I keep a regular yoga practice. I mainly practice at home, since it's free to do there, but I also attend yoga classes regularly at a good studio. I tend to do yoga about two to three times a week. However, this past spring semester, I ended up only practicing once a week, at most. So, I got decently out of shape from what I'm used to and I ended up hurting my left hamstring, somehow. What sucked the most about this was that my left leg has always been more flexible than my right leg, while my right leg tends to be stronger, so I was usually able to do hand-to-foot pose and this one-legged arm balance with my left leg pretty easily, while I still struggled a little with the right. However, this summer, while I've been trying to nurse my left hamstring back to health, my sides have reversed. I'm still not able to do these poses, or others like them, with my left leg, but I've gotten them down with my right.
So just today, while I was practicing at home, I realized that I've been so careful with my left leg this past few months that I've actually let it become weak. I've stopped trying to engage the muscles on that leg as much because of the injury. Of course, this is not helping recovery at all, so today, I started forcing that leg to pull it's weight, and while my hamstring still isn't totally better, I actually got my full trikonasana on the left side back today and my hamstring feels better now than it has in a long time. I'm sure the more I focus on working the muscles on my left leg, the better it will get, and I will be back to my normal yoga practice pretty soon.
This little experience with my hamstring really reminded me of my vocal recuperation, probably because I had a conversation with another singer dealing with their own voice disorder just this week. See, the thing is, I was acting like my hamstring was still injured, even though it's been months since the actual injury. My hamstring is quite likely healed up, it's just healed tighter than it was before. Because of this tightness, I've been avoiding really using it in yoga, making modifications on the left side for any hamstring-intensive pose and just allowing my lunge on that side to kinda go out of form. In essence, I was allowing my muscle to stay weak just because I was still acting like something was wrong with it well after it was healed up. In an earlier post, I said I had a hard time learning to trust my voice after it was healed up, because I felt like my voice had betrayed me by being injured. But I've talked to a few singers out there dealing with injury who have the added issue of still feeling like their voice is injured even after therapy is completed and they're given a full bill of vocal health by their team. So they're still fighting with their voice and letting it do the wrong things because they still think it just doesn't "work right," even though it does. It's a mind game, isn't it?
What these injuries really do to us is force insecurity upon us, so naturally, our reaction is to defeat the insecurity. Attack it full on so that we can get past it as quickly as possible. But when this tactic burns out, as it often does for many people out there, we start to retreat into the insecurity, allowing it to defeat us and beat us down until we give up. This can lead to regret and perhaps even bitterness for so many of us, and maybe we find the fire to fight again and maybe we win, but what if we just changed our perspective of this insecurity? What if, instead of fighting, we decide to accept this weakness that has been thrust upon us and still decide to be kind to ourselves? And what if, by being kind to our whole new self, insecurity and weakness and all, we learn how to patiently and diligently work through our injury, not by forcing ourselves to be as we were before, but by moving toward being someone new and different because of this experience? What if all we need to do is realize that healing doesn't typically mean going back to how things were before, but it can mean becoming better than we were before?
I suppose saying I'll get back to my normal yoga practice is a bit of a lie, because before this injury, my right side was more inflexible than it is now. If my left side is restored to it's former, flexible state, my whole body will actually be more balanced than it was before this. Just like how, even if my voice is only better because of being healed and the glories of vocal technique, I'm a better, more joyful singer because there was a time when singing was taken away from me. So to all those out there recuperating from any injury: May recovery make us all stronger, more balanced, and more joyful; may we be kind to ourselves and patient with our injury as we build our strength back up; and may we all realize that we will never be the same...and that can certainly be a good thing.
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