Jo has never worked with someone with a spinal cord injury. Intuitively, she knows to move slowly, gently, to not make me confront my lost body too quickly. “Can you put your hands slightly behind you and lift your chest? Good. Now can you do it again, but this time don’t hold your breath?” I’m a little alarmed—How does she know? Oh well, the work continues.
“Can you take your legs wide, like a big V?” she says. The spasticity in my legs resists, but eventually they spread and stay put. I am hit by a rush of something, something feels strange, something … “Matt, can you put your hands on your thighs, lift your chest, and breathe?” The rush intensifies. I feel something, like I am floating—no, flying. Suddenly, it hits me. This is the first time in over twelve years that my legs have been wide. The strange feeling I am experiencing is the rush of lost time. My eyes close, my voice choking, “My legs haven’t been this wide since …” Jo bows her head and whispers, “I know.”
What we have shared cannot be undone. She has seen, more clearly than anyone has, into what I have lost. Her strength holds firm. We have love at first purpose. She is my teacher; I am her student. We will work through a lifetime. She knows to keep moving. “Matt, can you put your hands in prayer? Keep your elbows at your sides. Stretch from your shoulders to your elbows, from your elbows to your wrists. Press your palms together, stretch through each finger, and lift your chest.” I am struck again. The pose seals itself, completes a sense of energetic connection. My chest seems to lift effortlessly, a feeling of lightness releases out the top of my head. Jo sees what I am experiencing. “That’s amazing, especially for your first time,” she says. Now we both know that I will be a good student.
That I could feel such things so quickly—the loud rush produced by simply taking my legs wide, the upward energetic release produced when hands-in-prayer was done with yogic precision—meant that those phantom feelings had not left me. Instead, they had been waiting in the silence, waiting for me to let them back into my conscious experience. Consciousness does not abandon us. It is only denied.
My life seems to have prepared me for my first encounter with Jo, again like a river gaining current. Before meeting her, I had been surviving on slim rations when it came to body experience. I was ready for a prison break.
When yogic instruction rekindled a feeling of energetic sensation within my mind-body relationship, it felt like settling into a warm bath—the relief, the feeling of nourishment, the calm and quieting reference. I grew in dimension as my entire body began whispering to me once again, albeit in a more eloquent voice.
The splendor and subtlety of living is most apparent in the conscious presence of the silence. Now, after thirteen years of yoga practice, not only do I feel an upward energetic release in hands-in-prayer, I also feel a downward energetic connection to the earth. Is this the same as being able to perform a complex, pretzel-shaped physical pose? Obviously not. Progress is what you make of it.
After this first encounter, Jo sends me home with these simple poses, plus one more. “Shaking hands with your feet” is not a pose exactly. It is an act, a ritual, an introduction. I am to take my foot, put a finger between each of my toes, and form a clasp. Then I am to rock and gently roll the ball of my foot first in one direction and then another. I am to “shake hands” with my feet. Sounds simple, right? This will become one of the hardest poses for me to do. The hurdle is not physical. I have been consciously ignoring my lower body for more than twelve years.
There is a gulf of silence a mile wide between my feet and me. They feel like a foreign country. I pretend that shaking hands with my feet is no big deal, just a movement like putting one foot in front of the other. Underneath, though, the river is different, the symbolic healing is so acute, so direct that I feel nauseous, like getting out of bed too fast. I do not consciously avoid this pose. Instead, it strikes me as stupid, a silly waste of time. “I want to do the real stuff,” I tell myself. This pose will not become a habit for years.
