Practice with Paul Grilley

"When you some day realise that your left side is different from your right side, here's the mantra to use:

I am the only one.
I am insufficient in some way.
There is something wrong with me.
Om shanti.

Repeat until all self confidence is gone."

-- Paul Grilley with a twinkle in his eye

First day of the Paul Grilley workshop was today at Flow Yoga. There were maybe thirty people in the room, mostly yoga teachers, and everyone was at their best behaviour. It's funny - usually we all have the bolsters and different blocks and blankets, but when the guru is there no one wants to take them! One of the first things Paul said was: "Don't be a hero. If a pose feels wrong, come out of it immediately." Still, at least in the beginning there was a lot of posing I think - if it went away later I don't know, as I was concentrating on my own practice 100%.

Paul was very funny - as you can see from the quote he has a black sense of humour that came as a total surprise to some people, I think. There's a tendency to think that gurus are in some way "holy" - but personally I would find that kind of a guru difficult to approach, for me humbleness is a much bigger sign of greatness. Paul doesn't come across as arrogant and also doesn't take himself too seriously. At times it almost seemed that he didn't take practice seriously either - but that was just a sign of his humbleness I think. For example a lady asked if a certain asana should be done this way or the other, and Paul replied that it could be done either way, that it didn't matter, although it mattered a lot. Meaning - it mattered for an individual how an asana was done, you had to do it right for your anatomy, but it didn't matter which way it was as long as you did it right for you. (He said it so that it made more sense, hope you get my meaning.)

After the practice I went to talk to him to show him my wrist. Doctor had told me last year that I had a ganglion in my wrist due to my flexible joints - that the joint flexibility had caused an empty space between bones to be filled with fluid that had then solified into the ganglion that is restricting my movement. The doctor didn't recommend surgery as there was a high chance I wouldn't recover mobility I had, and high chance too that the ganglion would just grow back. I had then decided to not to opt for surgery and "just live with it" - but since starting yin yoga I have started to think about joints in a totally different way and I wanted a second opinion from Paul.

Paul felt my wrist, and felt my other wrist, and his diagnosis was that it wasn't a problem with joints at all, it was a problem with my bones! On my right wrist, the problematic one, there is quite clearly - now that he's shown it to me that is - a sharp bone end that doesn't exist in my left wrist at all. How Paul explained it was that the sharp bone was the problem that was causing irritation and therefore the ganglion. It makes so much more sense that way - I've had this problem as long as I can remember. Unfortunately the bad news is that as it's bone there's nothing I can do about it - I had hoped he would have had some exercise that would have helped when I believed it was a joint-issue... He still said that exercising the wrist would probably make it slightly better but the bone meant that there was a physical limitation there that I couldn't change. He surprisingly also said that surgery would be a good option - he doesn't believe that recovery rate is as bad as the doctor told me: in his opinion joint mobility can be rehabilitated without any problems.

In a way, it's almost a relief - lately I've been hoping and believing that I should be able to do something about my wrist, that maybe if I just tried hard enough... but know it feels like the decision has been taken off my shoulders. It's a physical limitation I have, and that's the end of the story. I should really belive what Paul and Jason and Kelly teach - that everyone has poses they just can't do, mine are just the ones that require putting weight on wrists.

Very interesting to hear more tomorrow on the anatomy lecture.