There is something very strange about pain.

Whether it is physical or emotional, after a while it slowly becomes the centre of our world. It colours everything. How we think. How we move. How we meet other people. Sometimes we don’t even realise how much it has taken over until it finally eases.

Looking back over the past couple of months, I realise something I couldn’t see while I was in it.

It wasn’t the pain that taught me the most.

It was what happened the moment it eased.

Pain has many faces

Over the past few years, emotional pain has been one of my greatest teachers.

It taught me that pain rarely stays only where it begins. Emotional pain settles into the body. Physical pain affects the mind. One feeds the other until, at times, it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

It also taught me not to be so afraid of pain. Even when it feels like it will never go away, it changes. Maybe it disappears. Maybe it changes shape. Either way, it doesn’t stay the same forever.

What I didn’t have much experience with was continuous physical pain.

That lesson came this summer.

A month I had imagined differently

Two months ago I travelled to Portugal for a month-long Black Lotus Yoga Teacher Training with Ty Landrum.

Before I even left Mallorca, I was under quite a lot of stress. I could already feel it gathering around my right shoulder blade. It was a familiar tension, one I remembered well from my years in the corporate world, so I wasn’t particularly worried. I thought it would settle once I arrived.

Instead, it grew.

Whether it was the travel, the cold and humid weather, the intensity of practising every day, or simply unfortunate timing, the tension slowly became pain. Then stiffness. Then limitation.

Over the following weeks it only became worse.

I went from one professional to another trying to resolve it.

Nothing really helped.

Eventually the pain was there day and night.

Whether I was practising, sitting, lying down… it was simply there.

The tears probably weren’t only because of the pain itself.

They also came from the frustration of making such an investment in coming to this training. Time. Money. Energy. Heart.

I had been looking forward to it for months.

I really wanted to immerse myself in it completely.

Instead, I found myself constantly negotiating with pain.

Looking back now, I can also see that I wasn’t only struggling with the pain.

I was struggling with letting go of the idea I had about how this training was supposed to be.

How I was supposed to practise.

What I was supposed to experience.

Who I thought I was going to be while I was there.

The more reality moved away from that picture, the more I suffered.

Relief

Eventually, encouraged by some of my fellow trainees, I decided to take anti-inflammatory medication.

This is probably only the second time in my adult life that I’ve taken something like that.

Within a few days I felt light again.

The relief was enormous.

I suddenly realised I hadn’t been smiling much over the previous weeks.

It honestly felt like becoming a little kid again.

I couldn’t wait to get back into the shala.

I practised with so much joy.

That particular week happened to include a lot of shoulder-intensive movement patterns.

I could still feel the shoulder.

But compared to what I had been experiencing over the previous weeks, it felt almost insignificant.

So I just kept going.

I remember one of my fellow trainees asking me during partner work,

“Are you sure you want to do that with your shoulder?”

And I answered,

“Yeah… I’ll just do it gently. If it hurts too much, I’ll stop.”

Three days later the pain returned.

Only this time, it was much worse.

I had forgotten

A little later I went to see a physiotherapist and told her what had happened.

In broken English she suggested that, if I needed pain relief, I should take paracetamol rather than anti-inflammatory medication because the anti-inflammatory medication could interfere with the body’s healing process.

And suddenly…

I remembered.

Not because she told me something I didn’t know.

Because I knew it.

I had spoken about it so many times with students over the years.

I knew that masking the pain wasn’t the same as resolving the injury.

I knew that if I wasn’t willing to change the way I practised, removing the pain could actually make things worse.

I knew all of this.

And yet…

I had forgotten.
Or maybe that’s not quite true.
It wasn’t a conscious decision not to see.

That’s what still amazes me.

After so many years of practice, after so many years of teaching, after trying again and again to look honestly at myself and at life, I could still lose sight of something I knew so well.

Not because I stopped believing it.

But because, for a little while, I simply couldn’t see it.

I think the pain had become so consuming, and the relief so overwhelming, that I lost perspective.

Perhaps something else happened too.

I had become completely immersed in being a student.

I was so eager to learn. To absorb. To experience everything this training had to offer.

Somewhere along the way, the teacher in me quietly stepped aside.

When I think about it now, I’m not angry with myself.

I actually smile.

Because it reminds me how wonderfully human we all are.

How quickly we can forget.

How easily we become attached.

How no amount of experience exempts us from becoming students again.

What relief made possible

For a while I wondered why I hadn’t seen any of this sooner.

Then I realised something important.

When we are in the middle of pain, it is incredibly difficult to see the bigger picture.

Pain demands our attention.

It pulls us into survival.

Real understanding came later.

Only when there was enough distance.

Enough space.

Enough quiet.

We often hear that great suffering leads to great growth.

I believe that.

But I also think relief has an important role in that process.

Sometimes we need enough safety, enough space, or enough distance before we are actually able to learn from what happened.

Pain may open the door.
Relief allows us to walk through it.

Still practising

More than anything, these past two months reminded me that practice doesn’t make us immune to being human.

We don’t stop becoming attached.

We don’t stop forgetting.

We don’t graduate from being students.

Sometimes we forget the very things we have spent years learning.

And perhaps that isn’t failure.

Perhaps it is simply another invitation to practise.

To look again.

This time with a little more humility.

A little more humour.

And a little more compassion.

For ourselves.

And for each other.

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