HEALING
Am I healed from my stroke?
My latest MRI showed my carotid artery had reshaped itself, unlike the swollen imbalance shown here. Brain swelling went down and according to my neurologist “healed”, with a small damaged area of my right hemisphere that would never “ heal”. My brain MRI is the My yoga will logo.
My stroke was caused by a carotoid artery dissection that formed a clot that traveled up to my brain.
I spent 10 days in the ICU on Iv blood thinners and a variety of meds to keep my blood pressure up, before I was transferred to the Nuero floor to spend another week healing and finally a month in on a nuero rehabilitation floor healing more and more before being discharged fit for home.
The only picture I allowed in the hospital with my favorite goofy cousin, trying to cheer me up.
“I want to heal, I need to recover, I want to go back to the day before my stroke and feel like myself again”.
I hear these sentiments from fellow stroke survivors all the time and it makes me wonder, Do you really?
I was warned early on by yoga colleagues I’d better not use the word “heal” in my yoga classes, because I am not a yoga therapist and there is no data proving yoga heals someone from a stroke.
So I didn’t for years, until I realized, I am using yoga to “heal” from my stroke. Im using my techniques to help others use yoga on their healing path as well. Is that not data enough?
Well most definitely, but is the aim to tell people yoga will heal you? No, not really. No one should be saying that data or not.
Because yoga works differently in each of us.
Yoga can open a path or portal for you to enter into your own healing space, but yoga itself doesn’t heal anything. it only offers opportunity to explore movement and breath in a different pattern.
We don’t ever achieve a state of being fully healed or recovered in my opinion, trauma changes us and is meant to.
Well then, What does it mean to be healed? What does this word mean?
Healing in it’s simplest definition is “the process of becoming well again”.
Well that’s vague because how do you define “well”?
That’s subjective for sure.
but I think we could all agree it is a process.
But check it…
we need to go deeper when you look at the root and the word etymology you find
Heal means “to make sound or whole” and stems from the root, haelan, the condition or state of being hal, whole.
-defined by the National institute of health.
Ahhh being whole.
Yes. healing is the process of restoring a sense of wholeness to the self. Healing itself has nothing to do with getting anywhere or accomplishing anything, it’s restoring the body to wholeness, completeness.
Letting go of all that is not.
Everything you are not needs to get out the way. Making space.
My contracted arm and tight hips in warrior II might not be too imperfect for the yoga community, but I think of myself in that hospital bed and how much healing my body has experienced.
We need more images like this in the yoga community, inviting more to the practice.
The wound is where the light enters you.
-Rumi
or
The Trauma gives you access to the light within.
Everything you have is within you. Trauma or a disturbing something happens to you, you are wounded, injured maybe. You look to everything outside of yourself to make you feel even the slightest bit better.
All the while the joy is inside you, the last place you’d ever look. Sometimes hiding away in certain part of the body.
In the outline of Stroke yoga is speak about the areas of vulnerability in the body. The pockets of possibly stored emotion? stored tension? these “dark “ parts of ourselves? the shadows?
Im not sure but they are
Hip
knee
foot
shoulder
elbow
hand
This picture captures it all. After a long 2 hours on a paddle board on a windy morning, my body was beat.
illustrated here in this picture
head to toe.
Shoulder, elbow, wrist/ hand, hip, knee, foot.
The misalignment of a stroke survivor.
I was always warned of this pattern and told it would wear away cartilage if not corrected.
Knee hyper extension is function of the knee actually and possesses very little risk to the knee joint. 95% of people are able to hyper extend.
Without fully embodying your own self, your own thoughts, feelings and emotions you really are not gonna have access into that realm.
You intuitively know how. You just were never taught to access it.
This is why healing looks different for everyone, and has no set time table. There is no one way to heal. I can only share what helped me on my healing path and if someone finds it useful then great!
But healing isn’t something that happens to us.
Caroline Myss refers to 2 different kinds of healing in her book The Anatomy of the Spirit
Active and passive. Active being the one healing is engaged, doing the metal work, while the other is a “do it for me” attitude.
