Where and how can traditional medicine and yoga meet? We can use both these practices to understand where illness begins and how a daily yoga or mindful practice can illuminate the path to healing.
Both yoga and medicine are disciplines. From the Latin, disciplina translates as “to enlighten.” Contrary to the sense that discipline is drudgery, immersing yourself in a discipline can lead to clarity and yes, enlightenment. I am privileged to practice in both these spaces. We who care for patients, experience the sacred space between the patient and ourselves that is built on trust and confidence. Without the discipline we have developed to constantly train, read, question and study, we lose our edge. Without the ability to hear the silence behind the words, we can miss the diagnosis. Without a daily practice, we lose the language with which to teach, to speak to the processes that are taking place in our students. And in both disciplines, we need community to sustain us.
In our work as health care providers in the US, we treat what is serious: life threatening injury, heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, cancer. We find and treat serious infection or illness. We speak with authority on the benefit of vaccines and different types of medicines, we educate patients on stopping tobacco and excessive alcohol use, and we inform them on how these substances affect or impact our health. We counsel our patients about why the body develops hypertension, diabetes, pneumonia. We gently give the bad news and are there to guide treatment choices. Most peoples on the planet have nowhere near the resources we have when it comes to addressing serious health problems. Most peoples on the planet experience loss from more minor illnesses than we as westerners expect. Most westerners have a skewed expectation that modern medicine will cure all that ails them. It is true, we have come far: transplanting organs and wiping out diseases that killed generations before us. We can become accustomed to sure fixes, reliable access to top notch care, but lose our sense of responsibility for our choices that invite illness and disease. As a physician assistant, I ask patients to look at this. I try to teach, and even cajole, a person to see how they can help themselves. But I can also sense when I, myself, begin to feel tuned out.
Yoga practices allow us time and space to develop self awareness. As we move, rhythmically coordinating the breath with each yoga pose, we learn to breathe through discomfort. We breathe when we are upside down and sweaty and wonder if we have the strength to keep going. We balance on one foot and pay attention to our breath, or touch our toes, rise to standing tall, lifting our arms up overhead, observing our own reactions and sensations. Yoga slowly shows us where ingrained patterns have set in and offer us an opportunity to be present, feel into cause and effect in a visceral way. Yoga offers us a way to live more mindfully by discarding what no longer serves us. The practices of yoga teach us to stay graceful and breathe through outside our comfort zone and is inherently therapeutic in this way. Give the following restorative pose a try at the end of the day.
