Sometimes just a moment of enchantment can take you out of yourself, away from your worries and bring you a moment of peace. I found that in this magical performance on America’s Got Talent:
My undulating spine
Walking “wrong” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One of the things I’m most appreciating lately about the changes in my body is the return of my undulating spine.
I figured out some years ago as I released lots of patterns with the Flowing Body work I created, our spines are naturally meant to undulate as we walk. When everything is released and I’m mindfully letting it flow, my hips are moving, my lumbar is moving, my upper back is moving and my shoulders are doing full rotations as I walk.
Yep. Everything is moving. Separately. Unlike the guy up above who’s walking the way most of us (in the U.S. anyway–chime in if you think it happens in your country too) do, as if nothing in the entire spine from base to top can move on its own.
As I chatted with my students we realized that around age 12 or so (possibly younger now as children mature faster)
- girls get told that swinging hips are slutty
- boys get told that swinging hips are girly
and everybody starts walking stiffly. Add in a lot of admiration for stiff military posture and you get people walking with backs that don’t move and hips that stay stiff and move as little as possible.
Even after I realized how we’re meant to walk and had released enough to be able to walk that way, I’d still stiffen up while taking a walk unless I kept mindfully paying attention to how I walked. The stiff, motionless style of walking becomes so ingrained, it’s hard to overcome it.
When you walk that way, some muscles are overly tight in order to hold that stiffness. Over time the tightness starts creating patterns in your muscles which can spread throughout your body. Other muscles that are intended to be moving are not being used so they atrophy. The tightness in some muscles and the under use of others together create an aching back.
I’ve talked with so many people who report they, as I did, often finish a walk with a terribly aching back. It became something I dreaded about taking walks and contributed to why I’ve spent more time in recent years on an exercise bike and doing kundalini yoga.
Last year after my amazing healing session with Osunnike I noticed when I practiced the Flowing Body work for spine, even during the practice my spine already felt looser and moved much more than it usually did AFTER completing the release work and was much freer than ever before when I finished.
Since the latest big healing moment many things have been shifting. For a while my back really bothered me and after resolving some contributing bedding issues I started realizing that all the opening in my head is releasing muscles all over my body. As these muscles unfold for the first time in decades, they’re not used to exercise or … moving at all… and they protest. Some of the back issues came from that.
I did quite a bit of the spine releases and some specific yoga work to help, which actually just pushed more opening faster and, for a while, added to the pain. But now that area is all settled down and I’m realizing when I go for walks that I’m undulating pretty naturally. I don’t have to make each walk an exercise in mindfulness about how I move because my back has released so well and everything is flowing so much that most of the time everything is moving as it’s supposed to move.
Right now I cherish to these moments when something shows me clearly how much has changed. On the trip I saw how much more calm and centered I am. The walks I’ve taken since I’ve been home (it’s getting HOT so they’re becoming few and far between 🙂 ) have reminded me how much my body has changed and is still changing.
Do all the parts of your hips and back that should be moving actually move when you walk?
Pushing the River
Kentucky River, L. Gaitskill 4/16
The week before I left for Marin, I had an appointment at which a big release in my head finally occurred. Always pressing for this long process to be over, I hoped the release might lead to finishing the unwinding process before I left.
Didn’t happen. So then I moved to hoping it would finish out there. Didn’t happen. Though the unwinding has been moving at quite a pace since the big hang-up piece released, it’s taking longer than I hoped.
it’s not that I don’t know better than to keep pushing. Not that I’m unaware that when I keep looking ahead I’m not staying in the moment. Patience and waiting have been major, ongoing lessons for me as I don’t do either naturally :-). But I’ve found it especially hard to keep myself from looking beyond the pain and discomfort of all this muscle stuff… to gaze hopefully into a future where my body is free and healthy.
I imagined that the unwinding would be done by the time I got to Marin and I’d spend my weeks there resting and meditating and contemplating my next steps. Instead, lots of unwinding happened there, though for once it didn’t interfere with sleep and I got tons of rest. Instead of mapping out the next phase, I slipped into relaxation, allowing the huge shift created before the trip to percolate through.
