WARRIOR
POSES
head injuries here?” she asked,
and a wiseguy in the class called
out, “We’re ALL head injuries!”
to general chuckles.
At one point she had them on
their backs, knees drawn up and
held by their arms, a posture she
tells them “massages the descending colon.” “This will help ensure
you have that morning constitutional,” she told them cheerfully as
they gently rocked back and forth.
Soon she had them focusing all
their attention on their breathing, urging them to feel how each
inward and outward breath lightly
traces their spine. “Now I’m going
to turn the lights out,” she said softly, “in three, two … one. If you fall
asleep, that’s fine. If you’re snoring
too loudly, I will come by and touch
you on your right shoulder.”
On the mat next to Sgt. Martz
were two Marines. One was Billy
Wright, 49, who did two combat
tours in Lebanon in 1983 and was
later paralyzed from the chest
down in a car wreck. He uses yoga
breathing exercises to loosen up
his muscles and joints that stiffen
from long periods in his wheelchair. “Even lying on my back I
can feel my hips flex,” he said.
“Sitting in the chair, they get real
tight and this loosens them up.”
HUFFINGTON
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The other was 24-year-old
Joshua Boyd from Dry Fork, Va.,
a Marine lance corporal who did
two combat tours in Iraq and came
home wounded, with PTSD and
mild TBI. He lost a good friend, a
fellow Marine, who was killed by
an IED. “They had stuck it inside
a culvert,” Boyd said. “I had just
gotten to Iraq and didn’t have IED
training and I didn’t know what
to look for. I didn’t look where I
should have. It was my fault.”
After the blast, he said, he
and his platoon collected the
body parts.
At night, Boyd often jackknifes
awake, yelling and sweating,
dreaming of an intense firefight he
experienced in Iraq in 2007. During this recurring dream, his wife
is there in the middle of the battle
and his buddies have abandoned
them both while insurgents are
closing in on them. He can feel
them sense his weakness.
“I do have trouble sleeping,” he
said sheepishly. During the long
nights, he is often either deep in
his nightmare, or terrified he is
about to have it again.
But yoga has helped change the
way he sleeps and dreams. “Yesterday I did the iRest session. I
fell asleep,” he said. “When I got
done, I felt so much more energized. I haven’t felt like
that for years.”