Hey y’all, A student and dedicated practitioner sent me this back in the Fall. She said it was OK when I asked if I could publish this as a guest blog. She went through/is going through particularly difficult (and unusual) circumstances, and has learned a lot in the process. I think she tells a good story, gives some worthwhile warnings, and inspires us all to think and introspect more deeply. She ends on a very profound note. -Ti
By Shana Scudder (Guest Blog)
November 28, 2023
In 2017, I jumped down from the pull-up bar at the Crossfit gym where I was working out, and I couldn’t move my arms. Like, at all. They were bent up like little chicken wings. It was the oddest sensation. They definitely hurt, but as a dancer, aerialist, and now Crossfitter, “hurt” was just how I lived. And I had an eating disorder, so I wasn’t fueling my body properly for the amount of activity I was doing (or even for lying on the couch watching TV for that matter). My journey to this point in my life is a very long story, which I will tell, but not right now. Now I want to tell about how I am trying to learn to listen to my body, and why yoga is so crucial to my healing at every level.
It turned out I had rhabdo (Ti notes: Wikipedia says: “Rhabdomyolysis [shortened as rhabdo] is a condition in which damaged skeletal muscle breaks down rapidly, often due to high intensity exercise over a short period of time.”), acquired because I wasn’t paying attention to my body. My body rebelled in dramatic fashion. In Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, Stephen Cope writes:
“When the body moves beyond the point of comfortable toleration of sensation, we lose our equanimity—we lose the balance of the mind. When this happens, deeper levels of awareness are no longer possible, the mind becomes restless and dissociated. We move away from experience rather than toward it.” (p.231) That was certainly my experience…in retrospect.
Any gymnast or dancer knows that it is our job to “push through the pain,” so that’s what I was doing, and I was at a Crossfit workout for God’s sake, the whole point of which is basically to break you.
Because of my mentality, I got nothing but praise from my coaches. The night I got rhabdo, I had a coach literally screaming in my face to keep going. Even shittier than that was all of the praise I got in the ER for “exercising myself into the hospital.” Male nurses and orderlies came by just to congratulate me while the doctors were trying to save my kidneys and thus my heart and my life. It was every toxic athletic culture at its worst, and I was a living specimen of how far you can push your body past what your mind tries to allow.
One of the greatest difficulties I have encountered in each of my attempts to return to physical activity since my 2017 bout with rhabdo is that not only do I no longer trust my body, but it takes much less movement to induce pain than it used to. The obvious reason for this is that I am completely de-conditioned at this point, but this pain has been with me since I got out of the hospital and (foolishly) tried to start training again. There does not seem to be any medical or scientific evidence for disproportionate pain and soreness I now experience when using my muscles, but my body now hurts in a way it never used to, and after very little activity. When I was attempting to return to aerials, I ended up in urgent care after most training sessions, with that sharp, severe pain and stiffness in my biceps that had been my first indication of rhabdo during that fateful workout.
Therefore, I have been very off-and-on in my return to yoga, quite frequently giving up and trying to just accept that my body does not want to move anymore. At all. But I know that is not actually the case, hence my continued “starts” following lengthy “stops.”
This time I have found a medically trained yoga therapist who was my first entry point back into movement, and another teacher, who I consider my Teacher, because he is my spiritual guide as well as my link to joining both body and spirit back together in this healing process. In my last 1-on-1 session with my Teacher, he told me to “stop when there was any sign of pain or fear” in my body and that “there had to be consensus.” In other words, if my hip was okay, but my lower back was not, it was a no-go. As both of us predicted, these criteria have often left me just standing there, having backed completely out of every aspect of the pose because at this point in the life of my body, there are very few movements that do not cause pain or fear, usually both.
Stephen Cope writes that “slow, intentional movement creates a kind of absorption in the mind that allows precise internal sensations to be tracked very consciously” (p.232), but I can’t get anywhere near that absorption, even though I am attempting to move very slowly and very intentionally. Ultimately, the pain really isn’t the problem; it’s the fear. Fear that it will happen again. Justified fear that my body can and will break. And that fundamental mistrust of my own will that allowed such a thing to happen.
