Ashtanga Yoga and my experience with a permanent injury

I do not know Ashtanga Yoga practice without injuries. In fact, I began practising yoga regularly when I couldn´t walk, during the four months it took me recovering from an exposed fracture of the right ankle. The teacher adapted the asanas and this is how the practice was an important part of my rehabilitation. I took her Hatha classes for two years, between my 21 and 23 years old, and then, at 26, I was looking for something and I found Ashtanga. I had an ankle with the marks of a serious injury and a traumatic experience embedded in the body.

A permanent injury transforms your life and your self-perception. Even if you can live a completely normal and independent life, as I had the fortune, there is a body that dies and a new one is born in its place. One beautiful, survivor, with more limits and discomfort but also with more self-awareness. Priorities change after an accident: things that you thought were important no longer are. You take care of your energy. You became cautios.

In the nine years that I have been practising Ashtanga, I have gone through many states, including complete frustration and the feeling that my body would not be able to move forward on this path. Of course my practice changed a lot, I started attracted by the physical part and at a certain point I had to transform the way I practise. With time and a certain perspective, I think that my ankle thought me some good things regarding Ashtanga.

I´ve learnt that the body and the physical shape you get are not really important. I learnt to build a healthy relationship with my practice, in wich I don’t expect anything, where I accept things as they are. And that lack of expectation is one of the things I like about Ashtanga. I practice because I want it in my life every days, it doesn´t matter if it takes me somewhere else.

That does not mean that I do not perceive the limits that the injury imposes on me. It is a difficult task not to identify with my limits, and the breath is what takes my mind out of limitation: “Mind is the master of the senses, and the breath is the master of the mind” (Hatha Yoga Pradipika, 4: 26). Back to the breath, back to the drishti. Asana is just a circumstance you go through.

As I looked for teachers (I lived in many places and only with time I decided to have just authorised teachers) I had different experiences of the way they handled the fact of having a student with an injury: especially the first years, when I practised with a bandage on and still felt myself falling into the void when I closed my eyes to sleep. I guess everyone did their best. I will limit to thanking those who have accompanied me with respect and awareness of their role in helping me to remove the conditioning stored in my body.