Surrendering Your Neck Pain to Yoga

Hi Fightmaster Yogis!

Today is March 31st, and we’re so grateful to you for submitting blogs, reading them and commenting. We really are a community supporting each other on this journey.

There is one more blog on surrender, and it’s a wonderful tie in to the last one about the story of “Eye” and her experience with “Transient Global Amnesia” (TGA). You probably already guessed that “Eye” was me. A conversation with my colleagues at the club where I teach yoga led to hypothesizing if there was a connection with yoga and the TGA experience. As yogis we do allow ourselves to be more open and vulnerable in a good way. We are connected to our bodies and our bodies are made of cells that form layers of fascia and cells and fascia have memories just like our brain cells and nerves. The body is truly a wonder, and so we honor it by taking care of it.

My TGA experience started right away after teaching yoga. There was a lot of chest and hip opening asanas that evening, and some twisted balancing poses. A comment from a couple of students was along the theme of “that was a challenging class”. My colleague Stephen, a massage therapist, offered that body work opens up stored memories including trauma. Opening up the body doesn’t happen in one session. We condition the muscles and supporting bones, ligaments and tendons and the whole system into opening up, and that perhaps that night my body had released a stored trauma memory in my body. He could be right. I recall vaguely talking about my husband Bruno, who died in a motorcycle accident, after my class. After that conversation, I noticed that I spoke without emotions, almost as if I was “reporting” a story and not living it. I noted to myself that maybe I am better and healing that I can do this without getting emotional or melancholy.

So, onwards to our very last blog on surrender and it’s a great tie in, because Rachel speaks in her blog that…

The release of emotions stored in the body is a well-known occurrence during yoga (3), so be prepared for unexpected outcomes while working with your neck. For example, your thoughts may turn suddenly to a long-forgotten emotional upheaval from your past, or you may cry for no apparent reason. Take comfort in knowing that surrendering to whatever you experience during your practice is part of breaking the cycle of fear and avoidance that has kept you in pain for so long.

Enjoy her blog.

Namaste.

Surrendering Your Neck Pain to Yoga

by Rachel Dellinger

Does your neck never seem to stop hurting, regardless of how much yoga you do? Or don’t do? If so, then you are in good company. One study showed that for 50 to 85% of us who deal with chronic neck pain, our symptoms never completely go away (1). Rather than waging war on our pain with injections, deep tissue massages, chiropractic adjustments, or even surgery, yoga practitioners can instead use asanas to provide the neck with the loving attention it is crying out for. Here are some suggestions for how to surrender your neck pain to the benefits of yoga.

The Fear-Avoidance Model of Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain

After the initial onset of age-related spinal degeneration, people cope with pain along a continuum that ranges from full-on confrontation at one extreme to a complete avoidance of any movement with a remote chance of causing pain on the other. Researchers at Park Hospital for Children in Oxford, England first discovered that patients who confronted their pain during recovery were able to return to their normal activities. However, those who avoided their feelings by becoming less active continued to experience increasingly severe chronic pain, sometimes even to the point of becoming disabled (2).

Pain avoidance strategies are subtle when they involve the neck and people use them without consciously realizing they are doing so. These behaviors may take the form either of eliminating movements that hurt or of unnecessarily tightening surrounding muscles to protect the neck. The following are examples of actions that often begin imperceptibly but gradually become habits that lead to decreased range of motion and increased pain:

• Turning the torso rather than the neck to look over the shoulder

• Leaning the body backward rather than bending the neck to look up

• Keeping the head perpendicular to the ground while bending over

• Raising the shoulders or clenching the jaw when feeling stressed

• Thrusting the head forward while listening

If you find yourself doing any of the above behaviors during the day, then you likely bring them to your yoga practice as well.

Confronting Pain During Yoga

Out of fear of making their conditions worse, yogis with chronic neck pain sometimes assume that neck-bending asanas are off-limits to them. While this approach may feel like the safest bet, skipping poses that involve the neck reinforces your subconscious belief that you protect yourself from further pain and injury through restricting your movements. By neglecting it in this way, you risk making your neck less flexible with each passing year. 

A positive way to confront your pain during yoga is to acknowledge the fear of injury and focus on the tactics you use to avoid bending your neck in certain ways. For example, if you notice your shoulders tightening, choose to breathe into those muscles while moving slowly and being fully present with any discomfort you feel. Observe your pain when it first begins, notice its precise location, and don’t fight it. Instead, greet it as an old friend you are finally getting to know better. 