Before I can begin the “real” stuff, I have problems to solve. First, there are wood floors in my house. After twelve years of paralysis, I have a bony butt—the dissolving atrophy of inaction. The sound of my sits bones (the bones in my butt) rolling unprotected over a hard surface is like fingernails scratching down a blackboard, unnatural enough to cause a three-dimensional shiver. I go to a sporting goods store and buy two one-inch-thick, six-foot-long, deep blue exercise mats. On them is a picture of a perky woman wearing workout tights, a headband, and an affected smile. She glistens happily with sweat and looks like she might break into a dance-line high step at any moment. Life must be good in that body, I mentally mumble, but I do not believe her. What does she know—she has no idea. My resisting mind searches for ways to make what I am doing feel wrong. Maybe I should be embarrassed to buy what is advertised as a woman’s exercise mat. I’m a guy, and home-centered self-improvement offends my socialized sense of manliness. Still, I buy the protection for my butt and awkwardly tote the mats to my car.
The real problem is how I am going to move between the floor and my wheelchair. It is an incredibly difficult transfer. A dead lift of a paralyzed body requires brutish strength. There is no easy place from which to lift, no place to secure a leveraged and balanced point of exertion. My shoulders are not flexible enough for both of my hands to reach the level of my seat. If one hand stays on the floor while the other pushes from the seat, the lift lacks direction and my legs flop awkwardly off-center. This drives me to frustration rather than my butt into the chair. I do not possess Dwight-like strength to compensate for my shortcomings in balance and grace.
The thought of having to do this transfer on a daily basis makes my head spin. Enter the blue velvet chair. It sits innocently in the corner, its seat much lower than the seat height of my wheelchair. It is stained, the velvet’s nap dried and pushed against its natural grain. This chair will become instrumental in my early relationship with yoga. In retrospect, I romantically imagine that this chair was waiting for me, waiting for me to realize its place: a step up and into a new world. It becomes a place for me to think and practice yoga through the difficult times that wait ahead.
For now, however, I am scratching my head, trying to figure out how I am going to get off the floor. That’s when I truly see the blue velvet chair for the first time. Why must I make it back into my wheelchair in one fell swoop? How did I get stuck in this all-or-nothing loop? Such a simple thought is a revelation. I have nothing to prove, no increase in physical strength is necessary for me to move forward. Rather, I can think, problem solve, and find my own way back from the floor. My new mats fold in half. I can stack them on top of each other and easily hoist myself up to that height. From there, I can make it onto the blue velvet chair, pull my wheelchair around, and make the difficult transfer back to my mobility. It may not be pretty or powerful or inspiring, but it works.
Finding the floor and a way back is healing. It may sound too simple, too easy to lift a damaged heart. But most of our shackles are invisible. I am leaving my wheelchair via a blue velvet chair. This is healing.
Taking my legs wide and realizing the blue velvet chair were breakthroughs. Both were steps back toward the ordinary, back toward a life where common sense has traction. My body deserves to live in more spaces, not fewer. So what if my life as a paraplegic does not require that my legs go wide. Does that mean they never should? That would be like never watching a sunset because it has no practical function. Taking my legs wide was a return to common sense. So too was using the blue velvet chair. I was a paraplegic and there was a certain way (with speed and will) that I had been guided to do things. This vision ran deep, so much so that I had never contemplated using small steps to get back up into my chair. Performing this simple action began to release me from the grip of a limiting healing vision. Suddenly, my body began to present other possibilities—the beginning of yogic realization.
13
Body Memories
I have a mishap while doing yoga o
n my own for only the second time. Anticipation has gotten the best of me. It is early, and I want to get started. The chill of California spring finds easy passage through the uninsulated walls of my rented adobe house. The wood floor creaks with every shift of my weight. I feel like I am finally doing something, finally working to live through my entire body.
The pose I am doing is called dandasana, translated from the Sanskrit as “staff of life.” The classic instructions are simple: Sit with your legs straight out in front of you, press your palms into the floor beside your hips, and lift your chest. Jo has modified it slightly so that my hands are a little farther behind me. I cannot hold the pose very long because lifting my chest subtly changes the directional exertion of my diaphragm. It is enough to rob my ignored body of its breath. Still, I push forward. As I lift my chin up toward the ceiling, making the energy of the pose approach that of a backbend, something slips and catches painfully at the base of my neck. My right arm is shot full of tingles. Fear pulses through me.
