Craving Bitter, and Green

Spoonwiz recently published an essay of mine,  Healing Green, adapted from my memoir-in-progress.

As I've tried to work my way out of chronic Lyme and out of the ramifications of long-term antibiotics, I found that my tastes changed and then discovered that what I craved--bitter foods and green--aligned with Chinese Medicine theories of what my body actually needed.

On choice and releasing chronic pain

My muscles have been locked up lately, in the way that they do that is not simply tightness from working them, easily resolved with a stretch. Rather than tightness, it is more a sense of the muscles having seized up and the fascia tight and angry over them. It’s uncomfortable at best and painful at worst and severely inhibits my range of motion in a way in which I can’t even feel where the restriction is that is holding me back is, only that I can’t move my leg any further in the direction I want to move.

This is not a state that I am used to anymore although this is how I used to be all the time when I was really sick with Lyme Disease. It comes and goes and when it comes, it’s baffling to me because I haven’t ever been able to figure out how to release it.

I meditate almost daily, sometimes twice a day. It’s how I get centered, how I get quiet and how I move, shift and grow. And now, apparently, how I release physical tension.

I did a standing meditation the other day, and, taking from my qigong training, imagined the soles of my feet open and tension streaming out of me. It was one of those meditations when time and place seem to evaporate, and all is quiet and easy within me because I am perfectly aligned. From this center, I realized I could ask my quads to relax. They slowly melted their grip away from my femurs and pelvis, my patella shifted where it sat and my pelvis rotated to a more upright position. Then I asked the entire sides of my body to relax, and felt like a river of light was flowing from my ribs down through the sides of my legs. My stance shifted and I dropped into my bones and for once, felt my structure giving me posture rather than the grip of muscles to holding me up. It felt freeing and loose and like there was nothing that I couldn’t ask my body to do.

So here is what I learned (besides that habits and movement and holding patterning are deep and hard to shake—I went back into tightness, although much less severe, the next day): that tightness is a choice. That, although we sink into holding and movement patterns without thought, we do have control over release and relaxation. The trick is that release can be challenging to learn to do since so much of what we do in this society is about force, about doing rather than allowing, softening and receiving.

So often, I work with people who view their body as other, as this thing that they are in battle with, this thing that provides pain or is uncomfortably tight for incomprehensible reasons.

I think that understanding our bodies as something apart from what we understand ourselves to be leads to this lack of understanding pain and discomfort as signals that something needs to change.  

In my meditation when I released all this painful tightness, I had a deep sense of my own wholeness, of my control over pain and tightness. It felt delicious to feel the tension melt away but even more powerful than that was to understand that it’s my decision to hold tension and tightness and my decision also to release it and slip into a more gentle way of being, a way of being without force.

On Rest and Healing

It has been three days and I haven’t left my house yet. I cancelled Thanksgiving because I couldn’t imagine anything worse than having to sit upright at a table and hold conversation. I stayed home and ate chicken soup that my mom dropped off and slept for most of the past three days.

The thing is, I was going to pull it together to keep going and go to all the events I had planned, sick be damned. It took a dear friend to point out to me that I sounded burnt out and needed a vacation. That, and how could I expect to get better until I rested?

A full day into doing nothing and still being so very tired, I wondered at how much I needed someone else to tell me to stop and rest. Which is crazy because I tell my clients all the time that they need to slow down on forcing themselves back into action when they have injuries. And I know that rest is when the body recovers, when the body grows stronger, and when the body and mind integrate new movement knowledge—I know that recovery and strength don’t happen in the moment of action but afterward. And here I was, three weeks into a head cold, six weeks into a lyme flareup and I was going to force my way through another long weekend full of engagements and just hope that I’d get better along the way.

Here is the thing: I have a very difficult time figuring out when the sick that I am is part of Lyme, etc or if it is something else, something that I should deal with. Because I’ve been so actively sick for so much of my life, not only do I not know what healthy is (so I don’t determine what being sick is well), when I get sick, I tend to brush it off as just part of Lyme, etc., or, what I live with constantly.  I will push myself to extremes (like breaking an ankle and walking eight miles to a hospital or getting up and going to work after my PICC line opened and I bled through four comforters and my mattress or continuing on with life as usual when I am shitting blood) simply because I am really good at living life in discomfort, pain and exhaustion. I just tell myself: this is nothing, you have made it through so much worse than this.

