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?

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.