Fibro-yoga

Yoga

I am not an expert in yoga. I'm not a qualified teacher or any of that. I have been doing yoga long before I was bed ridden with this thing. I went to classes on and off since my teens, through my 20's and only really stopped when this bitch actually floored me at 30. For 10 years I got fatter and lost all of my muscle tone. September last year I had had it. I quit trying to do almost anything else and began trying to move my body again. Fibro-yoga is not pretty. In the beginning it hurt like hell. I try and do it everyday. If it isn't happening in the morning due to fibro fog or pain I feel really shitty I haven't. I do try to do it just before bed if I haven't managed it first thing. Through trail, and mostly error I learned a few things.

Keep warm. 

Add more layers than you think you need, have a blanket handy and some hot tea if you can. Cold is not your friend during fibro-yoga.

Don't try and tough it out.

Use blocks, extra mats, extra supports. I use two mats on top of one another and a foam kneeling pad to be able to kneel for any length of time. It is not a failing it is self care. If full yoga is too much to start with try chair yoga. Add all the cushions, blocks, chairs and so on, that you need. 

Expect pain.

It is going to hurt for a while when you first start. You have fibro, its going to hurt, period. However fibro-yoga gives you more good days and spoons down the road. If you have a thing like seeing a doctor that day, you can save your spoons, but know it will hurt more again when you come back to it. Ice for joints, heat for muscles. Start with 10 minutes everyday to start with and build up to 30 minutes or an hour. I didn't start slowly and I didn't use the blocks and supports and it messed me up a lot. It was my knees that were really unhappy to start with but extra support, mats and the like helped.

Start small.

I used to be super fit and I tried many times to do what I used to be able to do and it messed me up. I sort of do a pre-yoga warm up. Just moving joints like my ankles, hands and hips. I suggest starting with the hands and feet. Go slowly. Take a lot of rests and resting poses. Do the lesser version of poses and positions first and don't beat yourself up if that day you can't get it. Or can only do it once. Plus size, pure beginner and elderly routines can show you softer poses. It might take a long time for you to be ready for a class, and you might not have the spoons to get there, do the yoga and go home.

Breath.

Work on deep breathing. Working with and taking more breaths before and after a pose. I find it helps me tune in to my body when I spend a large amount of time and energy trying to ignore it yelling at me. Sometimes it can take a few breaths to get where I want my pose to be. As I do it first thing in the morning when I am basically made out of those cheap glow sticks (and crack and pop accordingly) and last thing at night when I am very wobbly, I try and do balances in the morning and deeper stretches at night.

Don't lock your joints, or over extend.

Better to do it smaller and less “full” than damage a joint. It might feel like a step backwards but it is okay to “walk through” it. This is not a performance. It doesn't have to look pretty. This about your breath and your body. I was a dancer, I like it look a certain way and I hurt myself a lot in the beginning trying to make it look "pretty". Some days just getting the mat out and my arse on it is an achievement. Some days I have to do it in a jumper, or topless, or with finger-less gloves on.  I almost always don't wear a bra because it hurts too badly to wear one. Sometimes I wonder what someone watching me would think, but no-one is watching and it is what it is. 

Use music.

Once you have an idea of a routine and poses don't stick to the pace of other people. I recommend Yolanda Pettinato's Simply Yoga as a basic routine you can modify and soften, CurveSomeYoga's beginners Youtube video, and go from there. I avoid “fibro” yoga stuff because most of it is insanely difficult and I can't do it, I couldn't even have done it before I got super sick and I was hella fit then. Kneeling on a wooden floor is isn't an option for me! Honestly the poses are truly nuts and I wonder if anyone with fibro was consulted at all!

There will be days you just can't.

Today is one of those days for me. The weather is blisteringly cold and my hip pain kept me up a lot. I'm on my period and having hellish cramps and even though I got dressed into my yoga clothes, I came downstairs, sat on the sofa with the dog and cried instead. I want to be able to do it, but I can't. At least not now. I have to find a way to be okay with that, even though I am definitely NOT okay with that. 

Still I am trying my best to be the FibroWarriorWitch.

“Don't be so sensitive.”

“Don't be so sensitive.”

I must have had this said to me a hundred thousand times in my life. It was a recrimination, an accusation. A declaration that I am the problem. The thing is I found a few ways. I found alcohol at a pretty young age. I wasn't a fan of drunk, but numb, oh I liked that. I also just avoided people. Books were pretty good for numbing too. Whole other worlds where I was someone else. Animals and outside were pretty good too. Yet it never fixed the problem, me.

I was super sensitive, I am super sensitive to everything.

You see about two weeks ago now, just before my 40^th birthday a doctor I was sure was going to tell me I needed surgery on my knee told me I have fibromyalgia. Don't be so sensitive, it takes on a whole new meaning. I have all this weird. Not the pain, that made sense to me. The itchiness, the figdetiness, the can't be in that shop because of the way it smells, the way I shop with my hands because very few textures feel right against my skin. My pathological hatred of scratchy labels. My love of old clothes. Things worn soft, or that smell right like old huge leather jackets. My love/hate relationship with shoes. I love them but they are torture to wear. I spent as much time barefoot and naked as a child as I could. I still do. I have a sense of smell like a bloodhound. It can be so intense something simple like a wet newspaper can make me sick. Of course these things were explained away, I was just too sensitive.

I have now listened to quite a few people describe how it feels. All and none of which are right to me.

This image is how I feel almost all the time. Like I have these tender spiralling tendrils reaching out from my body. I can feel the air pressure change. I can feel the temperature drop outside. I can feel the moon. I can smell and taste and feel far beyond what is normal. Sometimes it is overwhelming. It is quite often excruciatingly painful and it is exhausting trying to stay in a human shape. I still try not to be so sensitive.

I mask a lot. I put perfume on my gloves and scarfs so I can breathe this controlled smell rather than the taxi drivers hair. I listen to music or the sound of the ocean to drown out the other sounds, from traffic to my neighbours. I wear crystals, or carry prayer beads as much to focus my sense of touch as much as their other benefits.

I don't like swimming in pools with lots of other people, the water intensifies everything, as much as I love the water on my skin. I tolerate baths but I can never get comfortable, it isn't soothing. It feels like a wet coffin I get clean in. Much of my firbromyalgianess that isn't pain (and even that on occasion) has been seen as my person failing so often I believed it. That feels quite intense. It feels like I am finally seeing my whole life through this lens. 

In fact I was told as a child there was no such thing as pain, and if I felt it I had made it (martial arts can be a funny thing). Again feeling and more especially showing pain or weakness was bad, a failure. I fractured my collarbone as an 8 year old child and only the next day was I taken to hospital. 

How do I learn to acknowledge my pain and not drown in it? How do I learn to stop minimising my experience? How to accept help, when I can't walk or even stand?

How do I learn to be the fibro warrior witch?