Hell-Bent (17 page)

She looks back at us and laughs. “I like to have Bikram near, but not too near.”

Where does Mary’s faith come from?

It’s simple. If young Mary was a lioness, in 1994 that lioness got T-boned by a driver running a red light and almost died. She remembers the moment as unusually quiet. She was stopped at a red light. When the light turned green, she drove forward. And then was lifted. The cab beside her just disappeared from her peripheral vision. Her last concrete memory was thinking,
That’s so weird—where’d the cab go?

She landed in chronic pain. Her spine was badly damaged, her vertebral discs herniated. She couldn’t lift her arms above her head. Her surgeon warned her against physical exercise and prescribed a battery of painkillers. Mary, trying to avoid an invasive surgery, dutifully followed his recommendation and stayed in bed.

The result of the medication and the decreased ability to move was depression. At the time, Mary owned a chocolate factory just outside of San Francisco. “I had a storage closet that I turned into a cave; it had a cot, a futon. … The pain was so great, the fatigue was so great, I just hibernated. … I would wake up in the darkness of that little room, and everyone else would be gone for the day. They would close up the whole shop for me. Other times, I would walk out blinking, and it was almost a joke because everyone else would have to tell me the time of day.”

The problem was it wasn’t a joke. If Mary hadn’t owned the factory, she would have been fired. Miserable, she scheduled another appointment with her doctor to go over options.

After reviewing Mary’s current state, her doctor was adamant. Mary needed surgery. Her doctor explained her spine would continue to deteriorate if left alone. In two years, she might be in a wheelchair. But when Mary asked for details about the surgery, the doctor couldn’t give her any answers.

She asked, “Am I going to be pain free?”

The doctor said he was not sure.

She asked, “Will I be able to move the way I did before?”

He said he did not know.

She asked, “Will I be able to stop taking the painkillers?”

He explained he couldn’t guarantee it.

And then the doctor stopped the line of questions. He put up a hand. “Look, your back will never be the same.” He explained she had been in a life-altering accident and that failure to accept life-altering consequences was denial. When Mary brought up the idea of using the yoga as rehab, he dismissed it. When she persisted, her doctor shuffled around his desktop and handed her a business card for a psychotherapist and suggested she visit. It wasn’t the smoothest response in the history of doctor–patient relationships, and suddenly they were in a fight. Mary swore at him. The doctor swore at her. She stormed out of his office.

Alone on the elevator, she began crying. “I kept thinking in my head, ‘Mary, what have you done?’” She says, “I was in tremendous pain, and here I went and pissed off one of the few people who could actually help me.”

And then,
bing,
the doors opened, and Mary just knew. “I heard my voice tell me, ‘Okay, Mary, you’re going back to yoga. If it worked so well when you were healthy, why would it desert you now?’”

She had a ten-year knowledge of the yoga at this point. Before the accident, she was a full-fledged Bikram devotee; she haunted her local studio, expected to be the best in every class she took, and sold the yoga’s ability to heal to everyone she met. But now she would have to live it. Up to that point, her practice had been entirely based on choice. Now it was based mostly on desperation.

But she did it.

The next day, Mary hobbled into her studio in a neck and back brace and began pouring herself into her practice, taking the beginner class seven days a week. Her postures didn’t look anything like the other people in the room. “It wasn’t pretty at first,” she says. “I would do what I could do.” Which at first was basically nothing. It was mental. “Plenty of days early on, I was just locking eyes in the mirror and thinking through the posture.” Other days, she could muster maybe a tiny Half Moon, bending
barely visibly, feeling enormous waves of pain through her spine. When class was over, she would lie on the floor as the agony crept back in.

“Most of the teachers who were around at this point really didn’t understand what I was going through. They thought I was really hurt, not yoga hurt. They would get that nurturing voice you use when talking to dying kids or cute animals: ‘Mary, I’m worried about you, Mary, how are you? Are you sure you can do this?’”

