hearing a “pop” in handstand is never good

Hello, yoga injury #4.

This time it was nobody’s fault at all. We were practicing handstand, and my body fell to the left and my left shoulder buckled and I felt a pop. My arm felt weird and numb and weak for a few minutes, then that wore off and it was back to normal. Some I-slept-on-it-funny pain I’d been having for a few weeks now disappeared, weirdly, but I was left with a new pain, an unpleasant, low-frequency soreness. Today it hurts to bear weight – couldn’t do chaturanga at all, and upward dog had to be exchanged after only a couple of reps, and then even cobra was a bit too much – and when I get to the edge of my range of motion in any direction it hurts a good deal. And it’s a wee little bit sore in general, whenever I’m doing nothing.

After asking around, I think I’ve overstretched a muscle or, less likely, overstretched a ligament or a tendon. If I’d actually torn a tendon or a ligament, I was told, I’d know it – be in a lot more pain and be a lot less able to move. It’s a different kind of pain than when I tore my hamstring, not sharp at all, and indeed the pain it most closely resembles is next-day muscle soreness after I’ve pushed too hard on the forward bends. So I think if I rest it and ice it (RICES!), it’ll heal up in a few days.

The lecture yesterday was at the fire circle. Ganga talked about the chakras, and also briefly about tantra. His version of the chakras is a bit different than the version I know, a la Anodea Judith, but it’s close enough in most ways. He talked about the notion that the chakra system is syncretic, which means it’s a jumble of different traditions and sets of knowledge, all tumbled together until they make a whole that’s a synthesis of its parts. Ganga was talking about this essentially as a positive thing, and I’ve always thought of it as the opposite.

Not that I believe that things need to be pure to be good – that notion leads to little troubles like the Holocaust – but I always think of Hamlet. There are two major versions of Hamlet, and the way scholars have come to one definitive version is by melding the two versions together, making the play a lot longer, and calling it a “conflated” text. Throwing these two versions at each other until they splat together is not, in my opinion, how you find a “correct” version of Hamlet. And truly, neither one nor the other is the correct version either. They both have their place in publishing/playwriting/literature/British history.

People need surety, though; they need to be reassured that there is One Right Way and they’re following it. Hence Christianity. So it’s not all bad, I guess. Having a conflated text means that there’s a lot more security out there in the minds of people who need it.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the syncretic chakras. So I’m now reexamining the whole notion that mixed-up traditions are not necessarily bad. The way of things is that they wear down and evolve and alter until they’re hardly recognizable, like boulders in the ocean, but it still makes me sad when things are lost, or when things that matter are polluted and perverted. Yet I’m beginning to think this is not really the right way to look at it. All of mankind’s beautiful brilliant innovations have been subject to this process: TV and the internet sullied by advertising and pornography, American “traditions” being invented via untrue legends and thinking the best of our ancestors. Knowing that this is how it is, okay, fine, but liking it and finding it a positive thing? Whole other ball of wax. It’s very challenging for me to see our evolution towards this 2009 world as being wonderful, the best way it could have happened, rather than a garbled mess of wasted potential and mouth-breathers sexting each other.

In other news, I got myself into a coughing fit during savasana today that was so intense I nearly threw up. It was our last savasana as a group, and I still feel absolutely awful that I disturbed it. I’m hoping it was the last gasp of this stupid infection, though. I’m going to try and avoid talking as much as I can for the remainder of my time here.

I still love it here, and am determined to move to this coast (and to return to this beautiful, sacred place, someday) but I’m ready to go home. Crippled in one arm and coughing like a lunatic does not a good vacation make.

This morning we took a written test (Not-test! Tracey told us, because we’re not being graded on it, but it looked and felt an awful lot like a test to me), and tomorrow we teach little ten-minute classes to each other. There is much nervousness about all this. I cobbled mine together from some notes on a hip-opening class I wrote a while ago. Since I never actually put the class together, I don’t think this is cheating. I’m pretty confident about it, but I think I need to test it and go over it a couple more times.

I think I’m going to go enjoy the afternoon. Me and my ice pack, sittin’ in a tree.