Creating Balance After Trauma

It’s normal to feel “disconnected” after an illness or injury. The meds, tests, treatments, not to mention the emotional and mental impact can leave you feeling scattered long after the physical healing.
Here yoga instructor and author of the soon to be released book, “Reinventing Yourself With Yoga and Meditation After a Traumatic Illness or Injury,” Kat Robinson, explains how living a yoga lifestyle can bring you back to wholeness.
When I was just 17 I was bitten by a tick infected with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, that little tick almost ended my life. It was a long road to physical recovery and an even longer road to mental, emotional, and spiritual recovery. It actually wasn’t until I started doing yoga in my thirties before all of the pieces came into light.” says Kat
“I had grown up , gotten married, had children, but there was always this feeling of incompleteness, like nothing seemed to fit, I could never put my finger on it. I just floundered. What I had come to realize through yoga was that I had changed and everything in my life had changed after my illness. The things that I depended on most were not a part of me anymore. I went through emotional upheavals, my personal relationships changed. I lost myself somewhere along the line. When I started doing yoga, I didn’t exactly find myself again, what I found was that the girl who went in the hospital that day and the girl who came home were two different people. And what I had to do was grieve for the girl who did not return before I could rejoice at the new person I had become.”
Going through varying ranges of emotions from gratefulness to anger is a normal part of the process. Yoga and meditation can be very beneficial to get in touch with these emotions and feelings and to give them a voice.
“When I returned home after a long hospital stay, I went through so many different feelings, not all of them are perceived to be positive, however, with the right support, feeling these perceived negative emotions and feelings can have a positive impact on the recovery as long as you don’t get stuck. It was difficult for the people around me who did not understand what I was going through. I was 17, a senior in high school, at a time when I should have been enjoying that part of my youth, I was in a hospital, I missed all of the end of the year school functions that I had all year to get to. I was left out of the loop with my friends, and I was angry. But when I would try to talk about it, my family and friends would remind me of how lucky I was to be alive AND I was, AND, I really didn’t feel so lucky. Then when I read in the paper that a 5 year old that lived in my area had died from the same thing, I felt ashamed and didn’t talk about it anymore. In fact, I got rid of all the get well cards, newspaper clippings, etc. I guess I felt as though if I didn’t acknowledge that this happened then I maybe it really didn’t.. This set the precedent of trying to control everything for the next several years.”
When I first began to do yoga I tried to control every part of it just as I had tried to control everything else in my life. I would have emotions bubble up and immediately push them back down. As my practiced progressed, pushing those feelings down became harder. Then on day in Warrior II I looked down at my foot to check my alignment and noticed the spots on my legs from scarring and I began to cry. And cry. And cry. I realize now that I had never given myself a chance to grieve for the loss in myself that I had experienced and therefore, could not fully accept myself as I am. Yoga helped me get through this. With meditation I learned to stop trying to control my thoughts and feelings but to just be with them. The same was true of asana practice. I was to go into the pose as far as comfortably could and stop and experience the feelings in the pose. To not judge those feelings or myself in the pose but again to just be with them.
In tree pose I learned to be in the moment, to learn how the micro adjusting of my grounded foot could make me so strong, and that nothing is permanent, just as we have to adjust in tree moment to moment to stay balanced we also have to do this in life, to stay balanced. I began to feel more loving, to myself and others, as a result of opening my heart in poses like camel, and pigeon, I felt the empowerment in side plank, the anti depressant qualities of inversions, and the grounding of mountain pose. Through this I was able to get through all five of the steps of grieving, I had been in the denial process for years, which is the first step, the problem was I had gotten stuck, with yoga I was able to stop denying and start moving forward into the next 4 steps.

The 5 steps of grieving are:

1. Denial. Acting as though nothing had happened.
2. Anger. Why did this happen to me?
3. Bargaining. I will do anything if…….
4. Depression and feeling of sadness for the loss.
5.Acceptance. The true healing begins.

If we don’t go through steps 1 - 4 we can not get to step 5 and we will not fully heal.

It is also important to take care of yourself in other ways, such as eating a clean diet of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, staying away from processed and fast foods.
The ancient practice of neti, nasal irrigation is so opening and cleansing for the breathing process and to sharpen the mind. I also recommend dry brushing the skin daily. Cleansing the body in every aspect can rid you of the negative energies of what you have been through.
I finally realized that by denying what had happened was actually letting what happened define me. When I learned that this was just another experience in my life, I was able to let that definition of me go and live again.