I don’t know anymore where to draw the line. If I am so used to doing life while sick, if I don’t really know what well feels like then how do I know when sick is too sick? Because I don’t have the option to pack it all in and take a year off (which is what I’d really love to do) and just—sleep. 

What I know is that I'll work with clients who are training, hard, for some goal: to climb a mountain, to run a marathon, to lose weight and they will push and push and push, working out constantly but then they will hit a plateau. Often, I find, if they take a week or two off completely, they come back stronger, able to perform the exercises they previously couldn't and are more coordinated. Because the body grows stronger while at rest, not in the gym. I know this but forget to apply it to my own life: if I don't give my body the conditions to heal, how can I expect to fully recover?

The body remembering

I haven't been moving very much in the past three weeks. Or rather, I've been stuck in a hunched over position: at the computer, over my handle bars, propped up against pillows. I've been sick, there was my sister's wedding, I've been sick. A cold and not enough sleep was all it took to give Lyme some room to play. I'm feeling much better now. Not completely back to where I was a month ago, but better.

The past week, I've felt stiff and stuck in my upper back and neck and locked up through my ribs. I knew the whole time that it was because I've done not really much of anything at all. This morning the sun woke me up at eight am and I knew that it was time to get out there. I laced on my shoes and hit the road, promising myself that I'd take it slow and steady, nice and easy.

This is what I love about running: my body reverts to ideal posture as I go. I only ran three miles, nice and slow, but the second half, my abs turned on and shifted my ribs back and my spine opened up. I felt long and fluid and easy. I felt so good, I couldn't even remember what pain and stiffness had felt like an hour before. I felt perfectly right in my alignment.

The body knows, the body wants to heal, wants to maintain perfect alignment (which, of course, is dynamic). I just have to remember to give it the space it needs to find it.

the daily practice

This morning I woke with a fever and sore throat and that horrible lung congestion that feels like catarrh and always comes after I've had a drink. In this case, I'd had two glasses of wine at my sister's three days ago and haven't been getting much sleep at all and the symptoms had been slowly coming on since Wednesday. Here it is, Saturday morning, and I had to bail on plans with a friend. Again. I hate cancelling on friends, especially last minute like I did this morning.

I got to thinking about what I could be doing to change this pattern of mine--of going out and doing everything I want until I reach the point of collapse and then bailing on all plans at the last minute, sleeping for days and then going out and doing everything I want until I get sick again--and it's so obvious but I resent it so much that I haven't been able to see it. I need to consider getting well and taking care of myself a daily practice. In the way that I write daily and meditate daily, I need to make those choices to keep me well daily. Yea, it was just two glasses of wine on Wednesday night but I know that that sends my health plummeting within hours.

Its the same for people with chronic injuries. I used to assist in the athletic training department at Hunter College and these kids who were playing sports would come in right after they'd been injured and then never follow up with either the exercises we gave them or with appointments--until right before a big game or meet, when they'd come bursting into the office, demanding that we fix them right then, they had a game in three hours. It drove me crazy, both how these kids treated their bodies and their expectations of us. and yet, it's essentially how I have been treating myself. I am burned out on taking care of myself, of feeling always on the edge of getting sick again, of never quite being able to step into the life I want to live for fatigue and a vague sense of unwell. It comes down to this: to the choices I make daily, to making the choices that I need to make to keep myself well and getting better every day instead of justifying them with, it's just one glass of wine, or, I'll be fine not sleeping tonight. It's not easy but the alternative sucks.

None of us exist in a vacuum

This article is the latest in a series of articles that I’ve read or stories I’ve been told (my friend went fishing with his friend, who is a fisherman. They caught a fish and my friend says, “You can’t sell that fish, it’s sick.” And his friend says, “all the fish are sick. I sell fish sicker than this all the time.”)  that stop me and make me really see that we are all interconnected, that nothing stands alone in this world and that our actions ripple out and affect everything.

The descriptions in this article, of the absence of bird calls, of the interminable mire of floating garbage, of fishermen trawling reefs of everything living make me really stop and think about my food choices. Last night, I made fish tacos and they were delicious. But if the oceans are dead, and much other meat we get in this country so polluted, the current trend towards veganism begins to make so much more sense to me. I was a vegetarian for ten years and have been a rapacious meat-eater for the past ten but over the past few months, I keep coming back to the idea that maybe, right now, with the environment clogged with chemicals, meat stuffed with antibiotics and fed who knows what and the oceans and rivers and streams dying, perhaps it is time to change what and how I eat.

