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.

Pratyahara in motion

Lately I've been biking most days and when I've been running, my legs feel heavy and thick and wooden, like I have lost any and all spring in my legs. I plod and it feels terrible which is why I have been biking or when I do run, being aware that I need to rest so running really easily, not thinking about time or distance but just enjoying being in motion and stopping or walking before anything starts to hurt or get really tired.

Since I moved, I've been getting up early and running in the park (and it's the best thing to start my day early and surrounded by so much beauty).

Pratyahara is the fifth element of the 8 stages of Ashtanga Yoga and is recognized in other disciplines. It means "withdrawal of the senses." In meditation, it is not being able to feel the boundary between your body and the world around you. It sounds like it would take years and hours of meditating to get there, but after I went through my Reiki attunements, it was so much easier for me to go deep in meditation--and I reached the state of pratyahara without even trying. It felt like being liquid in a liquid environment. Time both ceased and speeded up. I felt both whole and a part of all that is. I wanted to stay there forever and sat, that day, for hours.

There are times when I am giving Reiki sessions where it feels like my hands disappear. I can both not tell the delineation between my hands and the person's body I am working on or the boundary between my hands the air around them. It is not them going numb because numbness has the distinct feeling of absence and anxiety, the exact opposite of this happening. I call it pratyahara of the hands, half joking, and when this happens to me, it feels like my hands are both present but in another dimension or on a higher plane or something but wherever they are is where I would like to be.

Anyway, I give all this very odd background to say that while I was running yesterday, the same thing happened to my body from the waist down. My hips and legs and feet were moving beneath me, but it felt, again, like they were liquid in a liquid environment, themselves but also a part of the air around them. I was breathing hard and working, but even so, my legs were light and I ran all the way to the beach and back, more than twice as far as I have been running, without any pain or heaviness and though I ran with effort, I also ran with seemingly endless amounts of energy. I have had days when I have run and it has felt effortless, easy and I could run really far and fast. These other occasions have been purely ones of physical readiness. Yesterday, it was spiritual. And today, I don't feel sore or tired or worked and better than that, the sensation of running on wooden legs is completely gone.