release the neck, relax the quads. wait, what?!

I have had two knots in my quads, one on each leg, in the lateral quad, just above the knee for years. I have come to think of the two of them as an unyielding pair and have followed the general protocol for releasing adhesions: I have spent countless hours rolling them out on foam rollers and lacrosse balls, stretching and having massage therapists, ART practitioners and physical therapist dig their thumbs or elbows into them to try and get them to go away, permanently AND have done a ton of strength training (adhesions don’t just disappear because you stretch and release, you have to make sure the muscles are strong enough to do what you are asking them to do).

Since I sold my car, I am now biking everywhere, all the time, these two knots have become tighter and denser and more painful. As has my neck and shoulders, but I never considered that the two could be related.

I went in to see my physical therapist yesterday, to work on my neck and shoulders (radiating tightness down my arms? Sadly, yes.).

Well, as he worked out my scalenes, traps and levator scaps, my quads relaxed and those two twin knots released. Fully. Without my PT ever actually working on them directly. Three days later and my quads feel like butter, not a sack full of golf balls. It makes sense, actually, as the muscles in my neck and shoulders are points on the gall bladder meridian line in Chinese Medicine and those two knots are also on the gall bladder line. Once again, I am wowed by how connected each point in our body is to all other points.

working with me

Many of you have reached out to learn more about the work that I do: reiki & qigong, craniosacral therapy, path finding and teaching pilates--all of it about helping you to live fully, joyfully and healthily.

Reiki and Qigong are two types of energy work that I use together during sessions, depending on which techniques are more applicable at the time. At times, I will blend energy work into a CranioSacral session, which is light touch manual therapy and helps to melt away physical restrictions, pain and open up an ease of movement and being.

Path finding is my newest addition! Somewhere between life coaching and arts therapy, I teach you how to cultivate inspiration, guide you into personal growth and help you add richness and fulfillment to the life that you already have. It's much less about making drastic changes than about finding ways to weave in joy and passion into the life that you do have and moving from there. You have to grow yourself before you can grow your career, business or relationship and I help you to do that.


For more information, you can find me here or here. And please! drop me a line if you have questions.

Cohesion of being

I have this rib that slips out of place. When it does, I get a sharp and lasting pinch where the vertebrate it should articulate with is, and sharp pinches at the front, where the rib wraps around my liver and connects with my sternum. It's annoying and makes everything from bending forward to moving my arms to carrying a backpack harder so I usually get myself into see my osteopath as soon as I can.

This time, though, I was trying to wait until my new health insurance kicked in (February 1st) and over the past three weeks, I witnessed my body shift to compensate for its new position. My rib slipped out and then my right shoulder tightened up. My right illium slipped up and rotated back and then it felt like my ankle fell apart. Like a pile of blocks had been knocked over, it felt like all the bones that make up the ankle joint collapsed in a shapeless pile. This week, when another rib and two cervical vertebrate went out of alignment, I could hardly stand so I finally called my osteopath.

Osteopathy, is, in my opinion, divine medicine. It is just heaven. Like CranioSacral therapy, it is light touch manual therapy, and osteopaths work with the body holistically and interact with the body rather than impose correction on it.

Anyway, I went in and Dr. Scholars, who I have been working with for awhile now, slowly worked out all the shifts my body made after my rib slipped. When she finally circled back to my rib, she suggested that it was my over-taxed liver (nope, not because I am having that much fun but because of all the meds I have taken over the past year to keep Lyme in check) causing it to slip. Vertebrate (so ribs too) correlate with the organ that is on the same neural pathway and together, the organ and vertebrate can create negative feedback loops: when an organ is under stress or not functioning well, it sends distress signal up the neural pathway and the correlating vertebrate and/or rib responds with pain or movement, sending new signals down the nerve to the organ.

It makes sense to me, actually, especially as I was just reading about the spine-organ connection a few days previously but to witness it in my own body, through a doctor's input, really shifted, once again, my understanding of my body and bodies in general. So often, when I have studied anatomy or physiology or learned any method of training, the education addresses individual muscles, muscle groups and the skeletal system, as if we could understand musculature in isolation from the rest of the body, when the body actually works cohesively at all times.

redefining wealth

I went back to yoga last week, after nine months off.

I always love going to yoga, I love taking movement classes because I get direction but really get to sink into my body and figure out my alignment that day by translating the verbal cues of the teacher into physical movement. 

Last week, I was behind a group of people who had come together and who must have been fairly new to movement classes: they wobbled a lot, had no connection between their lower and upper bodies, didn’t have the strength to hold the tactile corrections from the teacher or the awareness to make them on their own. It’s where all of us begin and, with consistency, move through it. For me, though, it forced me to appreciate all the classes, sessions, techniques, sports and methods I have taken and studied over the years. Watching the people in front of me moving just exactly like you’d expect novices to move made me appreciate where I am with my body.

I’ve been so sick that I haven’t worked in four weeks, and as I am self-employed, I don’t get paid when I don’t work and I’d been fretting about money—chronic illness depletes every aspect of life. But then in class, I had this moment of understanding that wealth comes in many different forms and I was thankful for the wealth of knowledge I have of my body, the wealth of awareness and experience and that I now know when to stop and when to push and can take class and constantly be evaluating my alignment.

Each of the group in front of me, as does each of us, has a wealth of something in their lives. I am often aware of the negative in my life, of those things I lack and it was such a boost to take a moment to recognize and appreciate something that I enormous quantities of.

Running in silence

I don't run with music.

I never have. I tried it once, and hated it because I spent the entire run paying attention to something other than running. Which is, I get it, why most people (or at least, the people that I've talked to about running with music) do it: they use the beats to run faster or to keep from being bored or to go further than they would if they were only focused on their body and their run. But I run to be with myself and in my body and I am completely taken out of that and out of the moment when I listen to music and run.

During one of the many courses I have taken with Eric Franklin, we were talking about the pelvic floor and he asked us to contract it. Most of us, myself included, didn't know where to begin and his response was, "But you've lived with it your whole life and you can't access it?" It was a rhetorical question that served as a jumping off point for the duration of the weekend-long class in accessing, toning and stretching the deep stabilizers but I have kept returning to the idea over the years. We live with and in our bodies during our entire lives and yet, when things go haywire, we hardly know where to begin in responding to and fixing the issue. Most of living takes us out of our bodies so when we experience pain or discomfort or a chronic or overuse injury, it shocks us back into our physical selves.

I run without music because I like to be present in my body, with myself and in the landscape I am moving across. When I run, I slowly re-align and discover things about myself. I ran five miles today, much longer than anything I have been able to do in months. My IT bands began to get really tight right away and I noted that I was landing on the outsides of my feet. I shifted my gait and began landing more medially on the ball of my foot. My posterior tibs, the muscles which run from the inner arch up the medial side of the shin, immediately started firing and within steps, my IT bands relaxed and I began to run with smoothness that came from a more harmonious interaction between foot and knee and hip.

During the rest of my run, I kept returning my attention to my gait and adjusting it, landing towards the inside of the ball of my foot. My run today felt graceful, a quality that has eluded me for some time as I have struggled with sick again, and I think that it had much to do with being present, paying attention to me and making adjustments.

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.