Delighting in autumn's arrival even as I suffer a month of intense back troubles:
releasing old, deep fear–constriction that has been locked in my physical being forever–becoming more spacious in my body.
Darkness comes earlier and earlier these days. And, blessedly, so do the cooler temperatures. So many of us here are thrilled to see the signs of summer ending at last. Not so many are similarly happy about the shortening days.
But, for me, the prospect of longer and longer hours of delicious darkness is most welcomed. I’m always so touched by how everything stills and slows as we move into night. I feel so enveloped and profoundly nourished by the quieting dark hours. I wrap myself in the softness of the dark. The shift from vision to hearing and smell and body senses that all seem to intensify without the distraction of vision’s dominance.
I still revel in my nighttime meanders to the creeks. But now I’m also delighting in the returning possibility of daytime hikes in the local mountains. Mountains that are awash with rusts and golds and tans mixing in with the greens that survived the brutal summer’s heat. Not “fall foliage” by any stretch of the imagination. But “fall chaparral” that glows radiantly in the magnificent golden blush of early autumn’s late afternoon sunlight.
There is a lightening, a loosening in my body during these cooling days. No longer weighed down by the relentless daytime heat of summer as we have it here. Such sweet relief!
Having lots of joyous playing in the “dirt.” Turning over the soil in parts of my little vegetable garden patches. Adding compost–some of it from my own kitchen and garden waste–and putting in some fall “crops.” This year it’s more little bits of arrugula, baby bok choy, Russian red kale, red and green mustard, some beets, some delicata squash and a new round of purple onions. All this while still picking cherry and beefsteak tomatoes, last year’s purple onions, collard greens, arrugula, some odd varieties of mustard greens, red and green chard, basil, oregano, mint and an earlier planting of bok choy. Still more strawberries coming in–at least from the hanging baskets. The local snails and slugs usually get to feasting on the ground level strawberries before I do!
I’ve been living with a very challenging companion this past month or so: Since the day I started traveling home from my last visit to Florida I’ve been plagued by mostly low level yet unremitting, endlessly morphing back ache and periodic intense spasms in one of my hips. My usual routine of Feldenkrais bodywork, massage, chiropractic, and acupuncture would help to reduce the more acute episodes considerably. Yet I’d still be left with the chronic, nagging discomfort and a sense of being vulnerable to new flare-ups at any moment. A mix of homeopathic remedies, gentle stretching, lying on a heating pad and repeated soakings in either bath or hot tub–my well practiced self-healing regime–also worked also only to reduce but not put an end to the challenging ongoing discomfort.
Some days, in desperation I’d try extra strength doses of ibuprofen (my one concession to “western” remedies) with the same frustrating result. I even succumbed to trying Aleve one day (a real stretch for me). Again, no noticeable effects.
I was relentlessly in discomfort that would ebb somewhat before returning in some new configuration. Weeks of moving very carefully and attentively. Wondering how it is that anyone learns to live with high levels of chronic pain. Feeling such enormous respect and awe for the people who actually manage to do that.
Trying, with no success, to engage in dialogue with the aching, spasming muscles of my sacroiliac. Wondering if I’d ever again be free from this plaguing exhausting discomfort. Having rants, crying, whining, feeling miserable. Having intermittent periods of feeling in some gentle balance with the suffering. Accepting it as a teaching in developing the patience and spaciousness with my body’s pain that I have with my psyche’s pain. And, throughout the whole of it having an unquestioning, unshakable deep, deep knowing that this incredibly challenging process was absolutely one of growth, healing and expansion.
That none of my attempts to help myself and none of the help I sought from others brought the full relief I longed for had made it absolutely clear. I was being asked to stay in the middle of all of it for some learning/some unraveling. Even though I couldn’t yet fathom the message/lesson/point. So, I lived with and around the ongoing discomfort. I found ways to do what needed doing in the house and the gardens–very carefully and only when it felt safe to try doing such physical work. I was able to take my walks most days.
Sometimes I suffered intense upset. Sometimes it was just how things were, a challenging and trying time. I was incredibly loving and tender with my overwrought and sometimes exhausted self. Suffering and yet still having a mommy inside me that was holding my physically hurting self with enormous compassion. Giving me loving assurances that we’d come to the other side in good time.
And, indeed–at last–I seem to have come to the other side this very week. The “finale” involved the most intense and incapacitating spasm of the whole cycle–as though it had all been leading to that huge intensification before the release could finally come.
The releasing came during a Feldenkrais session when my practitioner spoke to my body as he was working with my mid-spine. He loving whispered to it that it was safe to feel its pain. I dissolved into tears, wrenching sobs welling up from somewhere old and deep. In that same moment I felt as though a huge and heavy suit of armor melted off my whole body. The “armor” was a thick layer of terrified constriction with which my body has always responded to any physical pain. When the armor fell away, the healing work could finally reach the source of the pain.
Like so many of us who were inadequately mothered, my seeking comfort for physical or emotional pain in my early years usually brought anger, dismissal or cold withdrawal. Responses that my small, vulnerable, hurting self experienced as harsh punishment.
Over the years I’ve been able to teach myself to make wonderfully accepting, safe space for fully experiencing and re-mothering my emotionally hurting self. My physically hurting self has seemed in many ways beyond my capacity to re-mother. So much my response to my physical pain used to be as meanly dismissive as my biological mother’s response to it had been. As I became more compassionate with my physical pain, I also seemed to get more overwhelmed by it. I would feel extremely frantic, helpless and hysterical in the face of my physical hurting. In this frantic fear, my whole being would constrict. The level of pain and discomfort I was feeling would be intensified and made inaccessible-to-calming by my body’s fearful, constriction around the original pain. The armoring response, meant to protect my hurting being-in-a-body was in fact making everything worse.
These awful and intense five weeks of physical discomfort and spasm were both triggered and, at the “finale,” escalated by interactions that were strongly re-stimulating of my early woundings. Deep inner re-mothering work has helped me to transform these woundings on the emotional/psychic level. But, I’d been aware for a long while that there were still unhealed residues left locked in my body. Residues that I seemed utterly unable to find ways to release on my own.
With the releasing that happened in the Feldenkrais session, something really transformed, at last. I feel a huge change in my experience of my body, my embodied self. It’s hard to find adequate language to describe the experience, The closest I can get is to say it’s a sense of expandedness, of opening; a feeling of growing spaciousness in my physical being. A body knowing that I can now feel as safe to feel my physical pain as I’ve been able to feel safe to feel my emotional pain. It all feels rather miraculous and exciting!
Originally published October 2003