The obvious reason would be, if the fish that I can get are indeed sick (and farmed fish are dirtier than anything) and I am working my way out of a long bout with chronic Lyme, why would I eat it? As a nutritionist once told me, what I eat literally becomes me on a molecular level so eating polluted food just adds another layer of crud for my immune system to deal with. There is this: choosing not to eat animals or animal products for my own personal health. And there is recognizing that, in changing my choices, I change my impact on the world around me. 

I'm not sure what I am going to do; I used to believe that I could eat consciously raised meat infrequently and not negatively affect the environment but reading "The Ocean is Broken" hit home for me more than anything else that we are nearing (or at) the breaking point. Over the past years, I have weeded out anything processed and moved towards mostly organic eating but we're long past that being enough now. Especially since Fukushima, I have been pretty careful about the fish I eat (nothing from the Pacific) but now I am going to stop eating it altogether. Food choice, I realize, is not enough alone, but it is a starting point and already, my perspective shifts.

Injuries as teachers

One of my mentors always used to say that insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results. But this is how most people end up with injuries that affect the quality of their lives.

Most of my clients have found me because of their injuries and pain and most people that I work have injuries that got worse over time, from the low back pain that started in law school and then became utterly debilitating after a few years of work to the generalized achy knee and hip that made distance running impossible. It seems to me that there is always an element of mystery to many people about their body that stems from a lack of understanding of how it works and an inability to listen to it—or to trust their own instincts about their body. I think that it is this, this unknowing, that keeps people from moving out of the ruts and patterns of habit to try new things when pain presents.

At any rate, so many people that I work with seem to have waited until what had been a minor injury has become debilitating and its effects have spiderwebbed out into their lives, stopping them from doing what they love or, worse, making day to day functioning a challenge. 

I think that injuries can be our teachers. They can be the way in to understanding and knowing the body and learning a new way of being and doing what you do. The trick is learning to listen, to not freaking out or denying the first sign of pain but to sit with it and to begin to reach learn what is going on with alignment or movement or stress to unwind it. As we go down the route of reaching out to various practitioners, we can learn from them and start informing our own choices and understanding of the body, choosing to supplement or weave in new habits not just to alleviate pain but to promote a healthier more resilient body overall.

Summer's end

Summer comes to an end just as I am finishing up some of the hardest months of my life. I just finished nearly six months on a super-aggressive antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease again—years after I thought I’d never have to go back on them again. Being on any medication long-term is hard on the body and so is coming off of it.

Sick sucks. It’s limiting at best. At worst, it makes the best moments miserable. These days I am in awe at how easy life is when I feel well.

I had plans to end this phase of treatment in style by heading back out to Burning Man but I bailed at the last minute. I have outgrown it. It is so easy for people to say, “Well, yea, outgrow it already. It's just a party in the desert,” but for me, it is about so much more than sex, drugs and electronica. It was the first thing that I did after being diagnosed that made me believe myself to be a part of this world. The first year I went out, four years into treatment, I was still so sick that I slept most of the time, the same as if I were at home, and had to watch myself carefully so that I didn’t collapse.

Out there on the playa, after years of living close to home, of hooking up to an IV at breakfast and dinner, of living the saddest half-life I could have ever imagined, I felt like a part of something communal, something bigger than myself instead of isolated outside of it. Becoming a part of the world again allowed me to believe in my potential to heal and grow stronger.

I have outgrown Burning Man, yes, but not in the way of someone in her mid-thirties has outgrown partying like a 25-year-old. Years following my first burn, even with knock-me-on-my-ass treatment, I do live with both feet in this world. It’s taken a lot for me to get here, though, and it all started by being around the crazy vibrancy of people playing in the desert. Years of shuffling from doctor to doctor and wilting under a barrage of medication, I had forgotten how to play and laugh. I had forgotten how wonderful life is.

