Bamboo floor, lava stone: at the edge of the bend | Om Yoga Magazine

With my back aching, lying on the bamboo floor of my apartment in Hawaii, I thought my days of swimming, riding motorcycles and regular activity would be over. What made it harder was where I was. I lived in Hawaii, surrounded by vibrant land and water, and I couldn’t participate in anything.

For most of my life, I was able to meet the physical demands without much adjustment. I did what was necessary. But I ended up needing painkillers while riding, something I had never used before. That was the moment I realized my body was asking for a different kind of attention. I reached an edge I didn’t recognize, an edge that didn’t announce itself dramatically but still demanded a turn.

I didn’t know what lay ahead, but I knew something had to change. Around that time I started noticing yoga studios everywhere. I didn’t plan on doing yoga, but one day I walked into a studio and asked about classes.

With little to lose, I decided to give it a try. I hoped yoga would help me move beyond a series of back injuries I’d suffered over the course of my life: a hard fall from a trampoline at age 10, a weight-lifting injury in college, a slip on an icy roof in my 40s and onto a metal ladder below. Each incident left its mark, but none had stopped me completely.

But when I became incapacitated on the bamboo floor, it was different, as if I was standing on an edge where continuing as before was no longer possible. My back finally had my full attention.

I brought with me a Midwest belief in endurance that I still honor, but it also taught me to endure pain rather than listen to it, to press on rather than turn.

I jumped into yoga without any knowledge, and after a few months of constant practice, things started to change. I bowed more freely. The pain loosened his grip. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no miracle or sudden conversion, but there were many smaller moments of insight and more than a few tears of surrender. The change was steady enough to be unmistakable, quieter and faster than I expected. It felt less like progress and more like a twist that was already happening.

I continued, still not quite believing that something so simple could make a meaningful difference. But my body continued to respond to the only thing I could reliably do: show up. Yoga requires us to get to the edge of effort, not over it, nor away from it. And when you get there, to stay long enough to learn what that edge can teach.

In yoga culture, success is talked about in a different language. You appear on the mat. You do the work. You stay. Your “success” unfolds over time. At first I found that way of speaking naive, even reductionist. But as I kept returning, especially to the forward, backward, and sideways movements of the spine, the results became hard to ignore.

In addition to the physical changes, something else happened. Breathing easily became my way of dealing with stress. When the free diving instructor said the same thing as my yoga instructors, I realized that they were both looking for something transformative, not just for yoga or freediving, but for life.

When you dive down, “move like water through water,” my freediving instructor said; and when I instructed the half-moon pose, my yoga instructor said, “Move like the palm trees swaying in the wind.”

This also started to affect the rest of my life. I learned how to turn without violence, how to remain present in uncertainty. In short: how to trust.