In spite of those hopes for “doneness” and planning, I quite naturally moved into being in the moment more than usual, enjoying the scenery, the quiet, reading and walking, etc. Since I’ve been home the unwinding has gone amuck again and is back interfering with sleep. And I’m frustrated again, wanting it to be over.
So much in my face is now open and so little is left… but the remaining pieces are the deepest core and they’re SO tight. I’m not sure how much longer — I just know every day I want it to be the last day.
While I struggle with patience, I’m also understanding all the “wait” messages I’ve been getting for some time. Besides the inner message I’ve been receiving for a while, lately I’ve been drawing runes and tarot cards with “wait” messages.
And finally I’m settling into a place where — at least some of the time — I am prepared to just wait. The inner wisdom is that while my body is reorganizing itself (more on that in another post) I need to just sit back and let it happen. It takes a lot of energy to re-do a body.
But sometimes, I kinda want to push the river 🙂
BTW: It’s Sunday, so I hope you’ve already found or still have set aside 10 or more minutes to pray or chant or meditate for/on peace. See CPS page for more info.
The Mission: Uncommon Skills
Jamie’s post today is so worth reading — make sure you click through to Sophia’s Children read the whole thing
Earth — our beautiful home — from space, 2013, NASA. Public domain image.
“As we accept what is, we become people who stand in contrast to what is, freed from the aggression, grasping, and confusion of this time.”
“With that clarity, we can contribute things of eternal importance no matter what’s going on around us — how to live exercising our best human qualities, and how to support others to discover these qualities in themselves.”
~ Margaret Wheatley, So Far From Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World
In So Far From Home, Wheatley speaks of calling upon “skills not common these days, such as (quality) thinking, sense-making, pattern recognition, and reflection.”
There are others as well that would qualify as contrasts to what passes for normal (albeit an insane ‘normal’) in these times.
As Jiddu Krishnamurti said,
“It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a…
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Marin Reflections: the up side 2
Toward Mill Valley
The biggest reason I love to be back where I used to live is the hardest to describe. Soul fulfillment.
Part of it is the land there. Mount Tamalpais has always seemed magical to me and I feel its magic permeates the area. I often feel I’m being healed just by driving or walking around and gazing at the shimmering hills.
And then there’s the house my apartment used to be in. Gay, the owner, is the founder of Nine Gates Mystery School. For the 30 or so years she’s lived there the property has been the scene of frequent ceremonies, meditations, offerings to the devas, a Bhajans group (Sai Baba chanting), etc. That particular piece of property has a powerful energy thanks to the deeply reverent activities regularly taking place there.
Add the magic of the area and the beauty and power of the house and grounds and the recipe for me adds up to feeling my soul has been nurtured.
And then there are the friends. Most of my friends in the area are fellow Nine Gates graduates but I know a few folks from other spiritual workshops and one dear friend dates back to junior high school. While we can swirl through light topics like anyone, we also speak of deep and personal things. We tell of our spiritual trials and lessons. And I feel connected and nourished.
My best friends here in KY like to see me go off on these trips because they can see how healed I am when I return. It’s not that I don’t love the land here or that I don’t have good friends, there’s just something about Marin…
Nothing about the trials and tribulations around the edges of this journey interfered in any way with drinking in the energy and enjoying every moment. Not so many years ago I’d have allowed the small irritations to rule but I’ve moved into such a different space, nothing could stop me from drinking in the energy and beauty and loving it.
Marin reflections: the up side 1
I realized this week that if you only read the few posts I made in Marin and since I got home (starting here), it sounds as if I had a bad vacation. In fact, I had a lovely time and several things contributed. I’ve struggled to write this as all one post and finally decided it will instead consist of two or more parts.
This first piece fits the Journey2Peace series and I think also Ra’s latest B4Peace challenge (scroll way down to reach challenge), which, in short is to write about a habit which doesn’t cultivate peace and what you do to step aside and work on peace instead.