But it was working for her. She felt something. “The only time I was pain free that first year was when I was in a yoga class. It was a sign I was on the right track.” And so she doubled up on the classes, going twice a day. She also went, as she calls it, “full hermit.” Mary explains, “I stopped talking to other teachers. I stopped talking to people who wanted me to doubt.” Dealing with the anxiety she was producing in others was almost as difficult as the pain. “Asking me if I am okay fifteen times a day isn’t supporting me. Asking me if I’m in pain isn’t supporting me. Trust me, I knew I was in pain.”

And pain wasn’t actually the worst part. The worst part was the nothing. “After the car accident, there would be days when my leg would be paralyzed. I couldn’t use it, I couldn’t feel it. My left leg would just sit there limp like a tail. Especially when I just woke up.”

On those days, she would drag herself around to the side of the bed and hold on to the mattress and lower herself back into a backbend posture called Camel. I can picture Mary there, knees tucked almost as if in prayer, but instead of leaning forward with head tucked, she is slowly lowering herself backwards, arms stretched out in her holy backbend.

“I would hold that posture, desperately grabbing on to the mattress sometimes five minutes.”

And from that early-morning bending, she became convinced that backbending was at the core of her healing. “I would be against my bed, hold it and hold it, first there would be a tingle, then the leg would get fuzzy, then there would be a weird stabbing.”

In two years, she was doing the full series again. Her postures had returned, even if the pain was still present when she wasn’t in them. And her faith returned larger than ever: “Everyone can do this yoga. That’s what
makes it so awesome. The beginner postures are all so simple, unless you’re dead, you can do them.”

Pain

I’ve heard a lot of conflicting things about pain in the yoga world. First there is my almost unconscious YMCA-yoga cultural bias, dreamlike and pervasive, which tells me yoga should above all be relaxing, that all pain is bad, that I should “take it easy, baby.” At this point, I can’t remember if I ever actually heard this vocalized, or if I just absorbed it during various lattesoaked conversations. Or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned nonsadistic common sense. Either way, the notion that “if you hurt in a posture, you are doing it wrong” feels very yoga in the sense of the word that gets confused with yogurt.

Then there are my young beloved Bikram teachers who repeatedly echo their guru in class, conflating pain with authenticity, calmly explaining that a posture “should hurt like hell.” These are the wide-eyed and gung-ho. Teachers, often derailed from a primary career by their sudden passion, standing in the back of class, arms conducting up and down as they urge us to push deeper and deeper into the burning sensation. Here pain is validation, a blaring trumpet in my thigh announcing I have hit my edge.

Then there are the older, potentially wiser Bikram teachers, embodied by Emmy. “Most pain is your mind labeling a sensation it never had before,” Emmy says. “You need to learn to relabel the agony of stretching into the luxury of release.” When I ask about other types of pain, the result of something other than stretching, she looks at me like I am a dolt. “Of course you don’t go and hurt yourself. It’s a fundamental job of the yogi to learn how to distinguish between different types of pain. The bad ones, you must avoid.”

Then there is Esak telling me all pain is a phantom. All pain is in my head. Then there are the advanced practitioners walking around with constant backaches and smiles. Then there is Mary, Esak’s coach and mentor, who tells me it is impossible to feel pain in a yoga class if I’m doing it right. Which would make me wonder if I’ve gone full circle back to the YMCA,
except Mary is the person guiding those advanced practitioners into their backaches.

Last there is me in class. Who pretty much listens to everything my teachers tell me, except when I decide it crosses an invisible line, in which case I back off and feel like a wimp.
¹⁶

All of which begs the question, what is pain? Why do we care about it?

This is actually a surprisingly hard question to ask. Mostly because it seems so obvious, it’s hard to muster up the necessary faux-naivety to tackle. But also because once we start to look at our expectations closely, we see pretty quickly that they don’t line up to our experience at all.

The English word
pain
comes to us from Poena, a dominatrix goddess responsible for vengeance and atonement. Perpetually depicted by the Ancient Greeks in modern-day dungeon gear (maiden’s skirt, lace-up boots, and “coils of jangling chains”), Poena brought the pain. Literally. To be visited by Poena was to pay a price for something you deserved. It turns out etymologically
pay
and
pain
are more than just sound-alikes. To the Ancient Greeks, pain was revenge the person deserved. It was their receipt. This is a sense that my vertebrae highly commend during Backbending.

