Sunday evening I returned from a week of spiritual training and retreat in the Colorado Rockies, a Wisdom School, with the gentle and wise Rabbi Nadya Gross. In my travels and on the Retreat, I was plagued with lower back pain, the likes of which I had not known since I gave birth nearly twenty years ago. This time a combination of yoga followed by an intense bout of weeding on our Co-op farm shortly before my travels caused the present injury. The two day train ride, and a misstep on the funky staircase in the lodge where we stayed, exacerbated it.
Here I was, away from home,chiropractor and my usual comforts, doing something I longed to do, but hurting. I could not move myself in anything like my usual ways. My motions were, had to be, slow, deliberate, and supremely careful. I didn’t like it, but I adjusted as best I could. And, new for me, I chose not to let the discomfort dominate my experience, but to open instead to new ways of healing, new levels of health that I sensed were waiting on the other side of this injury.
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