“Sit up nice and tall. Take a moment to close your eyes and tune into how you’re feeling.”
The second I sit up; noticing a definitive straightening of my spine, a lengthening in my neck, I can’t help but feel the ghost of your touch – the memory of your hands kneading out my stubborn knots because even now, the slightest hint of relief brings with it the connotation of your undeserving name.
I struggled with missing you on the days my neck left me crippled by the excruciating pain. I told myself I’d forget you here, I told myself I’d quit smoking here, I told myself I’d heal; mind, body, and soul here. But the second I landed at the airport, my entire body ached so badly that I slept for two days and woke up with a pinched nerve on the right side of my neck and the sights and smells of all the barefoot men squatting along the side of the streets with a cigarette between their teeth made me buy a pack of reds before I even bought myself something to eat.
“Tend to yourself in this moment. Take this time to do a little energetic hygiene, because it’s all connected.”
I want to stop associating your face with feeling better, in the same way I avoided cat-cows for the longest time because they reminded me of the way you would call them cat-camels and how that honestly makes more sense. In clearing my mind, I need to clear the cobwebs of your caress. In taking inventory of my emotions, I need to identify all of the heartache I’ve suppressed.
As skeptical as I feel about the proclaimed healing powers of yoga or the new-age approach to medicine, there are certain revelations which make my former stance of disbelief impossible to sustain. I refused to go back to the alternative medicine practitioner my aunt forced me to visit on my first day in Korea, an unlicensed quack in a church basement who drew black blood clots from my neck and ignored my cries of pain. Maybe it was the culture shock, or the inevitably Westernized lens I view Eastern medicine through, or maybe it was all the bruises I traced on my father’s spine and the lack of results I witnessed after all the hopeful treatments he subjected himself to; but when the same bruises made themselves visible in black circles across my skin, I refused to go back with an unyielding defiance that riled my aunt’s control-driven chagrin.
“Open your eyes.”
I feel almost drunk off being awoken to my undiluted emotions. I’ve rallied during my waking days to forget the way my chest ached when your eyes met mine and you would make offhanded observations about my tell-tale habits as if I were once indecipherable strokes on paper, now fully-realized by your design. I remember the letter I never sent you and the day I finally contacted you in indignation after an entire bottle of wine. What you said in response, with such uncharacteristic coldness, made me clench my heart in a fist so tight that my nails drew hot blood from my palms. Then the creeping tension in my neck spread until I couldn’t sleep without my left arm raised over my head.
I tried everything I could think of; physical therapy from the only English-speaking doctor an hour away, stretches I retained from a trainer in Brooklyn at the onset of my recovery, generous applications of my go-to numbing cream, and a million different sleeping positions – none of which brought me any release. I begrudgingly resorted to yoga, something I have felt resistant about as someone who is both mentally and physically inflexible.
“Imagine a string pulling you up from the crown of the head.”
I can feel a crunch in my neck as I sit up straighter but it’s a refreshing sensation; like the relief that floods through my fingers after cracking my knuckles. I didn’t realize how hunched my posture was, how much I unconsciously draw my chin to chest; afraid to take up space, afraid to look up. I can feel a shudder of release spreading through my upper back as though I am unfurling my wings. The knot of tangled nerves where you once brushed your fingers against my spine and made me scream is slowly, impossibly, beginning to unravel.
For the longest time, I thought yoga was something I should start when I was “better;” after completing the final two months of physical therapy following my very drawn-out spine injury. I felt terrified at the thought of sitting on my shattered coccyx on the linoleum floor; separated by nothing but a thin sheet of rubber. Then the pain grew to a point where it became unmanageable, where I couldn’t sleep, where I couldn’t use my right arm to eat; in ways that shouldn’t be happening in a clear regression of all the treatment I had received in Korea. So I bought a yoga mat, then a second, when the first was too thin and I bruised my shins and knees. Then I started showing up.
“Use your exhale to soften, release any tension, any congestion, any stress that’s been building up. This manifests in the body.”
Once I made my way to the island of the gods, sailing here on a lifeboat with what was left of my sanity, I came across a healer’s hut and tried reiki; an uncharacteristic action which surprised even the inner-skeptic in me. I remember staring up at the beams of the thatched ceiling, following the trail of ants scurrying from one beam to the other in a perfect procession while the wrinkled woman waved her hands over my aching body and attempted to realign my misdirected energy. She made a few insightful comments which startled me; the diagnosis of my spine injury and weakened left leg, the status of my recently broken heart. She told me that from even across the beach, she could sense the pain that radiated from me, and something in her motherly concern broke my emotional dam and I cried for the first time in a long time; weeping openly while she promised me that her metaphorical healing touch would have me feeling better soon.
