response (referred to as a “relaxation response”) that helps relieve the stress. Many people, like me in 1990, spend all day in a sympathetic nervous state (a fight-or-flight stress response), and yoga literally resets the body’s stress switch from stress response to relaxation response.
Yoga also helped me gain awareness of my body and my belly so that I could notice when I was tensing up and then release and relax those muscles. In addition, yoga taught me to stand straight rather than slouched over. I used to stand like Bull in Night Court. Perhaps I didn’t want others to feel small, or maybe I was just trying to hear my girlfriend, who measured in at a grand total of four-foot-eleven.
Better posture is good for the organs. Picture your colon or liver working hard but being squished in an awkward position between your hipbone and ribs as you slouch over a computer. Now picture your organs resting freely in your body. Uncramped, they have better circulation and are better able do their jobs. Indeed, improving posture to uncramp the lungs is the first thing singers are taught: “If you want to project your voice you need bigger lungs, so stand up straight.”
You can try this right now. Slouch and try to breathe a slow, deep breath. Then do the same thing while sitting up straight. In fact, a full, relaxed breath, impossible while slouched, actually triggers a relaxation response.
Ten minutes of deep relaxation five times a day would change anyone’s life, whether or not he or she suffered from colitis. Imagine how relaxed and focused we’d all be, all that tiredness and irritability gone. I think we’d see the end of all war and hostility, a full-scale Age of Aquarius, if we all rested for ten minutes every three hours.
From a holistic health perspective, I’d say that my colitis was a condition of repressed angst pooling in my abdomen. In Western allopathic medicine we speak only metaphorically about emotion acting on our organs, and even then the quack police are readied for dispatch, but in the medicine of yoga, called Ayurveda, there is an actual language for this. Repressed anger affects the small intestine and the liver. Repressed anxiety affects the colon. Ayurveda literally states that disease happens when repressed or blocked energy pools and overflows into an incorrect channel. My ability to express and release angst was blocked, so the angst, with nowhere to go, pooled and pooled, and eventually, like acid, ate an ulcer into my colon wall.
Sun salutations massaged my muscles and organs, moved things around, broke up the blocks, and allowed some of the pooled energy to flow and release. This gave my colon wall a chance to heal itself, just as a cut on my finger would mend on its own. As the famous physician of integrative medicine Dr. Andrew Weil states, “Wounds heal by themselves…. If we want to foster healing and promote health, we should … encourage the body’s own, innate mechanisms of self repair.”* Stretching, relaxing, resting, reducing my stress level, exercising, improving my circulation and energy flow, and straightening my posture were supporting this innate process in my body.
* By the way, don’t let this cool basketball reference fool you into thinking I knew anything about basketball. I was an odd duck at Georgetown, caring nothing for the sport. The extent of my knowledge included knowing that Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo (both at Georgetown at the time) were very tall. And I recall that Dikembe had an unbelievably deep voice.
† Sticky mats were invented, by the way, in the 1980s by Western yogi Angela Farmer from simple carpet padding, like the stuff under the rug in your den. And it was Sara Chambers of Hugger Mugger who took the nascent yoga mat industry to the next level in the 1990s by designing a mat of similar texture, made specifically for yoga. That’s when the sticky mat that you now know and love was born and popularized. All rejoiced at this innovation, especially the tigers of India (whose skins were the choice mat for Indian yogis of yore).
* Family Guide to Natural Medicine: How to Stay Healthy the Natural Way (New York: Reader’s Digest, 1993), 8.
Yoga is the practice of tolerating the consequences of being yourself.
— BHAGAVAD GITA
My friend Paul and I had bonded over the chicken sandwiches served in the dorm cafeteria on Tuesdays, and we always made sure to be at lunch together on chicken-sandwich day. But as I woke up to my body and how things affected it, I recognized a cause-and-effect loop: on Tuesdays after I ate the chicken sandwich, I felt gross, as if oil was leaking out of my pores, as if there was a vile, indigestible mass in my stomach. These were the kind of processed chicken patties that look like breaded sponges with little nooks and crannies of fat and the occasional chewy piece of cartilage that makes you look both ways before hunching over into your napkin.
So finally, one Tuesday, I broke it to Paul that I wouldn’t be having the chicken that day. He was pretty upset. I didn’t blame him; this was our routine, a cornerstone of our fledgling friendship. Later I broke it to him that I was giving up the chicken sandwiches permanently.
First I gave up the processed chicken patties. Then, I ate less sugar, less fast food, and less processed junk. I was still a few years away from eating brown rice, kale, and tempeh, but I was on the right track.
Giving up the chicken sandwiches was a turning point for me. It was a harbinger of many future pronouncements, seemingly odd quirks, and even embarrassing epiphanies that resulted from my yoga practice.
In 1994 I had to tell a landlord that I couldn’t keep an office space because the “energy” wasn’t right.
In 1999 I had to break it to Linda that we couldn’t have sex in the mornings because it affected my morning yoga practice.
In 2000 I realized that I needed to learn how to feel and express anger, so in order to practice, I called everyone I had ever been angry at to tell them exactly how I felt.
And in 2002 I had to tell Millie that we couldn’t cuddle at night as we fell asleep because I was practicing Reiki (a form of energy healing) on myself.
But back to college in 1993, when during senior year, like clockwork, my colitis flared up after two years of remission.
I noticed the symptoms early, and I took immediate action. Since my last bout of colitis, I had weaned myself down to practicing yoga twice and eventually once a day. So now, without pharmaceutical help, I again began my self-medicating treatment — four sun salutations followed by deep relaxation, five times a day.
Miraculously, like the last time, after only a few days, the symptoms disappeared. Again I was elated and grateful and ever more committed to yoga and holistic health.
I wanted to tell my doctor about all that was happening, but I had heard a story about a woman with breast cancer. She had dived headfirst into natural health, visiting alternative health practitioners and staying in spas, ashrams, and mountain retreats all over the world. She found something that worked for her, and the cancer disappeared. She shared the thrilling news with her doctor. He responded, “Impossible, there’s no way that changing your diet and getting massages can have made the cancer disappear.” She believed him because he was her doctor. She was devastated. The cancer returned, and within six months she was dead.
This
