Click here to listen to the dynamic and informative dialog between Wendy and her acupuncture colleague Crystal N. Cliff, L.Ac., Dipl.OM, MAOM, CKTP, as they discuss the healing aspects of acupuncture and yoga. They detail out the internal connection of ourselves through the practice of yoga and the 8 Pillars of Yogic Tradition. Whether on the yoga mat or under the acupuncture needle, the ability to come back to a place of stillness and peace within your authentic self is made possible. We are reminded that no matter where we currently are in our lives, that the answers reside within and at the end of the day, we have all we need and we are okay.

By: Wendy Swanson

Some of you may know that I was in a small plane crash in December 2007. As we were crashing I braced myself, trying desperately to “put on the brakes”. Obviously I lived to tell the tale and I was left with some pretty profound right side low back and hip pain as a result. Now, almost ten years after the crash, my pain is substantially less. In fact most days I’m unaware of the pain unless something brings it back to the surface. This is my story on the nature of pain. My pain.

Before I go into what brings my pain to the surface and my opinion on pain, I want to clarify a few things. I have worked with thousands of people as an acupuncturist and yoga teacher and I KNOW that pain is very, very real. Sometimes pain stems from emotional trauma and manifests in the physical body, and it hurts all the same. I find that it is absolutely necessary to have a baseline of self-care when trying to heal the body naturally. It is vital to eat healthy foods low in sugar, pesticides and other chemicals, have an exercise routine, and get at least 7-8 hours of sleep per night. If we are NOT doing these things our pain will be worse. This is where we need to clean up our act first, in order to successfully allow our bodies to heal.

Now for the deep dive into my own pain…

This February my mom, at the young age of 73, passed from Alzheimer’s. In many ways I was prepared and even praying for her passing since she no longer knew herself or anyone else close to her. We had lost her long before her physical body left this earth. Even so, I went into a period of deep mourning and grief. My emotional anguish showed up a few ways in my body. The first week after my Mom died I got a terrible, hundred tissue a day type of cold. After the cold subsided I was then left with that old, familiar right side back and hip pain. The pain rested mostly at my sacrum and was so severe that I contemplated finally going for a MRI to see what the heck was wrong with me. To know once and for all what had happened to my back after the crash. You see I never got an xray or MRI because at the time of the crash I was 5 weeks pregnant and did not want to do anything that would harm my growing baby.

My pain kept intensifying as the weeks passed after my Mom died. I saw my gifted network chiropractor. I saw my therapist. I went to yoga classes. I meditated. I gave myself acupuncture. I rested. In short, I did everything right and yet my low back would not release. What I have come to believe is that my back was literally FEELING the intensity of my emotional loss and pain. There was no getting around it. There was only going through it.

Of course my emotional pain landed where there had been physical trauma. The instability of my low back and hip are completely real. The pain, though, for ME (and for many, many people that I have worked with) is directly correlated with the stress of my life. My mom’s death = BIG STRESS, BIG SADNESS, BIG GRIEF.

About 5 weeks later I attended a spiritual day long retreat with Dr. Matt Lyon. It was there that I had a profound vision of my Mom. In this vision I saw my Mom happy, dancing and free in a way that she had never been in her earthly life. She clearly communicated with me that she was still with me and always would be. It was almost exactly at that moment that my pain completely disappeared. I had gone from excruciating pain to zero pain in a moment of emotional release. In the months since that profound emotional healing I’ve had twinges of pain in my back but nothing like it was immediately following her death. I also know that there is a good chance that I will again feel that terrible pain at my sacrum, low back and hip. It will be at a time of great stress. I’m open to NOT feeling that pain, but I will not be surprised if my body once again manifests my emotional state in my body.

I could tell you countless similar stories. I could tell the tale of how I ended up at the urgent care thinking that I had a severe neck issue only to realize that it was my body’s way of dealing with the fact that I was about to let someone go from their job. Or share stories I have heard from my patients. I’m guessing you have your own story or two of pain in the emotional and physical body.

My solution to our collective pain is one that is probably not all that popular. It is important, though, for us all to hear it.

Get off the pain meds and get into feeling. Get off being a victim to our traumas and get into owning our own stuff. Pain is a reality of life. There is no medication that erases all the pain. There is no self-help book, no guru, no doctor that can make it all better. It might sound overly simplistic and trust me I know it is not always easy. The answer is about every single day choosing a path of love, forgiveness and healing. If you are living in the United States, reading this blog then most likely YOU DO have the ability to choose. I don’t want to minimize anyone’s pain because I see real pain every single day with the people I serve. We still have the ability to actively choose our path, to choose love, healing and to seek out help as needed. You are your own answer. You are the solution. And most importantly you CAN choose a path of LOVE & AUTHENTICITY.

PHOTO BY HALLIE HOFFMAN

For the full article, visit: http://www.charlottemagazine.com/How-It-All-Came-To-Be/

The story of a popular Dilworth yoga studio, its owner and how it came to Be

IT’S FAIR to say this story begins 400 feet in the air.

On the day after Christmas in 2007, Wendy Swanson and her husband, Andrew, were flying from Sarasota, Florida, to Charlotte after visiting with Andrew’s family for the holiday. Andrew had attended flight school while serving a stint in the army, and so the family of two were flying in his own single engine plane for the 560-mile trek back home.