Poses To Help Your Neck Surrender

Below are suggested asanas for restoring functionality to your neck, and some potential emotional barriers to practicing them. Some poses are fairly advanced, so consider major modifications when you first start. Ideally, consult a yoga teacher who understands your motivation to be free from the emotional-physical neck issues that cause you pain. Only by gently incorporating what seem like impossible poses into your routine will you ever convince your mind and body that surrendering to an asana is a safe situation for your neck to be in.

Decompressing Poses

Bending forward and allowing the weight of the skull to pull on the neck creates space between cervical vertebrae. The tugging sensation might be be unpleasant at first, especially if you have negative associations with traction devices in a chiropractic office or hospital. Try the following, perhaps supporting your head on a block to begin:

• Dangling pose (baddha hasta uttanasana)

• Standing wide-legged forward fold (prasarita padottanasana)

Back-bending Poses

Releasing the skull backwards in asanas such as camel pose might cause anxiety because it triggers our instinctual fear of falling. Daily sun salutations are a nice way to begin restoring flexibility to the neck muscles responsible for this movement, and are a gateway to eventually adding these three poses: 

• Camel (ustrasana)

• Upward-facing plank (purvattanasana)

• Fish pose (mathsyasana)

Forward-bending Poses

Seated forward bends such as paschimottanasana usually come easily for those accustomed to protecting their necks with a perpetual forward head tilt. These forward-bending poses instead challenge you to lower the neck to the chest: 

• Staff pose (dandasana)

• Shoulder stand (salamba sarvangasana)

• Plow (halasana)

• Ear pressure pose (karnapidasana)

• Upward lotus (urdhva padmasana)

• Embryo pose (pindasana)

The release of emotions stored in the body is a well-known occurrence during yoga (3), so be prepared for unexpected outcomes while working with your neck. For example, your thoughts may turn suddenly to a long-forgotten emotional upheaval from your past, or you may cry for no apparent reason. Take comfort in knowing that surrendering to whatever you experience during your practice is part of breaking the cycle of fear and avoidance that has kept you in pain for so long.

References

1. Carroll, L.J., S. Hogg-Johnson, G. van der Velde, et al. 2008. Course and prognostic factors for neck pain in the general population: results of the Bone and Joint Decade 2000–2010 Task Force on Neck Pain and Its Associated Disorders. Spine 33:S75–S82. 

2. Lethem, J.; P.D. Slade, J.D. Troup, and G. Bentley. 1983. Outline of a Fear-Avoidance Model of exaggerated pain perception--I". Behaviour Research and Therapy 21 (4): 401–408.

3. Raskin, D. 2007. Emotions in Motion. Yoga Journal https://www.yogajournal.com/poses/emotions-in-motion/

The Story of Eye Opening

This is just a little story about Eye.  It’s a day in Eye’s life - just a blink in the fold of space-time.

A short-time ago, not far away, Eye closed her laptop and got in her carriage, a silver van, to drive to teach her yoga class.  Inside the yoga room there were the regulars and then there were a couple of new ones.  On her trip to class, Eye had a premonition about death.  She just prayed, asking God to watch over her pets and Adam, and to cleanse her mind and soul.

See, Eye has a morning ritual.  She burns two tea lites.  One lite for the living-now and another for the living-forever, but it’s really the same.  Living now is living forever, but in this space-time continuum, there is still this separation in the mind.

After her power-yoga class, she called her boyfriend, Adam.  This was their routine to check-in after her yoga classes.  Step by step as she talked on her iPhone and walked from the 6th floor towards the exit of the club, Eye noticed subtle changes in her awareness.  “I love you,” she said before she hung up. She walked up to her silver carriage, and opened the sliding door. After putting her yoga bag inside, she sat behind the driver seat. She sat and sat. Then she recognized something wasn’t right with her mind.  

She called Adam back.  “I’m not okay to drive. Can you please pick me up?” They arranged to meet at the parking lot of the club.  “I can’t leave the van here, we need to move to a higher floor” and that was all she remembered saying.  After those words, the rest of Eye’s story is only bits and pieces from what others’ said, and mostly from Adam whom she trusted whole-heartedly.

Adam thought she was having a stroke, because she couldn’t answer any of his basic questions. She couldn’t remember where she worked, what she does for a living, that her sister was ill and that she was about to travel to see her sister. “Is my mother alive?” she had asked him. He called a friend, a doctor, who advised him to bring her to ER right away. In the event of a stroke then there was only a window of 4 hours before irreversible damage to her brain that could leave Eye paralyzed. During the drive to the hospital, Eye was not even aware of the heavy downpour . She had asked him, when they stopped at the house, “Where did the lilacs come from?” She had forgotten her day trip to Acton to buy fresh lilacs the day before.

