10 minute read

A few days after my nineteenth birthday I went on the piss with some friends. We ended up in a nightclub and another friend we met there offered us a lift home. He’d been drinking too, so this was not a good idea. Just how not so good of an idea I could never have foreseen.

I got into the small car, I think it was a Fiat Uno, sat in the back behind the passenger seat and promptly fell asleep. I woke up sometime later in an ambulance to a paramedic telling me that I’d sustained multiple fractures and was being transferred from Naas Hospital to Beaumont Orthopedic Hospital. He listed the fractures: skull, smashed elbow, humerus broken in two, collar bone snapped in two, five broken ribs. I remember saying to him ‘you must have made a mistake, I’ve never broken a bone in my life.’ Funny how youth lends the delusion of invincibility.

I have been told the following: the driver was speeding and lost control of the car which rolled multiple times. I was thrown out the back window and landed on the dual carriageway with the car on top of the left side of my body. No one else was injured. The four other people got out of the car and started to walk away. They called me to follow and then realized that I was trapped underneath the car. A priest stopped and blessed me. Somehow, the Gardaí arrived and an ambulance and fire brigade were called. The fire brigade cut me out from beneath the car and the ambulance took me to Naas hospital, I don’t know if anyone came with me. One of the guys in the car went with the Guards to my Mam’s house and she got the knock on the door that every parent dreads. There’s been an accident and your daughter is in hospital.

I’ve been told that when she got to the hospital there was blood coming out of one of my ears and she immediately rang my Dad, who came from Dun Laoghaire. It was he who insisted that I be transferred to Beaumont, as that has the best orthopaedic facilities in the country. I came to sometime later in a critical car pre-surgery room. A room where they put people whose condition needs to be stabilized before they can have a general anaesthetic. There were multiple tubes coming out of my left arm, chest and breast. My arm was massively swollen and the tubes were there to drain away blood and fluid before they could operate.

Let me tell you about the pain. The pain was indescribable, even now almost thirty years later. It was pain that rendered all else secondary, its own metaphysical category. Pain that even still I can’t comprehend, much less explain.

I could not be given pain medication since I had a fractured skull and a concussion. I was slipping in and out of consciousness. When I came to, I could only bear it for a couple of moments. My Mam got very micro; coaching me to stay for just one more minute, that’s all you have to do, try and stay awake for one more minute.

Darkness and relief. No dreams. I’m in a coma. Five days slipping in and out. Coming to and there is no place that’s not pain. Eating and drinking are superfluous. I don’t care about those things. I struggle to stay present in my body, to navigate this pain that obliterates all else. Crosswords help. Mam sitting beside the bed calling out the clues from the Irish Times Simplex. Something other than the pain to focus on. My Dad bringing in chocolate and delicate pastries, anything to get me to try and eat. My brother telling me he loved me. My sister in quiet support.

I have no memory of being brought for surgery, although I do remember waking up in the ICU too hot with so many blankets over me. A day or two later being transferred to an aftercare room. Waking up one morning to a quick sharp pain and a dull feeling thereafter on my left ribcage. A pulmonologist had just cut a hole on the skin over my ribs and inserted a tube to drain fluid. My lung had evidently been punctured by the broken ribs.

Oh, pain. I just know pain. Talking hurts, coughing hurts, laughing hurts. There is a rail over the bed with a kind of handle attached to a strap, like a stirrup for your hand, for me to use with my right hand to pull myself up when I slip down in the bed. It happens a lot and pulling myself up takes enormous effort. Most of the time the nurses, or whoever is visiting, physically moves me. I sleep sitting up since it’s impossible to lie flat with broken ribs and a punctured lung. When I can sleep. The nights are the hardest. Lying awake in the dark trying to make it through.

I am extremely fragile. Getting out of bed requires enormous effort and excruciating pain. But the nurses insist I do so to eat some of my meals and use the loo. After some days I’m able to walk to the visitor’s room to hang out with friends who’ve dropped in. Just don’t make me laugh, please don’t make me laugh it hurts too much. Broken ribs and a punctured lung don’t go well with laughing.

Eighteen days after my dramatic arrival I’m released from Beaumont. There’s a cage around my rebuilt elbow and a steel rod in my humerus to help it knit together. The rod remains, the cage was removed under anaesthetic about six months later. I was told I’d never have the full use of my left arm again. This seems like short change given that when I regained consciousness the first thing I was asked was ‘can you move your fingers and toes?’ I could, and this confirmed that I was not paralysed. I don’t know, to me a tiny functional difference between one arm and another is really nothing when there was a good chance of being paralysed.

I go back and forth for some weeks as an out-patient for physiotherapy and after a couple of months of recuperating I’m doing really well physically but my nerves are shot. Terrified of sitting in the back of a car and anxious on the bus. Fingers clenched going around curves, every fibre of my being on high alert. Even still I’m a bit of a nervous passenger.

In hospital, I was also told that I’d probably have PTSD but wasn’t actually given any resources. Well, I did have PTSD and I think it’s true to say that I have never entirely gotten over it. To be clear I’m not attached to being a victim and I’m not looking for sympathy. I say I still have PTSD because even after all this time loud noises startle me, I tend to scan my environment frequently wherever I am, I’m a nervous passenger. But it’s way, way less and I’m aware of it so it doesn’t control me.

But let me tell you about the good stuff. The car accident bifurcated my life. I was so shook up for so long that I became a deep searcher. I got into Buddhism via the writing of Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh while living in Amsterdam a couple of years after the accident. I also started practicing yoga in Amsterdam, not knowing how those first classes set me on a journey that would completely change my life and give me the opportunity to give back, to serve others who’d been traumatized.

