Curing back pain with Pasasana

Back in the day, I spent five years odd hitching around, mostly Europe and North America. This was, what, early 80's, The wicked witch Thatcher was in power and not so great Britain was a distasteful place to be.

I picked up all kinds of work, built roads, roofs, houses, laid concrete, plastered walls, emptied rubbish bins and worked kitchens, a lot of kitchens.

My favourite restaurant to work at was Pizza Express and the first  job I got there was after coming back from living in a cave in Crete. I was big and hairy and pretty damned grotty, went for a washing-up job at their restaurant in Beckenham. At the end of the interview the manager told me to clean up and start Monday as his Assistant Manager.

I worked there for a few months, was taught to spin pizza by a Sicilian named Leo who kept a gun in his locker just like the Yoga police video doing the rounds. He was the pizza police and I would have to stop him night after night from rushing out to get his gun whenever somebody complained about there not being enough cheese on their pizza. Good times. May came around and I walked out with the money I had in my pocket ( around thirty quid, that was a lot, the first time I only had half that ) headed for Dover, jumped on a ferry and hitched/walked to Switzerland.

Must have worked at ten different Pizza Express restaurants over the years, from Soho to Brighton I must have played them all ( no, actually still around ten but that did include Soho and Brighton) helped pay my way through Uni and gave me a taste for good jazz.

Rutherford College UKC

It was while working at my favourite pizza Express in Fulham that I put my back out. I was lifting a couple of trays of pizza dough to put in the proofer and out it went. Couldn't sit up for a week. That and my old Aikido knee injury meant the end of any road building or general labouring jobs, time to go back to school.

I mention this because every now and again my back goes in exactly the same spot. not as bad but bad enough. It hurts, getting out of bed I feel like an old man and have to very gingerly enter the first few Sun salutations. Yeah, I practice, if yoga's not good for a bad back then what's the point.

Actually it's the yoga that puts it out, not always, a little while back it was slipping over in the snow on my bike, but a few times it's been eka pada sirsasana, that leg behind head pose. I must approach it slightly cack-handed every once in a while, maybe twice a year it does my back in, just above my hip slightly to the right of my spine.

So I take it easy for a couple of weeks, skip LBH, curiously backbends are unaffected, can still drop back, it's the bending forward that hurts. After a month or so I notice the pain has gone but never sure when exactly, just figured it was an inflammation that had finally cleared up.

I did it again last week, really painful this time, stiff as anything.It was a good excuse to explore Ramaswami's spinal exercises from his newsletter, nice gentle postures. It helped a little but still stiff and painful  every morning.

Anyway this morning, being my day off, I had a little more time to practice, I did a longer version of the tadasana sequence which includes pasasana. It's a little colder here today so I knew, being less sweaty,  I could get a good bind and make it nice and deep. just as I began to bind my wrist my back makes this almighty cracking noise down the bottom of the spine and then near the top as I completed the wrist bind. My first thought was that i wish I'd caught it on camera. My second thought was that it didn't crack like that on the other side......my third thought was that the pain had gone.

Hallelujah !!!

I tell you it was like being shot full of morphine... I had that once, twelve hours in agony with Kidney stones before the hospital finished their tests and decided to put me out of my misery. A second after they put the morphine into the drip I felt it cool and clean, running through my veins chasing all the pain from my body.

This morning was a little like that.

Anyone remember my Epsom salt, I'm Superman post from last year? The rest of practice felt a little like that too.

Best of all now I know. Next time the back pain rears it's trickster head, I'll be the guy with the beatific smile on his face squatting at the end of the mat with his arms wrapped around his knees.

Here's the Vinyasa Karma approach, the pasasana comes in after about seven minutes.



Oh and I seem to have stopped practicing Ashtanga ( I know, said that before but this time not even a Friday Primary), what's that all about.

.....and where does that leave this 'Ashtanga' blog.