Upon arrival at the hospital the staff were quick to react.  A battery of tests ensued (blood tests, MRIs, EEG).  While she laid inside the chamber of the big machine, she asked herself, “Do I have insurance?”, “Do I have a job?”, “Who do I work for?”  “What kind of work do I do?”  These questions formed to in her head, the kind of questions asked for basic self-preservation and continuity… but of what?  

Before being wheeled on a gurney to the MRI room, she spoke with an angel, a staff member of the hospital.  He reassured her she’s going to be fine.  “What’s your name?” she asked him.  “Jesse”.  (“Almost like “Jesus” she thought, except for one letter and order of the letters).  “I’ll pray for you” Jesse said.  While inside the chugging machine of moving magnets Eye began to ask questions about the mind.  What is memory?  Who am I?  What is ego? Eye thought, “I have no memory.  The doctor said she suspects I have ‘Transient Global Amnesia’ (TGA).  Amnesia?!  Who am I?  I know me, the one watching and processing what’s going on, but I can’t remember how I came to be here.”  While Eye and Adam waited for her turn inside the tunnel of the big machine, she had asked him repeatedly, “Why am I here?”, “How did I get here?”  

There she was unaware of time passing.  She witnessed the movement from one event to another: the insertion of the IV needle into her arm, the shoe being tucked near her leg, and the wiggle of her toe, the lights above her passing by like the ties of a railroad track. All these events seemed infinite until another stimulus invited her attention.  

“What is memory?” she pondered.  “Is ego my memory?” “Is memory my perspective, an interpretation of what’s going on?”  “What if I never get my memory back?”  “Is this surrender?”

This story of Eye, a blink in the space-time continuum does not have a good or bad ending.  It just is.  It’s just a continuity from one event to another, so Eye thought upon her release from the hospital.  The ER doctor signed her “discharge” papers after all tests showed everything as “normal” in the relative means of “normal”.  

What an anomaly, Eye thought.  She feared having a recurrence of this event, though “Transient Global Amnesia”, she was told, and upon her research, does not have recurrent incidents from known historical cases.  As she prepared comfort food that night upon repatriating with her pets and the cozy nest with Adam, she tried to knit together the events of the past 48 hours.

She thought how funny that Jesse came out to the entrance of the ER as she was about to re-enter the building to deliver a box of chocolates. She had asked Adam to buy chocolates so that they can offer their gratitude to the heroes working in the ER. Her impulse was to hug Jesse, but refrained because of the pandemic protocols. “I wish I had anyway”, she thought in retrospect.

Jesse: I was just bringing this wheelchair back to the curb.

Eye: I was about to leave these chocolates for you guys. Thank you so much for taking care of me! Isn’t it weird about the timing of it. What a coincidence!

Jesse: There are no coincidences in the Universe.

Adam was laid out on the couch watching “froth” as he coined the “eye and brain candy” movie, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. She offered him a bowl of pasta, which he declined. He was exhausted too after the string of events in the past 48 hours. Eye lit another tea lite candle before sitting down to the bowl of steaming pasta. She bowed her head in reverence as she dedicated the light to All Beings as One without separating those in the living-now and the living-forever. She told Adam, “If I had a recurrence of this event then I sense it would be permanent.”  This she believed as a true surrender of the little “i” to the bigger “I’.  For what does it matter what Eye thought herself to be.  Her existence in this somewhere-place in this sometime-time is a blink in the breath of the universe.

A Personal Journey of Surrender

Hello!

You will enjoy this blog about surrender from Jenna Outwater. She writes openly about her exploration of surrender, guided by wise words from Lesley’s “Glow” Program that are 30 minute classes.

Jenna is a MyYogaPal member on the journey of connecting to her authentic self, the natural world around her, and cultivating open and honest communication and relationships

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I can’t pinpoint where the phrase came from but “Never surrender!” reminds me of a sort of battle cry of sports, school, personal goals, and professional goals and  settings. Never surrendering, at first,  can sound like an accomplishment to be celebrated, a standard, a recipe for success. At this point in my life,though,  I'm not so sure I buy this outdated notion anymore. Surrender can't be all bad, right?  In one of her Glow classes, Lesley Fightmaster, states that…

“Surrendering allows you to release your struggle”

Surrender can be scary. It can feel powerless and impossible. And I am just beginning to explore its waters.  After surrendering to the fact (sort of)  that I needed to enter intensive treatment for an eating disorder, I started to see how surrender can be a healer and a powerful force.

