Your meditation practice, and your pranayama practice help to cool the fire in the head. Generally the body switches between nostrils every 2 to 2.5 hours and the left nostril corresponds to the parasympathetic (rest and digest) system and the right to the sympathetic (fight or flight) system (PMID: 24741554) which one ‘should’ you be breathing through during your asana practice?
When we have a sensory overload, like being inside Sephora (when it was safe to be inside) it can lead to heat being locked in the head. Eating super spicy Indian food is the same heat trapping scenario as the perfume overload for the olfactory nerve. Heat locked in the head can lead to headaches, and heat in the digestive system can lead to constipation, indigestion, diarrhea.
When I was in nursing school I almost failed out because of my psych rotation. I know that there is a lot of hype and fear cluttering your inbox related to COVID-19 and the ensuing pandemic. I want to take a moment to honor your fears. You all mean a great deal to me both as students, and friends, a chosen family. Many of the emails that are cluttering said inbox feel as sterile as an Operating Room table and about as emotionless as the device you are reading it on.
In nursing school we learned about Florence Nightingale implementing hand-washing in the hospital during the Crimean War reducing the death rate from 42% to 2% as well as other non PG-13 techniques to ‘treat’ the soldiers during her nightly rounds. Hand-washing was one of those major nursing skills that required a check off list
Yoga, Qi Gong, or Tai Chi, when taught as a connection between breath, movement and focus, can be a tool that the individual can use with their response to the variability between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Read about that (here)
That doesn’t mean that a yoga practice is itself ‘without pain.’ On the contrary, there are two types of physical injuries that are associated with a yoga practice. Acute injuries occur suddenly, such as a muscle strain. This often happens when learning a new asana or stubbing a toe on the refrigerator at 4am. Using analgesics and OTC NSAID’s for a chronic pain without actually addressing the aggravating factor is like placing a band-aid on an arterial bleed without applying pressure. You can change the dressing all you want but that alone isn’t going to stop the bleeding and your patient will die. Habitual use of OTC medications or illegal drugs to alleviate the pain isn’t actually stopping the cause of the pain, nor is it teaching the patient how to cope with the situation. Unrelieved pain is a common symptom in methadone treatment programs and associated with mental distress and function as well as clinician frustration.***
People all over the world are practicing yoga. Yoga isn’t limited to an ashram, or cave in the Himalayas anymore. If you are like me, it’s all over your social media IG account and FB of people pushing the limits of their physical capabilities.
While photography can showcase the raw physical talent of an individual on social media, it does little in the way of showcasing the dedication and work that went into capturing the light in that 1/125th of a second when the shutter clicked.
You don’t have to listen to me as a teacher, as a nurse, or as an acupuncturist. In any and all of these professions, I am not responsible FOR you. I am responsible TO you.
Being responsible TO you in the medical field, we should be encouraging patients to seek a second opinion. Doctors are human too, sometimes they may be missing something, or not recognizing another option that is available. When I fractured my clavicle, the first surgeon wanted to operate that week, the second opinion said we can wait to see how it heals. He said that if it doesn’t heal correctly we can always go back in with surgery and straighten it out later. If I went and did surgery right away, there would be no going back. Which would you do?
There are times that we as students NEED to get a second opinion. We need another teacher to look at our practice. There are times when the teacher we study under is not seeing our potential, AND there are times when our current teacher may have pushed us too far.
I woke up this AM and spilled coffee grounds all over the kitchen floor while trying to make a daily brew. I know it’s not spilled (expressed breast) milk and it shouldn’t cause me too many worries, but at 4 o’clock in the morning on a Monday, it started to go down an unpleasant path. With the coffee grounds spread all over the floor like termite droppings there was no other way around the mess. I had to walk through it to get to the broom which meant tracking little black crumbs all across the kitchen floor. And those little bits of caffeine seeds start poking into my feet, waking me up from the outside in rather than the inside out like they normally do.
After I had finished sweeping up the entire kitchen and cleaning my feet, the situation became real. All of the coffee grounds were in the dustpan, along with tangled strands of hair, sand from Venice Beach, a green twisty-tie thing, red and brown acupuncture needle tabs from my lab coat, and an unidentified black substance, possibly food related.
I’m usually composed, and I’d like to think that the yoga is working in relation to my ability to decide what to get stressed about, but that’s after yoga. You understand?
After the morning yoga practice it’s ok for the coffee to spill. It’s ok to be stuck in traffic. It’s ok for the toothpaste to vomit down my shirt. It’s ok because I’ve had my leg behind my head, or I pressed myself up in a back bend that felt like my ribs were separating and my heart was exploding with light. The ‘noise’ of honking cars is muted after twisting my arms around my knee. It all seems a bit more trivial.
When I graduated nursing school, friends and family members who know that I also practiced yoga were excited for me exclaiming that, ‘how great it is that you can combine your yoga skills with caring for patients.’ Not exactly those words, but similar.
From where I was standing in a hospital starting an IV checking birthdates on an ID band, and lab data before administering 250mcg Digoxin I couldn’t understand how the two health care systems could possibly be combined. Aging was a process handled by health care professionals and pharmaceuticals.
Yoga was something you did so as not to end up on the receiving end of my IV. Yoga was something you could ‘try’ after seeing the Physical Therapist, or after we removed a blood vessel in your leg for a CABG. It was something you could try as a last resort because doctors didn’t know what else to do for the your fibromyalgia when lost in the pharmacopeia of drugs.
All complex systems begin to break down randomly and gradually at different times. It’s why in our genius we have built in back up systems to nuclear power plants, and back up systems for the back up systems. It’s why there are back up systems in the human body; an extra kidney, a second lung, liver cells that regenerate, etc. Systems in place that if the primary one fails a back-up can take over while making repairs or replacing the primary system. The secondary system isn’t as efficient or effective as the primary, but keeps the entire operation moving forward another day.
For most of our species existence on this planet the average lifespan of humans was around 30 years. It’s only in the last century that the average lifespan of humans has increased to about 80. The modern human is, in a sense, a freak. A mutant. An unnatural pheromone.
When we talk about aging with respects to our yoga practice we are entering uncharted territory.
