Friday, April 27, 2012

Connecting the dots

There are a lot of topics that I have been thinking about lately.  Aging and the good death, for one, due to not only the recent death of a good friend, but also my work in an assisted living facility.  The torpor of spring, when really I think I ought to be feeling re-invigorated.  The strange world of channeling and intuitive healing.  Separations and reunions, expansion and contraction, lost and found...  But what really finally broke my lethargy with respect to the writing was an intense somatic experience I had yesterday on the massage table.

message from Los Angeles


I must preface this with another story.  Two years ago, I had been working at my first massage position for a few months, when one day (in the spring or summer, around this time of year) I had a terrible headache.  I asked my boss to work on my neck and shoulder, but it didn't really seem to help.  I could feel an awful grief locked up in my shoulder (this was right around the time my divorce went to trial, and my eldest daughter was about to graduate from high school), and so we went for a second round of massage later in the afternoon.  Something got triggered out of my levator muscle that ended up making me feel as if I were in labor again, terrible, awful labor -- I cried my heart out and yelled and thrashed around for at least an hour before it was all over, then slept for several hours.  I felt better, but still disoriented and woozy, but with a lot of relief.  I told my mentor, Judy, about what had happened, because I didn't understand it.  She asked me how many kids I had -- and when I replied that I had given birth to 3, she said, "Well, good, you'll only have to do this twice more then."  I thought, no way.  That was bad enough!  I already gave birth to them once, why do I have to do it again?

And still, I did not put the pieces together until yesterday, when I understood.

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About a month ago, I took my high-school-senior daughter (and my 8th grade son) on a road trip to the west coast to look at colleges that she'd been accepted to, so that she could get an idea of where she really wanted to go.  We got to see it in the worst possible weather, a huge rainstorm having enveloped more or less the entire coast and dumping 14 inches of rain everywhere we went.


a relatively clear view, believe it or not

We had flown into Seattle, and proceeded to drive down to Los Angeles over the course of the next ten days, touring schools in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and San Francisco.  Then we flew home from LA, after visiting one of my oldest and dearest friends.  She eventually decided to go to the San Francisco Art Institute.


my kids and their "uncle"


The rental car we drove had no cruise control (!) and sad as it is to admit, I have gotten used to such amenities during long drives.  My right leg and hip got quite crampy without the ability to switch positions, stretch, or shift at all.  The pain became persistent even after we returned home again, and so I ended up seeing one of my colleagues/mentors to work in my pelvis and psoas area.  After the first treatment, I felt wonderfully free in the hip, and then I booked again for a treatment the following week to sort of 'seal it in'.  That treatment provoked a lot of shifting in the low back again, and I felt really great.  About two weeks later, however, I fell into a deep hole while chasing the neighbor's dogs back into their own yard in the middle of the night.  That caused me a great deal of misery, not only where I hit the dirt, but all over -- the sprawled-out shoulders, the knees, the hip, just OW all over.

The pelvic pain got so severe that it would wake me up from a sound sleep, so strong that it made it difficult even to breathe.  So I got back on the table with Jennifer.  As she worked deep into the pelvic area, we could feel the incredible toughness of certain points.  They were painful, but I felt that it was better just to get the work done and get the relief that I sought.  At a certain point, I consciously asked for help from my guides to remove these blockages.  At the same time, I was struck by the thought that this was so painful I really wanted to cry.  As I gave myself permission to cry from the pain, the tough spots began to loosen.  As they loosened, I suddenly recognized that I didn't want my baby girl to go away.  And as I voiced this to Jennifer, I started sobbing for real.  She talked me though this, massaged my womb, my lower belly, nest of the babies, and we both mourned the way we lose our babies from our bodies and our lives.  

I told her -- we gestate our babies for nine months, we lose them from within our bodies, and then we get rewarded for our pains with a beautiful new life to nurture... and then we gestate them for another 18 years, only to lose them to the world.  It is beautiful to see them fly off, to know that we have done the best we could, and to watch our children grow and take on their own challenges, live their own lives, create their own stories, and all that.  In my mind and my heart, I KNOW THIS.  But in my body, it is apparently another story.  I didn't "get it" until this second occurrence happened, that the link between these repetitions of the birthing pains is my body's visceral reaction to my children's growing up, when I have to let them go all over again.  Two years ago, I had to let go of my eldest child.  Now, the middle one.... so now I am waiting for the time, four years from now, when I will have to do this again to be able to let go of my son.  

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One of the things we are recognizing more and more is that bodywork has the ability to facilitate mental and emotional changes.  When my hands, with their thousands of nerve endings, are touching a body, with its thousands of nerve endings, our brains end up communicating with each other directly.  We are touching the central nervous system, asking our client's brain to change its response to the tissues of the body in order for the client's own body to heal itself.  The brain stores a virtual map of the body within itself, and we are literally asking the brain to change the map:  in order to relieve pain, inflammation, etc.  The emotions are stored very close to, if not actually on, the same exact map... and so, sometimes great emotional releases accompany the physical ones.  The bodymind truly is one structure.  We all need to be reminded at times of the power of the interconnectedness.  And, not to forget the spirit and its connection to the bodymind:  we are complex creatures, spiritual in nature, with unmeasurable aspects and at times unfathomable capabilities.


Be peaceful.