Back in the day, I tried to fool myself that I had some modicum of humility during yoga classes. I would always set up in the corner, and try to be unobtrusive while I did handstand scorpions, drop-backs, and over-splits, telling myself that this was my practice, and these were the poses I wanted to perfect. Which was true. However, none of this earned me any friends in class, except for the occasional single man who wanted to chat me up about my training regimen. If I had really wanted to blend into the class, I would have actually blended in, and used the free time to practice yoga, not gymnastics.
But I had no idea how to practice yoga. None. Stephen Cope writes that “we are interested in the internal experience of the posture, not in trying to recreate some picture from a book” (p.232). I knew how to bend my body into impressive shapes, but I had no concept of the actual purpose of it all.
In “Yoga as Self-Transformation,” Joel Kramer writes, “Being able to do complicated postures doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to do yoga. The essence of yoga is not attainments, but how awarely you work with your limits – wherever and whatever they may be” (p.1). At that time, I was not aware enough to know my limits, nor was I at all interested in honoring them. I stretched for three hours a day. I used weights to hold my legs further down than they wanted to go. I did splits with my foot on a chair. No one past age eight and with a genetic mutation has a body that wants to do an over-split that extreme. All I wanted to do was push, push, push.
My yoga teacher at the time told me that I needed a practice like Yin Yoga to “calm down.” I would sometimes force myself into a yin or a restorative class, but I found them “so boring.” Kramer writes,” I have found there are basically two personality types in yoga. I call them the ‘pushers’ and the ‘sensualists.’ The pushers are more into control and progress – the sensualists into surrender and relaxation“ (p.2).
For me, boredom meant that my body was still, but my mind was going berserk. If both my body and my mind were still, I wouldn’t be “bored” because I would be experiencing bliss, which is decidedly not “boring.” Now, in my quiet little practices, sometimes I find myself thinking that I am “bored,” but if I really examine what is going on, this feeling of boredom occurs on days when my mind is the most restless, because I will just auto-pilot through a practice while my mind is racing a thousand miles an hour. I finish and don’t even feel like I have practiced at all. Unfortunately, this probably still happens more often than not.
Interestingly, before I got rhabdo, I was already in a process of transformation, but I had not surrendered to it. I now believe that rhabdo was God’s way of saving my life. I have come to view this experience in much the way that Ram Dass describes his experience of having a stroke:
“The way I approach what happened is that with the stroke I began a new incarnation. In the last incarnation I was a golfer, a sports car driver, a musician. Now I have given all that up. The psychological suffering only comes if I compare incarnations—if I say, oh, I used to be able to play the cello. So I say my guru has stroked me, to bring me closer to a spiritual domain.” https://tricycle.org/magazine/stroked-guru/
If I had kept going the way that I was, I would have likely ended up injured in a much more severe way. I was often upside-down, 20 feet in the air, having ingested (or at least retained) very little food or water. I took in massive amounts of caffeine to compensate for my lack of hydration and nutrition. My entire way of being was PUSH. Go hard or go home. Ironically, I justified this attitude because I believed I was given the gift of being able to do gymnastics, aerials, and ballet into my late 30’s, so I was just going to push my body until it broke and deal with it then. Well, that’s what happened. But it could have been worse. Much, much, worse.
And now I consider this a gift—this body, as it is, this life, as it is—and I think I was given the whole bag of experiences to wake myself up, and maybe someday, to help others awaken as well. My practice today is filled with gratitude, even when it looks like “just standing there,” or just observing a yoga class, truly delighting in what everyone’s bodies can do and trying to absorb the teaching as best as I can. I have a Teacher, yes, but now I have another teacher, and that is my body. And I am learning from my Teacher that “I love you, I love you, I love you,” is all this body has ever wanted.