In many ways, because we are better acquainted with ego than with compassion, we have just barely outgrown that notion of pain. When we look at people in pain, especially ourselves, we have to fight to get to empathy. It may not be pretty to acknowledge, and it certainly is not universal or unrelenting, but lots of times our gut reaction to pain is an expectation that the recipient is somehow weak or deserving.

The extent we have outgrown this notion is limited to the extent that in our own lives and own skins, we’ve connected Poena to Trauma.

Trauma is of course why, when we’re not in pain, most of can say something like: Pain is helpful. Pain warns and teaches, steering us away from scalding liquids and against our macho-judgment toward our doctor’s office.
Even in its more bratty forms involving knees against coffee tables, pain awakens us, pulls us into present focus. In the larger spiritual sense, this is why the great religious seeker and children’s book author
C. S. Lewis called it
“God’s megaphone.” Pain has a unique ability to pull lives otherwise too busy to stop, out of their banality, toward their great cosmic humility.

As such, unlike any of our other sensations, pain operates both inside and outside of us. It is separate but apart, of us but against us.

This dualism is pain’s most essential quality to a yogi: It exists without integration. In this way, pain is unique as a sensation, sharing far more with our more unsettling appetites: sex, hunger, and sleep. It is modular, functioning parallel to our sense of self. Like a weather system in the environment we inhabit, like an ill-fitting pair of shoes, pain is definitional to our experience—demanding adjustment, but never integrated.

Listen to neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick
Jr. talk about pain. A dyed-in-the-wool materialist, so phobic of anything resembling the mystical slash nontraditional that he snarks about visiting chiropractors and acupuncturists only “under assumed names, of course,” Vertosick suddenly joins the Age of Aquarius when discussing pain: “When I’m alone with a chronic pain patient, it feels as though three entities are in the room: the patient, the pain, and me. So palpable is the pain, even to an outsider, that it becomes another living creature to deal with, not a disease to be treated but a conscious demon to be exorcised.”

With the right pain, we all become junkies striding down the corridor, observers of our actions, just removed enough not to stop them.

Writing in 1664, Descartes encapsulated
what, for many of us, still feels like an accurate explanation of physical pain: the Pain Pathway. In Descartes’s theory, an injury is received at the tissue, then “passes along a delicate internal thread” until it reaches the brain, whereby the mind produces the sensation of pain. Think tin-can telephone. Like Newton with his apple, this theory was the result of an insight Descartes had outside the laboratory, while walking in a trick sculpture garden. He stepped on a tile in the floor and suddenly water squirted out of a statue into his eye. He stepped again
and it came to him again: cause, hydraulic pathway, effect. Or in the human body: we get injured—cut, burnt, or bruised—a message is pumped along our nerves to our brain. Then we squirt out a curse word like the water from the statue. In his later writings, Descartes likened the sequence of events to pulling a rope to ring a church bell. The harder you pull, the louder the bell clangs.

Given how closely this explanation reconciles with our common sense, it is difficult to express how radical these ideas were in their time. Up until Descartes, descriptions of the senses, including pain, were left to the philosophers and poets. Scientists and doctors were still uncovering details of the physical anatomy, and not yet ready to tackle phenomena that couldn’t be labeled or measured. This gap between poetic theory and scientific practice was not fun if you were a patient. In Italy, for instance, in order to silence “the pain energies,” it was common practice to prepare a patient for surgery by placing a wooden bowl over his head and hammering on it until the patient passed out.

Descartes’s insight changed that. If pain was essentially physical, it could be connected to anatomy and studied. For the next three and a half centuries, the scientific community was dominated by experiments doing just that. Researchers classified pains based on the subject’s description of the experience (sensory—
sharp, stinging;
affective—
draining, annoying
), based on the quality of the insult (thermal, mechanical, chemical), the duration (acute, chronic), and region of the body (head, shoulders, knees, and toes). They then steadily connected these classifications to objective structures within the body.