I’ve had travel anxiety since childhood. Mostly about flying. My mother and I used to fly to Kentucky for a longer summer visit than my father could manage and as soon as I was old enough to hear about a plane crash, I was afraid. My parents both tended toward stress and anxiety around travel, so any form of travel tended to be permeated with tension and unease.
In recent years, as air travel has become an increasingly troublesome process, from the long distances to airports to the need to arrive so early to the tedious and often annoying security process… For me travel has become so fraught with difficulty and anxiety that I often question whether I really want to do it any more.
When I noticed this constant anxiety several years back, I started creating and repeating affirmations ahead of time along the lines of “whenever I travel my journey goes smoothly and easily.” Oddly, it didn’t stop me from being anxious, but it DID quite clearly create much smoother sailing through airports and plane rides, etc.
As I prepared for the house sit in Marin from which I’ve just returned, I felt more anxious than usual. As I considered this, I added to my list of “travel dislikes” that it seemed to me airline and airport personnel have become increasingly rude and unfriendly and part of what I dread is being snapped at all day long. So I created another affirmation or two about kind and helpful people on my journeys.
I set off for the airport more anxious than usual– literally shaking from head to toe — but experienced an easy journey. Including that all the security people here in Lexington — usually a cranky bunch who work hard at making it worse to get through security here than most airports I ever go through) — were smiling and lovely (possibly taken over by happy face aliens???).
Even the one who insisted on squeezing my clipped-back hair was quite gentle and apologetic. [Someday I want someone to tell me what you could possibly hide in your hair or a silk neck scarf that couldn’t be picked up by those machines you pass through that can read your underwear???]
In spite of affirmations the return trip didn’t go so well and I spent an unscheduled night in the Chicago area and wound up switched to another airline. Unlike American, which I usually fly, United had no one around to help me with the boarding pass phase of things and I bumbled my way through without really knowing what I was doing.
They didn’t have security streamlined as well as most of my recent flights, so it took nearly 40 minutes in line just to get up to the person who looks at your boarding pass and passport. Who informed me the pile of print-out stuff I handed her didn’t include a boarding pass.
When I stammered, “do you mean I have to go back out and go through this line again?”, another security person stepped up and said, “no, I’ll take you.” She walked me back to the front, got the pass, and walked me back to the head of the line, chatting amiably all the way. Bless her kindly heart!
Even the guy in Lexington who made me come back to the airport to pick up my own delayed luggage was quite friendly.
Normally all these issues, from security through cancelled flights and bags not delivered would have left me foaming at the mouth, possibly stomping around, and locked in melodrama. Years of meditation, emotional release work and spiritual practices have calmed that down.
And for once, what I remember the most is the good stuff. The acts of kindness outweigh the problems in my memory of my journey.
And I have to say, even though my affirmations don’t seem — so far — to have ended the anxiety I feel, they have changed so much about the experience of travel; every trip has seemed to flow far more smoothly than my usual unhappy experiences. My reactions to it all have changed so greatly as well, I’m beginning to “expect” good stuff to happen.
I think the practices, releasing and affirmations can all shift your experience of anything you tend to be anxious about, so I recommend working on both the exercises that calm your “self” in general and also on writing affirmations about smooth sailing in circumstances about which you worry.
WPC: Faces
I keep trying to get a post written but it’s eluding me. Since you all have heard about me, my mother, my friend Gay, her cats for whom I “sit”, and my cat Salty, thought I’d reblog this one from my Scribblings blog so you can see our faces…
Yeah, yeah… late again. But here’s my selection of faces for the WPC, from my baby Salty to the babies I just “sat” for, Hermes and Pepe, to my mother and my great grandfather and more:
The Technological Gods are Mad at Me!?! :-)
Corte Madera canal
When last heard from, I’d experienced some internet and computer problems in Marin and all seemed to be straightened out … NOT.
A couple of days later, my hosts’ fancy jet tub started turning itself on and running the drying cycle every day at 5 p.m. or so. They didn’t know what I could do to make it stop and the owner’s manual provides detailed info on how to install a tub but ZERO info on how to actually operate it. Not even a diagram of the control panel let alone instructions on how to use it. So that kept happening.