This year, instead of dancing under the open sky, wild and free, I want quiet and the chance to tend to myself. This city is giving quiet to me right now—San Francisco is never so vacant as mid-week into the burn. I am healthier than I have ever been, but I still have a ways to go.  I want quiet because I am finding that the hardest thing so far about chronic illness is putting together a life when the illness is nearly over. It feels a little bit like showing up to dinner when everyone is already on dessert.

Closing the door

I am on antibiotics again, since I finally acknowledged being sick again back in February. This summer has been brutally hard to live through. When I was first diagnosed with Lyme disease ten years ago I had to grapple with my own mortality (which I wrote about for Seven Ponds here) intimately. Though I prepared myself to die, through all my healing, I never closed that door.
Working through the past months of antibiotics, I finally realized that--that I'd never really chosen to be fully in this life again, that I'd kept one foot inching towards the door out all the time.

In having to admit that I was sick again, in going back to the doctors' again and going back into treatment, I had to stop denying that I have a chronic illness. Moving out of denial was painful but I hadn't even suspected the aftereffects of it: that in acceptance, I also stepped firmly into this world and closed that door.

On Acceptance

Lyme disease reared its ugly head in my life way back in July. Nine months ago. I made sure that I brushed the night sweats and daily fevers off as ‘just fighting off a cold’ or “that nasty flu that is going around.” I ignored the fact that I was blowing off more and more commitments because of fatigue, always promising to reschedule things to some vague time in a two weeks or so when I was sure that I would be feeling so much better and have more time.

It took the past three weeks of intense sore throats, disorientation and not being able to get out of bed again for me to admit that what is going on, that what has been going on, is a recurrence of the disease that has shaped my life.

The past few months I have been unduly harsh to the people around me as I have been filled with fury and flipping between rage and depression as I’ve become less and less able at keeping on top of my life. I felt like I was fraying at the seams and stumbling to get to work. Finally, last Friday, I admitted to myself that I was experiencing a recurrence of Lyme Disease, that it wouldn’t pass just by waiting it out, that I haven’t been sick with the ‘never ending flu,’ as I had begun to refer to it.

I'd gone in to see Matt again, for an MAT session, and he asked how my body was doing.

"Well," I said, "it hurts. But I don't think that it's injury but a Lyme flare-up."

"What does a Lyme flare-up look like," he asked me.

"Weird muscular pain and achy joints and just feeling like I am about to get the flu."

"And how long does a flare-up last?"

"Oh, a few weeks," I said, but as I said it, I realized that I'd been complaining about these symptoms since the holidays. No, since the end of summer. Since I started a fellowship back in July. Oh shit. I'd managed to completely ignore that the sum of the symptoms I'd been experiencing was Lyme.

Once I’d admitted to myself and accepted that I was dealing with Lyme Disease again, I began making different choices out of respect for where I am, health wise, and what I need to do to get better. I have different expectations for myself and have begun to treat myself gently instead of forcing myself to get it all done, right now, no matter how I feel. I reached out to family and friends. Since acceptance, I’ve become quiet, gentle and patient. There is a sense of ease to my days that didn’t exist when I was denying that I was sick.

It was incredibly difficult for me to come to this point of acceptance and I only did when I had become so sick that there was no denying it anymore. I lost almost everything of myself in my first go-around with Lyme’s that I would much prefer to deny that it’s never gone away than to deal with it.

running solid

I am four sessions into working with Matt, my Muscle Activation Technique practitioner, and whew-weee! has it made a difference.

After a cruddy morning, I decided to run it off and it was such a good run: I felt perfectly balanced and so evenly supported from my hams and glutes.

I think a combination of MAT and good work with my oh-so-inspiring trainer who has been targeting that area as well. but I tell you, it feels good to land and feel fully supported all the way up from the foot to the hips on each and every step!

diapause

My dad was making fun of me last week for writing a blog about running when I haven't even been running.

But I used to run, so much and all the time that my whole identity was wrapped up in being strong, being fast and being a runner. And then the injuries and illness started piling on and breaking me down and so did my sense of self.

I used to run and I am looking forward to running again, in the not-to-far-off future, but right now, it feels really good to be taking care of decades-long injuries and building strength again.

beauty of exercise

One of my clients has been working really hard over the past nine months to get in shape. She's never really been active at all, ever, but started pilates to get in shape for her wedding.

