My Adventure with Hip Replacement Surgery how I got here part one Read before approaching surgery

My Adventure with Hip Replacement Part ONE Pigeon Pose and how it began

This blog ,like many of the others, is here for you to understand more about me, rather than what I do. Actually, what I do is also about me. There is no separation. Although, for more than half of my life up until retiring from the public school system, the real me was concealed from colleagues and of course students. But WAIT.. that is for another time and place. The topic at hand is all about the body, and modern surgery and how I unexpectedly had to redo my self-concept.

At age 49 after biking from San Francisco to LA and a number of other adventures, I began to seriously study the teaching of yoga (Wait! Is she offtrack again? Hang in there.). It was a great antidote to teaching middle school history, and later became part of my career.

In the Bay Area there was little shortage of yoga studios. I knew them all, and loved most of them. There was also a GREAT metaphysical bookstore with yoga classes in Mountain View, called East West Bookshop. It was home away from home and the yoga was great nice and gentle. I balanced that out with Bikram and Vinyasa (definitions below) I realized that I was not only good at it, but loved showing other how to do yoga, and started helping them in my spare time. My amazing teacher at East- West recommended a place in Nevada City where I could be trained in a slow, gentle practice. So I went- that was the benefit of teaching that indeed we had a number of weeks off in the summer (not as many as the public thinks though). The practice was easy, calm, and nurturing replete with affirmations like “In The Middle of Life’s Storms, I stand Serene” and “I am free, I am free.” That was in 2000. By 2004, I had moved to a middle school and did yoga with kids on periodic days, and even started an afterschool program for teacher wellness. Why focus on this? Hang in there dear readers.

Well.. I had HUGELY flexible hips and adored my favorite pose, pigeon which was a deep hip opener. I taught this in EVERY class . It was both relaxing and nurturing and felt wonderful. I adored those hip openers…….Fast forward to…………2018/2019

We moved north to our destined home in northern Oregon. Yoga teaching ended simple because with country living , which we loved, I was simply too far away to teach regularly. We were blessed by stunning beaches and forests and hiking became my friend and new pastime. I started to feel a bit of pain in my right hip flexor (where the leg and torso meet at the top of the light). This muscle pretty much controls walking about and movement. Two dates are listed above as the inception of pain, but it became more and more noticeable in 2019 before a trip to Glastonbury.

End of part one.