Gingerly, I sit up straight and start to flex my hand and arm. Thankfully, they still work. But I have lost the normal feeling in two of my fingers to the sensation of pinpricks. I am dangerously close to a much bigger problem. The only thing I can figure out is that the Harrington rods in my upper back have slipped and are now pinching a nerve. This turns out to be exactly the case.
Since causing my neck to break at age fourteen, I have learned to avoid these rods. My posture has become a miracle of passive contortion. My shoulders have rolled forward and scrunched toward my ears. My head has jutted out away from my torso; my chin has turned slightly upward. I have unconsciously created a protective dead zone at the base of my neck. In short, the rods and I have entered into a postural nonaggression pact. I stay out of the troubled area, and the rods will injure me no more than they already have. Truce.
Starting yoga broke this pact. I consult with an orthopedic surgeon. The pinched nerve at the base of my neck will clear up on its own. The rods, however, pose a different problem. They were originally inserted into my back for support while the bone fusion solidified. That process was complete in about two years. Now, the rods only pose a threat to increased activity in my neck and upper back. The only solution is surgical removal. The upshot is that to pursue yoga, I will have to purge metal.
The surgery is scheduled for the beginning of June, a little over a month away. Before performing the procedure, the surgeon insists that I embark on a month of physical therapy. He wants the muscles in my upper back to strengthen and loosen up before being traumatized again.
Why is yoga so important? Is it worth having major surgery? Even before I experience the practical benefits of yoga, the rods present powerful resistance. This waiting period gives me ample time to think. The rods feel symbolic. They are vestiges of the death that I absorbed so many years earlier. Their inanimate metal represents a lifeless past and stands between me and where I want to go. I want to scream, “Get this shit out of my body!” But I am also begging the rods to leave, pleading, because I am scared. They have cast such a powerful shadow over my life these last twelve years.
I also question what I hope to gain from the practice of yoga. How could it transform a paralyzed body, a body that can do only a limited number of poses? While in the midst of these doubts, I have an experience that helps me move forward.
I am lying flat on my back in my backyard. My arms are wide, my eyes are closed, and I am set upon moist, strawlike spring grass. As the California sun warms my face, I am letting part of me die. The toil, the will, the arms that dragged my body to this time, to this place, must sleep. Years and years of hollowing struggle are releasing into the ground. This is what I believe; this is what I am imagining.
I am being covered—the shovel’s nose crisply cutting the earth, the sound of thrown soil encasing my body, the smell of open dirt. I am becoming buried so I can rest, so I can wake, so I can begin again. As the dirt covers my face, my dreamlike vision dims. I feel the earth’s benevolent hum. I drift off to sleep.
When I awake, I decide to plant my first garden. My landlord has recently cut down an ailing orange tree; he has even ground out the stump. All that remains is a bald patch, six feet in diameter, waiting for me. I need a beginning, something tangible to help me feel the paradigm shift required to rebuild my life. I decide on a garden.
The ground needs tilling and I cannot work such a machine. I decide to use my hands, to feel the dirt directly. Soon my tilling takes a backseat to observation. Where I expect nothing but plain, lifeless dirt, I encounter just the opposite. The amount of living in this soil is staggering—gruesome acts of carnage, feats of incredible strength, even occasional cooperation. Most of all, there is a continuous bustle of life. Despite having their world literally turned inside out, the grubs, bugs, and insects don’t miss a beat. They embody a singleness of purpose, a theme within inflicted chaos. So seamless and rhythmic is their effort that they seem an outer expression of the earth’s inner breathing.
Eventually my hands come upon a pile of bones, someone’s kitten or hamster, maybe. I sink with the sense of having entered a forbidden place. Unearthing a grave feels like sacrilege—an interruption of a secret between the earth and its fallen child. And yet, the earth makes no judgment. She absorbs the bones of death with the same graceful presence that she houses grubs, bugs, and insects. Life and death side-by-side, unfazed and unassuming in a perpetual stream of becoming.
