Bamboo Floor, Lava Rock: At the Edge of the Turn

After years of back injury and pain, I began a practice that through spinal movement, breath, and restraint taught me to go to the edge and remain. This gradually reshaped both physical capacity and the way stress is met in everyday life.

Reading time: 4 minutes

On my back in pain, lying on the bamboo floor of my apartment in Hawaii, I thought my days of swimming, motorcycling, and regular activity might be over. What made it harder was where I was. I was living in Hawaii, surrounded by vibrant land and water, and I was unable to participate in any of it.

For most of my life, I had managed physical demands without much accommodation. I did what needed doing. Eventually, though, my motorcycling required pain medication, something I had never used. That was the moment I understood my body was asking for a different kind of attention. I reached an edge I didn’t recognize, one that didn’t announce itself dramatically but still demanded a turn.

I didn’t know what was ahead, but I knew something had to change. Around that time, I began noticing yoga studios everywhere. I hadn’t planned to do yoga, but one day I found myself walking into a studio and asking about classes.

With little to lose, I decided to try. I hoped yoga might help me move beyond a series of back injuries accumulated over a lifetime: a hard fall from a trampoline at ten, a weightlifting injury in college, a slip from an icy roof in my forties onto a metal ladder below. Each incident left its mark, but none had stopped me entirely.

But when I was incapacitated on the bamboo floor, it was different, like standing on an edge where going on like before was no longer possible. My back finally had my full attention.

I brought with me a Midwest faith in endurance that I still honor, but it also taught me to push through pain rather than listen to it, to keep going rather than turn.

I jumped into yoga with no knowledge, and after a couple of months of steady practice, something began to shift. I was bending more freely. Pain loosened its grip. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no miracle or sudden conversion, but there were many smaller moments of insight and more than a few tears of surrender. The change was steady enough to be unmistakable, quieter and quicker than I expected. It felt less like progress and more like a turn already underway.

I continued, still not quite believing that something so simple could make a meaningful difference. But my body kept responding to the one thing I could reliably do: show up. Yoga asks you that we come to the edge of effort, not past it, not away from. And when there, to stay long enough to learn what that edge can teach.

In yoga culture, success is spoken of with a different language. You show up to the mat. You do the work. You stay. Your “success” unfolds over time. At first, I found that way of speaking naïve, even reductionistic. But as I kept returning, especially to spinal movements forward, backward, and sideways, the results became difficult to dismiss.

Beyond the physical changes, something else was happening too. Breathing with ease became my way of moving into stress. When the free diving instructor said the same thing my yoga instructors were saying, I realized they were both onto something transformational, not just for yoga or free diving, but for life.

When diving down, “move like water through water,” my freedive instructor said; and when instructing half-moon pose, my yoga instructor said, “move like the palm trees swaying in the wind.”

This began carrying over into the rest of my life too. I was learning how to turn without force, how to stay present in uncertainty. In short, how to trust.

Hawaii was a good place to learn yoga; the land itself seemed to understand patience, repetition, and renewal. Sugar cane fields and pineapples, volcanoes and massive waves, signaled it as a place unlike any other. The Pacific was always nearby, the sound of the tide never far off. It was a place that encouraged movement without hurry, because everywhere there was something worth noticing.

In Hawaii, I was in a place where even the land was once fluid, practicing yoga on bamboo floors, watching and hearing resistance and release as waves broke against black rocks and orange volcanic fire blasted into the night. The contrasts were instructive.

Walking on still-smoldering lava fields, I realized that even this hardest ground had once been fluid. What looks rigid now was once in motion. Yoga teaches that the body holds both rigidity and movement, and that learning when to soften is as important as learning when to hold.

One afternoon, riding my Harley-Davidson Road King down a busy one-way street, the road ended abruptly in a school parking lot just as children were being released. Cars crowded in. Buses crowded onto the narrow street. Kids darted around unpredictably near the pavement’s edge, where sharp lava rocks perched just beyond the asphalt.

I needed to make a tight U-turn on a large motorcycle, in close quarters, with no margin for error. Under normal circumstances, that kind of U-turn with a large bike and a pillion rider is difficult. The body braces. The breath shortens.

But this time, something else happened. I kept my gaze forward, quickly executed the turn, and only after completing it glanced down to see my front tire had passed within inches of the drop-off to sharp lava. I accelerated away, and only then noticed my reaction.

Surprise.

That was easier than it should have been. I did not feel tension in my shoulders or back.

Later, I understood what had carried me through. The same skills practiced in yoga, breathing instead of bracing, staying attentive rather than reactive, had transferred into that moment. The body found calm before the mind could argue.

That was the turn. Not just on the motorcycle, but my understanding of effort, pain, and attention. It eventually led me to teach yoga to motorcyclists, many of whom live with chronic back or neck pain, and the limitations that come with it. Pain and lack of flexibility, especially in the neck or shoulders, limits movement and can become life threatening if the biker cannot turn to check out the blind spot.

I don’t describe yoga as a cure, and I don’t offer guarantees. I can only speak from what happened over time. My spine did not stagnate as I aged. It changed. Flexibility increased. Ease returned. My adaptations to stress changed in many surprising ways.

Now I practice in Arizona, among mountains and the desert. My only goal is to show up. The landscape is different, but the work is the same: forward, backward, sideways. Breath. Attention. Return. Each practice is another U-turn at the edge.

I keep writing about yoga, not because I achieved something, but because I have shown up to the mat, done the work, and stayed long enough to learn what the experiment had to teach. I am grateful for that.

If back pain has left you hesitant to move, the question may not be whether yoga will work for you or anyone else. The more practical question may be simpler: what do you have to lose by standing at the edge and taking a step toward the unknown? If it doesn’t seem to be the thing for you, you can always do a U-turn.