Free One Can Make a Difference by Ingrid Newkirk Page B

that it is a reflection of Sharon’s personality, which I have always found astonishingly, genuinely, and consistently loving and giving. Her path has inspired many people to seek their own.
    W hen I was thirty and living in Seattle, I fell down some very steep and slippery stairs, fracturing my vertebrae, resulting in intense pain as well as intermittent paralysis of my right leg. I was a musician and performance artist at the time, without a lot of financial security, so seeing a doctor was out of the question. Plus, I’d recently suffered a personal trauma, which had led me to the brink of suicide. I’d come through it with an, at times, obsessive commitment to making something good out of my life. I’d also developed a high tolerance for pain and a no-tolerance approach to drugs, prescription or otherwise. Rather my approach was to continue with my daily activities regardless of whatever obstacles might appear. In fact, when there was difficulty I plunged into creative pursuits with a greater urgency, arising from a feeling that each day might be my last. It was with this surge of creativity that I moved to New York City to further explore my avant-garde artistic pursuits.
    While I enjoyed my new home, the back pain wasn’t diminishing; in fact it was increasing. I was waiting tables part-time, and a fellow waitress kept suggesting I take a yoga class. I found this advice to be silly and even annoying. I thought of yoga as just physical exercise and I was already getting plenty of that. In addition to waiting tables, I was also a bicycle messenger (I had to carry my bike up and down six flights of stairs every day), an aerobics teacher, a dancer, and a choreographer! Not to mention the strength it took to load and unload musical equipment for my gigs. So, I continued to do my best to ignore my body, but when the pain became so great that I could no longer concentrate, I went as a last resort.
    During those first few yoga classes, I began to connect with myself in a radically new way. I had the rare opportunity of exploring the feelings in my body (I didn’t even know my body could have feelings) and the judgments, assumptions, and opinions in my mind. Was it painful? Extremely so! But perhaps for the first time in my very physical life I was actually being physical. I wasn’t trying to get out of my body, but I was going deeper into it with a sense of adventure. Previously, I’d objectified my body, viewing it only as a tool, because, after all, I was going to change the world and needed a body to accomplish this great work! Now I began to realize that ideas, even great ones, were not enough to change the world or to change my own life. Whatever I wanted to see in the world around me had to first become real in my own body right down to the molecular level.
    To do this, I learned how to align with my breath. I discovered the only way that I was able to go deep into the pain in my back was by breathing. I couldn’t think my way in, but only breathe. Breath is the life force; it is the Holy Spirit. It’s what connects us all. Do you know that there are atoms of air in your lungs that were once in the lungs of everyone who has ever lived? We are breathing each other. There’s a sense of deep relaxation and well-being when you actually feel that you aren’t working against the world or the world isn’t against you, when you feel that we are not only in this thing together but we are this thing together.
    I began to practice regularly, and my back pain lessened. Initially, I had no intention of becoming a yoga teacher or of becoming the administrator of a large school with many other locations around the world. I still thought of myself as an artist. But when I got more deeply into the teachings of yoga, I realized that here was something that could help others understand how life works, how anything and everything works, how to be happy. The transition from East Village