From The Professor:
My recommendation is to tell your students to pause, explore and become more discerning about all pain.
I also recommend that you do not equate pain with tissue injury, or the quality of pain to specific pathology.
As a Pain Care Aware yoga teacher, I hope you understand that the intensity of pain is not an accurate indicator of tissue health or tissue damage. The same is true for the quality of pain.
Danger signals travelling through nerves from the body to the brain do not carry quality information. The quality of the pain, or ‘what the pain feels like’ seems to be up to mechanisms of the brain and mind.
If you are thinking about injuries to your skin, this might not match with your life experiences. Special receptors in skin help me know if my skin is poked by a needle, pinched hard, cut by a knife or burned. Science tells us that all other parts of the body send danger signals when something is injured, but without quality information attached.
This of course fits squarely in the category of the complexity and weirdness of pain.
We want pain to tell us where the problem is, what it is, and how bad it is. That’s not its ‘job’.
Pain is not to be ignored. Yoga and other mindful movement practices provide opportunities to explore pain. My recommendation is to tell your student to modify their position if the quality, intensity or location of pain is making it impossible to explore the pain.
There are of course times when you need more information, and the best advice is to find 1:1 time with the student outside of the class to do this.
Pain is a human condition. It is complex and it scares us – more so when we haven’t had the chance to learn more about pain.
From The Swami:
Pain is a human condition. It is complex and it scares us.
As much as it seems counterintuitive to move towards or explore pain, and get to know it better, this is one of many approaches supported by yoga and by science.
I too had a teacher who gave his students this very firm advice, and I followed it and passed it on for years… And then I learned differently. I learned that pain is something to mindfully explore and in doing so, I changed my pain. So now I teach students to be more discerning and to self-regulate while exploring. This is in alignment with living Yoga. Teaching others to be fearful of pain will take them further away from living Yoga.
In being pain care aware I have become informed through pain science and then have reconfirmed through my embodied experiences of Yoga. This is a living wellness practice that is a pain care lifestyle choice.
Pain can be a teacher of sorts, it has something for us to hear, to know, to understand more about ourselves. It is also an alarm, yes. But our alarms can misfire or be set at a highly sensitive set off point. And the alarm only tells us to stop or change our behaviour. It doesn’t tell us what to change.
When we are pain care aware we get curious. We do not rush to change, but rather we step into deeper awareness, stronger discernment and disciplined regulation. We make wiser choices by practicing the 8 limbs of Yoga.
Allow yoga to be the answer to more discernment for each individual. Anything alarming to us will come with a message to pay attention and yoga can guide us from fear to freedom.
Be curious, Be Fearless, Be Pain Care Aware.