Another couple of days after that I had trouble getting ice from their ice maker and when I fiddled with the lever, it spewed ice all over that end of the kitchen. Then went back to functioning normally.
When I got to Chicago, my final flight was cancelled and I had to get a hotel (which the airline didn’t pay for). The TV and the hair dryer in my hotel room were both not working. My bags are finally at the airport and they’re refusing to deliver them so I have to go back to the airport to collect them.
I arrived home and got on line while watching TV and a few hours later the TV and internet went down. My phone line, on the same account, has had trouble since the day we got this new set up and I’ve spent the morning trying to get my phone fixed…
Okay, what did I do to piss off the gods of technology??? I’m so glad I’m the new me (see previous post) so instead of ranting and reveling in melodrama, I think it’s a hoot. Really, what did I do??? Haven’t meditated on it yet to find out what I missed the last time I meditated on it…
And the turn around in Marin
The technological drama has, in fact, turned around, but I thought I’d first mention a couple of the aspects of my visit that have been quite fine all along.
(1) As I head through the county park that’s the last leg of my favorite walk, the above photo is one of the views I get to see (helped along here by zooming). I worked pretty hard in Kentucky for about two months prior to this trip, getting back to walking. There are such steep climbs here, if I haven’t already gotten my “walking legs” in pretty good shape, it takes most of my visit to work up to my favorite, 1-1/2 mile, walk.
There are a couple of shorter walks I also take which have the advantage of being entirely on pavement. So today, for instance, when it’s been pouring like crazy and the county park segment will be a mud trail, I’ll probably take one of the other routes if it clears enough to walk. The thing is, it’s so beautiful here, every walk in this neighborhood is stunning with breathtaking vistas, lovely scents wafting through the air, and a feeling of being in nature even while on streets lined with houses (many of which you can’t actually see from the road…).
(2) My friends here were just about all made at deep, spiritual workshops and our connections stem from sharing soul-baring experiences, so we relate at such deep levels, it feeds my soul to spend time with them and I’ve had such lovely visits with dear, dear friends.
***
Back on the weird series of internet/computer problems:
The day after getting wifi access from the neighbor, my hosts were able to get to a place with cell reception and turned the service back on. Two days later I finally took a look at my laptop again and noticed the “on” light shining. Hmm. So I opened it up and tried one more time to start it. This time, instead of coming on for a few seconds and shutting off before loading the OS, it announced that it needed to diagnose and fix itself. Something like 45 minutes later and it had found and fixed a few things and voila, laptop back!
Meanwhile, Thursday evening my new friend/neighbor decided she wanted to do something for Cinqo de Mayo and came over to invite me along. By the time we got to her restaurant pick, Celia’s in San Rafael there was a long wait, no place to sit and it was LOUD. So she had the brilliant idea of going to the bowling alley across the street for a drink.
I had one of the best regular old Margaritas (i.e. not some top shelf version) I’ve had in years, in a quiet bar, where we chatted with the lovely young woman bartender and then meandered back to the restaurant where we were just in time to be the next ones seated. The Mariachi Band came to our area almost immediately, played for about 10 minutes and stopped. For me, just about the right amount of time to have Mariachi playing deafeningly close… By the time our dinner came the place was beginning to wind down so it actually became quiet enough to speak to one another. Kind of perfect. And we noted, the evening would not have happened were it not for the internet snafu that led me to request wifi when she asked if I needed anything…
So the problems all resolved one by one and, besides lessons learned, benefits arose from the trauma and drama. The nice thing for me as all this unfolded was observing myself staying, for the most part, calm. Did I feel angry when I realized the internet was gone and wouldn’t be turned on for a few days? Yes. Did I cry for a few seconds when my laptop wouldn’t work? Yes.
But years ago I’d have been caught up in the angst of those events and lived in the drama for days or weeks. I’d have carped incessantly to anyone with whom I spoke and called for 5 or 10 more people to enroll them in the angst train ride. This time I noted what was happening, started asking what the lesson was, settled into finding alternative things to do and mostly told people the story with a laugh as a funny example of the Universe handing out a lesson.
