slipping
There’s this thing I want to talk about. I’ve been putting it off.
I’ve written about my left leg pain, due to a nerve irritation in my lumbar spine. I’ve written about the torn hamstring I suffered from last year. And now I have to write about the pain in my right knee that’s been bothering me for about a week now.
I think all of these injuries have come from yoga, whether through my own foolishness or not, and I am feeling such a poisonous mix of emotions about it all that I sobbed about it to BF two nights ago, feeling embarrassed and childish. “All I want is to do yoga,” I cried.
It hurts most when I am sitting, leg bent, knee to the right of foot. It hurts on the inner edge of the knee, right where a torn meniscus would be. I have snapping sounds in my knee whenever I bend and put weight on my leg. I tried elevating and icing it for a few days earlier in the week, and that did nothing. I chose not to go to yoga on my regular Thursday because I thought resting would do it good.
I don’t want to go through weeks or months of healing, or even surgery. I don’t want to hold back from poses that are hard on my knees (and two of every three poses are). I don’t want any of this; I just want to do yoga. I want to feel peace, shakti, prana. Not pain.
Comparatively I am not badly off. I still have all my arms and legs and they are all in working order. The injuries I’ve dealt with so far are not so bad, and I have whined about them at length. But I am frustrated to my wits’ end. I am near defeat.
I have been feeling otherwise depressed about yoga and the way I want it to be in my life since the end of the semester. Before May, it was impractical to imagine myself in teacher training. I couldn’t do both. But now it’s only a matter of not having enough money, and I find that depressing beyond belief. Just money that’s keeping me from my dream, the thing I want most right now. Just money. I am so tired of money.
All I want is to do yoga.
After crying, a release that I badly needed because of the knee and all the other stress I’ve been feeling like a great flat weight on my back, I felt ashamed of myself. It’s not a big deal. There are people who’ve been laid off, people who’ve lost their houses. I am dealing with knee pain. But I’m hurting, dammit, and even if this post too sounds like I’m whining and childish, I will just have to live with it.
The crying helped. The next day I had a new perspective: many people have musical, semi-painful knees, and if I keep feeling severe pain I will go to the bone doctor. I can cope, either way.
For the past two days I have tried putting heat on my knee instead of ice, and that seems to have made a huge difference in how much pain I feel when I’m cross-legged. Which makes me think I may have just overstretched some ligaments/tendons/whatever in my knee instead of actually tearing anything. The pain is far better than I think it would be if I’d actually torn through something. I even did yoga on Saturday, exploring what I could and couldn’t do without pain. Yet the snapping, indicating that something is rattling around under my patella, continues.
I wonder if my acceptance helped to heal the pain as much as the heat did. I wonder if the struggles with my legs and the struggles with my money are connected, as I think they are, and if they mean what I think they do – that I am still not grounded, still not recovered from what happened to me after college. I have been healing as best I can for almost four years, and yet I still keep slipping backward.
June 21, 2009 at 9:36 am
During this have you talked to any of your doctors to see what they might have to say about it? That is super shitty, considering I thought yoga was one of the lowest impact activites you can do.
I hope you can find a solution for this.
I asked the bone doctor when I went for a follow-up on the nerve injury, and she said it sounded like a kneecap irritation. She gave me some exercises to do, and when I did them the pain worsened. Since 2 of three of the injuries I mention here have been worsened by clinical suggestions, I’m going to try the same home remedy I used with the hamstring: time, rest, heat.
June 21, 2009 at 12:05 pm
May I gently remind you that asana is only one – and not the first – limb of yoga. Perhaps you can, for the time it takes your body to adequately heal, focus on some of the other aspects of a complete practice?
I find it much easier to feel all limbs working together when I’m practicing asana. If I don’t have asana to help me focus all the other aspects of yoga, I feel unbalanced. Plus, sitting to meditate hurts; this does not help me to move beyond the physical realm.
June 22, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Yeah, I get that. Keep in mind, though, that meditation doesn’t have to be seated. I find that car meditation is a great practice; my logical brain and my body are busy operating the car, freeing up my spirit to wander…
Oh, for sure! You’re talking to a former pizza delivery driver here.
June 21, 2009 at 7:31 pm
I have what sounds like exactly the same problem with my right knee. My self-diagnosis is mild tendonitis. It’s painful in several postures, but not crippling at all. And yes, its an over-stretching injury.
For me, the cause was not yoga, but doing yoga improperly. Because you want to do yoga so badly, my guess is that you are also overzealous in your practice. It’s so easy to push too hard, and at the time it doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong with it. Also, I’d be very, very careful about alignment in the poses that really strain the knees. (For me, thats Fixed Firm, aka Reclining Hero).
There’s a series of knee strengthening exercises in Eric Schiffman’s book that might help. Basically, you start out as you would in Bikrams standing separate leg head to floor, with your feet apart but parallel with each other and knees locked. You bend forward, then backward, then rotate the torso to the left keeping feet planted and bend forward. Then to the right. You repeat the same thing with a number of different hand positions (prayer, arms locked at your ear, clasped behind your back, prayer behind your back, and a couple of others). This helped me a ton with an earlier knee injury and is helping with my current problem as well.
Thank you for your suggestions. Because the knee is locked (which causes overextension), what you describe is basically a series of knee and quadricep strengthening poses, which is what was suggested to me by the bone doctor and which made my knee hurt more. Reclining virasana doesn’t make my knee hurt, it’s turning it the other way that does. I believe it was caused by a pigeon series that put a good deal of weight on my knee when bending that way.
June 22, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Here’s something else to think about. Flexi types are much more prone to injury in yoga than people who are wound up tight. It’s very easy to overstretch for people who are very flexible. Sorry to say, but to get the balance required, this means paying more attention to the strengthening poses, even if you don’t enjoy them or are not interested in them, as you have said in the past.
I’m not saying that this is what’s going on with you. There’s no way I could know that from some brief internet discussion. But it’s at least something worth thinking about.
The other thing about injuries is that, approached the right way, they give a wonderful opportunity to learn more about your own limits, about the form and alignment of the poses. That doesn’t stop them from sucking while they are there, but I may have learned as much about the poses while healing the injuries I’ve had as I learned in all the rest of the classes.
Thanks for sharing this insight.
June 22, 2009 at 10:10 pm
My knee has NEVER been the same since the marathon and I have actually had to change how I train. I do not think it is serious (which is what I think about every injury) and with heat after running and the next morning, it has really helped.
I also think, for me, that my state of mind has a lot to do with my injury…it might not be the same for you.
Maybe you could try rest?
I think it’s all connected, but I doubt it’s in the same way as yours.