Shortly after taking off, when the couple had flown 400 feet in the air, the engine failed. With water ahead, a u-turn to the departure runway, in aviation called “the impossible turn,” and likely rough landing was, suddenly, the pair’s best hope.”

Andrew spun the small aircraft around, but because a jet had taken off just before the smaller plane, the air near the ground was disturbed and manhandled the plane like a paper kite into a nearby ditch.

“My husband, having military training, he relaxed, he was trained how to relax his body,” Swanson said two days after the ninth anniversary of the crash. “I, on the other hand, went, ‘Ahhhhhh!’ so, you know, (the right) side of my body…just became a mess.”

Swanson, who was five weeks pregnant at the time, could barely move and was worried about the baby growing inside her. After being rushed to the hospital, she refused pain medication and an X-ray, fearing the medication or the radioactive waves would harm the child.

Without able to diagnose with certainty if Swanson had broken any bones and without able to deliver pain-reducing medications, doctors released her from the hospital after a few hours.

“Being pregnant there was just, like, ‘All right, I’m not gonna do pain meds, I’m not going that route,”’ Swanson said. “It’s interesting. I’m not sure if I had the option to, I’m not sure what would have been, but to me, I felt like that option wasn’t on the table because of the pregnancy.”

Swanson had difficulty walking for the next week and suffered debilitating pain down her entire right side for long after the crash. To help ease the pain without medication, she turned to an old friend: yoga.

“There was this process of, like, just rebuilding and, yeah again, yoga really was just this practice of being present in my body and being present to the pain,” Swanson said.

Swanson had casually practiced yoga for years after discovering it through her New Jersey church as a young woman. Now, though, she turned to yoga to not just improve her body but, rather, to heal it.

“I was taking yoga to its most basic place,” Swanson said “Yoga was then this journey for me and a very humbling journey because I could barely do cat cow (resting on all fours, arching one’s spine back and forth).”

Now Swanson had to use yoga to teach her battered body how to touch her toes, how to bend, how to simply be.

“It was just, like, this very deliberate process of using yoga slowly, slowly to heal,” Swanson said.

Just seven months before the crash, in May 2007, Swanson had earned her master’s degree in acupuncture from Tristate College of Acupuncture in New York City, where she lived before moving to Charlotte. When she gave birth to her daughter, Nora, Swanson was working both from home and out of a chiropractor’s clinic in Fort Mill while her husband worked full time as well.

The couple needed a nanny. Enter Kaitlin Lacey.

Lacey worked for the family for nearly two years before she said she had been presented with a dream opportunity: to run a yoga studio. The family would need to start looking for a replacement soon.

But after a few weeks, Lacey came to Swanson and said the studio had already run into financial trouble and she had stopped getting paid.

Swanson, though, before she had earned her master’s degree in acupuncture had earned her Master of Business Administration and saw a business opportunity worthy of her own dream.

“I actually credit my husband with saying, ‘Wendy, this is a golden opportunity. We can toooooootally make this work,”’ she says now.

So the couple sat down with the then-owner of Yoga Palace and negotiated the terms for the Swansons to take over the lease.

But the place was a disaster and needed a new name.

“For me, it was about, beeeeing your yoga more than anything. It’s the awesome, it’s living, being kind, being mindful, being thoughtful, healthy. It’s literally all that your life encompasses,” Swanson said from the living room-style lobby of her studio, Be Yoga in Dilworth. “If somebody comes and they’re practicing yoga and then they go home and they’re kicking the dog and they’re miserable and they’re just unhappy that’s not necessarily, we’re not doing our job. Our job is helping people, to me, become their best possible self.”

With a new name and vision in mind for the studio, next came the task of redesigning everything from the floor up – literally.

The studio’s main yoga room had concrete floors with paint peeling up. There was a phone line directly in the studio, which, as any practicing yogi knows, doesn’t make for the most zen of experiences.

Swanson brought in her brother and brother-in-law, who both lived with her for six weeks during the work, in addition to private help to redesign the studio’s space, rip up and replace the floors and rewire the phones.

All the while, the studio remained open.

“It was kinda awful actually. I can’t believe anybody would actually still come to class. At night, there’d be all this construction, there’d be this film of sawdust on the floor, on the bottoms of everyone’s feet, “Swanson said. “There wasn’t very many of them coming, but…people believed in, you know, just believed in it, believed in what we were trying to do.”

Seven years later, the studio’s main yoga room is a beautifully spacious, window-filled second-floor room (without a phone line in the zen zone), and the studio has won this magazine’s reader’s choice Best of the Best Award for the city’s best yoga studio for three years in a row. The studio has also since expanded to a second location in south Charlotte.

Swanson thinks for a bit on how the studio has evolved during the past seven years and the memories she’s made here, including her daughter’s recent eighth birthday here in the sun-filled studio. It was yoga-themed, of course.

Swanson smiles at the memory and laughs.

“We decided to Be Yoga,” Swanson said. “And it’s been a crazy, wild ride.”

The studio has also since expanded to a second location in south Charlotte.

by Wendy Swanson

by Wendy Swanson

by Wendy Swanson