Even more fun is how easily it all became sorted when I just stayed calm and assumed all would be well…
Sideways in Marin
I’m having a lovely time here, basking in the beauty and spending time with beloved friends as well as thoroughly enjoying the sweet kitties for whom I’m sitting. But much has gone sideways here and I’m still sorting through the lessons.
I brought my phone, which has wifi internet access, but the screen is so small I only use it for certain apps. I also brought a Kindle Fire, for reading and watching Netflix, as my hosts don’t have a TV connection of any sort. Those were my main planned forms of entertainment when stuck up here alone (more on that later)…. and of course they require the internet. And then I brought my ancient laptop, as I’ve never been able to successfully write anything of length on a screen keyboard nor have I had much luck getting blog posts to come out right from an android type device. Intended to write posts as I contemplated and accomplish some other writing too…
Imagine my dismay last Saturday morning when I figured out the internet account of my hosts had been suspended as they forgot to pay the bill before leaving. And they were in the busiest two days of teaching so didn’t want to clear up the issue. Then, I got up on Sunday morning to find the kitties knocked my laptop to the floor and it’s dead. What??? Hello, Universe… what’s the deal?
So I practiced yoga and took lovely walks. The reading plan had been to get library books, one at a time, downloaded onto the Kindle (which is new and has few things downloaded on it yet) and fortunately I’d gotten one nice long Louise Penny novel downloaded the day before losing the internet so I read and read.
Sunday evening a friend and I went to dinner at a restaurant with wifi and I took the Kindle to download another couple of books since I’d finished with Inspector Gamache. Got on wifi, picked out books… and nothing would download. What? Universe? Hello? I can’t even have a book???
Time for a little inner work, clearly, so I meditated and called on my guides to clear up what this was about. Need for a break from technology — not to hard to figure. But also losing the laptop is about trusting that it just means something better is coming.
I’d been feeling drawn to use this time for being quiet and integrating the huge amount of shifts and changes I’ve been experiencing and apparently that meant being off line. Later on Monday the next door neighbor dropped by to see if I needed anything and graciously helped me get on HER wifi. We’d known one another when I lived here but didn’t really click. All these years later we spent a lovely evening (had some trouble getting on her wifi) and I felt somehow that connection was another piece of the snafu-laden weekend.
My hosts don’t have a second car and take lots of stuff to these workshops so they have to take the one car. This house is way more of a hike than I can manage from groceries, restaurants, shopping, etc. and not near public transportation, so the days when I don’t have things booked with friends — who are always lovely about hauling me to Trader Joe’s or wherever if I need it — I’m just up here on the hill alone.
I love to walk around here and the setting of their home is lovely for doing yoga so I enjoy spending some of my time doing both and I relish sitting and staring out at the amazing view. But then I’m ready for blogging or reading or watching a movie…. Quite a lesson in realizing how dependent upon all these devices I’ve become in order to stay entertained. And how much I feel the need to be entertained instead of sitting in the quiet and just being.
Anyway, all that’s a long way around saying I didn’t mean to be so absent from posting. The internet is back on and my hosts have given me the password to get on one of their computers so I’m kind of back. Don’t know how to upload photos on their Apple so you’ll have to see my Marin shots after I get home.
I’ll probably be a bit sporadic about responding to comments as the computer is in an unheated out-of-house office (i.e. no cold evenings in here) and that not-typing-on-screen-keyboards thing extends to commenting for me 🙂 But I CAN read on the WP app on my other devices so now that I’m back on line I’m trying to catch up on reading all your lovely blogs.
Marin and More Healing…
I’m in the countdown toward another Marin house/cat sit, for which I head off on April 23. And I just had my appointment with Hanna and her DNA clearing friend, Larry. So a happy week!
It’s been a couple of years since I last did the house sitting gig. All the earlier times I sat for Moti, the kitty I helped raise when I still lived there. Moti died a year after my last visit so I wasn’t needed so much and didn’t push to take any of the annual gigs.
