Stress and me

I had resisted for a long time to write my experiences with Yoga. The last 1.5 years has transformed me to such an extent in every possible way that sometimes I don't recognize myself. My resistance to write was due to two factors - first, I could hardly get these experiences in words, in any language; second, it will be easy for anyone to judge me as one other crazy being. Anyway, whatever happened to me in the last one week is magical and marvelous(though not the first time).

Since I started practicing yoga and kriyas(www.ishafoundation.org), I have been very calm, composed, joyful and free of many physical ailments (especially back pain - my 24/7 partner for 6 years). Life was going in a very positive way. I got busy with volunteering at Isha yoga, Center for Visually Impaired(CVI, Atlanta, GA) and few other organizations. I had 2 amazing opportunities to give a car ride to Sadhguru. Got wonderful friends and social life in Atlanta improved. The list goes on and on.....

However, 3 months back, I started suffering from severe back pain and slowly I started feeling that I was going back to how I was 2 years earlier. I would get upset or emotionally disturbed without any reason. However, I was still not losing control and I was able to handle everything in a peaceful, calm way. But back pain was something that I could not tolerate and I tried changing my chair in the office, sitting posture, sleeping posture and also stopped doing Hata yoga. Nothing helped me. I realized that there was some problem with my mind or body that was impacting the other, but I couldn't figure out the problem.

Suddenly, last week(1 day after volunteering at the Isha Yoga Inner Engineering class), out of nowhere I felt like talking to my husband for a long time. I didn't know what I was going to talk. I just called him from work and luckily he was also free. As I started talking, I realized that there was one issue that came up 3 months ago and one part of my mind knew that it's not a big deal. Meanwhile, another part of my mind kept thinking about that issue and slowly a poison tree had been developing in me, without my knowledge. My good sane mind had been suppressing this. This suppression had developed so much stress in me without my awareness. Last week I got sick, rather felt so sick for no good reason. After I realized the problem and became aware that this is the root cause, life is back on track. Right after I was done talking to my husband, my body felt like water flowing in a river that we call 'Existence'. I felt like there were knots in every cell of my body that untangled themselves.

The next day I did surya namaskar and realized how flexible I was. In the last 3 months, I had trouble bending forward. It's so surprising how stress killed my body's functions. Inspite of reading about it and hearing it in the yoga class, it's great to learn this experientially.