Healing is a tough choice

Sayana chaturangadandasana: repose fourlimbed rod pose. 

Recuperating is different from healing. All sick beings -- I mean humans or animals -- when ill have no choice but be forced into recuperation. Much of the paraphernalia of injury or sickness --  fever, pain, immobility. disinterest in social interaction, the need to hole up or be bed-ridden, even disinterest in food -- is a way of the body to facilitate recuperation. But recuperation is different from healing. Healing can be a tough choice and it does not always guarantee that your choice will be favored. Nevertheless that is where, in making the choice, that you make a difference.

Choosing the right type of healer/doctor, the right choices of food, the agony to return back to normal, and the absolute stamina to sustain the discomforts of your choice -- tasteless foods, physiotherapy, discipline, movement where there is resistance, all of this are very difficult. Then this can become compounded because healing means how you deal with people rallying around you -- do you lie back and ask for attention, or resent where there is no attention, or resist attention which limits your healing?

I realise most of us are not trained to think like that. I believe a strong yoga practice gives you the right practice over this tight-rope walking. Unless you watch out for how, perhaps,  you are not interested in healing -- and unfortunately that is true of many of us -- healing would take the backstage. It is frustrating for me that most peopledon't make this choice. I feel we are required to make this choice for all those people who do not have this choice -- who are seriously sick and who would love to be in your privileged position of choosing sickness over healing. It is even mean, if you come to think of it.:somehow, I believe people who feign illness or who do not make a serious choice for healing, are dragging the rest of the world down because at the end of the day, we are a collective consciousness.

The process of healing means you have to pass through a canopy of pain or discomfort. Running away from that, however tempting, and just to lie back... understandable, but  at the least you should know that is what you are doing.

I told a celeb student recently that she was a hypochondriac. It was essential to point that out, and even if it meant losing a student. It goes against my role as a teacher to allow people the idea that they can dilly-dally about healing. Especially if they continuously talk of their ailments.: this is particular trait of hypochondriacs! The really sick people hole up and suffer it:(

The other day one woman landed at my studio door. She had a mat and said she will join my class.She had a list of problems, from hormone to digestion to body weight. I told her that she need to go back and come back to me only after choosing to make a choice for healing. Because I do believe yoga helps control, if not cure, many chronic problems. She messaged me a few days later and said that this request was an eye-opener for her and she need to analyse if she wanted to be really healed. She said she had never seen it from that angle and what shocked her was she was hesitant to be subjected to a process of healing.

I was not surprised. But I think many of you would be. It is a thought we need to have, not just regards our own healing, but that of those we love -- are we facilitating the healing or creating more space of sickness.

This is a tricky bit. But here is where yoga helps. Because healing is very tough.

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