The first four months were really about laying a solid foundation and building new movement patterns. She's gone from two sessions a week to four (one session a week outside, making use of San Francisco's terrain to get in hills, stairs and soak up some natural beauty) and has blown my mind with her commitment.

Yesterday, after her session we were talking about where she wants to get to and where she has come from so far. She said that working out has made her strong and that she has stopped hating specific parts of her body and instead, loving the way that she feels: strong.

This is the true beauty of exercise, I think. You begin to understand your body as one, you inhabit it and begin to love what you can do in it, rather than hate on fat thighs or shapeless arms or whatever it is that has been bugging you.

remembering the lyme years

It's nearly ten and I am still working away.

I've been up since six am, taught, wrote, got a workout in, saw some friends, grocery shopped, made dinner AND I STILL HAVE ENERGY!

I was sitting here and just thought about how long the day actually is.

I think that those of you with chronic illness can understand, but in the worst of my Lyme years, my days were about three hours long, sometimes five or six hours long, and every minute was a struggle to be present, to be engaged, to just be. The rest of the time I was in bed or on the couch, sleeping. I used to always wonder at how people did so very much in a day and now I know.

My uncle recently sent me an article on Lyme Disease that profiled a woman who's life has basically been reduced to doctors appointments and the few hours here and there when she can be up and about. I read it, and even though I have lived that life, it all sounded so surreal and impossible.

I am glad to be on this side of things.

Running out to meet the day

Today, I feel like I am back. 

I woke up really early, just as the sun was rising and my first thought was that I wanted to run so I laced up my shoes and hit the road. I felt strong and the running came easily.

Something dramatic has shifted in me over the past few weeks. I feel so much stronger now—not the stronger that you get from working out consistently but the stronger that is the opposite of depletion, a sense that I have a foundation now, that my energy reserves are beginning to fill up again.

Lyme Disease is long and difficult to understand. I never really looked sick, except to the people who knew me well and were monitoring my health, that is to say, to my mother and yet, at the worst of it, I often didn’t have the energy to climb up the stairs and would pass out on the couch before making it to bed. Being this tired and sick made me feel two dimensional, dried out and brittle. Last year was the first year that I could really invest in my life, but I couldn’t withstand any stress, any change to my schedule or fight off any cold. I still felt like a light breeze could shred and scatter me so I have been keeping really tight reigns on my life, hardly going out or venturing off the strict and narrow lifestyle I know that I can support. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I feel strong and solid and supple. Vibrant.

It is pretty incredible.

I’m not planning my runs or workouts right now, just doing something when I am inspired to so I am not running far--I ran 3 miles this morning, and walked another mile but it felt good. was the early morning and so beautiful in the park.

My ITBand has been acting up lately but I learned another piece of the puzzle: when I land on my left foot, I feel my left hamstring and glute strongly engage to support my landing but when I land on my right foot, only my quad fires. It’s a really unsupported landing. And then my it band starts getting really tight. My current theory is that I need to get my thigh and hip muscles to all work together so that my TFL and glute med don’t have to do more than their share of the work, get really tight and then yank on the ITB. I am working with Matt, the MAT practitioner again this Friday and I am really curious to hear what he has to say about it all. I will definitely update!

What is CranioSacral?

Since starting CranioSacral, I've received so many questions about what it is and how it works so here is a post on my experience as recipient and practitioner and an explanation.

I think that CranioSacral sessions are exquisite--the work is subtle and gentle but the relief and healing is profound and lasting. After session, I feel so much better: less pain, more vitality and it feels like the benefits I get from sessions compounds when I get consistent sessions. 

CranioSacral is very light touch manual therapy. The touch is generally no more than 5 grams of pressure, or the weight of a nickle. In a world where we are used to thinking of deep massage as effective, it can be difficult to wrap our heads around the lasting effects of gentle work. CranioSacral therapy targets the release of connective tissue and works because of the viscoelastic quality of connective tissue, meaning that it is fluid-like and maleable with gentle, sustained pressure but becomes solid under quick, hard pressure. You can think of silly putty, how you can tease it apart into long strands if you work with it gently but that its only choice is to break if you jerk it apart. Connective tissue is similar so responds to the gentle touch of a practitioner.

