The Return

Part IV of On the Mat, Off the Mat

It was the second day of the training and we were working on backbends. Dorian Shorts — a yoga instructor and therapist whose practice prescribes posture and breath as healing for diagnosed conditions — was assisting me in full wheel. His hands were on my body. I was a few years out from breast cancer treatment. For a long stretch of that recovery, I could not stand to be touched. I raised my hand at the beginning of every class for the opt-out card.

That was not the body in this room.

The body in this room had asked, in writing on the intake form, to be assisted. The body in this room was in full wheel, lifted, breathing, being held by a credentialed practitioner whose hands knew exactly what they were doing. My task in the pose was not to go deeper but to slow down — to keep the practice from outrunning the body that had only recently come back to it. That instruction itself was the discipline. Restraint, not depth, is what prevents reinjury in a body that has been through what mine has.

What I understood, lying back into the adjustment, is that building trust with myself was the precondition for building trust with anyone else. The trust meant I could speak up — for the assist, for the pace, for the body I was in that day. That capacity to speak up for oneself is something I recognize in another form when I sit beside clients who cannot, in their moment, speak up for themselves. The work of advocacy begins with the practitioner who knows how to advocate for her own body in the room.

The mat is where I learned. The mat is also where I keep relearning.