The Panacea

Apoorva, a man in his late thirties, got the key to his longstanding pain through the realisation made from a sitting with his physiotherapist, Dr. Kumar. Not long ago, when Apoorva landed up in the same city where his good friend practiced and taught yoga, he was elated with unbound happiness for two reasons. The first being reunion with the old friend and the second one being the thought of having a blessing that his friend could cure him of a very old pain. A pain that had become his shadow in the last two decades. Apoorva shared his experiences and the pain in his back that haunted him almost every day, a nagging reminder of the years when Apoorva wanted to be a cricketer. A faulty bowling action had left him with a pain for life. Cricket was left behind in search of a job and in the pursuit of excelling in the job. He had no alternative in life, no throwback option available but to succeed in his professional career. Cricket was long gone but the pain remained and reminded him always what he wanted to become but couldn’t. Apoorva’s friend suggested him to attend yoga sessions but there was an awkwardness in his approach to yoga which left him with more pain than relief. It was then that his friend suggested to see a physiotherapist, Dr. Kumar and it was little known to Apoorva that Dr. Kumar would cure him and teach him the very essence to a stress-free, pain-free life.

Apoorva also had another issue to deal with - a distinct stammer in his speech from childhood. He picked it up not as he started speaking as a toddler but it was an incident which was vivid in his memory when he was a 6 year old. In the midst of pronouncing the months, he was supposed to follow one of his classmates to say the second month and all he remembered was struggling to say February. As he grew the number of words he would stumble upon kept growing by the day. His confidence dented with his struggle, he had no clue how to come out of this stuttering speech issue. An unfamiliar place, unknown people would render him in a nightmarish situation. Such pronounced was this stammer that he would ask his friends in college to respond to his attendance call lest he would fall short in the attendance requirements. He was in his early twenties when a friend suggested to take the help of a speech therapist. The therapist worked with him for about 3 weeks asking him to slow down and not rush into the words. As he would ask him to speak in front of a mirror to understand where he would stutter, he would work on his back muscles, gently massaging them. Although it helped Apoorva overcome the stigma to a greater extent, he would actually learn the cause of it after a decade and half.

As Dr. Kumar asked him to look back without moving the torso, it dawned upon him that he had lost the ability to use the flexibility of his neck to look back. He would turn back his head alongwith the upper body to be able to look back. He had developed stiffness in his upper back and neck and was completely oblivious to this predicament. Dr. Kumar was God-sent for Apoorva. With each sitting, the genial physiotherapist made him learn one of the most important lessons of life which had been plaguing him since that incident as a six year old – the ability to R E L A X. The physiotherapy sessions continued with all its paraphernalia but Apoorva was elated that he had found his cure – to relax. It was the panacea that had eluded him for more than three decades. It was the cause for most of his problems, if not for all. He has been a completely different person since he learnt The Panacea and now lives his life with panache.