So you know how pain hurts?
I was walking down the stairs last night and I had this moment of awareness of the miraculous way my body works and for a minute there I could feel it, all the joints and bones and muscles interacting smoothly with no pain or ache or weakness or stiffness. It was really beautiful. And then I had a glass of Bruichladdie and took my beautiful body and my mild buzz to bed.
Things that are good: muscular-skeletal structures and really great booze.
I noticed the beauty because I twanged my leg last week - I THINK it's the IT band? But really, what do I know about musculature? It is something that reaches from above the knee up to and around my hip and when it twangs it feels like the muscle was shortened by 6 inches and the hip is being aggressively pulled forward. I can't stand straight and walking makes me want to cry a little.
It is extremely unpleasant.
I find myself wanting to say its Nothing In the Grander Scheme, which is true and not true, but also annoyingly self effacing. Pain is, your FEELINGS are. Denial serves nothing but the status quo. Etc. Etc.
So I used to feel this way all the time. That's what is blowing my mind this week, the fact that I forgot that this is what I used to feel like almost every day. For years.
I was fat. I'm still fat but in a very different way. But then? Unfit, unhealthy, full of bad food and depression and puffy and withdrawn and sad and sort of basically unfriendly. I hurt all the time. My legs felt tired, my soul was heavier than my body, my back hurt every day. I had no energy. I would no more have gone for a walk than set myself on fire.
I was already two years into therapy and it was WORKING. This was an IMPROVED place for me.
I meet people now and they notice most of my friendships are under 10 years old. Why? And I'm like, you would not have liked me. And they are all, why do you talk about yourself that way? And I am like NO, you would NOT HAVE LIKED ME. Not many of my old friendships survived my learning to like myself.
All this from a muscle spasm, right?
The first time I went to the gym as an adult was in maybe 2003 - February I think. A neighbor dragged me. And I was all I WILL DO CARDIO ONLY and when I am thin I will do weights (Free weights are for FIT PEOPLE<--------This is what disordered thinking looks like, in case you would like an example). Thus guaranteeing that I would gain nothing from this process because who could go on the cross trainer for 3 continuous years without dying of boredom? It's grim.
But the gym membership came with a training session with my mad Russian and for some reason, some bit of progressive thinking that was beginning to stir in my brain, I DID the session instead of putting it off until a year from never. And it was...fun. I lifted things. Very light things. But still, this was new. I liked the Russian.
(He told me recently - we still work out once a week - that when he first saw me trailing behind the salesmen he was, not to mince words, horrified at what stood before him. Me too, my friend, me too) (Don't be hating on him for saying that. There was context and I was not offended).
So I lifted wights and did cardio and lost 20 pounds and then gained it back in muscle, and I learned the DIFFERENCE between fat and muscle and met with him 4 x a week for several years and the outside of me changed and the inside of me changed and honestly I was still at the bottom rung of human fitness, but I was so much better that I could begin to learn to be a real person. Because the one thing I have really come to know is that I'm a body AND a mind. I only ever valued the mind and neglected the body and the lack of balance very nearly killed me I think, which sounds a bit melodramatic but is true.
I have a related post brewing about my relationship with my appearance which will continue to brew until I can talk about being pretty without feeling like a total douche-bag.
ANYWAY.
Somewhere along the way I hurt something, or - more likely - discovered something I hurt a long time ago but which only began to nag when I asked my legs to DO things regularly, this shortened feeling at the front of my thigh that limited movement and for a couple of years it was with me most of the time. I never even really thought of it as an injury or a chronic problem. It was just the latest in a line of small things and I almost didn't notice when it didn't heal and fade from my head. The Russian moved back to Russia for a while and I worked with a young woman trainer. We switched to more mat work,more body weight work than free weights and that was an interesting change, and with her I began to work around the leg, target it with stretching and sometimes, for a week or so we'd get it working again without pain. I saw the rolfer* then and the chiropractor and it helped. But I began to understand that this was a problem that I wasn't getting rid of. This was middle age. And in middle age I limped.
Time passed, leaves fell, hearts broke and mended, flowers bloomed. The Russian was back, I was restless and bored with weights, I was stronger, my feet hurt and I had kidney stones and I was turning 40 and the whole thing was just an OUTRAGE.
And so I started to practice yoga, turning the vague notion of years into a reality.
My first class twanged that thigh hard and I limped out, but it also receded after that to better than it had been in years. And then a month later it twanged again and then faded for a month completely and then it twanged hard and stayed twanged until I finally made the synaptic connection that resting this NEVER HELPED and made myself go for a walk, the first 3K of which made me want to cry with every step and the last 2K of which were as pain free as I had felt in a decade. Oh. OH.
That was Summer 2009 and until last week, I've not felt a twinge. I'd begun to forget about it, in fact. I have a deep hippy suspicion about why this twanged now but it requires a whole 'nother digression and I'm not in the mood. Superficial summary: I reached a new place with pigeon pose and didn't respect how wobbly and open my hips were feeling, accused myself of laziness and went to class when I didn't want to, and in the simplest of movements my leg said fuck you for not listening, HERE FEEL THIS DUMB ASS.
Ow.
I know what to do, and I did it, OUTRAGED every step of the first few days. I FIXED YOU you betraying bastard. And then I stopped being such a damnpissytwerp about it, and noticed that I hadn't had this chronic pain for over a year and that was really a cycle broken and a remarkable thing. A little respect please. Last night - after 5 days - the spasm eased in a moment I didn't even notice, during yoga of course. And meditation was amazing afterward, the silence that the pain left behind it was big.
I'm not sure there's a lesson here - my pain is not yours, not everything can be healed this way - though I have a tendency to say that yoga fixes everything because in some larger sense I think it really does.
But last night I walked down the stairs and felt the exquisite working of my body like the miracle it really is and I was grateful. I love that.
*love the Rolfer. This is Rolfing