Nobody can tell you what to do to heal.
This is why I love yoga so much, or one of the reasons.
It’s a path. Maybe the road less taken, but nevertheless a path that is there for you to set foot on if you choose.
Healing from trauma is a journey not a destination.
Whether you want to admit it or not yoga is a path that can restore wholeness to the sense of self if the one healing remains an active participant in their healing. Is that true healing?
Maybe.
Yoga is not something to quantify or organize. The more you try to understand yoga, the less true you are to the essence of yoga.
I understand the field of yoga therapy and the need to sort of explain the how’s and why’s to get insurance approval and I respect the hell out of that.
I also regard the how’s and the why’s of yoga as beyond the physical, beyond the metaphysical, therefore nearly impossible to explain, quantify, organize or standardize.
The practice of yoga asana is one in which we use different postural alignments and BREATHE into our bodies, sending breath to the deepest darkest parts of ourselves.
You see if healing is really restoring wholeness, healing cannot take place outside the body, be done by someone else or by a medication.
It’s an inside job!
Many look at me and don’t even notice my stroke, others ask what’s wrong with your arm?
The quintessential arm swing that every stroke survivor seems to want to restore, but few realize the arm swing is a rhythmic flow coming from the feet to the hips to the shoulder girdle to the arm, its not just oh swing my arm.
All this separateness is such an illusion.
WHOLENESS
Healing means restoring to Whole, considering the Whole. Addressing the WHOLE body as a system, as an onion, peeling away layers.
I choose to use the word Wholistic in an effort to make a statement and remind people of this Wholeness
The word Whole has roots back to sacred, and getting in tune to this sacred nature is possibly what healing really is.
The human spirit is sacred. Life is sacred. Earth is sacred.
You are a sacred being.
What then is HOLISM?
Holism itself is a concept rooted in evolution and acknowledging “an organism can only be explained by reference to its past and it’s future”
Holism and Evolution by Jan Christiaan Smuts
“Holism is a process of creative syntheses is, the resulting wholes are not static, but dynamic”
“This is a universe of whole making”
“In organic application, the term “whole”, will be much more useful than “life” and will render the prevailing mechanistic interpretation largely unnecessary”
So my question is why drop the W?
Holism in its efforts does try to acknowledge the whole, I just personally think the ideas of holism goes too far beyond the self and we need to more or less remind folks of the WHOLNESS within themselves, not look to the past or future too much. Stop externalizing things.
Go within.
Healing in my opinion is a Be Here Now kind of thing. - reference fellow stroke survivor Ram Dass.
Not this crazy way the medical community has divided our body up into parts, If you had a stroke that’s nuerological, see a neurologist,
Oh you have TMJ from your stroke- see a dentist they handle the mouth and jaw
Oh you have incontinience see your gynocologist.
Oh your eyesight is troublesome yep head on over to your eye doctor.
But not one of these issues is separate from the other, yet is treated that way. I hear the most sad experiences from stroke survivors worldwide.
Why is it like this? Well, the almighty dollar.
Cha-ching!
I have heard many professionals lightheartedly reference its easier to try to not experience trauma then to try to heal from it, because healing is something even experts can’t really confirm we do after trauma.
I will continue to ask, so do we ever heal fully from a trauma?
And I’d continue to say no and why in the hell would you want to. The point of trauma is to change us, reshape our brains, reshape our lives, so why would you want to heal and try to get back too who you were before?
That’s not the point. matter of fact I think a lot of people miss the point completely.
Peter Levine says in his book Waking the Tiger Healing Trauma, “Trauma evokes a biological response that needs to remain fluid and adaptive, not stuck and maladaptive”.
Ah yes, As Jan Christiaan Smuts said in her book Holism and evolution:
“The resulting wholes are not static but dynamic”
Sounds a lot like human life, right?
Dynamic, fluid and adaptive.
Maybe life itself is traumatic and the whole meaning of life is to unpack that trauma and continually adapt.
Whether you identify as a holistic practitioner or Wholism at is rawest form I think we can all agree the body is not fixed,set or separated as conventional medicine might have you believe.