Now there are two new kitties and I’m looking forward to meeting them. Curious how it will be since I’ve not met them before — unlike Moti, who spent his first year living more in my apartment than in the main house…
In the meantime, I had the appointment Hanna suggested last time, wherein she did Body Patterning, Reiki and general energy work while her friend Larry did an array of healing techniques. I felt glad I’ve been around alternative healing and New Age stuff for a long time (30 years!) because the array included crystal surgery, drumming, some kind of sound vibration (I didn’t catch the whole list he rattled off and my eyes were closed during the treatment), crystals and/or stones placed on me, etc. Seemed normal to me 🙂
They both felt the last piece– the one related to the ancestor witch, bad past lives as a healer/seer/shaman, and shutting down my third eye — clear completely. And reminded me that I will have a choice occasionally about whether to stay cleared or go back to the familiar shut down.
There hasn’t been a magical opening in which every remaining muscle knot sprang open. But the muscles are unwinding like crazy and I no longer feel them pulling against a steely core that won’t let go. A big place of holding was in the solar plexus — an area that has received a lot of work and attention in the past as well — and that cleared too. Again, I feel like a core of strong holding is no longer there, but the muscles in that area are in process.
Hanna said it would probably take about a week for the process to finish, which fits with past experience. I love the timing because it means I’ll be at the end of this process and the new beginning when I head off to Marin. I can’t think of a better place to hang out letting this settle, while I rest, drink in the beauty, meditate and converse deeply with long time friends.
Bay area Word Press friends: I won’t have a car but if anyone would like to have a cuppa and hang out, I’d love to meet my blogging pals in person, so if you have transportation to me in Corte Madera and would like to visit, let me know. yogaleigh at earthlink dot net
A new perspective on purpose
In the flow… Kentucky River by Leigh
Some days ago, Nadine Marie put up a post on Aligning with Truth about purpose in which she explored new ways of thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about purpose and how it relates to me, and whether I know what mine is, etc. for a while so this was timely and I’ve been pondering ever since. As I pondered, some things came together for me.
The process of healing in recent years has kept me living pretty far outside the norm and a life that doesn’t look much like most people of my age expect. So much change has been moving through I’ve let go of many thoughts I had about what my purpose may be or even what I most wanted to do.
In the U.S. (other places, your two cents about your country are welcome and encouraged) there’s a lot of pressure to have a purpose and a plan and there always seems to be an underlying assumptions that purpose must involve either some great act of charity or — more often — something to do with earning a living or having a career.
Since those things aren’t happening for me, I’ve struggled occasionally with feeling inadequate. The pressure to have a life that suits the norm surrounds me and you might be amazed how frequently other people have made it clear that they consider me lazy or useless because they disapprove of anyone living a life that doesn’t meet their standards.
My health struggles have been going on long enough that I learned long ago to shrug off those opinions though I won’t say I don’t still have moments when their contempt or disapproval hurts my feelings. For most of the early years of illness I struggled to keep up with the norm and juggled part-time jobs with many failed business attempts.
Finally, however, I realized that my energy vibration was so faint and weak I could never succeed at jobs or businesses without getting healthy (need to match the vibration) … and also that I didn’t really have the stamina for even the part-time jobs or the attempts at self-employment/business. Something like five years ago I realized my health had to become the priority.
I’d been going to alternative practitioners, practicing yoga and other healing modalities, doing emotional work, taking supplements, etc. for many years, always with small, steady amounts of progress but I finally got it that this had to be the focus. Other than teaching some yoga (which for me is very healing) and writing a couple of books (which I can do on whatever schedule I’m up to), I’ve done nothing but work at healing, exploring my inner landscape for answers, etc.
Until recently I’ve tended to think of it as a time spent living outside the world and figured I’d get around to a new purpose and its implementation after becoming healthy again. Recently, though, as I’ve worked with Hanna on finishing out some of the ancestral issues that have anchored my muscle issues, I’m looking at it all differently. I’m particularly affected by realizing how much all of this ancestral healing is healing everyone in my extended family tree on some level.
Sparked by Nadine’s post, I’ve now moved to a new view of purpose. These years of healing WERE/ARE MY PURPOSE! Not necessarily the only one — as she notes, I think there can be more than one purpose in a lifetime — but a huge part of why I’m here on earth. Healing myself. Healing my ancestors. Learning to be a voice of healing.