Like massage therapists, CranioSacral therapists look to release restrictions in the body freeing up motion and moving the body out of pain. Instead of feeling for hard knots of tension and then working away at those, CS practitioners feel for the CranioSacral pulse, a pulse which occurs throughout the body. By feeling for the pulse at various places in the body, CS therapists will also feel irregularities or inconsistencies in the rhythm or intensity of the pulse in particular areas. These inconsistencies indicate restriction and the practitioner will treat that area to release the restriction.

When I receive a session and a restriction releases, it usually feels like pain melting away. As practitioner, when an area has been released, it feels like that area has been synced with the rest of the body and I feel a sense of harmony and flow.

For me, CranioSacral work has been huge in my healing path. Lyme Disease utterly destroyed me--I was depleted, lost all memory and language and was in constant pain. I had a migraine for four years. Getting regular sessions first helped me to get restorative sleep--I used to wake exhausted after sleeping for ten hours which is typically of the chronically ill and stressed out. The body never shifts out of flight-or-flight (or a state in which the sympathetic nervous system is at work) and into rest-digest (or when the parasympathetic nervous system takes over). My first sessions with CranioSacral, I went into a deep meditative state and came out of the sessions feeling rested. Following these sessions, I started getting restful sleep. CranioSacral work will also open up the skull--when I hold a head in my hands at the end of a session, it feels like the head is breathing--and my migraines immediately lessened with the work. Now, I hardly get migraines and when I do, it's always when I haven't been sleeping and I've been working on a computer for hours a day.

These days, I feel like Lyme disease is mostly something that I have left behind but in the way that, after a flu, there will be a few days when you're no longer sick, but still tired because your body is restoring, after being sick for nearly two decades, I am still restoring. When I get sessions now, I always feel like I've been filled up with some vital energy and count on regular sessions to keep me on the road to full recovery.

Healing lenses

I’ve been reading Anatomy Trains, a book on the myofascial meridians in the body. It aligns perfectly with the work that I am doing with both pilates and craniosacral. What especially resonated with me, though, is Meyers’ philosopy:

It is not our job to promote one technique over another, nor even to posit a mechanism for how any technique works. All therapeutic interventions, of whatever sort, are a conversation between two intelligent systems. It matters not a whit to the mayofascial meridians argument whether the mechanism of myofascial change is due to simple muscle relaxation, release of a trigger point, a change in the sol/gel chemistry of the ground substance, viscoelasticity among collagen fibers, resetting of the muscle spindles or Golgi tendon organs, a shift in energy or a change in attitude. (2)

This is exactly what I am getting at in bringing together many disparate techniques and methods.  There is no one method or technique which will work for everyone nor does the body care what the name or theory of the technique to which it responds is. It doesn’t matter HOW the body heals, but that it does heal.

Because body workers often come to the work through their own healing journey (including me), people often get very attached to whatever method worked for them and think that it is the best way to fully heal. Except that people are individuals and even though two people have the same injury, they will respond to treatment in totally different ways.  Besides being able to offer people a variety of techniques, part of the reason that I am pulling together three very different methods: physical training, fascial release and energy work is to have more lenses through which to understand the body, injury and healing.

Learning to listen with my hands

Learning CranioSacral therapy has really been about learning to listen with my hands.

It's learning to touch again and to become aware of the space where the palms of my hands and your flesh connect and to let your body speak. Rather, to learn how to listen to what it has been saying.

The touch is like melding with the surface tension of water--not breaking through the surface tension and not merely touching the very superficial skin of the surface tension but melding with it. When the touch is right, when my hand is melded then all the life within the water, everything below the surface tension in the body of water, explodes into communication with my hands. It is exquisite to experience.

I have been giving a lot of sessions lately and I absolutely love it. As the sessions go on, the sensitivity of my hands increases--it is almost as if the your body and my hands are developing a clear language between the two. This is really different than Reiki. With Reiki, when I give a session, my hands are on the person before me but the work is in allowing the energy or light to pass through me and into the receiver. I take no information from the person before me so every body feels exactly the same to me though the sessions feel different in how the energy moves. CranioSacral sessions, on the other hand, are exactly about me reading the body and I am learning just haw incredibly uniquely different we all are.

Today, I worked on a dancer with some low back pain. Towards the middle of the session, I was working on her sacrum and ASIS and all of a sudden, her sacrum settled into my hand and it began to breath and it felt like holding harmony. She had a huge sigh and said that that was an incredibly release and I moved on to work on her head. This is why I love craniosacral work--because it is so gentle and yet produces such incredible ease of being for people.

