Hug Your Knees

My knee hurts.  Not just a little – a lot.  Yesterday as David and I were walking up the hill back to our house, I felt some sort of pop in my knee, and it started to hurt.  Luckily, I was about 100 yards from our door, so I could make it home fairly easily. But my knee kept hurting, and I couldn’t walk with the ease I have come to take for granted. 
 
So, something happened to my knee.  I wasn’t doing anything unusual or risky. I was walking up the hill that we walk up every day.  My dad used to say, “The window didn’t just break – somebody broke it!”   In that case, there was usually an agent causing the action. But in this case, it wasn’t really anything – unless we see the act of walking as the cause of my sudden knee injury.
 
This isn’t uncommon, especially as we age. Many times, I’ve heard people say things like, “My shoulder hurts and I wasn’t doing anything.”  Or “I was doing what I’ve done a thousand times, and this time I hurt my wrist.” 
 
I guess that’s the terrain of aging – we can feel sudden or subtle changes, and in many cases, we don’t know the cause and couldn’t have changed what we did because we don’t know what we did!  (Have you ever experienced that?)
 
OR we take a fall and hurt something – a shoulder, an ankle, a knee.  We might criticize ourselves for walking on that path or down that driveway (even as we tell ourselves to fire that inner critic).   Or we might lift a box in a way that causes back pain. We might end up needing a chiropractor or physical therapy.  The injury might end our current habits of physical activity (or our plans to start some).
 
But there’s another possibility.
 
Here’s the next part of my story:  Just after thinking, “Dang! That hurts!” I had the comforting thought that my yoga practice can continue.  There are so many layers to a yoga practice (physical movement with lots of variations, breath, exploring our inner terrain), that we can shift our practice on a particular day depending on our needs, desires, and current challenges.
 
And not only that, but I can adjust my practice to provide some of the benefits that I’d normally get from my daily walks, if I need to take a break. (As my teacher Kristine says, we can kick our asanas up a notch to bring more energy and strength into our system.)
 
So, my morning yoga practice today was to lie in constructive rest (on my back, knees bent, feet on the floor), notice how I felt, move slowly and mindfully, protecting and nurturing my knee, hugging knees to chest, rocking, gently stretching, noticing when and where my knee hurt.  Bringing my legs and arms up into “upside down dog,” rotating wrists and ankles, getting a gentle stretch to the backs of my legs.   And breathing – slowly and smoothly.  I ended with a short relaxation, bringing my attention to feet, then shins/calves, then knees (pausing to send a little extra kindness to my hurt knee), and on up, relaxing and releasing.  That was it.  I needed to nurture myself by having a more subtle practice than I might otherwise. It’s all good, and it’s yoga.
 
If you would like to explore healthy aging and how yoga can support you, consider my new workshop, “Healthy Aging through a Yoga Lens” on June 13, 1-4 pm Pacific.  Details here.