November 2011 Archives

I finally had another bite of the yoga tree (!?!!), when I went to see Fredee, an instructor who was one of the other participants on the yoga session I went to for The Guardian back in September.

The experience second time around was inevitably different. This was partly because we were in her house rather than a swanky yoga studio, but it was also because I had more of an idea of what I could expect. While the session was less dramatic as a consequence, it allowed me to explore my 'internal space' more fully.

The poses and stretches were tough; difficult to achieve and exhausting. This left me with the sense that there is certainly much to explore and a lot of work to be done before I can formulate any definitive view on what yoga can do for me.

But I did find myself already able to view my relationship with the paralysed half of me in a different way, and this in turn changed my notion of what yoga could offer to people with spinal cord injury.

My first experience had left me with a certainty that yoga should be taken into rehabilitation centres as soon as possible. I have since changed my view on this. After that first session, I found myself unable to sleep for three nights. What kept me awake was a buzzing, tingling 'sensation' in my legs. It was this feeling that contributed to a major sleep problem when I was in hospital in the weeks and months after my accident.

The best way I can explain it is to imagine that my brain, after 35 years of feedback suddenly loses contact with my legs. Silence prevails for a while, but soon my brain starts looking for news. In the same way that inactivity will give us pins and needles or even cramp, the brain sends a danger signal to impel the body to move, in order to maintain circulation. Not surprisingly, this has no effect as I can't recreate the sensation of moving my legs. Instead I feel pain and discomfort build up, eventually causing me to move my legs with my arms, or even just slap my knees, etc.

During the day this is uncomfortable but there are usually enough distractions to keep my attention, or at least get me over the worst spikes of discomfort. However, when I am trying to sleep, this 'buzz' of white noise from my legs makes in very difficult to switch off.

Over time, my brain has developed some kind of method of filtering out this noise to enable me to sleep. This isn't always enough however, and sometimes a take a sleeper to help knock the corners off.

What I have rarely done is to explore the white noise coming back from the far reaches of my body. Yoga made me begin to do this, but it has also made me realise that it would have been unwise to try and face the 'silence' in my body during those first few months or even years. This is because such internal exploration brings me face to face with my spinal cord injury, without any rationalisation distractions to soften the reality of paralysis.

It has taken me a long time to feel able to explore this part of me, but in doing so I hope to change the relationship between my head and body and maybe hurt a little less in the process.

Cooking has always been a bit of a passion of mine, one that started very young. I have very early memories of cooking with my mother, and I also remember realising that dinner with friends was an important and enjoyable part of grown-up life.

In my family there has been a lot of moving from country to country. My mother is Austrian, my paternal grandmother was Dutch, my great Uncle was Spanish, and I have cousins from Pakistan who settled in the US, Cyprus and Canada. This familial diaspora may be a factor in the importance of food. Food connects us to people and to a sense of place. It is what people reach for when they want to remind themselves of 'the Old Country' wherever that may be. Taste is closely connected smell (a subject that I commented on recently), so it is perhaps  unsurprising that it carries such an emotional attachment.

It meant a lot to be able to get back to cooking after my accident. One of my assessments of independence when I was up at Stoke Mandeville involved cooking a meal in the Occupational Therapy kitchen (I did seabass stuffed with herbs and lemon with mashed potato and purple sprouting broccoli as I remember). Every time I realised something from my 'old life' was still possible, I was filled with a surge of excitement.

In the same way, everything I realised I would not to do again  drove me into a pit of depression, but most of those realisations came in the first couple of weeks post-injury, and it turned out there were more ways of doing things than I had thought.

So cooking for me is reconnecting with my history, and that of my family. But there's more to it than that. It's a bit sad, but I think I get a bit of a 'provider's lift' by making dinner for the family every night, instead of wrestling Elk or whatever I'm supposed to be doing. These days, I am happy to acknowledge that I am easily pleased by anything that makes me feel 'whole' and useful, even if it is a misguided confidence that I could do something, rather that actually having to do it.

One of my recent discoveries has been breadmaking. This is not breadmaker breadmaking, although we do have one of those which has put in many years of good service. But I am talking sourdough; hand-kneaded, home-grown-leaven, proved-in-a-basket sourdough.

I think part of the pleasure is quite a primal one. Bread must surely be the first refined food that we produced as a species. Pounding grains, and making a sticky dough cooked in a fire. It would have been pretty rough, and I like to think that my efforts are a bit more sophisticated, or at least contain fewer ashes and squashed grasshoppers (note to self, new loaf idea: ash and grasshopper surprise).

But having a jar of gloop that needs feeding every day is very satisfying. Taking a blob of leaven and adding flour water and salt to produce a loaf makes me feel, well, useful. And if it helps to give my children an early, warm memory of the pleasure of cooking, then so much the better.