Learning from Injuries - My Story

Injuries are a painful reality of being human and being alive; we all have injuries, no matter how careful we are, how well trained and athletic we are, or our age.  I have friends who had serious bone breaks before the age of ten and know incredible dancers who broke their ankle stepping off of the curb to catch the bus.  If you're currently injured or have lingering pain from an injury, you are not alone, and you don’t have to beat yourself up or accept a life of performance below your desired level.  In fact, injuries can be an incredible tool for learning, and can propel us forward to become even better, if we frame them with the right mindset.  

My Worst Injury

My worst injury happened a few years ago while I was touring in the UK with Disney on Ice.  On March 17th, I was warming up with my friend (a national champion in ice skating, what was I thinking), following him on jumping sequenced on the backstage concrete, something that we did often to warm up.  I went up really high for a rotating axel jump and got a bit disoriented in the dark backstage, coming down sideways on my right angle with an audible crunch.  That poor ankle, it had already taken a series of bad sprains when I was a teenager, and was always more prone to pain than the other.  Insisting I had just sprained my ankle a bit, I hobbled off to the athletic trainer to tape me up and get me in my skates so I could perform.  It was slated to be a two-show day, but after the first show my ankle was so swollen that I could not fit it back in my skates and my director let me sit the next one out.

I did not, in fact, resume touring that season because as it turned out, I had not sprained my ankle but broken my talus bone.  Shockingly, it took three sets of x-rays for someone to notice that there was a hairline fracture on the small, weightbearing bone below the tibia of the lower leg and above the calcaneus, or heel bone.  The Colorado doctor foot specialist who I had been transferred to held no punches as he told me how serious this break was, how this bone allowed for all weightbearing through the foot in walking, running, jumping, and how depending on the severity of the break, I might have to get screws in the bone or metal plates to have the most basic of walking functions back.  A quick google search of “broken talus” can give you enough horrifying content to send you into a spiralling abyss. Not a great thing to hear when the bulk of your career is dancing, acrobatics, and ice skating. 

Luckily the next doctor, the more specific specialist for this bone, thought that the break was minor even though the bone was major, and he thought I would have a good shot at returning to activities if we took the situation seriously.  So he placed my lower leg in a solid cast for a month (a practice hardly done even for breaks these days) and sent me on my merry way to crutch back to the car and drive myself home with the left foot.  

I spent the next three months without walking, moving from a solid cast to a brace after about five weeks, choreographing verbally while I sat in front of my computer screen, and directing the university project I was in Colorado for from a chair.  To say that I was depressed is an understatement and I felt the effects of this confinement physically, emotionally, and mentally.  I tried for a short time to socialize, but the effort to go places with people was extreme, and I felt extremely vulnerable.  People also looked at me so differently, passing me over as a person, ignoring me, and certainly not approaching me with intellectual or romantic interest like before.  What an eye opener, showing me a whole world of disability that many people live with their entire lives.  I very quickly noticed which places were handicap accessible, how the pacing of events and social gatherings hinged on the ability to move quickly, and how I had to ask for help with basic tasks.  How we move though the world changes so much about our lives.

But this time also forced me to think, to slow down, and to feel.  I keep the insanity at bay by practicing hours of handstands, stretching, and of course, Awareness Through Movement®.  At home, I would ditch the crutches to crawl on my knees, hop on one foot, or gallop in a sort of three-legged shuffle.  All those years training capoeira and breaking helped to give me alternatives in movement, a reminder of the wisdom these forms have that help us adapt in times of need.  These forms practice a multiplicity of movement patterns in order to not just rely on the most developmentally recent one: walking.  You never know when you will have to resort to an older (in the evolutionary sense) movement pattern or ability to get you through a time of injury.  

Once the cast was off, I still had nearly two months without being able to put significant weight on the foot, though I now had permission to bend and flex the foot, and to stretch it.  My ankle had about three degrees of motion at this point, a horrifying sight for any athlete or dancer.  My right leg had shrunk, and my whole body had aligned to the left.  It was time to get to work.  

My Feldenkrais teacher Elizabeth Berringer had imparted an extremely valuable lesson for me during our last segment of training.  She had taught a series of lessons with a book suspended on the foot, imitating the floor and allowing the ankle to move through its various positions in relation to weight bearing but without putting any weight on it.  Lessons such as these allow the nervous system to experience the novelty of a new orientation and often improve our functioning dramatically.  Perfect I thought, and started incorporating this lesson into my daily routine, sometimes multiple times a day.  After weeks of this work, combined with other Awareness Through Movement® lessons, a few private Functional Integration® lessons with master teachers, and my continued stretch and handstand practice, my foot and ankle were starting to act more like a foot and ankle again.  

At the end of August I got the ok to start walking again, and I limped around town on my own two feet, so happy to be able to do this most basic of human activities again, even if it was jerky and limping.  Another three months of rehab in walking, and I was beginning to feel a little more like my old self, though I was still limited to a fraction of what I could do previously.  In October I got cleared to go back on tour with Disney on Ice with the restriction of no jumping and I continued to rehab the foot as I worked.  I would stretch my foot in every direction I could think of, attempting to break up scar tissue, despite the pain and discomfort.  

