Topic 6.08.11​ Pain

Topic 6.08.11​ Pain. VERSION CONTROL: 1 August 2017

Pain is one of the voices of your body. It is a great teacher. There is no pain without potential gain. Emotional immaturity seeks an immediate escape from the slightest inconvenience or pain. This happens particularly when deep involvement with a Yoga posture brings us face to face with our true nature and bodily inadequacy.

What you can’t feel, you can’t heal.

If you are working under the handicap of a bodily injury, perform with caution. Do not, however, use the thought of pain to justify laziness. Remember your past mistakes just long enough to benefit from them.

When you do anything new or when you are out of practice and/or shape, soreness, stiffness, minor aches and pains sometimes develop.

• Tolerance is required. Feel your pain, learn about it.  Breathe into it.

• With dull pain, breathe and go slowly, for you are moving energy into new areas.

• Learn to work consciously and cautiously at the centre of the ‘pain-cause’. Bear it.

• Learn how to convert unbearable pain to bearable, unhealthy pain into healthy pain.

• Gently coax your muscles to accept 1% to 5% more of the pose. View this not as

•    an imposition on yourself, but as a necessary discipline leading to a naturally healthy state of well-being, and an increased understanding and enjoyment of bodily awareness. Stop with sharp pain. Avoid sharp pain at any time.

• Learn to distinguish between the pains of lazy, dormant muscles and the true hurt of an ailment, over-stretching, and wrong positioning.

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