This is not what I expected. I thought that my garden was for bell peppers, basil, and tomatoes—payback for my efforts. It is not. In the silence of a sunny afternoon, I contemplate my impending surgery. How can I feel that yoga is worth it? How can I have faith that life awaits me within the silence of my paralysis? The answer is simple: Because of the life in the dirt.
After all this, it may seem that I am confident heading into surgery and in the path that waits ahead. But that is not the whole story. Simultaneously, I am past tired. My inward sense of dying, of drifting within the silence, has not disappeared. In fact, it has just barely begun to seek a healthier expression through yoga. I still long to lie down and sleep, to no longer resist the graying sensation of flying apart, of hovering above that Foster frame. The work of reentering my body seems an impossible task. In truth, I enter this surgery not entirely clear if I want to live or die.
I awake from the surgery to a voice saying, “There he goes again!” A flurry of movement envelops me. I start to realize that I am in a struggle. “Matt, can you hear me, stay with us.” It is the alarmed voice of my anesthesiologist. I am in recovery and having a terrible time coming out of this lifeless sleep. My blood pressure is all over the map. Slowly, I make it back into that room, back into that body, back to a life that I am rechoosing. By the time I talk to the surgeon, I am in the clear.
His first words are, “You sure didn’t behave very well.” The look on his face is tired and concerned. “Honestly, I’m not sure what happened. You bled like a sieve. Have you been taking a lot of aspirin?”
“No, not anything like that.” I am being told about events to which I feel absolutely no connection. I feel only a dark, grizzled humor about having returned.
“We had to give you a couple units of blood. You left quite a mess on the floor.” He is shaking his head, trying to lighten the mood. “And your blood pressure, what was that about?” He slowly rubs his eyes. “There were times when it dropped off the table. I tell you, you didn’t behave well at all.”
“What can I say?” I smirk. I am trying to follow his lead.
“Just remind me not to operate on you next time. It’s too much work.” He turns and quickly heads to his next surgery. The extended length of our encounter has put him behind schedule.
I am in the hospital, but what am I healing? Is it my back or is it my past? Whatever it is, I am on fire. What should be only a three- or four-day stay turns into seven. I cannot sleep. Time won’t let me; ghosts won’t let me; past trauma won’t let me. Each time I drift of
f toward sleep, there is fury. Startled, twitching, jumping, screaming—not mind, but body. I can’t see it coming. Blindsided, hammered, bouncing, thudding, breaking. Then I wake to quiet, to stillness, only for it to repeat when I doze again. I am exhausted, but it won’t let me sleep; whatever has me in its clutches won’t let me sleep. I am overwhelmed.
I am besieged by a past that I can no longer see. I try drugs. All these years later, they now give a patient control of the IV morphine drip. I press a button and bingo. I am trying to eliminate the transition into sleep; my aim is to move straight into passed out. It doesn’t work; nothing works. Something deep within me has uncorked. I am coming apart. That thirteen-year-old boy is calling me back. I am being pulled into what I left behind.
Over time, it dawns on me—I am having flashbacks. Almost all of my physical trauma has occurred between the states of wakefulness and sleep. I was dozing in the car when we slid down that embankment. I was in a coma during those first few gruesome days. I was on Valium when the screws went into my head, when they broke my wrist, and on and on. So often my trauma had come when my guard was down, when I was trusting the world, when I was taking a nap. Whether it is being in the hospital again or having my spine manipulated, my body is making me relive my past. It is gaining voice because I am finally strong enough to let it. My body has been terrified, and I am grief-stricken that it has suffered silently for so long. I can’t stop crying.
This goes on for nearly three days. Barfing body memories is what I am doing. It feels completely out of my control. But the memories are helping me regain a semblance of continuity. For example, I have mentioned before that I have no memory of the day of the accident. That’s not exactly true. I have no mental memory. But I am learning that my body has retained the memory; it has been holding pieces of my history until I was ready.
Waking Page 14