertebrae expand, are you feeling the expansion, or are you feeling a resisting contraction? As you untwist, do you feel a release of deeply-held pressure? Observe and note what comes up.

As we move into the first practical application, remember: take things at your own pace. There is no rush. The most common mistake that people make when beginning to develop a working, deep-level understanding of their body/mind system is forgetting to breathe. Remember Ujjayi breath, and keep the ocean-sounding breath active throughout the practice.

In the interests of brevity and ease of understanding, an in-depth review of each asana is found within The Horizontal Path, which provides a step-by-step review of the method, the associated benefits, precautions, and questions for guided reflections.

+ Homework

Watch this video at least once again before moving on to the next, and do the sequence a minimum of three times a day before the next.

If you have some serious injury, you may want to take a couple extra days, maybe up to a week, even. Don’t feel bad about how long this takes. Everyone’s body is different.

So, three times over the next day, take five to ten minutes out of your day and run through the sequence, paying particular attention to transitions between the postures.

You might find that you need to rotate your shoulders or twist your hips to avoid pain when standing up in base, for example, or that you can only twist so far. Maybe as you stand, your mid-back is tensed. When you notice something like this, freeze.

Slowly, work with the movement, and find the limits of available movement there. Ask yourself: ‘Why am I moving like this? Where else can I move? What pain, tightness, tension, or etc. am I letting guide my movement? Is that what I want?’

Maybe the pain is good where it is. Maybe it’s simply muscular tension.

The body can rapidly become conditioned to react with overwhelming force when we fear pain. Is this an overreaction? Do you have more freedom than you thought? Go through the entirety of the sequence with serious intention.

This is simple stuff: twisting, sitting down, standing up. Don’t let pride get in the way of actually understanding your spine. Remember, we are setting the foundation for much more capabilities later on, so don’t rush. Allow yourself to appreciate the subtle joys of relaxation.

+ My Story

Where I’m coming from:

Thank you for caring about your health and well-being. It is the most beneficial thing you can do not just for yourself, but for the world at large. While this series is addressed to any who suffer from a spinal injury, because that is my personal experience, I want to connect with everyone who has suffered from chronic pain, of course.

This series is founded on the understanding that conditioning is stored in the human body/mind, and that through active engagement with psycho-emotional content released during the physical practice of asana, any individual can take conscious control over their well-being.

The lessons here were written the day I ruptured a disc between my L4 and L5, leaving me effectively paralyzed.

The infantry pain-gift that keeps on giving. Too many miles with too much weight on my back while I was in the Marines. One too many rapid ascents down a rope.

So after the rupture, I found I could painfully shuffle-crawl to the phone, just out of reach.

An hour later there was a conversation that led to my girlfriend and I parting ways.

A jab and then a left hook, bam bam, and I couldn’t help but be aware that both of these punches entirely my “fault,” so to speak.

At the time, I was homeless, having left my job to travel for a year, and now I was paralyzed and alone, sitting in a stew of my own cooking. Painfully aware of my reality.

How could I not be? My decisions, no one else’s, had placed me in the situation I found myself in. Having been in similar situations before, I knew that I had a choice: I could suffer, or I could be grateful.

That didn’t lessen the physical pain, mental turmoil, or the emotional anguish. But as I tried to somehow find a comfortable position to sleep, I could choose to suffer, or I could choose to be grateful.

And that was enough.

This series is based on my own experience with recovery, distilled to its base principles, so you don’t have to experiment and explore all the bunny trails. I had plenty of time, plenty of interest, and a singular chance to apply a lifetime of physical knowledge and exploration, not to mention my own yogic teaching practice and knowledge.

The Horizontal Path goes further, and provides some direct insights of my own ever-developing and yet still barely-budding awareness, connecting many more of the dots between reconditioning one’s bodymind, and their ultimate recovery.

The asana sequences we go through here are the routines that, over the course of a few months, gradually brought me to full, painless, beautiful mobility, and are sequenced to allow you to grow at your own pace as well as to fully understand the depths within each pose.

Back pain is the leading cause of disability in the western world, and most of the time, it’s non-organic; meaning that it’s not caused by serious conditions, like arthritis, fracture, or infection.

It is my intention to provide you with a foundational understanding of how to develop awareness of your entire spine, and, if you are dealing with back pain of any sort, to empower you to live your life to the fullest extent possible, given the nature of the damage.

Most people with back pain recover; this course will assist in and drastically speed up the recovery process and will provide you with the tools to prevent reoccurrence.

Over the course of the following lessons, you will be expected to learn a little about anatomy, and to apply that knowledge to yourself.

Because of the often overlooked aspects of the psycho-emotional conditioning that resulted in the injury in the first place and its primary importance in facilitating your recovery, I will also start to talk more and more as this series goes on, without going into too much detail and while trying to keep it more or less applicable, about perspectives and points of view around which you can shape your approach to the asana practice and ultimately to life in general.

The bodymind is an interconnected whole, and the entire architecture of your beliefs are absolutely essential in determining how you address an injury or any sort of psycho-emotional trauma. A physical injury, or an emotionally scarring event, it’s all the same to the bodymind. There’s no real difference, at least, as far as your operating system is concerned.

So in the coming lessons expect a little bit more distillations of traditional yogic wisdom, which can seem to the uninitiated to be full of “woo-woo” and spirituality. Again, I encourage and invite you to approach this with the same open heart and mind that you might hold for a dear friend who wants nothing but the best for you in every way possible.

You don’t have to believe everything in this series, but you should at least consider it. You don’t have to believe in something to get value out of it, this is a massive misconception. In time and with practice, you will quite naturally stop identifying so much with habitual patterns of thought and belief anyway, it’s a part of becoming more mature and crystallized as a conscious individuated expression of this universe. So take what works, discard the rest, and remember: everything starts with gratitude. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Thank you, for being you. For caring about your life. I’ll see you in the next lesson!