I don’t know if it was her words or her workings that drew the confession out of me, but I told her about my emotional exhaustion and she listened empathetically while I embarked on my own journey of healing through acknowledgement and admission. When I finally opened my eyes at end of an hour-long session which had merely minutes-long, she asked if I was feeling any better. To my surprise, as I took inventory of my body from head to toe and noticed a significant decrease in pain on my troublesome left side, I realized I was. I mused for a long time afterwards how this was even possible, how someone could heal me without touching me and it be anything other than an elaborate hoax.
“Take a second to just wake up your feet, dig your heels into the earth. So even yoga for neck and shoulder release, it’s connected to the soles of our feet. One moving part.”
An unexpected angel appeared in my life at the height of my substance abuse issues and told me I needed to wear more red, that she could read chakras and mine was a violently blinding shade of violet. She told me, with startling acuity, that I constantly had my head in the clouds with my feet barely grazing the ground. We hardly knew each other then, I was still defensive and feral and numbed beyond the means of human connection due to drugs and alcohol. I was only twenty and it was my first time ever hearing about the existence of chakras. I didn’t even have the opportunity to feel skeptical because her analysis was so accurate. All I could do was wordlessly tremble at the thought of my hard-built defenses being too easily toppled; the person I tried so hard to keep fettered suddenly freed and fully-seen.
I tell everyone red is my favorite color but it’s actually just a lifelong reminder. I wear it like a prayer; hoping that one day it might anchor the unbearable lightness that plagues me, even all these years later. I used to dread the endless repetitions of “Root to Rise” in yoga practices until I realized that I now relish them. There’s a certain quiet in humbling your heavy head to hang in between your knees, the instant relief that shudders through the spine. The buoyancy in your creaky knees as you coil in preparation to flatten your back and lengthen from the crown. Then finally, the sensation of stacking each spinal disc in deliberate dedication before triumphantly arriving in “Mountain Pose.” It was my tailbone injury that taught me one displaced component shifts the entire spine out of alignment. It was yoga that taught me that healing my crooked neck begins with rooting my restless feet.
“A mentor of mine always is talking to me about how often neck pain is not seeing both sides, or not seeing more than one side to something. So that may be something to look into, to consider.”
My sister complains about her own debilitating neck problems and the only thing I could tell her, someone who lifts weights and hates yoga more than anyone I know, was just to give yoga a go. She remains as resistant as I was, two obstinate sisters who inherited this mutual trait from their father. Two other people in my life are equally but oppositely suffering from the peripheral reach of addiction, their anxiety partially manifesting in neck pain and stiffness. I know those sleepless nights, those uncomfortable days dealing with the distracting ache, and all I could think of; as I stretched my neck from left to right and reflected on those words, was the pain that they were experiencing, instead of my own.
I am careful to tiptoe around sharing my support in a situation involving substance abuse because I am someone who still struggles with the temptation of seeking solace through escapism. What struck me like lightning was the commonality in the timing of our shared discomfort. I sent them the same video; the one that allowed me to heal in the way I needed most, unbeknownst even to myself. The pinched nerve that troubled me was located on the right side of my neck, which was always odd to me when the trauma to my tailbone was concentrated in the left. You were the one that showed me how my spine had shifted into a displaced diagonal and worked the kinks until they became bearable. When they came back, I adamantly refused to admit that the thoughts of you had followed; as if remembering your touch was akin to confessing you were necessary to my healing. I wonder now, how much sooner I could have reached this place of recovery had I been less inflexible; more amenable to trying new methods, more open to admitting my faults, more willing to look back in your direction.
“Repeat this sequence to find length and release. Let it be a physical release but also you can take this opportunity to choose to let go of anything that’s not serving you. Just release it with every exhale.”
My reiki treatment provided a much-needed release, but it was nowhere near as life-changing as briefly encountering a passing guardian angel. My current yoga practice has me thinking about that moment more and more, wondering if in eight years my chakras have healed or if I am still in a definitive deficient of the color red; overwhelmingly outbalanced by my oversaturation of violet instead.
I want to heal, from base to crown, from blood to bone, from heartbreak to spinal cord. I want to start by grounding down and firmly planting my vagabond feet. Working my way up from establishing my foundation to healing my sacrum to strengthening my core to clearing my throat to opening my eyes to broadening my mind to finally feeling alive. Even from a million miles away from the apartment I left behind in New York, from the family who makes me feel perpetually alienated, from the lack of direction I struggle to overcome in the middle of the jungle, from the island oasis where I drift in the Indian Ocean, I am cultivating roots.
noted things 