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.