Silence is an empty space,
Space is the home of the awakened mind.
—Buddha
On the Fourth of July weekend when I was fifteen years old, I was with a group of friends chicken-racing down the middle of Highway 124 at dusk. A driver coming over the rise either didn’t see us or couldn’t stop fast enough and barreled into us. The impact sent bodies flying into the air in all directions. One of my girlfriends suffered a broken back, another a fractured pelvis, and I sustained a skull fracture and a broken collarbone. When I’d landed, I skidded across the pavement, scraping most of the skin off one side of my body.
My parents had gone to a party in Angola, Indiana, about an hour and a half from Bluffton. I had recently gotten into drugs, and that afternoon my friends and I had gone to the house of a local dealer. A beautiful brunette who looked like Pocahontas opened the door. We bought some acid called “Love” and some Quaaludes.
Pretty soon we were tripping and chicken-racing. Three teams with one person on the shoulders of another were running side by side, trying to knock each other off. Laughing and careening into one another, trying to be the last one standing, we never saw the car coming.
My older brother Joe was at a party with friends that evening. Someone at the party heard there had been an accident and that I might be involved. Joe rushed to the hospital and gave the doctors permission to do more than just stop the bleeding. Drifting in and out of consciousness in the ER, I became aware that the monsignor from our church had appeared beside me. According to people who were there, he asked about administering last rites, and I said, “I’m not going to die, Monsignor. So, please, get the hell out of here.”
The only thing I remember about my stay in the hospital is screaming when the nurses changed my bandages—it was so painful. While the doctors and my family focused on my physical injuries, I was more scared about what was happening to my brain: I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t think clearly. The world seemed to be going along just as before, but inside I wasn’t the same.
Shortly after I was released, I went to a party (which we called a “kegger”). My head was still partly shaved where my scalp had been sutured and I was wearing an orange-and-white-checkered halter top with a shoulder harness over it that held my broken collarbone. The whole right side of my body was covered with bandages. I felt like some girl Frankenstein.
A plastic cup of beer was in my hand and I was swaying to the music. I lived for music; like all my siblings I worshiped Bob Dylan and knew the lyrics to all his songs by heart. Now I couldn’t even remember the first verse to “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
When I went back to school for my sophomore year in the fall, I had trouble concentrating. I’d been a straight-A+ student before the accident. Now, I had to study incredibly hard to get a B and sometimes even a C, which was as good as an F to me. I knew that, in some way, my brain was damaged.
Frustration in life is inescapable. We’ve all had the experience of losing something that we would desperately like to have back. The yearning creates internal anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and conflict. I wasn’t able to accept this new reality and the post-accident brain I now had. I was also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though no one diagnosed it at the time. For years afterward, the sound of screeching car brakes became a trigger for intense anxiety and panic. Sometimes, just lying in bed at night and hearing a car drive by would be enough to make me freeze and shake violently in terror.
I needed relief. After the accident, I found that one of the most therapeutic activities I could do was running. I’d been an accomplished runner since I was eight years old when I’d won a 50-yard dash at a Junior Olympics–type event in Watkins Glen, New York. Even after the accident, I set records at Bluffton High School in the 50-yard dash, 100-yard dash, anchor leg on the 440, as well as hurdles, long jump, and high jump. Some of those records stood for thirty years.
Running had always put me into a kind of trance. It was one of my first meditative experiences, and it let me escape from my self-berating, never-good-enough routine. Running produces endorphins that are calming; running lowers anxiety. I loved the feeling I had when I ran. It was shelter from the storm.
Running also made me feel seen. Because I had so many siblings, excelling at something was a way to stand out. Later, the sweet and intense rush of drugs hitting my veins would remind me of the feeling of running, of breaking the tape at a finish line—the world slows down and becomes beautiful.
I also found relief in prayer. Good Catholics that we were, our family went to confession every Saturday, Mass every Sunday, and we kids attended catechism classes on Wednesday evenings. My brothers couldn’t have cared less about praying but went through the motions to please my mom. I loved praying. I shared a bedroom with my older sister Peggy, and being younger, had to go to bed earlier than she did. I’d pull the blankets over my head and repeat, over and over, “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” The Hail Mary was my first mantra. I thought if I could just pray enough, everything would turn out okay: Bluffton, Dad’s job, Mom’s tears—and me.
Soon, drugs gave me more relief than either running or prayer. I started with marijuana and quickly moved on to hashish and alcohol. Before long, I was dabbling in hallucinogens (mescaline and acid). With drugs, people tend to gravitate to one end of the energetic spectrum or the other. Some prefer uppers—like speed and cocaine—and others like downers, such as Quaaludes, which became my drug of choice. They made me feel comfortable, relaxed, and sexy.
