“ I would try to grab a door handle and just miss it. Or I’d be walking across a room and would bump into a wall.” therapy (VRT), which is similar to physical therapy but geared toward movements and exercises for balance. “I had to do squats and walking back and forth in a line.” Sandra’s life was completely disrupted by her new condition. She had been laid off from work prior to the surgery so her schedule was more open than previously, and her kids were teenagers, so they were pretty self-sufficient. On the one hand, this gave her time to focus on healing and regaining her balance. But many of her day-to-day activities and household duties were impossible. She couldn’t drive. Her husband had to take over all the errands that Sandra had normally done on her own, or someone else had to give her a ride. She couldn’t go into supermarkets or shopping malls because the lights, colors, and crowds made her dizziness worsen. Restaurants were an unpleasant experience. When you are deaf in one ear, it can be difficult to differentiate between overlapping layers of sound—such as overhead music playing in public places and people talking to you. In these environments, Sandra would often just hear an echoing kind of noise. “At the time, I thought all these symptoms were temporary, that I was healing,” Sandra says. “I had no idea it would take so long. You just take one day at a time, and you're waiting to get better.” FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN Luckily, Sandra had been an Iyengar Yoga student at the Yoga Institute of Broward in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, studying with Ruth Ann Bradley, for 10 years prior to the surgery. When she came out of the surgery and found out that she now had a vestibular disorder, she knew immediately that yoga would be a part of her recovery and longer-term management of the condition.
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“Somehow I knew my yoga practice—as well as meditation and help from my personal trainer—were the things that were going to get me through,” Sandra says. “I always knew yoga was beneficial—I saw the benefits every day, but when you have a traumatic event or crisis, that’s when it really comes through. It’s like I fell in love with yoga all over again.” And she says she knew instinctively which poses were going to help. “It was funny. After the surgery, for some reason, I kept hearing in my mind, ‘Utkatasana, Utkatasana,’ so that’s the first pose I practiced,” Sandra says. “It’s not one of the poses I had practiced regularly and definitely not one of my favorites, but I just had this voice in my head from the first day after surgery telling me that this would help me.” FINDING BALANCE At first, Sandra was confined to home because of the dizziness. But about a month after her surgery, Sandra started taking weekly private classes with Ruth Ann. That’s when she began to see tremendous improvement with her balance. “They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears, but this can go the other way too,” Ruth Ann says. “A teacher has to be ready to take on what her students appear with.” And Ruth Ann took on the challenge wholeheartedly. They didn’t do that many poses at first, but they held them longer. For example, she did Ardha Chandrasana using the trestle for much longer than it would normally be done in the middle of the room. The idea was to put her brain in a variety of positions—not just as it is when standing up or lying down. This
Maintaining balance depends on information received by the brain from three peripheral sources: eyes, muscles and joints, and vestibular organs. All three of these information sources send signals to the brain in the form of nerve impulses from special nerve endings called sensory receptors.
Yoga Samachar Spring / Summer 2017