A mismatched set of legs

It is Super Bowl Sunday! And for the first time in four years, I didn’t run the Kaiser 5K in Golden Gate Park this morning. It wasn’t even on my radar that it was coming up even though I’ve been quite aware (how could you not, living in SF?) of the upcoming Super Bowl until I walked to a café by the park today and saw all the runners trickling out onto the streets.

There was awhile when I knew of races happening every weekend and was racing once a month and loving it now I am not even aware of races happening mere steps from my home! This is how much I have not been running.

Partly, I’ve been super busy with about 18 different projects that have me sitting in front of my computer and partly, when I have been running, I’ve been keeping my runs slow, short and sweet because my body hasn’t been feeling right. It’s like I have a mismatched pair of legs.  My pelvis has been mostly aligned so I’ve been fretting a bit about my legs, rolling them and stretching and strength training and just hoping that it would sort itself out.

And then one of my clients, J, so generously gifted me three sessions to see a Muscle Activation Technique (MAT) practitioner. MAT has helped J out so much over the course of 6 sessions—he’d been dealing with a chronic injury which was nagging on him for about nine months even though he was seeing a chiropractor/ART practitioner, a rolfer, personal trainer and me. Nothing was working until he tried MAT. Every week now, it is like J has shed another layer of the injury and his stance, his gait and his posture have all changed dramatically.

Even this wasn’t enough to make me think I should check it out for myself! And then J gifted me sessions. I had my first this past Friday.

Matt, the MAT practitioner, didn’t ask me anything about what was going on in my body but had me lay down on a table and looked at my alignment. From that, he started testing muscles to see what was causing overall misalignment. For example, he wanted to check my multifidi (the deep stabilizing small muscles along the spine). I just assumed that mine would be super strong because of all the work that I’ve done targeting them specifically and the larger-movement, full-range exercises that should have naturally recruited them. He tested them by putting me in a position that would recruit them (lateral flexion, legs over to the left side, left leg turned out, hands holding on to the side of the table) and gently pulled my ankles to the right. The idea is that I should resist his pull and not let my legs move. However, I couldn’t even begin to register where I would possibly resist from and my legs slid across the table. He tried it again and again and nothing.

He had me turn over and then worked his thumb down the left side of my spine, reactivating the multifdi and then tested again. Nothing. He tried to activate again and again, I can’t resist. Matt then moves to the right side and then targets the TFL, the glute maximus and medius, lats and psoas. I could not use any one of these muslces on either the right or the left sides to resist his very gentle pressure. Only the lats turned on very strongly after his reactivation thumb-in-very-tender point technique. As he worked through my body, I began to understand why I feel so uneven when I run.

           

He said that it was common that people who train and use their bodies all the time, like pilates instructors, dancers, etc., have a system that is so tired that no muscles recruit to his testing but we also talked about chronic Lyme Disease and how, because I had 3^rd stage Lyme, and it both affected my neurological functioning and severely taxed my body, that my muscles weren’t activated.

           

Whatever it was, when I stood up at the end of the session, I felt utterly balanced and integrated. I also felt raw and vulnerable, like I was born into a new body again.

           

Do no harm

I was taking yoga last night and in the middle of class, the instructor said, "Do no harm. Start right here, with yourself."

It should be an unnecessary reminder for me, as I spend much of my time teaching working with people with injuries and structuring workouts to challenge them within the frame of their abilities but I get on the mat and just want to move to my limits. And it is different in a packed yoga class than a private session. The teacher structures the class for the group and can't possibly give everyone feedback all the time so we fall into the poses that we own and push a little to get to the ones we are learning and fall completely apart on others, moving to the rhythm of the class not our own rhythm.

I love yoga class, I love being in a class working within myself but sometimes it is hard to pull back where I need to or to even know where it is that I need to pull back. It's easy to get so used to doing something wrong that it's hard to know what it is that needs changing.

Last night, my quads and hipflexors were locked up and I had to keep my stance really short in lunges to keep from collapsing in my low back but the thing is, I love wheel (a full backbend) so even though I stayed conservative all night,  when we got to wheel, I jumped into it without being open enough for it and felt an old, old low back injury flare up.

