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april 2019yogajournal.com.au“YOU’RE BETTER NOW, RIGHT?” people
sometimes asked.
I had to hedge.
“Mostly,” I said. “I’m mostly OK.”
I wanted to be totally better, to have a
clean break between sick and better. But
illness like mine doesn’t work like that.
It’s like having a cold that lingers, and
you think every day might be the last day
and tomorrow will be better, and then
you forget what feeling better feels like
and you just hang on, and “normal”
changes, and you’re not sure if you still
have a cold or not, until one day you
wake up and you just don’t have a cold
but you don’t know what broke it or why
then. And I was in the in-between, even
after I got better, for over a year.
I slowly edged off of almost all of my
medications. I took 14 pills a day and
then I took 13. Then 12, then 11, then 12,
but one was different. And I kept doing
everything else, everything I could think
of: desensitisation, allergy testing,
enzymes, iron supplements, yoga, yoga,
yoga. And therapy.
I signed up for a teacher training,
and I set a rule: no-one could touch me.
It was enforceable because of the
container of our weekends together,
because there were only nine trainees
total, because everyone was working
through their shit. I was able to ease up
during those hours, and because of that
easing I was able to recognise how
guarded I felt the rest of the time. And
then slowly I began to touch again. First
just my teacher-training partner, Kris-
ten, who was so similar to me that I felt
I could trust her. And then another
woman, Alice, whose brightness and
raspy voice felt like a waterfall of care. I
touched them and then, once I could tell
my nervous system that touch wasn’t
only about pain, I let them touch me.
I had been touched against my willIn her new book, How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship,
Eva Hagberg Fisher chronicles how, after five surgeries and a lifelong battle
with her health, she unexpectedly found strength and healing through yoga,
friendship, and physical and emotional support.
Hear Me Roar
for so many years by so many people.
And they were, for the most part,
well-meaning touches, pats on the arm,
or hugs. But I had also been touched in
ways that I had consented to but did not
want. In a matter of a few years, I had
brain surgery to drain a cyst that had
haemorrhaged into my brain, heart
surgery to seal an extra pathway in my
heart that could lead to sudden death,
and experienced a range of debilitating
symptoms that turned out to be a rare
disease called mast cell activation syn-
drome, which tricks your body into
thinking it’s allergic to everything. I had
consented to every one of my surgeries,
but I had also been, occasionally,
roughly handled. By trainee doctors—
my surgeons were all at teaching
hospitals—or by nurses for whom I was
just another number. I was starting to
remember more, too, about how it felt
to lie down and put my head onto a
plate, knowing even through the fog of
Versed—the greatest anxiolytic ever
produced—that my skull was about to
be cracked open.
Every other weekend, I went to the
yoga studio and learned the language of
healing. I learned about empathic feel-
ings and how I picked up the sadness
and the fear and the anxiety of others.
“I’m not an empath,” I’d written,
proudly, on my application. A few weeks
into the training, I realised that the
opposite was true. That I am so deeply
empathic that I’d had to numb myself
for years with drugs and sugar and
television and sex and men and women.
I learned to talk my cohort through a
pose, into and out of it again. I roared in
Lion’s Breath.
One evening, I experimented with
letting another student touch my head.
The tremulousness of her touch sent me
into panic. I opened my eyes and looked ORIGINAL ACRYLIC PAINTING BY LARISSA DAVIS, LARISSADAVIS.COM; BOOK COVER DESIGN: EMILY SNYDERup at the familiar ceiling of the studio.
“I’m in present time, I’m in present
time, I’m in present time,” I whispered
to myself. I tapped my arms, willing my
body to come back to present time, out
of the trauma accordion, but I couldn’t.
It was stuck in exam rooms, surgery
clinics, waiting lounges. It was stuck
being touched, being scraped, being
carved, being pierced. My teacher came
by, sat down next to me, put her hands
on my belly. I couldn’t breathe.
“Get up,” she said. I did. “Get into
Horse Pose,” she said. I did, standing
with my feet three feet apart, knees
bent, my hands pressing into the tops of
my thighs. And then she roared and
then so did I, reaching deep into my
body for a sound I had never before
made. I screamed, and then the scream
turned into something else, and some-
thing deep and animal and unimagined
came out of my lungs, my throat. I felt
the rawness of my throat, my mouth,
the way in which talking to doctors and
friends and Allison and Lauren and
Jason and Winston had kept me alive,
the way I had talked myself into
existence, and I let it go.
Paying so much attention to my body
for six months helped me rewire my
relationship with it. I hadn’t noticed
how subtly a language of terror and
anger had crept into my vocabulary.
“This fucking body keeps trying to
kill me,” I had said once, and then I said
basically the same thing again and
again. I had been so antagonistic toward
my body for so long. I’d replaced any
kindness toward myself I’d cultivated
with an overt hostility.
“Eff you, effing tumour-maker. What
the hell is wrong with you?” was the
kind of thing I thought to my body every
morning, afternoon, and evening.
I understood, theoretically, that this