Cut to 2002. I’m living in Chicago studying analytic philosophy as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The programme is very stressful with a high workload and I’ve yet to make good on my intention to pick up my yoga practice from where I’d left it in Amsterdam. (I had kept meaning to go back to it in Dublin, but never got around to it, busy as I was partying, socializing and doing all the other things people in their mid to late twenties do.) I walk past a yoga studio and before I know it I’m back there taking classes several times a week. I have found my thang.

Something in me has shifted and I engage the practice in a deeper way. The yoga poses touch me in a place that’s ready to be touched. The layers of the onion start to peel away and I realize how much trauma is living in my body and also how I am my body, I am traumatized. Still. As I go further with the practice under the guidance of some highly skilled and sensitive teachers I come to understand that my body is a tape recorder that has recorded everything that has happened, that memory is not just a mind thing, it’s somatic.

I start to have profound experiences on the mat. Sometimes I cry for a lot of the practice as my tissue releases long-held memories supported by the constancy of my deep breath and the safe space around me. I start to get a lot of bodywork. Cranio-sacral therapy, Korean bodywork, deep tissue massage.

The more I start to understand that trauma lives in the body, the more I commit to moving this stuck residue on through.

I devour books on Ayurveda and yoga philosophy, I start volunteering at the yoga studio. I study with all the master teachers who come through Chicago and start going to kirtans. Almost by accident, I start teaching yoga and before too long I take my first 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training. All the while I’m understanding more deeply just how ungrounded I had been, how unsafe I felt in my body for years. Yoga practice is giving me back to myself, but it’s also giving me something that feels more than myself. It’s giving me radical empathy and compassion for people who have been traumatized.

I become very skilful at creating a container and holding space for people with significant trauma. I can spot it in a yoga student and am very good at coaching the breath. The body needs to feel safe enough to release, to start to relax. The best tool at a yogin’s disposal is steady, deep breath; it affects the brain and elicits changes in the central nervous system that brings about quiescence, otherwise known as relaxation mode. This is the elixir, the place where deep letting go happens and the body becomes hallowed ground. At the best of times integration happens and a feeling of renewal.

I can hold the space for this with my students because I’ve been there myself. Until I had a regular yoga practice, I didn’t even know that I didn’t feel safe in my body. Looking back I don’t think I even understood hypervigilance. Now, two decades into daily yoga practice, I can honestly say that I’m less hypervigilant, a million times more grounded and feel safe in my body. This has taken a lot of self-effort, consistent practice and showing up again and again on my mat, deep breaths and quiet determination. And I have had wonderful teachers, kind, skilful and experienced. I still get bodywork regularly as I have chronic neck pain as a result of my injuries. But I am thriving. My life is amazing.

Every now and then there’s a reminder and the hypervigilance kicks in. A few years ago, my husband and I were on holiday in Provence and had the pleasure of touring around. He was at the wheel as we ascended a corkscrew coastal road in the mountains overlooking the Cerulean blue Mediterranean. It was spectacular and I was a total mess. Rivulets of sweat running down the inside of my arms, one hand holding the door handle, the other balled into a fist. I simply couldn’t relax and enjoy the beautiful surroundings. Deep breaths only helped so much. My heart pounded in my chest and my system didn’t calm down until we were back on level ground.

They say you can only take people as deep as you’ve gone yourself. I’ve gone deep. And then some. Less than a year after the car accident that bifurcated my life I suffered a massive emotional trauma, the shock of which added to the PTSD from the accident and accelerated my search for meaning in the quest for healing as I tried to rebuild my life and move on.

I have come back from the brink of emotional hell and indescribable physical pain that couldn’t be medicated and not just lived to tell the tale, but created a life of deep meaning and purpose, of thriving. Knowing what if feels like to not feel safe in your body has made me a more skilful yoga teacher. Emotional trauma has also given me empathy and enhanced sensitivity.

In 2010 I went to a prison in Northern California to guest teach in the prison yoga programme and facilitate a discussion amongst inmate participants about how yoga has impacted their lives. Hypervigilance is the norm in prison. Your life depends on it. Inmates are on constant high alert because letting your guard down can have terrible consequences. Talking with the inmates after the class I heard how their yoga practice gave them respite from the hypervigilance, how they got some reprieve from the constant tension in their bodies. I can hold space for this because I’ve been there. Not in a prison, but in my body. I know what it is to have fear hardwired into my soma. I also know that respite is possible. I didn’t talk about my own experience with the guys but it is because of my own trauma that I could hold that container.

One time I did talk about my own PTSD was teaching veterans, Navy Seals and US Marines who were participating in programmes to reduce PTSD. Just like when I was with the prison inmates, my Dublin accent has never been stronger.

Those guys can smell artifice a mile off, if you’re not coming from the real real, forget it.

When I’m teaching yoga and I hear my Dublin accent strongly, I know that I’m really grounded and my true self is coming through. Without going into detail I told them that I too had experienced PTSD and knew what it was to feel unsafe in your body. This created trust, so important in working with such a population.

Your life is your curriculum, I’ve heard it said. I teach yoga for several reasons, the biggest of which is that I want to share with others the experience I’ve had of coming home to myself, of feeling safe again in my body. My classes are often quite physically demanding. Yoga is a practice where you learn to expand your comfort zone, to be with discomfort, to breathe through it and not run away.

Occasionally I tell my students about being in so much physical pain that staying awake for one more minute was all I could manage. Telling them this lets them know that I’m with them all the way. I’m holding the container and with them every step of the way. I know you can do this; you can do things you didn’t know were possible.

You can create beauty and meaning out of the ashes of trauma. You can find a way through and not just survive, but thrive. You can take your pain and let it be a portal to creativity and freedom and helping others. I promise you. It’ll be hard, but you can do it.

Dearbhla Kelly, October 2021