A Time to Get Still

In the fall of 1999, I was a happy woman. The previous summer I had triumphantly led a group from my faith community, The Seekers Church in Washington, DC, on the Raleigh NC to Washington DC AIDS Ride. It was a 350-mile bicycle trip that raised millions of dollars for two Washington non-profits that provide direct medical and social services to people living with HIV/AIDS.

With the expectation that I might begin teaching yoga, I was invited by my yoga teacher to attend staff meetings at her studio. I was taking three classes per week, as well as being committed to an intensive home practice. Life was lighthearted and fun. I had a healthy, fit body, a loving faith community, good friends, and a promising career teaching yoga in my future.

At about 3:00 a.m. on the morning of November 4, I awoke from a horrible nightmare, terrified. In the dream, I had been shot numerous times, and the sound of myself choking on my own blood awakened me. Shaken, I turned on my light and walked around my apartment, praying for Jesus' protection. Later I woke again, unable to move the upper half of my body. When I tried to move my arms or sit up, excruciating pain seared from the side of my neck to my mid-back.

After an eternity, I managed to crawl out of bed, get some Advil in my system and call my yoga teacher. She was familiar with such things happening to people engaged in an intensive yoga practice. It was a muscle spasm, she said. It would go away, and in the meantime, I could practice the more restorative yoga poses.

Slowing down would be good practice for me I thought, as I had a tendency to push myself a bit too far and hard. While the crippling pain did go away after a few days, it never went away completely. Pain shifted to my mid-back and then to my low back and buttocks. Within a week, the pain was radiating down my right leg. Then my left leg.

So began more than a year of doctor's visits, MRI's, physical therapy and alternative healing modalities, all of which probably helped some, but most of which only brought huge medical bills, little relief from the pain, unbelievable frustration and utter despair. I was not getting better. By June I had given up hope of getting well again. I took no pleasure from being alive anymore. My yoga practice was devastated. My life was devastated. I felt like I was dying.

My physical pain necessitated slowing down not only my body, but my mind and spirit as well. In the stillness which was foreign to me, I struggled with difficult questions: Why me? Where is my power? My faith? Do I have the courage to live a life of chronic pain and physical limitation? What does it mean to have a body? Where is God in this?

By engaging these questions in therapy and spiritual direction, I began to see that my intensive yoga practice demanded the integration of unreconciled parts of myself. It provided a doorway for processing childhood and adolescent trauma which I had previously been able to ignore with the help of prescription medications and simply not knowing how, when and why to deal with it.

Over time, I've learned that the unpacking of a lifetime of stuffed-down rage and tears is what will ultimately open the way to my healing, and that it isn't necessary (or even ideal) to have a perfect body in order to be myself.

I am slowly healing and I believe that one day I will be completely well again. Do I wish I were completely healed right now? Of course. Do I understand why such pain and despair is necessary for my personal growth? No, I do not. Do I have the courage to live a life of chronic pain, if necessary? I don't know the answer to that one, either.

I know that for reasons I may never understand, I was called to this path as clearly as I was called to the path of yoga and to the Seekers community. I know that life, as painful or as joyful as it is, demands our ability to change and to shed old ways of thinking for new ones.

Regardless of how much physical healing happens, I hope that this experience will allow me to become the person I was created to be -- a more grounded, compassionate and integrated person, in body, mind and spirit.

Carolyn Shields is a member of the 20^th Anniversary Women's Event team, part of the Jubilate Mission Group at Seekers Church in Washington, DC and she is the AmeriCorps Coordinator for the Catholic Network of Volunteer Service.