Beyond Movement: Yoga Philosophy – Beyond Meds: Alternatives to Psychiatry

Since I frequent disability circles I often hear about how annoying and traumatic it can be to be told “just practice yoga.” I get it. Yoga is often touted as a cure all from people who know absolutely nothing about disability and chronic illness.

Yoga has been a way for me to find and practice peace and healing while still being profoundly disabled. You can both be disabled and be a yogi!

Beyond Movement

Yoga is not about stretching. It’s not necessarily even about moving. It can include those things but it doesn’t need to. Unfortunately, the word has been misunderstood and misused in the West.

Yoga rehabbed me out of bed when I’d lost complete muscle control. I had absolute atrophy. I started doing things like restorative and yoga nidra in bed. Truly barely moving and it was still yoga. So one of the problems is people don’t know what yoga is and how it includes movement from virtually nothing to yes, fitness yoga which really isn’t yoga most of the time. Fitness yoga is a mutation of Western society on the philosophy of yoga.

Yoga got me out of bed when I had been bedridden for 5 years.

When you think of yoga as more of a philosophy rather than a practice of specific movements then it opens up the world. I talk about yoga off the mat. That sometimes includes movement but a lot of times it does not.

Yoga as a philosophy can take a lifetime of study. I am just sharing a tiny little aperture of my own experience in a direct way. It’s really just a smidgen of what there is to know via that discipline.

The yoga I do might be considered an amalgam of a lot of different yogas. I took a course that I ran with later that was micro yoga. You barely moved. You laid there and barely moved on the floor.  I would take one class of all sorts of restorative and rehab yoga and I learned how to go from there.

But when I was bedridden a friend came over who teaches non-dogmatic crazed yoga and she just showed me what to do and it was basically barely moving until I could move more. (Lifting a leg, rotating the ankle. Lifting a arm and rotating the wrist. )  Doing it mindfully etc. that just slowly built up to more. And yes, it took a long time. As I learned how to walk again. Walking to the mailbox was part of my yoga. … And a thanks goes to  Kristine Kaoverii Weber (SUBTLE YOGA)  who was really the only yoga teacher who saw me at that time completely disabled in bed.

I also learned to be extremely free about my own accommodations. Once I got out of bed, I didn’t hang around if a teacher didn’t let me do whatever I needed to do.

And now I don’t use teachers really I just integrated yoga into my life and that’s why I call it yoga off the mat because it’s basically mindful moving at all times and sometimes that still means I can barely move. Still now today I become incapacitated and can barely walk at times. Tardive dyskinesia does that and so does lyme.

and one little thing I’ve learned for movement:

Yoga tip for the chronically ill. Do yoga that you might do laying down flat on the ground, standing up against a wall. It helps with reestablishing being upright if you’ve been bedridden a lot. Experiment make your own moves, do them slowly, and deliberately. Feel muscle, bone and fascia.

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