“The sound is not disturbing you. You’re disturbing the sound.” This is one of my favorite yoga quotes from Deborah Adele’s book The Yamas & Niyamas. Totally unrelated to tinnitus, but as someone who’s had tinnitus since 2020, I think it’s entirely relatable.
The sound is there. That’s a fact. Ideally, someone would have found a cure yesterday. Until then, how do we stop constantly giving it our attention and allowing the relentless search for a cure to consume us?
For me, yoga is the answer. The physical practice alongside its philosophy has helped me shift the focus to the entirety of my experience. It has helped me see tinnitus for the background noise it is, not the central focus of my being.
Here’s my story and why I think yoga could be your answer too.
The onset of my tinnitus
When my tinnitus began, I was already struggling. I had given birth less than three months ago. The end of my pregnancy and the early post-partum didn’t go as planned. I was faced with a lot of uncertainty. In some sense I had too much time to dwell on what ifs which caused a lot of anxiety.
Then, as if I wasn’t stressed already, my right ear began to ring. The sort of sound you hear after a gunshot in movies. July 4, 2020. Quietly at first, but in a few weeks, it was multiple sounds all at once and felt like a loud manufacturing plant. I struggled to sleep at night. And while my baby napped during the day, I desperately scoured research papers for a cure.
Chasing tinnitus relief
I also took all the appropriate steps, getting in touch with my physician. I thought I’d get a resolution after my first ENT appointment.
But what I thought would be a one off visit, turned into countless appointments with ENT specialists, neurologists, a neurosurgeon, physios along with completing numerous tests, ultrasounds and MRIs.
The conclusion was always the same: my tinnitus couldn’t be placed. The positive side of this, as my ENT explained, is that there was nothing visibly wrong with any structures and my hearing was not impaired.
My tinnitus is psychosomatic. It has left no trace in my physical body that would explain the persistent ringing. While this is no doubt a positive outcome, this also means that it hasn’t left a clue on what to address to stop the constant ringing.
Turning to yoga to stop ear ringing
When the Western medicine shrugged its shoulders, I had to become open-minded to other avenues. For context, I am big on science and critical thinking, so in some sense having a Master’s in Media and Information Literacy made what I did next quite odd.
But there I was. From research papers, I turned to Reddit threads, YouTube and Joe Despenza books.
In the midst of ice baths, Tibetan rites, questionable diet choices, and sessions with healers, yoga was one of my more esoteric attempts to cure tinnitus. I’d read about yoga providing a complete cure for some people and clung to those stories.
I had first tried yoga in 2014 for work-related stress, and I remember feeling an immediate connection. I was never into exercise, but suddenly, there was movement that truly moved me. In a few years I was already hoping to take yoga teacher training but talked myself out of it. After the initial hype and moving countries, my practice became irregular.
But as Krishnamacharya, one of the leaders of therapeutic yoga, said: “Thank god for Duhkna (suffering). It is the unavoidable motive to practice yoga.” And that was true for me.
Fast forward to 2020: my son was six months old, and hoping that yoga would rid me of tinnitus I jumped back into my practice with more intensity than ever before. It became my daily ritual, and within nine months, I could do a headstand and a full split.
The caveat? Seeing my body become stronger and flexible was a great side effect but my right ear was still ringing and now at times the left chimed in too. Much less noticeable during the day, it was still a noise I reacquainted myself with every evening.
However, something had shifted. I was no longer sleeping next to a speaker with masking sounds. I could fall asleep hearing just my tinnitus disharmonies. I had turned my perspective from hearing the sound and classing it as a disturbance to just hearing the sound without dwelling on it.
As the years passed, I learnt to look at tinnitus not as annoyance but the catalyst in me paying attention to my needs. Tinnitus helped me rediscover yoga and work myself up to doing the yoga teacher training at 29. I am also currently studying Health Sports to deepen my knowledge of nutrition, anatomy and physiology. Everything that I was interested in for a long time but didn’t prioritize in my life.
