Fat Lady on a Bike: My Journey to Peace and Fitness

Join me and my wonderful Electra Townie bike on my continuing journey to inner peace and both inner and outer fitness.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Breaking the Cycle

This has been a remarkable winter and extremely challenging early spring, and I apologize for my long absence from this space.  I hope to write with more regularity as I navigate through this next stage of my journey.

Last Thursday, I had an amazing experience:  a complete convergence between the physical and the psychological/spiritual realms. 

In the physical world, while I have been much healthier this past year than for many years previous, and much more energetic and active, I have continued to experience periodic pain in my knees (osteoarthritis) and left ankle (sinus tarsi syndrome due to impaired leg mechanics).  Over the winter in Hawaii, my ankle was fairly well behaved, but during the past couple of weeks after we came back to Massachusetts, it started hurting more and more.

Similarly, while I had a wonderful winter in terms of mind, heart and spirit, eating well, sleeping well and feeling extremely balanced, the minute we got back east I was bombarded with stressors.  For one thing, we continued to be displaced from the heart of our home, primarily due to the unreasonable recalcitrance of a neighbor who wouldn't give us permission to access our pipes through her apartment until just last week.  For another, in order to hold our rather large Passover seders in the apartment which is usually reserved for that purpose (and storage) but which has been where we sleep for the past 8 months, we had to move a whole lot of stuff out to give us some space.  We also had to remove everything we might need from the unit where the work was going to be done, and we also had to make space in the unit where our offices and second kitchen are so we could eat meals down there once Passover had ended!  Not to mention shopping and cooking for a challenging holiday and 40 dinner guests!

We got through the holiday joyously, but I found my mood going downhill.  I recognized that I had a serious attitude problem; I was seeing obstacles, not challenges, and did not see how to pull myself back to my usual, more optimistic point of view.  And above all, I felt out of balance and desperately in need of restoring that internal gyroscope.

On the Thursday in question, I had a morning phone session with Teri Hirss, my friend, teacher and guide along this journey, and she gently led me to the realization that I was back in the darkest place in my past, that horrible moment of being in a world without my mother, not knowing how to go on, feeling totally powerless and not heard or understood by any of the adults in my world.  While household upheaval is certainly not on a par with the death of a parent in terms of actual emotional trauma, what I realized was that I was similarly overwhelmed and thrown by the intensity of the situation and my inability to deal with it into "lizard brain" mode -- fight or flight only, no higher consciousness involved.  And the resonance with that earlier time had me trapped in my earlier feelings of helplessness and frustration.

In the afternoon, I went to physical therapy, and Lena's magical hands set to work on my ankle.  She probed deep and hard, and then told me that massage was all about breaking the cycle of pain.  If there was knotting and spasm in a muscle, it would break that spasm.  In my case, where she said she felt no spasm, it could break the cycle of escalating pain by desensitizing the nerves.  While this was painful at the time, it could offer great relief.

When I left PT that afternoon, I walked out into the sunlight with a light heart and a pain-free ankle.  The cycle was broken. And I've been pain-free and feeling balanced again ever since.

A hui hou.

1 comment:

  1. Glad for the update and for the lifting of your spirits. I've had a similar journey of late... and it's amazing how an attitude adjustment is sometimes the most important thing you can do for your health... mental, physical or spiritual. Here's to keeping our heads straight... or in your case, simply clear. ;-)

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