The Hot Yoga Pain Game

"Oy, this pain in my shoulder is so bad I can't lift my arms for three weeks already."

I grew up in Jewish household where the name of the game was Who's Got Worse Troubles. If the trouble was painful, it was particularly holy. You wore your injury til you wore it out. Then, someone with a more death-defying ailment always stepped in.

In my house, this kind of talk was called "conversation."

As I grew up and engaged in outside conversations, I slowly realized that this was not normal; to focus on pain, to stir it up like stew and chew on it again and again. When I moved out at nineteen, I closed the door on painful talk.

Then, some twenty two years later,  I took up hot yoga.

Now, thinking back to my family fascination with pain, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe they were onto something...

Does pain make you a hero?

If you practice hot yoga, you have experienced pain. Anything from mild fatigue and simple soreness to outright bruises and muscle strain. And while I don't see pain as the end game in hot yoga, I do recommend that you honor your pain.

Pain is real.  And pain is all in your mind.

Turns out your body knows this secret about pain: it has a purpose and it's not necessarily to tell you when to back off.

Recent studies on the brain show that pain actually changes you neurologically. Inflicting a pain repeatedly actually raises your tolerance - in other words, the more you do it, the less it hurts.

How can that be? If pain is in the flesh, what makes the same pain feel so different?

Dr. Nelson of The Physicians Back and Neck Clinic of Minnesota explains it this way: "When you overload a muscle, essentially working it to a point of failure, the neural-muscular channels physically change; the muscle adapts." Pain may also produce a kind of adaptation making your muscles more impervious to pain and even damage. 

Pain actually changes pain.

Pain, while it originates in the flesh, is actually registered in the mind. Without that connection to your brain, no pain is felt. This is obvious in paraplegics and others who lose nerves in the spine. Impact to the flesh creates no sensation of pain til the impact registers in your brain.

Your perception of pain creates your experience of it.

Sure, your spinal cord delivers the signal - but turns out, it's you who takes final delivery. 

As a pain signal makes its way to the brain, other factors join the trail -  emotions, memories, beliefs, mental suggestions - and determine how that pain is experienced: as a paralyzing moment or as a passing twinge.

Is it possible that your past traumas, memories, stories, all affect how you feel pain? Pain is not just a trip up the spinal cord; it is also the result of the baggage of the mind.

And pain is a choice.

Not only can you choose how to react to pain,  it turns out that your choices will change the physiology of your brain. For instance, relaxing instead of contracting into a pain can create a whole new "neural net" to form - a bridge from the mind to the experience. Neural nets are so strong that just the suggestion of the stimulus can produce the sensation.

So here's the big question: in hot yoga, is it better to push into the pain of a pose, or back down to the strain of a stretch?

Emmy Cleaves, at 83 years old the most senior Bikram yoga teacher of all, is quoted in the book Hell Bent by Bejanmin Lorr as saying,"We need to relabel the agony of stretching as the luxury of release." Boy, that feels good just to say - the discomfort of stretching muscles is a luxury to be relished.

Can you just call it something else? Can you just relax and believe that pain serves a purpose -  to help you transcend; to expand your mind...and your old ideas of your limitations, physical and otherwise.

What I recommend in my hot yoga classes is less extreme and very effective as well: drop your ideas about your injured body at the front door.

Inside the heat, relax into the feeling of each pose and allow yourself to notice and even observer what you are feeling. Consider when it is not pain, but a new sensation of musculature moving and stretching awake. Follow that trail stretched before you and find your new boundaries... and then push those as well.

There is no wrong answer to the pain question, except the one that scares you away from coming to hot yoga at all.

So relax;  hot yoga can help you navigate the turbulence of pain, the inner and outer, the physical and psychic. No need for you to go too far, but push, push, push inching closer to the edge.

You are way more able than you think. Don't let your mind talk you out of finding out that you are more powerful, more capable, more healable. Let yourself believe.

Just don't believe everything you think. And don't believe everything others think you should think.

Come to hot yoga and feel for yourself.

Comments

[AlexandriaS]

I love your blogs so much... In Italian households its the same thing kind of. It's that twisting agony that pushes me away from the repercussions of walking into my nana's kitchen. Emotional strangle holes I call them... The kind of limiting beliefs and situations I come to realize are not normal or condusive to growth. Able. Powerful. Capable. Those are things I want in my life. Pain is strength in scar tissue. But maybe it never existed after all.

[Rhonda Uretzky, E-RYT]

It's amazing how many cultures wean their kids up on the virtues of pain; we have this notion that pain makes you bigger, better, faster and generally more successful. But it never really bears out. All it makes you is...pained. We downplay joy (the old Evil Eye belief) and mistakenly call it" humility." Cant we just celebrate the good stuff already - ours and everyone else's?