How yoga provides tinnitus relief
In my experience, yoga can help in two ways. One is based purely on the fact that moving our body is beneficial for our health. The other is through its philosophical texts.
Yoga movement practice for tinnitus
First of all, yogasana and pranayama are yogic practices that work directly with the physical body through moving it from the inside through breathing and outside via yoga postures.
From the Western perspective, exercising in general improves mental health. But even when zooming into yoga, scientists have found the physical practice helpful in reducing tinnitus distress. I really love a recent quote I read by doctor yogi. For people who respect both the yogic tradition and its evolution through science.
Tinnitus is often associated with posture issues, such as forward head posture, TMJ, cervical spine instability. In such cases physiotherapy and exercise programs can even provide complete recovery through strengthening and stretching the areas and tissues that need nurturing in your body.
The cause of your tinnitus and your situation may be different, but the mental toll is universal. Recent analysis of multiple tinnitus research papers confirms what many of us already know: the ringing in ears is closely linked to anxiety, depression, and insomnia.
Yoga Sutra of Patanjali defines yoga as “Citta Vritti Nirodha”, meaning the practice of calming the mind. Its movement practice is one of the ways to get closer to this state. That’s why it is worth giving yogasana and pranayama a go even if the cause of your tinnitus is not psychosomatic.
You can do a treadmill run or strength workout while watching your favourite TV show. The only thing you should watch during an asana practice is yourself. You become aware of the entire bouquet of your bodily sensations. In this context, tinnitus is one of the sensations but so irrelevant that it fades into the background.
And what you practice on the mat, you bring into your daily life. Hopefully, in time, it takes the backseat of every other experience you have.
Yogic philosphy for tinnitus
Beyond the physical practice, I invite you to explore yoga’s philosophical side in your journey to find peace with tinnitus. Not even in a spiritual sense, but as a source of ideas for shifting your perspective on life.
The questions of how to shift your mindset and deal with the life’s challenges aren’t new. For thousands of years, philosophical texts, be it from Buddhism, yoga, or Stoicism have offered guidance on this very topic.
In the Yoga Sutras, yoga is outlined as an eight-limbed practice known as Ashtanga Yoga. The first two limbs, Yamas and Niyamas, are principles that guide a yogi on how to treat others and oneself. While I won’t go into detail on them, I’ll share two of the principles that helped me mentally accept tinnitus.
Yoga teaches us to cultivate Santosha, or contentment, for where we are. Reading about this concept from different authors helped me stop fighting my reality which was tinnitus. It is clear that whatever we fight, we focus on.
But don’t confuse this with giving up. The very definition of yoga is a change, a movement from one point to another. It’s a practice of continuous improvement. So instead of giving in, we accept the hand we’ve been dealt and play it to the best of our ability.
While we do that, we also remember another profound concept: Vairagya, or non-attachment. In the physical practice of asana, you’re encouraged to embrace your body as it is today and move toward a goal you have without attaching your happiness to achieving it.
The same is true for tinnitus: your happiness doesn’t have to depend on its disappearance. Placing your ability to move on with life after ridding your ears of tinnitus only adds to stress and anxiety.
Through yoga, the ability to stop chasing the cure becames a cure in itself.
Tinnitus is just one example of the lack of control we have over what life throws at us. The ability to live in the present moment with appreciation and acceptance, without attaching our happiness to a distant goal, is a skill we need in all areas of life.
Beyond tinnitus, recognizing and responding to each of life’s situations appropriately is yoga’s greatest contribution to my life.
Yoga helps clear away biased thoughts and see situations for what they truly are. It helps build the confidence and courage to change what is within one’s control, and develop the grace to accept and navigate challenges that are outside of our circle of control. And that circle of control? It’s pretty small.
I am currently working on free Yoga for Tinnitus series. Send me an e-mail to join the waitlist elinakarole.yoga[@]gmail.com.