Fire of Love, by Aadil Palkhivala

Aadil Palkhivala is the co-owner of Yoga Centers in Bellevue, WA, and co-director of the College of Purna Yoga teacher training programs.  He teaches yoga and teacher trainings at Yoga Centers and around the world. 

Read the exerpt below or download the entire chapter: FIRE OF LOVE:  CHAPTER 5 - FEELING

Feeling, by Aadil Palkhivala

“Never apologize

for showing feeling.

When you do so you

apologize for truth.”

—Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

He was a novelist and England’s first (and only) Jewish prime minister. According to one account, Disraeli arrived at a party wearing “green velvet trousers, a canary colored waistcoat, low shoes with silver buckles, lace at his wrists, and his hair in ringlets.”

One day, a woman in her mid-forties (I’ll call her Jill) came up to me after a class and told me she had been experiencing severe sciatic pain. When I asked about her life and her yoga practice, she told me she had been running marathons intensely for the past year. Prior to that, she had lived a life of relative inactivity. She had worked in an office, with her only “exercise” being getting up from her desk each hour to get a cup of coffee.

Jill said that in the last few months, she had hardly been able to walk because the sciatic pain had become so intense, spreading all the way down to her toes. She had been to physical therapists who had tried to strengthen her legs, and massage therapists who had worked on her buttocks until they were sore. She was doing as much yoga as possible to push the pain out of her system. Yet none of this was working. No matter how hard she fought the pain, it only got worse.

When I met with Jill the next week, I first asked her to do the Purna Yoga Hip Opening Series. Moments into it, I understood the problem. I asked her to start over again, but this time to make very small movements, move very slowly, and focus on her breathing. I then instructed her to bring her awareness inside her body, inside her hip, and then inside her pain. I asked her to breathe light into the pain, and feel the changes that were taking place within her hip.

I then asked her to explore the feelings that were stuck inside her hips and buttocks. From where did her desire to push so hard come? Was it a desire to prove that she could do anything she wanted to do? That she was still an invincible teenager? What was motivating her to run so hard that she was running herself into the ground? How did she feel about growing old? Did she feel that she was not living her life, not expressing her dharma? What were her fears?

With each breath, I asked her to release her fears, and we used other techniques of Purna Yoga Meditation to assist the process. Half an hour later, she sat up with tears in her eyes. As she walked around the room, at first slowly, and then with confidence, she said to me with a smile, “This is the first time I have not felt pain in six months.”

In making pain her enemy, Jill had missed the meaning in its message. Her body was communicating something essential through the pain, but the message was not getting through — her forgetting to feel was the failure. Now she could walk away from her pain rather than run into it again and again, all the while trying to run away from it.

SUCCESS BY FORCE?

The survival of the fittest. Looking out for number one. Getting to the goal. Winning. These are the ways of force.

The survival of the most sensitive. Looking in for number one. Living the journey. Growing along the way. These are the ways of yoga. We are often taught to succeed by force. Diseases are considered to be mortal enemies, and we must destroy them before they destroy us. We must “win the war” on cancer! In schools and workplaces, we are tacitly encouraged to dominate our peers, to compete in “the struggle for existence,” to climb the corporate ladder by trampling over the heads of others. 

©2008 by Aadil Palkhivala

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