Kapotasana blues

I have been feeling down for a while now. It is mostly ashtanga funk, the rest of my life is more or less OK. The name of this misery - well, kapotasana, of course. I am so sad about the whole thing, I did not want to write, read or even think about ashtanga lately. Dreading the pose poisoned my joy of practice completely and making myself to go to Mysore became an exercise in willpower. In addition, I hurt myself again.

It all started with waking up with a crick in the neck. Nothing new, happens when I go to bed too tired and not move enough in sleep. I went to practice, and it made it worse. Now this is a surprise, because normally yoga always helped in these situations. But I never practiced kapotasana before, and this was the pose that made a difference for the worse. Pain moved from my neck and settled in the upper back, between shoulder blades. It was so bad, pushing a door open with one hand cause sharp pain, leaving me gasping for air for a moment. It was painful to take full inhalations, sit, stand, lie down. Whew. Went to get a massage with Keith. He discovered a string of brand-new knots between my shoulder blades on both sides. The massage itself was painful, but I felt much better afterwards. So good that I practiced on my own at home, carefully and gently, but including some backbends. This morning - the pain is back, not as bad as it was, but bad enough to keep me seated like I just swallowed a stick.

I googled the upper back pain and it seems that the injury to that area is extremely rare. But again, they are talking about normal people, not ones who try to stick their noses between the feet bending backward.

So it has been nearly a week I am on and off in pain. If I were smart, I would go to see a doctor. But then I think that he would tell me just to stop doing what I am doing and everything will be fine. I can't imaging any disk problems in the chest area, because the column just does not bend backwardly there. It doesn't. There are spikes on the vertebrae that prevent that bending. On the other hand, something obviously irritated the outgoing nerves to make the rhomboid muscles bulge up. Movement of the ribs? I noticed before that really good backbenders have their ribcage sticking up when in a deep backbend, so I was trying to emulate the movement, so this is a possibility. I am not sure, though, if there is a proximity of the ribs and the nerves that exit the spinal cord. Anyway, if it is not vertebrae and the disks, then it can't be anything serious, right? Right?