This article originally appeared in the June 2016 issue of SELF.
I was 6 years old when my dad took me water-skiing for the first time.
It was mesmerizing, watching him behind the boat.
He’d fly back and forth across the wake, slicing a clean zigzag.
Really, the guy was good at everythingjuggling, selling cars,poaching eggs, playing chess.
He could pull a quarter from behind my ear and shoot a perfect free throw.
As a little girl, I wasn’t sure there was anything my dadcouldn’tdo.
He was just that good at life.
I was terrified, but I so want to be my father’s daughter.
I bought it for one reason: to learn how to do a headstand.
This would be somethingIcould do.
My dad was good at everything; couldn’t I be good at something, too?
Many evenings followed of thuds, tumbles, and annoying my mother with “all that banging.”
My dad was impressesed: He could only do a headstand against a wall.
“Nice job, Peanut,” he said, giving me a thumbs-up.
“You’ve got the hang of it.”
A few months later, a car accident turned our whole world upside down.
“Your father is probably dead.”
My mother repeated the sentence on our drive to the hospital.
“You have to prepare yourself for that, OK?”
The trees outside my window were a wash of green watercolor.
“Ok, Janna?”
“He’s dead dead, Mom.”
I clenched my teeth.
“He’s not going to die.
You’ll see.”
He was pinned down by his seat belt, which had broken 11 ribs.
He also had hit his head very hard.
The jaws of life were called in to extricate him from the wreckage.
I sat and waited: for my grandparents, for news, for anything.
My mother convinced one of the nurses to let me see my father.
“Just tell him you love him,” she suggested.
I entered a quiet room that smelled like a vet’s office.
He was frozen in a coma, threaded with IVs that tethered him to a cluster of machines.
His mustache was the only thing I recognized.
I wanted to throw up, but I stood dutifully by the bed and told him I loved him.
The only response was chirping machines.
In the week that followed, my family lived in the waiting room.
At some point, my grandparents' minister drove to the hospital to pray with us.
Six day later, he woke up.
It was a miracle.
No on told us that this was when the real work began.
Back then, not even his doctors knew much about brain injury.
Here is what we learned.
Living with a survivor of traumatic brian injury (TBI) can be deeply sad and very frustrating.
It’s tears and loss; it’s endless conversations that are nearly impossible to navigate.
His personality took the biggest hit.
After two months of rehab, he could hold a conversation and walk down the street on his own.
But he struggled with controlling his impulses and feeling compassion.
No one could tell by looking, but he couldn’t hold a job or balance a checkbook.
In short, my dad had a really hard time making good decisions.
As a teenager, I vowed not to add to the chaos.
When he swore at me, I ignored his harsh words.
I went to college in Ohio, then moved to New York City for graduate school.
He’d lost almost all of his friends and couldn’t hold even a volunteer job.
I had a new life, but I was still desperate to alleviate stress.
One afternoon, I passed a Bikram yoga studio and decided to try it.
Then I went backnearly every damn day for the next two years.
I fed off of the discipline, the intensity.
Next, I went to Jivamukti studio, known for its flowing Vinyasa sequences and attention to alignment.
Hello again, headstand.
Easy as pie, like I’d been doing it my whole life.
All of that balancing and breathing started to unearth something.
I stopped askingWhy me?
Why brain injury?And I decided to become a yoga teacher.
Toward the end of our monthlong intensive, we had a discussion on karma.
The teacher asked: “How are you going to use yoga to give back?”
It was a big question, but everyone around me had a thoughtful answer.
One woman planned to work with soldiers on her next tour in Iraq.
A guy wanted to teach yoga in prisons.
My dad and yoga: It just made sense.
After all, yoga is about the union of mind and body.
Brain injury is trauma, which damage the connection between mind and body.
My father’s body was still present, all things basically intact, but his mind was stuck.
He was unable to fully acknowledge his injury, his behaviors, and his limitations.
All the drugs, specialized thaerapies and journalizing exercises in the world couldn’t get him to change.
It was time to try something new.
A few months later, properly certified, I drove home for our first class.
“That will beinteresting,” he said, drawing out the word.
“After all, people have been doing yoga for over 5,000 years.”
Our first go was rough.
His muscle tone was gone and his breath labored.
I felt like I was trying to mold old, hardened clay.
Still, he did everything I asked, wobbling through standing poses and struggling to differentiate left from right.
I could tell he liked it: the challenge, the sweat.
I stayed home two extra days so we could practice together.
To everyone’s surprise, he did.
He was becoming more limber, more confident and more aware.
I wasn’t the only one who saw positive changes.
My mom, our friends, and his therapist agreed that he was exercising more passion and self-control.
In 15 years of brain injury, nothing had helped him quite the way yoga had.
“It makes me feel smooth,” he told me.
Two years later, I moved back to Pittsburgh.
I helped my mom by taking my dad to his doctor visits.
I went with them to his TBI support group.
And as much as I could, I did yoga with him.
Our typical practice was nothing fancy; just those same 20 poses.
Yoga was something we could share, a little like water-skiing.
It’s cumbersome, unfamiliar, and utterly satisfying.
It was my way back to my brain and my body, and now it could he his.
And slowly, it was healing us both.
Photo Credit: Nico ElNino / Getty
