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?