Bend * Adapt * Change * Heal: The Yoga Way

A personal account of how a severe backache led me to go deep into healing and become a regular yoga practitioner as well as a certified yoga teacher.

Last year I was sorely tested. Quite literally! I’d moved to a new city after quitting a long-standing work association (due to distressing management changes) where I’d done significant work. This was soon after tragically losing my father and facing some sudden health hiccups of my own. My elderly mother who had been saved from the jaws of death moved in with me, and I dropped everything to take care of her.
Then as (bad?) luck would have it I suddenly got a slipped disc. I’ve experienced and handled mild sciatica pain, but this was excruciating! I had no support structure in the new city and couldn’t possibly go to a doctor, as it took me 10 minutes to even reach the toilet.
I felt challenged, but not helpless, as I have some knowledge of homeopathy and alternative healing. So, I worked on myself, through rest, homeopathy, and mild yogic asanas. I had barely recovered a little when my mother suddenly fell very ill. It was a sudden, violent onset of diarrhea and vomiting leading to dehydration and rapid heartbeat.
I tried arranging a doctor and drip at home but was told to take her to hospital. Arranging an ambulance and emergency hospital was hard enough, I remember how incredibly painful it was for me to climb into the ambulance! Luckily, we got an ICU bed for her and she recovered enough to be shifted to the ward eventually.
I decided not to call my family from another city as the worst seemed over. That week in the hospital, I wore two back belts and took painkillers periodically which I never do normally. Yet, I could not sit, stand or move without pain. It was difficult.
But everything passes. Slowly things limped to normalcy, and I could focus on my troubled back again. With back-bending yoga postures, especially repeated variations of bhujangasana (cobra pose) I recovered completely. Because I’d benefited from my asana practice so much, I thought I’d go deeper into yoga and decided to enrol for a Yoga Teacher Training Course.
I have always loved yoga and practiced asanas on and off which I mainly learnt from books as a teenager and from whatever odd sessions I could attend. Earlier my focus had been meditation, but now I wanted to pursue yoga systematically, holistically and deeply to understand the body, mind, and spirit connection. So, I enrolled in an online course and went daily to a yoga studio for in-person sessions.
It was a worthwhile journey. In my yoga teacher training, I came out with flying colors, with distinction in theory and practicals. More importantly, I deepened my sporadic knowledge and am inspired to travel steadfastly on the path. Let me share my understanding of the deeper reasons for the situation I found myself in, how I overcame it, and am still keeping a watch on myself.

The Body – Managing change

The body ages naturally and changes happen. Everybody knows that – in theory! But how often do we make significant changes to our lives, our activities, and our to-do lists to accommodate inevitable changes? Many of us keep plodding, doing, and hoping to continue doing at 55 the same things we did at 25. As if age is a curse and change a compromise.
Change is. Deal with it. Begin with the body. Sure, you can do most, often all the things you could do three decades ago. Frankly, I have found my physical health growing better as I’ve grown older. In a woman’s body change is more prominent. Periods every month, then their cessation, and everything that comes with it. But I have often playfully observed that there is a ‘male menopause’ too! I see a lot of middle-aged men feel challenged emotionally and physically.
I’d led a busy life, with lots of travel due to work or fun. Aches and pains occurred now and then, but soon they were hard to brush off. I knew I couldn’t and shouldn’t ignore this. I tried several things – swimming, walking, yogasanas and pranayama. However, I couldn’t do it all due to time and other constraints, so I decided to focus more on doing asanas.
Regularity matters. It’s not the flash in the pan, but the one steady flame you can hold that will light your life. I resolved to do asanas every morning. It wasn’t easy but I managed to do it five times a week, varying from 15 to 40 minutes. This was far from ideal, but it was self-driven and self-disciplined. That counted.
Back bending asanas helped me tremendously to get my back on track, especially bhujangasana (cobra pose) with all its variations. This one asana repeated every two hours helped to fix the bulge/displacement and slowly got me moving. Later, I moved to mild spinal twists while lying down, dhanurasana and ushtrasana. Once I was better, I added spinal side twists, and ardhamatasyasana and its variations to my regime. Forward-bending asanas like paschimotanasana were skipped till I recovered.
It is important to take medical advice so that you don’t end up making your pain worse. Once you are on track you need to work on yourself diligently.

Back-bending asanas helped me tremendously to get my back on track, especially bhujangasana (cobra pose) with all its variations. This one asana repeated every two hours helped to fix the bulge/displacement and slowly got me moving. Later, I moved to mild spinal twists while lying down, dhanurasana and ushtrasana.

The Mind – Managing Stress

Yoga is not merely asanas, though that’s what’s most often seen, discussed, and promoted over social media. That’s just one part. While I’m not going into what yoga truly is, I will discuss another important dimension that has helped me tremendously to go within and access the root cause of trouble –pranayama. Pranayama is the bridge between body and mind. It takes awareness to the world of emotions – explosive and suppressed, loud and subtle, revealing to us how the mind speaks through the body.
The reason I’d experienced severe back pain was not primarily physical (okay, a bit!), it was also because of what I had undergone, and the emotions piling on till they broke my back! I had watched my father die over a live video during the second coronavirus wave as I was helplessly sick in another city and unable to travel.
My mother who was fighting for her own life, in another hospital couldn’t be told that he had died and been cremated, till she reached home. I’ve never forgiven myself for not being present, thinking perhaps if I had reached in time, it wouldn’t have been like this. I understand the inevitability of death and parting, but when you live through something like this, life is never the same.
Then there were some stressful top-level changes at my workplace that I decided to quit, after 12 years of building and bringing up a school from scratch. It was difficult financially too as I was supporting my family and now would be responsible for nursing my old mother back to life and health. All this took its silent toll on me.
I suppose in testing times when storms rage, the leaves and branches snap off, it’s the roots that hold and regrow your life. This is true at the physical, emotional, and mental level. Eventually, a variety of pranayamas and meditation techniques helped me rejuvenate my mind and body. You may have to try a variety of pranayamas, not all have the same effect on us. I could pick the ones that could help me the most. It is a good idea to take guidance because pranayama affects us deeply and shouldn’t be practiced casually. Pranayama can truly turn your life around and churn you at the subtle level, which is often needed if we are to be deeply healed. Having said that, although we need mentoring, we have to do our own walking.

Food and lifestyle

Along with asanas and pranayama, I consumed food that suited my body and eased my pain. A herbal pain-relieving concoction that helped me a lot was to crush three to five fresh harsinghar (parijat, night jasmine) leaves, make kaada by boiling them in water till it was reduced to half. I often had tea with cloves and cinnamon. All these have a heating effect on the body, so you need to understand your body type and the climate. Homeopathy was a tremendous help, as were infrared rays, while heating pads didn’t make much of a difference.
I also gave my attention to creative pursuits like painting. This was a deep calling that I couldn’t pursue earlier because of circumstances, but I let myself go into it during the first coronavirus lockdown, where I spent almost four months in utter isolation (and liked it!). I went more into art and painting when this happened and found my mind stopped roaming when I had a paintbrush in hand.
My understanding is that most problems have a body-mind-spirit connection, so their solution has to be holistic too. If the main cause is emotional turmoil, then an oil massage can only go so far. If it’s a lifestyle problem, then it’s a lifestyle change that’s warranted. It’s important to get medical help, we can’t battle it out alone. But ultimately, we have to take responsibility for our health. We are the only people who can truly cure ourselves. True health is always a journey, not a random episode. We are a work in progress and must constantly work on ourselves.