How Yoga Ended My Back Pain In Six Months
The life benefits of getting on the mat
A tractor trailer introduced me to real pain. After suffering a major trauma in a collision with a vehicle ten times bigger than my own, I began a long, painful recovery from multiple injuries, including the wrenching of almost every muscle and tendon in my back. This place of pain continued as center point of my every day life long after returning to normality.
Once recovery was thought complete, I restarted my life acquiescing pain as companion. My lungs, lacerated and collapsed in the crash, continued with soreness for years. Deep breathing always proved difficult. The pain that most often invited immobilization came from my back. Back pain is always written as I write it; two simplistic words incapable of expressing the broken physicality's complexity. In every day life, back pain is plural. There’s never a singular place of raging fire, knifing torment, or weighted strain. These sensations manifest all at once in indescribably varying degrees.
Six years after the trauma, I continued to experience daily pain in both my back and lungs. I had fully recovered, moved to a new city, relaunched my career, and was living every aspect of my day in unnoticeable convention. Except for pain. At this place in my journey, however, I interpreted the pain, also, as…
