Yoga Tales from Rural Maine: Why resting matters

On January 6th, I misjudged the clearance above my head and jumped—hard—in order to adjust my footing while standing on the steps of a fire truck during what should have been a painless firefighter training. Instead, I gave myself a concussion and a neck sprain and developed a killer migraine. That was a week ago.

One of the most fascinating but challenging aspects of my brain injury has been around my relationship to words. I am a person who is naturally able to quickly locate and articulate the words for the ideas I have and want to convey to a listener or reader. But since my concussion, I have had a fierce struggle to connect these dots. It sometimes takes a lot of time and mental energy.

When I was filling out forms about my accident, for instance, I could write the number of my street address with no problem, but I couldn't retrieve the word for the name of my street. I could understand that the box labeled Street wanted the name of the street where I lived. I knew what my home looked like; I could picture it in my mind. I could feel the feeling of home. But it took all of my determination and focus to pull the word "Central" out of the vast, foggy canyon of mental space behind my eyes. I also struggled for a long time looking for the word "Bucksport." I nearly wrote "Northampton," a town where I used to live. I started to draw the "N," but an alarm bell went off and my sluggish mental engine chugged away until I could retrieve “Bucksport” instead. It took at least three times as long as it would normally have taken to fill out that simple form and it made my head feel like it was splitting. That was about 36 hours after the concussion.

Today, my sister-in-law asked me to write down the ingredients for the smoothie I had made her. I was able to speak all the right words to her. I found “Yes” and “I’d be happy to,” for instance. I was able to understand the task and to remember where I kept pen and paper. But when it came time to write down the simple list of ingredients, I had to fight really hard. My brain felt so tired. I had to push; it actually felt like it took muscular effort. And with all that hard work…I still got it wrong.

Trying to locate the words and then write them down was so challenging that I used a work-around. Since my visual memory is still very sharp, I tried understanding the letters as shapes. I wanted to write “coconut milk.” I wasn’t able to write the words as words, per se, but I could picture the word and then copy the shapes onto the paper. This is a different mental process than spelling, I think.

I could picture the container. I could remember the taste. I knew I had added something called “coconut milk” to the smoothie. And I could say the word. But when I tried to turn that knowledge into a written item on a list…the letters c-o-c-o-n-u-t…they were…foreign. They floated and separated; they had no meaning as a sum total, strung together. It was confusing. “I know I should know this…,” I thought. It was a puzzler.

When I finally wrote the words, it felt more like putting the right-shaped pieces into the right-shaped hole, like when you were a kid and you had that toy? The plastic box and you had to put the star in the star-shaped hole and the crescent moon in the crescent moon-shaped hole…?

I’ve always been a good speller. I’ve always learned and retained vocabulary well. I’m a writer. Words, stories—this is how I interact with my universe. It is so…curious to realize that this complex process happens underneath all that. These complicated tasks are always happening, it’s just that usually my brain does them lightning quick, so it seems like they aren't there.

In the end, what I wrote on the list was “coconut millk.” I could see that it was wrong, but the migraine-type headache I’ve had since about 24 hours after I cracked my head was made worse from the effort; my brain felt what I can only describe as muscle fatigue. I decided it was way too much work to try spelling the word “milk” again—plus, I wasn’t confident I could get “coconut” twice, anyway, if I started over--so I just told my sister-in-law, with my voice, that I was having trouble with spelling, but that she knew what I meant.

Why can I say “coconut milk,” but not spell it? Why is that so hard? I suppose a neurologist could explain.

The important thing, I think, is that I’m not worried. I trust that my words will come back. I wrote “gap” the other day when I meant “lapse,” and it took me more than 24 hours to resolve the nagging feeling that "gap" wasn't what I'd meant to write and to locate the right word to take its place. Words are getting mixed up for me. But I know that won’t happen forever.

Until I get all better, I am using my restorative therapeutic yoga training to help me to cope and to heal. My doctor told me that the key to recovering fully is to rest the brain. He mentioned a recent study that showed (if I’m recalling correctly) that in a group of American teenagers who had received concussions, half were allowed to play video games while recovering and half were not. In the group that played video games, 70% of them (if I remember correctly) suffered more symptoms and slower recovery times. Luckily, I don’t play video games. “It turns out,” said my doctor, “that the brain is like a muscle. If you injure it, you have to really rest it. If you keep using it and using it, then it takes longer to recover and repair itself.”

This makes sense to me. I also read an article from the Mayo Clinic online that said watching TV was detrimental to concussion recovery because it required the brain to focus. So I have tried to rest my brain as much as possible—and this is remarkably hard. Watching movies or good TV programs is how I would normally “rest.” I haven’t cut out that sort of resting altogether, but I have spent a lot of hours lying in the darkness in restorative yoga postures with an eye pillow over my eyes. My migraine and neck sprain have been extremely painful, so it was a challenge to just…be. It is not easy to lie still in the quiet with nothing to distract me from the pain.

Sometimes, though, it is beautiful. This is what I wrote in my journal on Day Three of the pain: The thing that made me feel better was lying with an eye pillow and listening to TV or just being in the dark; it was shockingly hard to rest my brain; to let it do nothing—and to rest my body, too; stillness, closed eyes, rest; in the warmth and darkness alone with the fire and the cats, I rested and I visited with my pain; it cringed and withdrew from hugs or any touching; it flinched with cool or heat; the only thing that did not make it feel worse was quiet companionship; bare as bone, raw, solid, aching arch of pain and I sat next to it, with love, and we watched together, not touching; as the horizon blazed red, then orange, then yellow and then a radiant white Light, then twinkling darkness. Touching, attempting to “help” or control—these upset my Pain, intensified, prolonged, made worse her experience. I breathed; I stayed. I watched and waited; I feel blessed and peaceful; our home is miraculously, effortlessly warm; thank you; I am loved and well-supported by my partner—thank you; I saw a kind and helpful doctor; I saw Vicky, who is pure love itself; I have something for the migraine and Tylenol for the pain; I have a day to rest tomorrow; all is well; my head and neck sure are full of pain, but all is well. Thank you.

I suppose I share all of this because I’m not sure, culturally, that we are really prepared to rest—or to be with our pain with awareness and compassion. I don’t think we, as Americans, really understand what rest is. We watch TV or fiddle around on Facebook and we think we are resting…but I know for a fact that our brains are not at rest when they do these things. I know because of how much it hurts my head to check Facebook or watch TV.

Meditation is the act of Being. It’s that simple. I spend a little time doing this almost every day. But because of my injury, I have had a glimpse into just how lopsided even my life is—and I’m a yoga teacher! We need more eyes-closed quiet. We need time to recover from mental fatigue. It’s a real thing--even if we aren’t foolish enough to bonk our heads on a firetruck! I understand now how Deepak Chopra can spend two hours every day in meditation. I’m beginning to wonder how any of us survive if we don’t spend two hours every day in meditation…

Today is the first day that my pain is trending downward. While I’m still struggling to write grocery lists—and writing this post has ramped up my pain quite a bit and my right arm has gone all tingly—I’m encouraged to have (I hope) finally turned a corner so that I can go back to living without the feeling that my head is cracking open and my neck will never stop aching. If I continue to truly rest as much as possible, I expect that I will soon be writing grocery lists with all the speed and acuity of a woman can not only spell “acuity,” but who takes such things for granted.