Taming the Beast

About 20 years ago I was involved in a freak accident at the restaurant I was working at. A walk-in door slammed shut on my face, and I ended up with a hairline fracture in my jaw (quick note, having your jaw wired shut for 6 weeks is NOT a recommended weight loss strategy!). As a result of that accident, I've suffered from TMJ problems throughout my adult life. The main problem I have is that most tension in my body gravitates right to my jaw. With time, the ill-effects have lessened, but there was a time that the tension caused severe headaches, teeth-grinding and interrupted sleep. Tension in the jaw can also radiate out into the neck and shoulders, which can create their own health issues.

Tension in the body is generally the result of stress, either physical, mental or emotional. Un-checked, stress can lead to a variety of disorders such as heart disease and depression. Before I discovered yoga I used a lot of unhealthy means to try to deal with tension and stress in my life: alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, food, sex, spending...you name it, I probably tried it. The problem was, these methods only masked the symptoms, and in many cases started to cause other problems. I started to become unreliable at work; I was spending too much money and was always scrounging around to pay my rent and bills; I was isolating myself from family and friends. All of my coping tools stopped working. I had created a hamster-wheel of bad choices and un-resolved situations. It wasn’t until I was ready to look at and address the reality of my life that I was able to clean up some of the mess that I had made, thereby starting the process of releasing some of the pressure that had built up. With work, I started to be able to make choices that didn’t bring more chaos into my life. Stressful situations still arose, but instead of trying to hide from them or mask them, I learned to deal with them. It was this journey that led me to yoga, where I found a very healthy way to start to work off tension and begin to detoxify physically, so that I could start to detoxify emotionally and spiritually.

A life free from tension and stress isn't necessarily the goal of our yoga practice. As wonderful as that sounds, it's not terribly realistic. Everyone has stress of one kind or another in their lives. Denying the truth of this will cause our stress and tension to re-direct into other areas of our lives, or build up like a pressure cooker, waiting to burst forth in unhealthy ways. So, in our asana practice we deliberately put our bodies into very stressful situations, and then observe where we feel tension and restriction. We use our breath, our awareness and our attention to release the tension, thereby relieving the stress. We practice this physically so that we begin to become aware of the process, then we can start to apply it to our lives off the mat. Through this practice of self-observation we develop self-awareness, and then begin to identify those situations that trigger stress and tension, and begin to make choices based on those triggers.