Nothing like the body to remind us we’re not perfect. A month ago I had my first experience of major surgery. Neurosurgery, that is. A C4–5–6 disectomy in the parlance of body repair specialists. How did this happen to me, a perfectly functioning lifelong health nut and yoga aficionado? Whose worse medical ailment before was, embarassingly, persistent toenail fungus?
Truly, our body is our best teacher. And I’ve had many teachers, both human, Divine, and of Nature’s higher offerings. Many of us have learned the body-as-guru the hard way. Decades ago, I started trusting my body’s wisdom the easy way. Through yoga, my body, quite literally, taught me how to Be in the moment, how to embrace What Is, and how to Focus on the many positives, forgoing all the incessant negatives “out there.”
When you study yoga — which begins with breath, gradually includes physical positions and scriptural references which demonstrate the benefits of stilling the mind (aka meditation) as I have for over five decades — you inevitably come to the realization that trusting one’s own body is the vehicle through which we all get to experience the very most out of life.
Some of us are stubborn about this fact. I’m lucky, my scoliosis urged me to surrender to yoga’s methods as a teenager. I’ve put “trusting my body” to the test in many ways since then. Believe me: your body is the wisest of teachers.
And by “the wisest” I mean exactly that. The brightest moods, the highest health standard, the fittest, most balanced mental-physical-spiritual people with a body-mind-spirit approach such as yoga offers, we yogis get to choose how to, or how not to, live without pain and with maximum happiness (contentment is a better word for happiness, to me). Without embracing the “body as teacher” many of us are forever looking, searching, and alas, being disappointed with second-level teachers or teachings.
So what does this have to do with a neck gone wacky from a run-in with an innocent screen door nearly ten years ago?
My body finally had to surrender to something “outside” itself (namely, modern day neurosurgery) in order to fix what got “broken” in the flash of a second. The so-called accident was beyond weird, totally unexpected and seemingly unrelated to how my life was so, well, happy. Rushing, that’s how it happened. But we all rush! This time, though, I smashed into someone else’s closed screen door (which wasn’t “supposed” to be closed, therefore, my awareness of needing to avoid it wasn’t matched with its physical reality … sound familiar?).
Ten years ago my right arm got crunched (no broken bones, no blood) and immediately reacted with a violent surge of what I can only describe as the force of an electrocution. That’s right. You heard me correctly. My injured arm reacted as if IT had just been electrocuted. The rest of me was standing there, looking at my arm being the only victim, not my entire body. I and my four friends who were with me that day, watched in horrified astonishment, dumbfounded, as my right arm gyrated up and down, wildly jerking on its own willpower. And then — that arm went absolutely dead.
For months afterwards it could only hang by my side. It simply wouldn’t respond to any message my brain or muscles kept sending it, “Move, arm!!” No movement at all happened until I started doing yogic moves, helping it to regain some connection between the obvious severe nerve damage that had occurred.
Anybody in their “right mind” would have gone rushing to a doctor, and would have gotten an MRI on the spot.
But I … self taught yogini, proud of her happy healthy teacher-body, and committed to learning what life has to show me … figured I could heal myself.
WRONG!
Even the best of self-healers, and those who heal others, need help from what modern technology has to offer. Hence, the Covid vaccine (please consider getting yours if you haven’t!). My precious neck never had an MRI for the next period of time in which I visited countless doctors, healers of all sorts, PT folks, acupuncturists, and finally … out of desperation I visited my stem cell orthopedic specialist.
Years afterward a smart stem cell orthopedist ordered an MRI. No other medical specialist I’d gone to before even suggested imagery, seeing how “fit and healthy” I was, regardless of my continuing withering right arm.
I, a big fan of stem cell rejuvenating properties, went to see the orthopedist who’d successfully treated both my bum knees a few years before. In hopes he could “bring my arm back” by injecting my own stem cells in my bum arm, just as he had saved me from the misery of hobbling around with both knees whose miniscuses were torn torn to shreds from years of running barefooted (I said my body was wise, not “my over-thinking, smarty-pants mind” who thought bare-footed beach running so cool back in my 30s and 40s).
Finally, the MRI showed I had radiculopathy. The official name for the benign sounding condition of “pinched nerve” in my neck. My stem cell doc, a loving and role-model healthy tall tree of a man, looked me right in the eye and said:
“teZa, your incredible fitness was, in this case, the reason why nobody had ever ordered an MRI before. Every other doc, myself included (he’d looked over my arm injury a few years earlier while assessing my knees for stem cells) … just saw that you were recovering fine from what appeared to be only an arm-nerve injury. But what really happened was the door collision caused your neck to severely be displaced off its axis. And bone spurs started growing as a result of the trauma. The spurs are now so enlarged that they’re pushing into the thin layer separating your spinal column from your vertebrae that are affected, C4–5–6. You have to have neurosurgery. And soon! There’s no other way for you to have a high-quality life. I’m sorry.”
Thus begins the journey of what my neck is teaching me. It’s the subject I’m exploring in the next series of posts both here and on my website. Follow me and share my amazement of what our bodies can teach us … if we open our minds wide enough to listen to their wisdom.
Check out tezalord.com and don’t forget to sign up for my blog’s email list while you’re there. Stay healthy! Stay content. Discover bliss. I’ve written 4 books documenting this ongoing discovery of mine. Life is a marvelous gift. I am a joy junkie! Are you?