It took over a year to get to the place where I could jump again.  But then I started to jump.  And to backflip.  And to frontflip.  And to run, and the shocking thing was, I found that I was even better at these things than before I had broken my talus.  I had a friend comment on one of my cartwheel to back tuck videos, “Even higher than before!.”  I brought back the ballet and found that my pirouettes were just as they were before, if not better.  My running endurance and ability was better than it had been since high school.  Two and a half years from the injury as I write this, I am pushing my limits and continuing to learn more difficult skills and patterns that require jumping, turning, and landing on my previously injured ankle.  

And of course there is still occasional pain, days of discomfort and weakness, and difficult movements, but I experienced that before the injury (remember all the teenage ankle sprains?).  But strange as it sounds, in general my foot and ankle got . . . . better as a result of being injured.

I do not think this happened because I am special, or strong, or particularly athletically gifted, or have healing powers like Wolverine from X-Men.  I think this happened due to careful, meticulous study and awareness of myself using the principles of the Feldenkrais Method® combined with my training in dance, martial arts, and acrobatics.  Though all situations are different, this experience has given me faith that there is a path to recovery from most major injuries, and that our setbacks can become our aids that move us forward. 

Injuries as teachers 

As with my broken ankle, injuries can be incredible teachers.  An injury requires you to slow down, and to examine how you are doing what you are doing.  A fundamental principle of the Feldenkrais Method® is that how we do something is more important than what we are doing.  However, in order to see both what and how, we have to go at a slower pace and pay attention.  Sometimes the teacher of injury is trying to bring awareness to a part of yourself that has been neglected, and you need to slow down in order to see it.  Framed in this light, we can become curious instead of angry, sad, or afraid when we become injured.  

Relying on our other attributes

As I mentioned briefly above, injuries often force us to remember other patterns and organizations that we might not have used in a long time.  These are often older movement patterns from an evolutionary perspective.  For instance, the body-half jumping pattern of a frog or the side bending pattern of a lizard are patterns that came prior to the human pattern of walking.  We as humans, still can and do use these older patterns, though many of us will start to forget them if they are not used consistently.  An injury sometimes shows our reliance on the most refined patterns and forces us to remember older patterns.  Though difficult, this ultimately gives us more range in our movements and creates a more balanced system, as well as ensuring our immediate survival.  For instance, when I broke my foot, I had to rely on older patterns (such as crawling) to go about daily life, but my system ended up learning from the crawling to integrate more effectively when I returned to walking.

Addressing the organizational pattern of the injury 

When we get injured, it’s easy to focus on the hurt of the injury and what it means for our lives.  But what Awareness Through Movement® has taught me is that we need to look at how the injury happened in the first place, and the underlying pattern that manifested itself in an injury.  For instance, with my ankle injury, it was not an accident that I broke my right foot and not my left.  Certainly it would be possible to break my left foot, but years of a certain alignment in activities like soccer and dance, as well as compensations from previous injuries, created a certain pattern that created strain on the right foot.  Instead of looking at the right ankle as somehow weak, inefficient, or “bad”, we can see that that ankle was perhaps working overtime to compensate for certain patterns, preferences, or weaknesses in my hips, spine, shoulders, etc.  If we just look at the foot, we miss the global pattern and the chance to make lasting changes through our whole system.  

Emotional Correspondence to Injuries

Another element to injuries is our emotional state.  In the Feldenkrais Method® we see thinking, moving, feeling (emotions), and sensing as one unified process in ourselves.  So how we feel emotionally will affect how we move.  All of the serious injuries I have sustained in my life have happened when I have been in a state of emotional distress; coincidence? I think not.  When we are feeling imbalanced emotionally, we don’t have the same sensitivity as when we are grounded and clear, we miscalculate small adjustments in our actions and our words.  We are literally pulled off of our gravitational center and are easier to defeat.  This is why you find martial arts masters (in movies if not in real life) admonishing their students to fight from a place of peace and calm, not from anger.  Large emotional imbalances make you foolish and insensitive.  

This was the case for me in the weeks leading to my foot injury.  Exhausted from a year of constant travel and dealing with the interpersonal difficulties that come from living as part of a traveling circus, these factors exacerbated patterns of imbalance and contributed to the outward manifestation of what I was feeling inside: pain.  There are many more esoteric schools of thinking that claim that emotions cause pain in various body parts; these things may or may not be true.  What I am proposing here is a more grounded, objective theory based on the work of Moshe Feldenkrais that links the state of our thoughts and feelings to the state of our movement in physical space.

Full of Possibilities

Don’t let injuries bring you too far down, there are ways to continue learning and to bring yourself back to mobility so that you can pursue your passions.  Try Dynamic Movement Coaching or the Feldenkrais Method® to help jumpstart your process of healing and learning.

Photo by Grace Gershenfeld