So one thing that often happens with chronic injuries is that people tend to work on the symptoms, and don’t get enough to the root cause. That’s one thing. So what tends to happen is that people find themselves running around after various symptoms which keep changing a little, and then you never get significant improvement. Being able to see the body as a whole system is a huge first step, like how does the injury relate to your body as a whole, what are you having to compensate with and how in order to function around the injury, and how does gravity and other dynamic forces travel through you with this injury vs before? Working with physical therapists, bodyworkers, feldenkrais practicioners, massage therapists, and chiropracters can be super helpful at this juncture, if they are sensitive and able to see the whole body at once while working on a part.
Once you’ve done some preliminary work on this level, and relieved some of the pain so that you can breathe again, then it’s time to work on the next level. A few more words about this first stage though – it’s imperative to develop a few things called mindfulness and awareness of movement. You need to be able to feel how you move through the world, and to have some awareness of your movement choices. If you have some incorrect movement patterns that cause you more pain, it’s really good to investigate those and do your best to move in different ways that are not as painful. It really helps to have outside guidance on this if you are having trouble. The mindfulness of movement also serves to help the body/mind connection which is an essential part of healing from chronic injury.
Ok, yes, the next level. This is where it gets maybe a little new age-y or there might be some people who think I’m nuts or what I’m saying doesn’t make sense, but I will do my best to give you the facts as I know them. There’s a basic belief, that a fair amount of people agree on, that emotions and psychology are very related to how we live in our bodies. Through our life experiences, we accumulate emotional holdings sometimes, where our bodies hold in these patterns of tension called holding patterns. That can contribute tremendously to chronic pain or injury. Now, beyond these holding patterns from chronically held emotions, there is also this creative entity called the unconscious mind. I believe that underneath a chronic injury is a chronic false belief or image or symbol held by the unconscious mind that holds us in a frozen place where we do not grow. When we can trace, or find, that unconscious false belief, image, or symbol that we somehow accumulated as a child or over the years, and understand it at the root, I’ll explain more what that means, but understand it at the root, then we can begin to untangle the weakness or propensity in us that led to the injury in the first place. To understand something at its root means to have some kind of memory of when and where you first accumulated that belief or image, and to have some insight as to why it resonated with you so much. This insight can be one or many, chances are there are a lot of dimensions there about why something resonated for you and stuck in your unconscious mind. There will be a lot of emotions resting there at the root, for you to be with in a compassionate way, and understand was part of some solution that worked at the time. A therapist of some kind can be very helpful in unwinding these early associations.
Now where this gets a little tricky is how an image or a false belief or a symbol can get associated with a part of the body. This happens a lot more than people think and it’s actually a very creative solution to difficult circumstances. The problem is that it only helps temporarily, and if your body continues to use that as a solution, you will end up sick or in pain. What the mind has done is created an association to a body part, to put the image or symbol there somehow, to give it somewhere as a home, or a spatial location, to give it more legitimacy or strength somehow. I’m glad I’m writing about this, because this part of the process is most curious. I don’t know why images and symbols can’t just float around in the unconscious without getting attached to some part of the body, but I believe the answer lies in a theory about how the body IS the unconscious mind, and also, I think there may be some wave/particle theory here. The original thought, idea, or image is a wave and it makes contact with the self by becoming a particle that somehow lodges in some organ or some part of the body where it makes the most sense for what the image is. I know this sounds nuts, but in my own process of becoming embodied, I found a lot of images in my unconscious embedded under chronic tension or pain, such as arrows, handcuffs, or velcro. I also found a lot of emotions, where a place gets tapped into by sensitive hands and a lot of old feeling from the past was released. This is not new, a lot of people have written about this. But I have an example for you, and I don’t think she will mind. A friend has shooting pain up through her body that starts from the ball of her foot. I asked her when the pain started and she said when her parents got divorced, and she asked her dad to go to a doctor and he said her foot would be fine and didn’t take her. Later, it developed into a lot of chronic pain. I asked her if there was anything on an unconscious symbolic level that she could think of that would point to her feet as the origination point, like a fiction book she read or a movie she saw. Right away, she said she would pretend to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz when she was a little. On an unconscious level, there was an internal rising up on her toes, saying there’s no place like home, and really wishing that she could get what she knew as home back, because it was lost and would never be the same again. It was never resolved, the emotions didn’t get addressed by the adults in her life, and in some way, her body unconscious held onto that hope for home and wishing it back, keeping her a bit on the balls of her feet. So now, as an adult, to help relieve the chronic pain that she feels, she will need to dive back into her psyche and connect with that little girl who was wishing that she could go back home again and meet all those feelings as a compassionate adult. What’s more, she will need to feel these emotions in her body, down to her toes, and allow herself to release the feelings and let them be expressed, in words or actions, or with some heavy meditation. Her whole body will feel differently at the end of this process, and her emotions and wishes from childhood will be understood and transformed, so that the energy of them can be used in adulthood in an integrated way. It’s so much easier to look at someone else and do this, and so much harder to do it for myself! The mind is an incredible place, very good at finding temporary solutions to overwhelming feelings and anchoring them in the body. I guess I am getting to them, thai yoga massage has been feeling quite on the pulse lately. Wishing all luck with what they’re working on, feel free to reach out to me with questions or for discussion – http://www.healingthroughmovement.squarespace.com
Eve Chalom 