For me, the beginning of surrender looked like letting other people help me, not white-knuckling and death gripping ideas, habits, and opinions that were no long serving me, beginning to open my mind, or better yet, starting to find out  where mind was closed and I didnt even know it. Surrender has no definite shape or step-by-step plan, and its looks and manifests differently for every person and every situation.

Now, realizing that I need  a lot more of this surrender stuff in my life, I am taking the practice into my yoga practice. Or, let me rephrase that, I am beginning to try to bring surrender into my yoga practice.  And it is a struggle.  

I would love to be able to  report that I am a mindful, disciplined, yogi that enjoys every moment on the mat in a peaceful, present manner.  But that would be a big lie. I get on the mat and my mind continues to race and I continue to be harassed by my own ceaseless thoughts.

Soon, after I realize this is happening, I find myself criticizing myself for my lack of focus, and lamenting my lack of ability to find peace and serenity in yoga. I believe you can imagine where it goes from there. I have trouble surrendering to the poses, the breath, the stillness, the repetitiveness, and even to the idea that I am allowed to be calm during a yoga class.

But, I know I am not alone in this. And, sometimes begrudgingly, I know that continuing to practice surrender in yoga poses and breath will slowly teach me how to surrender to other thoughts or factors in my life that are only bringing me suffering with my continued disgruntled struggle, even with simple everyday things, like allowing myself a few minutes to unwind and rest, or take nap. 

Surrender is an essential part of your practice, and it’s a good thing. It can be scary to release control, but when you do, you allow the flow of the universe to guide you and you release your struggles. - Lesley Fightmaster (from “Glow” 30 Minute Practices")

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Thank you Jenna. You’re amazing!

Be a Warrior not a Worrier

This is a short blog from Violet about how not to surrender to worry and be a warrior. It’s a fun take on our theme of surrender.  Don’t succumb to worry when you can overcome obstacles with the Warrior pose.

 Be a Warrior not a Worrier

by Violet Michalik

As I step my feet wide apart, the right foot turns out 90 degrees, toes pointing to the front of the mat and I bend the right knee over the right ankle, so that the shin is perpendicular to the floor and my right thigh is parallel to the floor. 

I gently turn my left foot into a 45-degree angle, and firmly grip the ground with the outer edge of the left foot. I lift through the arches of my feet. Weight is evenly distributed between both legs. They remain active all the time. I check the heel to heel alignment. I tuck my tailbone and draw my belly in towards my spine. My chest, hips and groin are nicely open. 

I raise my arms shoulder height parallel to the floor and reach them actively to the sides from fingertip to fingertip, palms facing down. I keep the torso straight. Both side bodies are equally elongated. I turn my head to the right. I feel open, I feel free,

I feel strong. I gently close my eyes and start long deep

 inhalations and long deep exhalations through the nose. Victorious breath, conqueror breath. 

I draw my awareness inwards, discovering my inner warrior, gaining strength to confront daily battles with ease and grace.

Surrender Is Not Giving Up

Hi!

We’ve made it to March. Thank you to all bloggers for contributing on the topic of love…and thank you to readers also. We encourage you to please comment on the blogs.

Our topic for March is about surrender and what it means in relation to your yoga practice or what is your relationship to your practice?

As we move from winter to spring with the days becoming longer, we are witnesses to how gracefully nature surrenders over and over. To every thing there is a season, A time for every purpose under the heaven." - Ecclesisastes 3

Surrender is Not Giving Up - by Erin Donovan

When you think you've surrendered, surrender more.

-Gabby Bernstein

One of my teachers, Gabby, said it all the time. I find it to be such a difficult lesson. When something's not going right, I have such a hard time letting go, surrendering, and trusting in the universe that it will unfold the way it's meant to unfold. So often in life, we want to fix things or make things happen how we think it needs to happen. Us attempting to control the outcome doesn't typically work out well for us. Usually, it leaves us stressed out, anxious, and overwhelmed.

One thing that I have learned is that lessons will keep showing up over and over and over in different ways until you learn what you're supposed to from them. Sometimes, the only way through a problem is to truly surrender your power and trust that the universe will take care of whatever it is. I'm not saying this is easy. In fact, I think it's very, very hard. Remembering that the universe has a plan which most times, is better than ours, takes repetitive practice to learn. Like anything in life, the more we practice, the better we become at it. Surrendering Is not giving up, it's letting go of the control for things to unfold how they're meant to, not how we want them to be. The best thing that we can do to save ourselves stress, is to get out of the way.

Lesley Fightmaster has wonderful video about “accepting what is”…and “surrender is about joining the winning side”.

Lesley’s mat has the words “I am unique. I am beautiful.” Surrender to truth of being unique and beautiful!