Practicing Yoga Through Injury
I was honored with the opportunity to write an article for the Love Hive Yoga Studio’s blog. I mulled over many topics for my focus and landed on one that I had plenty of personal experience with: maintaining your yoga practice through an injury. You see, I have been suffering from a pretty severe hip flexor injury and low back pain for the last handful of months and it has made staying motivated to do anything physical very difficult. My injuries occurred right before I began my yoga teacher training, which was a bummer but also taught me a lot.
I spent more time engaging in yoga asana while making my way through my YTT classes than I typically do. I was forced to really think about how I could stay in my practice when there were so many poses I couldn’t do at all or to the extent I had in the past. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. In fact, dealing with an injury while maintaining my yoga practice made me confront a lot of things: my ego, fear, body issues…my ego.
I went back to looking at yoga through a beginner’s eyes. I reintroduced myself to all the yoga props and learned how to use them in even the most basic poses. I was shocked to find that the props allowed me to access a sense of space and my body I had not experienced before. I also had the opportunities to learn and deepen my knowledge of other forms of practice including meditation, mantra, and breath work.
In the article, Maintaining Your Practice Through Injury, I share many of the insights and tips I gained while working through my own situation. You can read the article by following the link below (copy and image by me.)
Maintaining Your Practice Through Injury
Finding time to develop a consistent practice is one of the biggest challenges a student faces as they being to travel down the path of yoga. It takes discipline to step on the mat every single day for any length of time. Once your practice is established, there is a multitude of events that can occur and derail it temporarily or indefinitely. One of the most common is an injury. [Read More…]