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.