On the next repetition, the teacher said, "Do no harm, starting right now, with yourself."

and finally, I got it. Not honoring where my body is, where I am in the moment but pushing to where I have been able to go in the past or where I would like to go in the future without listening to my needs at the moment is hurting me. I stopped and stayed with bridge pose, focusing on the hip extension to begin to release my quads and it felt so much better to come out of it and feel a little looser. 

This is what chronic illness has done to me

I am so used to being in pain and feeling tired, kinda feverish, and rather cruddy that when I get sick, I usually pass over it, thinking that it’s just a Lyme disease flareup. I never see my Lyme specialists anymore because I am getting better and better all the time but when I do get sick, I wait and hope for it will go away on it’s own because I am so used to thinking of sick as something that doesn’t pass, as something that I can’t do anything about. And because I have a horribly irrational fear of ever letting my regular doctors know that something is wrong with me. Not because of them, but because then it goes onto my record and the insurance companies know that I’ve been sick.

From my experience, insurance companies will quite literally ruin your life in order not to cover any health care and now I believe that having any medical record besides annual checkups and recorded good health is a liability.

So I’ve been having sweating through the quilts fevers and chills for the past couple of months had vague abdominal pain and I just ignored it or, when it was really bugging me, chalked it up to Lyme Disease.

Well, finally about two weeks ago I realized that this probably wasn’t Lyme disease but it took me until two days ago to realize that not only could I do something about it, but I would feel better too if I took care of it. So I did what I never do and saw a doctor. Bladder infection. Antibiotics. Bam. Easy!

I think that I keep coming back to this, but here it is again.

I started this blog when I was running a lot, thinking that it would be a good place to put down all the ideas I had while running but then I got sick, I got injured, I got sick, I didn't have time and each time I had to take a break from running, I also took a break from blogging. And often returned to running long before I returned to blogging again.

In the past nine year, when I hardly ran or blogged at all, something shifted and I began to understand that me, meditating was helping me while running. Me, doing pilates or training? Helping me to run. Me, writing and me, working and me, hanging out with friends is all a part of me, running as the running feeds the writing, readies me for meditation, makes me alert when I work. It is like, when I first started pilates a decade ago and I first began to really understand that if the wrist hurts, I should look at the alignment of the neck and that the ankle bone truly is connected to the hip bone only now I am understanding the holistic connection all aspects of my life feeding each other. As my understanding of this shifts, so has this blog. One, I am finally really excited about writing it because I know that I will discover things that are beneath the surface of my consciousness in my understanding of the body and healing and also, because what this blog is in my mind has shifted into an exploration of the interaction of the layers of physical and spiritual or energetic vitality. It sits at the intersection of all the work that I do: writing, pilates and reiki/qigong/craniosacral and I am really looking forward to understanding how they all feed each other.

Conveniently, this shift happened at the end of 2012 so I can commit to blogging at least once a week and feel like I have a fresh start to it.  I am looking forward to 2013 in such a big way!

the best book club ever!

We did it! We began our book club on movement and I am looking forward to taking my learning to a whole new level.

T. is a good friend of mine--she managed the first studio that I worked at in California and is still teaching pilates herself. We met up in the midst of the holidays and she brought up this idea of hers: to start a book club where we take the times to explore different movement modalities (like Alexander technique, Franklin Method, Feldenkris to name just a few), various healing techniques (Qi Nei Tsang, Ayurveda and Craniosacral, among others) and study anatomy in-depth. How much fun and how valuable!

I have done so much continuing ed since I started teaching pilates and personal training. I have taken four day human dissection labs at a chiropractic college, immersed myself in qigong for a year, spent weekends reviewing anatomy and physiology in an effort to understand chronic injuries and how to structure training sessions, attended pilates and mind-body conferences and, of course, taken countless pilates, yoga, capoeira, dance and gyro classes. From every class, I have learned so much about how to teach, about my own limits and places to push myself and about the body, health and healing but there is only so much that can be taught and learned in a week or weekend. And the idea of exploring on our own and getting deep into these topics is really exciting.

So we did it. T. and I met up today and went over our interests and what we want to learn to fold into the work that we do. Naturally, I am really interested in anything that will support my Craniosacral work right now and we decided to start with anatomy with a focus on the fascia. We'll be reading Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers first.