As I move toward the end of the healing journey, I’m still in limbo about what’s next and what I think my next purpose may be. As I just posted on the Scribblings blog (including the above photo), I’m seeing myself as part of a flow and trying to stay out of the way and allow the current to take me to the next destination my higher self has determined.
Off the normal path, in solitude and quiet, I’ve been living a purpose that doesn’t look anything like expectations about purpose held by the mainstream in my country. But I believe it’s a purpose that’s at least equally important to all that stuff “out there” considered to be the meaning of purpose. I’m even at the point of questioning the usual idea of purpose and whether a lot of these plans made by minds instead of hearts or intuitions are really the raison d’etre for many of those who believe they’re living their purpose…
I’m even pondering many side trips people I’ve known have been led to make and wondering if purpose may often be more about what we learn and how we change from the challenges that blow up our plans than about the outer world and the careers and the normal stuff of “purpose”??? Are attributes like kindness and compassion and healing and nurturing possibly more central to “purpose” than most people think? I’m very interested to hear the thoughts of others…
Addicted to Your Story….
Very insightful thoughts about how easy it is to become invested in the story of illness. Make sure you click through to read the whole post!
Muscles: 4 Steps Forward, 2 Steps Back… Forever?
Helen yoga (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Trying to post the last couple of weeks has been an interesting process. In this time of transition I have SO many ideas swirling through my head, so many realizations arising; much of it is interconnected. Right now I’m struggling to sort my way through it all and my mind doesn’t seem to have its usual organizational abilities to sort through it all and create posts. Not to mention that much of it is still in process…
I will get back to J2P Monday again, but right now the one arena where I seem to have some coherent thoughts is about muscles.
Last time, I talked about how muscles intertwine, squeeze off energy and can take a long time unwinding. This time the exploration moves to the up and down process of healing muscles.
You see, no matter how much body work you get or how many muscle-healing exercises you’re doing, life is still going on. You sit with your head twisted to the side watching television and that’s twisting the muscles in your neck. You hit your head on a cupboard door and tighten a bunch of muscles in your jaw, neck and shoulders. Your boss goes on a rampage and you tighten your whole body. If you have really tight muscles, the tight ones are pulling the healed pieces back into tightness.
For a long time I found that at every massage appointment the first half — at least — was spent getting out the kinks that settled back in between appointments. Increasingly I tried to make sure to do yoga and/or soak in a hot bath before an appointment so I could work some of the kinks out on my own.
When I created my movement work, it was just for me and I practiced numerous times in between appointments, often achieving more releases. Sometimes my practitioners said I came back in even better shape than I’d been in at the end of the last appointment.
At this point I generally make appointments at a time when I can spend at least an hour-and-a-half beforehand on doing the release movements and yoga and then soaking at least 20 minutes in a hot bath. Very little time is wasted in my appointments on retrieving lost ground and the fact that I’m looser and in balance makes it easier to achieve some deep releases.
Even with these efforts, there were times when I fell or slept in an awkward position and lost some ground. With TMJ, even though the muscles in my face and jaw were unwinding, I clenched in the night and tightened it back up. Sometimes I had stellar spells when the movement seemed only forward. But most of the time the process of healing my muscles moved more like four steps forward, two steps back. Always getting better, but an up and down process…
The healing moved much more quickly when I developed the exercise sets that so deeply trigger releases in the muscles but still it has been kind of four steps forward, one step back. Always up and down.
When I say I’m almost done, I’m referring to the patterns of muscles currently in my head. There are still a few other places that haven’t let go. And I’m always aware, body work and doing my exercises is a life-time commitment because as long as I’m alive my muscles will ever be subject to sitting “funny”, bumping into things, tension, etc.
There is no such thing as DONE with muscles. If you want muscles that are relaxed, strong and healthy, it’s a lifetime commitment to taking care of them. Even when you’ve solved any specific issues you may have, you still have to work at keeping them healthy.
J2P Monday: About Unwinding Muscles
I decided to take a little break from using ho’oponopono for healing and instead to bring up an issue from my healing journey that I think also relates to peace.
