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Sunday, January 25, 2009

R.I.C.E.


Today in yoga teacher training we talked about injuries and scar tissue. While Geoff Outerbridge was talking about scarred and injured tissue in the physical body, I was silently relating it to my own subtle body and how I've got some scar tissue and some inflamed places as well.

He said that to treat acute injuries you should use RICE. Rest, Ice, Compress, and Elevate. I can totally relate that to my current hurt. Rest it - take some space from it like is happening right now. Ice it - use medicine or a long bath or something to soothe it. Compress - hold myself in tight so I don't make any disturbing movements or phone calls. Elevate - listen to inspiring teachings or be with people and get uplifted.

And for scar tissue, the deal is to break it up. Get in there and dig at it. Bust up that tissue so it reforms in the right pattern rather than a haphazard pattern. So I'm doing that too. Looking at the past issues, letting them hurt a bit while I help them to reorganize. And this scar tissue manipulation is usually something you hire a manual therapist for - massage, chiro, physio, whatever. So in this case, I've hired my coach and an old therapist to help me reorganize my subtle tissue.

Geoff said the problem comes when people don't take care of the injury or the scar tissue that forms. If you wait until it's too late, chronic pain can arise and it can be much harder to deal with. I think that applies too to psychic or emotional pain. Gotta deal with it. When you don't take care of injuries or old scar tissue, what happens is you compensate physically and you walk funny or can't do certain poses or get pain in other areas in your body. A shoulder pain could be caused by an old ankle injury, for instance. Same thing with emotional pain.

Today's massive hurt (injury) being in the situation I'm in is probably related to me not dealing with something that happened a long time ago. If I'd been dealing with that, then I wouldn't have allowed this situation to get to the point it's at now. It wouldn't have come up this way. But it did and I see it and I'm taking care of it now so hopefully it won't get re-injured again in the future. He said people get injured picking up a pencil off the floor and think "I shouldn't have picked that up." He said that's not the point - what have you been doing the past decade or two? That's where the problem lies. I see that being true for me in my emotional situation as well.

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And then I found this video and it made me cry again because this is where I was at but I was there by myself.

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