It Hurts Everywhere
I do this specific kind of yoga called “cham seon yoga”, and it’s a routine made by a Korean Buddhist monk who used to be a bodybuilder (!!!). He used yoga to fix his severely impaired body which helped him practice as well.
I felt the need to do yoga because of my practice. Over time I learned how to love the process of diving deeper into myself and deconstructing all frameworks of reality as I knew it. But the pain and discomfort that comes from prolonged sitting really messed with deeper introspection.
For this reason Buddhists have walking meditation. You alternate between static sitting meditation and dynamic walking meditation. But since I was interested in prolonging my inquiry sessions, I found this yoga routine and I’ve been doing it for years.
My mother in law never exercised and my wife and I have been trying to get her in shape for the time she’s here. My wife is a pilates instructor so my mother in law and I have been taking her classes, and at home we do the yoga together. Her struggling with the moves reminds me of when I started doing yoga.
I have a big problem with lower body flexibility (although my jiujitsu teammates might disagree). Upper body and spine I’m pretty flexible, but oof my hamstrings, quads, and calves are super tight all the time. The hips! They’re so tight AND painful.
So at first the pain was all about the posterior chain of the legs. When my hamstrings were crying in pain all I could think of was “oh man, if only my hamstrings would hurt less! Then the yoga would just flow!”.
Plot twist! Turns out achieving a certain level of flexibility opens another blocker within the body. Now that my legs were allowing me to enter certain poses, I found a new problem with my core that wouldn’t stay fixed during poses.
So I addressed my core, after which I was able to reach the hip problem. And like the title of this email says, “it hurts everywhere“.
And it couldn’t be better.
Yes, it hurts tremendously and it makes me so tired. However the sense of circulation that you get after the yoga and the amount of focus you’re able to cultivate over time is almost unbelievable. Pain feels bad, but it allows me to access what I want to access so it is good for me.
There are times when I’m too tired from jiujitsu or don’t have the time to do yoga. So it feels nice to not do yoga, but if I don’t do it for more than a few weeks my hips start aching during meditation. So comfort feels good, but it’s not beneficial for me.
I see my baby nephew with insane baby flexibility and I’m reminded that pain is the karmic cost of staleness, stiffness accumulated over time. Crazy to think that I was born that flexible too, but I lived my life in a way that would make me lose all of it without my awareness.
When you work on your life, you will find a similar struggle. Your improvement in a certain area of your life will surface a new challenge. At times it feels like life is just an endless sequence of challenges.
Just like yoga, challenges feel bad but they demand that I grow and become the person I want to be. Challenges are beneficial for me, if I can widen my perspective to that level.
What is your relationship with challenges?
🪞 The Reaction Mirror will uncover your unconscious patterns of karma, and like yoga your results will change over time.
💪 The Resilience Test will show you where your mental strength is at, so you can face challenges at a level where it won’t hurt and damage you.
Let me know what comes up for you!
📚 This essay now lives in a searchable library of 450+ writings, organized by theme.
Very insightful article, I needed this today!