Few people in the western world make it very far past early childhood these days without developing tight, tense muscles. Often emotions and issues not dealt with are stuffed into those tight holding patterns The longer such patterns go without being healed, the more the patterns spread over the whole body and the more deeply rooted the unacknowledged issues become.
When muscles are tight the knots and twists squeeze the nerves, blood vessels and nadis. Then blood, oxygen and prana are unable to flow freely, which impacts physical, emotional and spiritual health. Only when the flow is free can your body experience fully vibrant health and connection to high levels of consciousness.
Hatha yoga developed out of the knowledge that energy must flow freely throughout the body in order to find connection to higher consciousness and to be the Divinely loving being each of us came here to be. Modern yoga practice in the west often seems to forget that the point of the asanas was not so much physical fitness as energy fitness — opening the nadis (energy pathways through which prana flows) and balancing the chakras.
When muscles have become really tight or have intertwined with others into tight patterns, restoring health is, in part, a process of unwinding. The muscles can open mainly (but not exclusively) from:
- certain types of exercise, like yoga or the triggers of release work I do
- certain types of body work
- emotional release.
Sometimes a couple of these things happen together.
Often there’s a release in a muscle at the time someone is working on you or when you let go of some emotion but it’s just the first opening. The initial release creates some space and the muscles release more over the next few days.
I first experienced the phenomenon when the bone in my left lower leg straightened 25 or so years ago. The bone was twisted from birth, which meant a lot of muscles were pulled out of place. By the time of the healing, I’d had decades for those muscles to pull on other muscles which then pulled on others; there were issues all over my body that all came from the original twisted leg.
When the bone moved back into place, all the connected muscles suddenly had some freedom and were also being pulled in a new direction. It unleashed an unwinding process that would begin at my left foot and move, section by section up into my neck and then start back down. For months afterward I experienced these releases, the muscles yanking and jerking and causing involuntary movements all the way up and down.
So I was reasonably prepared when, after many other varieties of body work, I came to CranioSacral work. It’s quite typical in this therapy for a release to occur in the appointment — one you may not even feel on the table — and then to have many big releases starting the next day and possibly for several days thereafter.
In fact, it was CranioSacral work that opened enough stuff in my head about 13 years ago to start the unwinding process that continued on its own until now (when the last throes are finally working their way out). Once I was years in, friends occasionally would ask if I knew of this happening to other people. It was unusual enough that some practitioners didn’t believe me when I tried to tell them about the unwinding muscles in my head.
Though I’ve known a few people who’ve experienced a lot of unwinding in their muscles, I’ve only found one other who’s experienced the years-long process I’ve been going through. So, after a recent question about whether this is common, I started hunting on line. I discovered there’s now a type of bodywork centered around unwinding, which seems to be based in part on working to further the kind of opening created by CranioSacral and Body Patterning.
Even in the modalities in which it’s normal to set off unwinding of knots in muscles the conversations are usually about days and sometimes weeks or as much as a few months. I’ve not found anything that discusses a decade plus of unwinding, so I think it’s unusual enough I doubt you have to worry about setting something off that goes on as long as my process.
Unwinding can be uncomfortable or even painful. But when muscles unwind, the process frees the nadis, circulatory system and nerves in your body and allows energy and oxygen to flow freely. Huge amounts of energy become tied up in holding those patterns, leaving you tired and listless and the opening restores your stamina.
If you want to be peace, to live from the place of peace, you need to have a healthy body in which vital force energy (prana or chi) can move freely. Practitioners often don’t discuss — or in many cases seem to know about — unwinding and how it can go on for some time or that it may hurt or be annoying.
When you start healing and/or releasing issues or your body, you should be aware there’s a chance you will unleash some sort of unwinding. Personally, I enjoy it for the most part (when I’m not whining about it 🙂 ) because I know it’s leading to the healthy body and healthy flow of energy I desire. I recommend embracing the discomfort and feeling gratitude for the healing it represents. It’s part of the path to PEACE.
Not Just Sassy on the Inside 
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