We can choose among many paths in life. Each of us is looking for one that feels right, that fits our sensibilities, that will help alleviate our suffering, and maybe even create a little enlightenment. My mother had the Catholic Church with its rituals and Ten Commandments. My friends who are Buddhists follow the Eightfold Path with its meditation, right speech, right intention, and right action. Yogis have ashtanga, the “eight limbs” for how to live a meaningful and purposeful life.
• • •
If my accident at age fifteen had any upside, it’s that I have a heightened empathy for the traumas, large and small, that my students have experienced. At times, I can see where trauma is held in their bodies, and I try to figure out sequences that can create relief and release for them. Trauma can show up as tension, anxiety, or illness. Some common places of binding are the pelvis, the diaphragm, the throat, the jaw, the hamstrings, and the shoulders and neck. I can sense trauma in a student’s choppy breath or darting eyes. When we release the “stuck” areas in our bodies, we’re better able to glimpse what yoga calls the true or authentic self. This is a big part of why we step onto the mat: we’re looking for freedom from the imprints and obstructions that are held in our bodies. We intuit that we’re not free, but we don’t know why.
When we practice yoga, we learn that we can sit with our traumas and observe them instead of trying to run from them. We notice where the blockages and obstacles in our bodies are, and we recognize the stories we create to hold them there. Physical injuries can create scar tissue. Fear and grief and pain also can create debilitating, invisible scar tissue. Yoga practice often brings these unconscious blockages to the surface and helps release them.
In order to unlock these areas of tension slowly, methodically, and mindfully, it’s important to sequence yoga poses correctly. With care, we can chip away at habitual ways of being in the world that cause us isolation and suffering. Yoga sequences are designed to uncover our birthright: love, joy, and freedom. The body can experience these essences as space, ease, and liberation.
For many people, yoga is simply stretching or exercising. It is that, but it’s also so much more. Why do we put our bodies in strange poses that are uncomfortable and challenging? Why do we practice meditation, which can be even more difficult than the physical practice of yoga? Asana wrings stress and tension out of the body—then we sit in meditation with what arises. We attempt to observe ourselves calmly without running, knowing that the fear of the imaginary is often much worse than the reality. As Mark Twain put it, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
Like the Department of Homeland Security, our bodies have their own voluminous manuals of “just in case” defenses. Armor builds up around pain and makes us hard, alienated, and sick. The mind is brilliant at making up stories that explain and justify our armor—and these can paralyze us. Our stories are what Patanjali, who compiled the Yoga Sutras, calls the citta vritti, the “fluctuations of the mind.”
The first step toward liberation is to realize that we have this incessant “monkey mind,” or chatter, going on in our heads. Instead of becoming prisoner to it, we can use yoga to help us develop the ability to witness our habits and our habitual responses. When we practice the eight limbs of yoga, our minds quiet, like a child who’s being held. As the surface ripples on the lake calm, we see the jewel that sits obscured in our hearts. This is what we do on our yoga mats: we sit with what is here and now so that we can become vulnerable, exposed, and real. As the stories buried in our bodies emerge, we open up space for them so they don’t have the same hold over us. With that perspective, we can see our own beauty. As the Persian poet Hafiz writes: “There are so many unopened gifts from our birthday.” Do we want to die with our gifts—our potential—locked inside us?
The first thing to notice is where the dumping grounds in your body are; there can be many, and they change. My dumping ground as a child was my belly—and I got an ulcer in the third grade. Later, my dumping ground became my throat—I was scared to talk for fear of looking stupid. After that, it was my back—I didn’t feel supported. And now it’s my shoulders—I carry the weight of motherhood, marriage, and a business.
During my Jivamukti Yoga Teacher Training, I had the privilege of meeting Sri Swami Satchidananda, a renowned Indian spiritual teacher who developed a system he called Integral Yoga. Satchidananda said that when we are practicing pranayama (a channeling of the prana or “life force” through breath work), we are closest to God during the pause at the end of the exhalation. He explained that the pause is the experience of space and peace.
Yoga is about the search for space, physically and emotionally. We aren’t trying to erase our stories, but to place them in a larger context. What happens when you put a teaspoon of salt into a cup of water? The water becomes highly salty. What happens when you put a teaspoon of salt into a lake? The teaspoon of salt is still there, but its impact is minimal.
In yoga, we aim to become the lake, to put our problems and issues into that larger context so we aren’t thrown off balance as easily, so we can keep connected to our centers. Looking to expand our perspective on personal suffering, the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “Even as they kill my people, a flower blooms.” My mom used to say that her heart grew bigger with every baby—that there was plenty of love for us all.
After my accident on Highway 124, my brain never worked the same way again. I became a different person as a result, but I now understand that I’m more than just the part of my brain that was damaged. My dance today is complete, fulfilling, and maybe even more interesting and beautiful as a result. There are days when I can barely taste the salt because my lake is big enough. “Enlightenment feels like spaciousness in the joints,” Swami Satchidananda said. How lovely when we begin to feel it.