Yoga Injury – When My Ego Took Over…


Originally Posted 23 January 2015
I love this quote and came across it recently after I injured myself in a yoga class and was looking for someone to blame… My ego of course!

In yoga we talk a lot about the ego, that “monkey-mind chatter” that tells us what we should do, what we should fear and where we should go next. The ego is something we want to quieten in yoga in order to see our true selves but this is of course easier said than done! The ego is very persistent and it’s a little bit like fog which prevents us from seeing clearly… Eckhart Tolle says in The Power of Now that ‘to the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important’ so it’s always concerned about something that happened in the past which we can’t change or the future that is not there yet. It’s so important to live in the present moment because otherwise we miss it completely and it will become the past which we can’t change!!

I’ve written about this topic in more detail in my post Live In The Present Moment – Your Children Will Teach You How which is all about how being around children and observing them can help us to come back to the here and now.

So what does all of this have to do with my yoga injury? The ego can get in our way in our yoga practice and completely ruin it if we don’t find a way to let go of it. It can do two things: it can make us feel scared to try something new as it tells us that we can’t do something because of xyz reason and secondly it can take us completely away from the presence into the future to a place that it wants us to go to. Or in clearer words it makes us do something that we think we can do but our body is not ready for it.

And this is exactly what happened to me! I went to my Bikram class at Bikram Yoga Wimbledon after quite a long break of four months (as I’m doing my teacher training in more of an Iyengar Yoga style and am now usually going to Iyengar classes at Jiva Health in Wimbledon). Four months ago I was in a very different shape as I had just stopped breastfeeding, hadn’t practised much yoga for a few months and was generally unfit so I took it really easy in the Bikram classes. When I went back this time I was much more flexible, much stronger and much more ambitious so when I noticed that I could now more or less do the Standing-Head-To-Knee pose which always seemed impossible for me before, I got a bit carried away and tried even harder in the next few postures!! And then it happened when coming up from the Toe Stand… I twisted my knee!!!

I was so upset with myself because first of all I kind of rely on healthy knees if I want to be a yoga teacher but most importantly because I let my ego take over! I was not in the moment but I was ahead of myself listening to my ego which just wanted to get to the end of the pose…

What I can say, however, is that this experience taught me a few things. First of all I never had knee problems before – of course it’s not great to be injured but at least I will be able to relate to someone coming to my class with knee problems! The most important thing, however, which I knew already but had maybe temporarily forgotten about, was that it is vital to stay in the moment and listen to my body at every stage of the pose. Not only going into it but also coming out.

I went back to Bikram the week after my injury and I took it really easy. It was actually my favourite class so far as I just enjoyed being completely present and not trying to get somewhere all the time! I wasn’t looking at anybody else but just listened to the teachers instructions and moved very consciously in and out of the postures. At the end of the day it really doesn’t make us a happier person if we can touch our toes or get our leg up behind our head. What does make us happier is being present, observing, accepting whatever is given to us, surrendering to the here and now… and everything else will fall into place.

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  1. I love yoga, but haven’t been able to practise due to illness, this has given me a lift reading it x

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