ABL: Always Be Learning

Life lessons from my injury and from Norman Wong

Physio time at the crossfit gym

I started doing yoga in the late 90s (the 1990’s not the 1890s!) before you were all born, and now it’s 2025 and I’m still learning new things.

ABL: Always Be Learning

During a live online class a while back (pre-sciatic nerve injury, more on that below), I learned that my arms weren’t/aren’t long enough and/or my anjaneyasana wasn’t/isn’t deep enough to catch my back foot with both hands during a thigh stretch. For a moment, I was chastened by my body’s inadequacy. I was like, “What the hell? All these years of practice and there is still shit to work on?” And then I laughed at myself. Because OF COURSE THERE IS STILL SHIT TO WORK ON. There is ALWAYS shit to work on.

Then at a Vedic Meditation rounding workshop at which I was demonstrating poses for the teacher, I refined my understanding of finger placement in Nadi Shodhana pranayama. Did you know that the ring finger should stack lightly on top of the third finger when blocking the left nostril so that the pressure exerted by those combined fingers matches that of the thumb on the right nostril? Wow.

And then! And then! At one of Marc Holzman’s Guerilla Yoga classes, he encouraged me to pivot my left hand ever so slightly outward during ardha uttanasana so that I could have better access to my shoulder blades as I extended forward. More breath! More expansion! How amazing to adopt a new micro-change and feel the immediate, salubrious effect of a tiny tweak at the periphery of a pose I’ve done thousands and thousand and thousands of times.

Thanks, Norman Wong

My mother, a high school Spanish and French teacher, was fond of quoting one of her students Norman Wong who would exclaim at the end of nearly every class: “You learn something new every day!”

My mother used that quote at home so often that we appended “Norman Wong” to the end of it: You learn something new every day, Norman Wong. Every time my sisters and I learned something new, or used a hackneyed phrase, we invoked good old Norman.

Norman, wherever he might be, probably has no idea that his reaction to memorizing another verb tense or vocabulary word rippled out beyond the classroom into his own teacher’s life. Did he have any idea that Mrs. Trélaün and her family continued to talk about him, years after his graduation?

And that’s the thing with learning and—even more importantly—with being OPEN to learning: it’s an exchange, not a one way flow of information. My inability to grab my foot with both hands in anjaneyasana? That was definitely an a-ha moment for me but also for the teacher who upon seeing my dino-arm struggling stopped the class to demonstrate how to use a strap. I’ve refined my finger and hand placement in Nadi Shodhana and in ardha uttanasana, and will use that refinement in my next class.

Which brings me, conveniently to…

Injury update

In early August, my injury was piriformis syndrome. Then after an MRI, it became a sciatic nerve issue due to a herniated disc (sustained how? Nobody knows.) After four months of different treatments—oral steroids, anti-inflammatories, analgesic gels, physio sessions, zero exercise—on Thursday I finally moved into phase 2 of treatment which was a visit to the sports medicine clinic for an epidural of cortisone delivered straight to the nerve area.

30 minutes and 200€ later, I was back home for a mandatory rest period of 48 hours.

During this long period of not doing much in the way of physical activity, I’ve had a lot of time to think and rethink how I move my body and take care of it. Have I been a bit lazy about warm-up and conditioning exercises pre- and post-run? Yes. Should I have done more navasanas to strengthen my core? Definitely. Should I have broken up intense laptop sessions with regular stretching? Without a doubt. Do I need to invest in a better ergonomic seating situation in front of aforementioned laptop? My physio sure thinks so, and I agree.

I will most definitely be making those changes because guess what? There is still shit to work on, new things to learn. Thanks, Norman.