Balasana

The pose that changed my life

I did Balasana (Childs pose) a thousand times before. All the “fitness” blonde hair, blue eyed girlies on instagram and youtube using it as the “rest posture” the posture I could reward myself for after I sweated enough and burned enough calories. I loved it because of that, my little reward at the end.It was after reading “The Body Keeps the Score” that yoga slowly became a work of self study rather than self discipline. 

It was somewhere around there, after the car accident, when fitness was still about making myself smaller, when I still didn’t know who I was in the world, and my PTSD was manifesting into more prominent side effects I could not control as well (ie DID - dissociative identity disorder).It was some random Tuesday afternoon after work, in my small apartment by myself, that I wrapped and bound myself tight into a child's pose on my mat. And utterly fell apart.There was something broken in me.I could give it lots of different names: my spirit, my belief in humanity, etc. I had been hurt, and I could not claw my way out of it anymore. I had to lay there instead. Running was no longer an option. I had done all the hard “rebuilding” I could… I understood on a very cerebral level, that I was not to blame for the sexual assault that took place before I could even form full sentences. I understood that. 

I could even understand where all these long term side effects of it all were stemming from. I just couldn’t get past that.People for a little while talked about “emotions stuck in the body” and then we quickly moved past it as other professionals came along and explained that "emotions can’t get stuck in the body because we only experience an emotion in our brains for about 90 seconds.”What does happen, and what both these professionals are screaming in their varying books and on podcasts and even on tik toks and reels, is that the body and mind are not separate things. And if we keep coming back to the same emotion (anger, fear, shame, etc.), how out body immediately reacts to that is how we will learn to react to the rest of the world around us that has any collocation or connection to those emotions.“Anger is stored in the hips”. 

True.

But so is shame. 

So is fear.

Anxiety. 

Sadness.

I have always had a weak back. My whole life… I was probably thirteen the first time I really felt my back “go out” after a soccer game. I remember limping around for a solid week, doing my best to not be noticed because if someone noticed, I would be taken to the doctors, and I hated the doctors.I was nineteen when I i experienced my first herniated disc. I was twenty-two when my lumbar got swept away into pain during a “rough hosing” moment with my boyfriend.

I was twenty-five when I got into a horrible accident that sent me to bi-weekly chiropractic appointments for six months. It was also that car accident that sent me deeper into studying yoga. 

And it was around that time that I cradled myself into a child's pose. And found all my sorrow there. Rested between my rib cage. My chest tight, my hips aching, my psoas stretching for the first time in years, and my nose leaking so much snot. I held myself so rigidly, kept away from lifting too heavy, running too fast, and feeling too much in my lower back because it was the place I had started to curve into myself, make myself smaller. And over the years, I have learned to recognize those feelings a little sooner, before they become pain in my body. 

And I still go back to my favorite pose.

It was just a few weeks back, I had been in another car accident, bruised and aching and dealing with a thousand other issues that all seemed to keep coming up… it was a week of simply resting, no moving other than a short walk in the afternoons. Otherwise, I pretty much kept myself bed ridden.

It was around day six that I decided (with the thought of guilt first) that I should do some Asana’s.

Guilt, yes. But guilt that led me to turning on a YouTube instructor that I had been enjoying for years and moving slowly through the flow with intention.

Fourteen minutes into this sixty minute video, she instructed the screen to drop into a soft child's pose for a few breaths before we opened up into wider asanas. 

I did so.

And immediately, the tears fell.

The pain releasing from my lower back, yes.

But so was the shame from having been to blame for the accident. 

So was the anger of the relationship issues that had taken place earlier that day that had me so distracted.

The anxiety that feared I was not capable enough. The fear that I would make another mistake.

I met my anger, and my shame, and my fear and made room for them, tucked away inside my body, but opening up my mind and my spirit to the possibility of creating enough space to honor each and every emotion inside me. Child’s Pose is more than just a resting posture. For me, it became a sacred space… a place to feel what I could not yet put into words. It showed me that healing is not about pushing through or shrinking away. It is about surrendering, feeling deeply, and allowing the body and mind to meet with compassion and patience.

In that stillness, I learned to hold space for my brokenness without judgment. I began to understand that strength is not only in standing tall but in folding into ourselves with grace. That pose changed my life because it taught me how to be present with my pain—and in that presence, I found the first glimmer of peace. With Love and Gratitude,

Niah Blue