Warrior Pose Miracle

How yoga improved my life

In 2018, my family and I moved two thousand miles away from our perfect lives and everyone we loved…from Michigan to Nevada.

Our new town is surrounded by public land, and close to Lake Tahoe. As avid hikers, we were excited to explore. On our first day living here, my husband and I went to South Lake Tahoe and hiked the Van Sickle trail near Heavenly Ski Resort.

I was amazed at the views. I still am, four years later!

In 2019, I got a seasonal job working outdoors. It was labor-intensive, and required work boots. I bought a pair that seemed to fit well. But after a couple of months, my right foot began to hurt. I believed it was a problem with a tendon on the outside of my foot.

I tried salt soaks, foot massages, even pedicures…all in an attempt to relieve some of the pain.

Soon, I was limping around everywhere. Just the thought of my work boots would make my foot hurt. My husband and I stopped hiking together. I no longer took my daily walks around the neighborhood and surrounding public lands.

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in dance. I spent many years teaching several varieties of dance to all age groups. I started a competitive dance team at the studio I taught for. I performed in a local belly dance troupe. I danced barefoot most of the time for over thirty years.

Through all of that, I never had any foot pain.

Yet I suddenly found myself unable to even take a stroll around the block!

I have always had a bunion on my right foot, as did my mother and grandmother. I hated how ugly it was, especially since my job teaching dance was mostly barefoot. It was embarrassing to me that my students had to look at it. But it didn’t bother me in any other way.

Ten years ago I even went to a podiatrist to inquire about removing it surgically, but he advised against it, suggesting that vanity alone isn’t reason enough for such a surgery.

I suspected that this inherited condition was the source of my current predicament. The pain was on the side of my foot, but I thought maybe my bunion, stuck in those work boots, was causing some kind of misalignment elsewhere in my foot.

In February of 2020, I finally decided to see another podiatrist…this time regarding pain rather than vanity.

They looked at my bunion and said it looked “angry”. They recommended surgery to remove it. A pre-op appointment was scheduled for a month into the future. They sent me home with a big boot that I clunked around in for a month or so. I was worried about getting surgery but relieved there was a plan that might result in relief from this curse.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

All non-emergency surgeries were canceled. My appointment was canceled. I don’t think I would’ve gone even if it wasn’t. This was when no one really had any idea exactly what to do. I figured that the solution to this issue of mine was going to have to be put on hold.

The store I worked for at the time was closed to indoor customers for a couple of months, so my work there was temporarily suspended. My summer job was out-of-season. In other words, I found myself unemployed.

Normally I would spend my time at home working out, stretching, dancing, walking around the neighborhood. . But my foot would no longer allow for it.

Then, one day in April of 2020, I forced myself to do a little bit of yoga. I knew my foot would hurt, but I was starting to feel out of shape and I needed to do something.

I’ve taken yoga classes many times over the years, and even included some moves and poses in my dance classes. I have never claimed to be a yoga teacher, but I have always trusted myself to incorporate yoga into my daily routine because of my extensive and continuing education in body movement.

So, I did a few sun salutations in my family room…slowly and deliberately, to avoid further harm.

At one point, I was holding warrior pose for about thirty seconds. My right foot was in the back. Some of you who are familiar with yoga can picture the position of the back foot in the warrior pose.

Suddenly, I felt a SNAP in my right foot. It was so dramatic that I swore I even heard it! But that couldn’t be so.

I immediately fell to the ground and held my foot in my hands, stunned and motionless. I was sure I messed up my foot for good.

I decided to avoid moving for the rest of the day, and into the next day. When I did have to move from one room to another, I did so slowly, trying not to put weight on my right foot.

After a while, something dawned on me. I felt no pain in my foot. None at all!

I never felt pain in my foot again. After a couple of weeks, I couldn’t even remember what the pain used to feel like. My foot was completely fine. And it still is today, almost two years later!

I’m no expert on foot anatomy, but I suspect holding that yoga pose corrected a kinked tendon in the side of my foot.

In the two years since the Warrior Pose Miracle, I have been hiking, dancing, working outside, and choreographing. I started teaching dance again. I even choreographed a tap solo for a student. I’ve hiked hundreds of miles since the episode. I led a three-hour choreography project with seven students in which I danced most of the time.

None of this would have been possible before the warrior pose incident.

This year is our 25th wedding anniversary. Just a couple of weeks ago, we signed up for a hundred-mile-long hiking excursion in Iceland, to celebrate. We will be hiking about ten miles a day, then staying in communal mountain huts at night. We have been training for this on the weekends in the mountainous areas near the town we live in.

We don’t travel much, so this is a trip of a lifetime for us.

And it’s all thanks to yoga. The practice of yoga has existed for many a millennia. My personal experience has brought me insight as to why yoga has persisted for such a long time, and throughout so many cultures.

Thank you, Warrior Pose!!