The pride-less place of starting over

I thought about writing this post all day yesterday, but alas I was too busy to actually sit down and write it. Definitely the bane of my writing career. Time... So I brushed it off as I do all of the other long lost blog posts that never came to be and went about my day. But while we were at small group last night a girl mentioned same concept I was thinking about all day.

She started talking about starting over from square one and what a scary and pride-less place it is to be. Maybe a sign that I should sit down and write this post huh?

I have been teaching yoga for roughly 5 years now. While I'm no guru I do think of myself as experienced with a special knowledge of the human body especially when it comes to athletic performance. However, I got injured somehow someway during my pregnancy two years ago and I have been fighting it on my own thinking I could self teach my way out of this pain and frustration of an injury.

So after the birth of my next baby I decided to give PT a shot to see if they could teach me some magic that I just wasn't thinking about. The first exercise the PT showed me were pelvic tilts. She had my lay back and tilt and tilt and tilt. I've tilted a few times here and there in the past. Almost every yoga move requires a good tilt before you set your position so I as I was tilting I was wondering what this ever so basic move was going to do for me.

Obviously my face read of my thoughts because she then explained to me that we needed to start over from the most basic foundations. That with a chronic injury of the hip/back region, something is wrong deep down inside in your core (your tranversus abdominis) and you need to fix it first in order to progress forwards.

I started to think about how I missed the most basic aspect of fixing an injury, taking a step back and evaluating the situation; the same way it is so important to do that in life. As we grow in our practice we tend to think we've gotten over baseline skills, and that once we conquer those skills we can keep pressing on. This is what I did. I kept saying there was no way it was something I already know that is the issue, it has to be something more... something deeper. So I kept pushing myself and pushing myself and always came out of it with my same injury.

If you've run a marathon before then you're "better" then the 5k distance right? You've mastered that skill. Yeah, tell that to the lady that is re-learning how to run a 30 minute 5k after birth.

In life we tend to want to fix ourselves in that way as well. We assume because we are beyond the basic fundamentals of life, we've mastered those fundamentals. It's only in the times of pride-less starting over that we learn we have NEVER mastered ANYTHING! We must always be students. We must always been the teacher laying on the PT table saying "I don't know anything. Teach me." And not only do we need to speak these words, but we need to be honestly and openly receptive of them.