I have been awake since 2am and up since 3:30am working to release my psoas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psoas_major_muscle
I’m up and awake because of pain impossible to sleep through.
I have done so much investigating of the body in the last 5 years, I’d think I would have it a little more under control. But that’s the very problem…Control.
Trauma.
I know what has set off the most recent psoas tantrum is riding in a car in a seated and restricted position for 4 days. But if this were the only cause then why isn’t my husband’s psoas complaining…or for that matter, my daughters? We were all sitting the same amount of time and in relatively the same position.
Yet, it is me who experiences this intense and demanding pain.
Trauma.
It leaves me to question as I have questioned for many years now.
Psoas pain is deep, gripping and unrelenting once activated. It can effect the entire being on every level.
Trauma.
I seem to go in circles with pain issues. It’s chronic at this point, but the circles are sometimes more broad and spacious and encompass a set range of symptoms at some times more than others.
The pain circles can be tight, almost like a weaving thread-a fine thread and needle. Intricate, defined, and acute. Other times it is thin and constricting like a binding that covers any given area. And still yet, other times it is thick and suffocating like a blanket, but without the softness or comfort.
I began researching the body, it’s structure, and body/mind responses in 2008, not long after a series of assaults I experienced.
Mostly, I have books I haven’t really been able to read. My body has the answers and I’m afraid to have them confirmed. As long as I don’t have them confirmed from another source I have the magical, false belief that I can make my body change first, and later validation of the truth won’t hurt so much?
Just before the pain, which I still experience 5 years later, I had been frozen. I am not sure if I had ever been “not frozen,” even prior to the assaults in recent years. I think I have probably been frozen, in some ways, from sometime near birth. And though it sounds fantastical I sometimes have to wonder if it wasn’t closer to a time between conception and my real first breath. Because there has never been a time in my history that stress and trauma of some sort was not surrounding my existence.
(It’s funny I used to become enraged if someone suggested I’d ever experienced trauma.)
The first time I actually felt pain was deafening. It was some time in 2008.
I had met pain before that, but I had only really known pain as a word. Not as a felt experience. Even if I had felt it before it was on a much more cognitive level.
Then the floodgates of hell unleashed its fury on me.
I was 28, in massage school and couldn’t walk. However, I did walk. I had to walk. I had to get from place to place. I couldn’t just not do it. My body couldn’t do it, but I had to do it. Somehow I did it. I didn’t miss school. I didn’t fall behind. I graduated with honors. Some people in my class probably didn’t even know I was in immobilizing pain. In fact, most of them didn’t, I’m sure now. ( In hindsight, some people probably thought the scowl on my face was because I was a very angry person. I’m not and wasn’t. I now recognize that wrote expression my “determined to be happy” look so nobody would know anything was wrong, lol)
But the pain changed me. It continues to “F” with me, if you know what I mean.
I have had some breaks with it during short spans since it first came on, but only briefly and to seemingly regain strength at the next intersection. And the pain moves around my body. First, and always, my spine, but it seems to like to “specialize” on one or two areas and then move on. But it always returns to where it has been before. It is the circle.
However, I’m most interested in pains ability to evermore find new spots and new ways to impact me! Truly ingenious.
So, I’m reaching a new level with pain and the amount of joy I am seeking to tap into.
I need freedom.
In the past years I’ve developed ways to deal with the pain. Some of them are old, adaptive, and until recently, dependable, like dissociation. I know that I don’t actually even hold all the pain myself. But then there is the “learning sickness” I carry (sometimes dormant) that takes hold of me. I have a shelf of books dedicated to the mysteries of pain, it’s origin and release. I am always looking for connection. I think this unrelenting wish for connection might, in fact, be part of why the pain does not dissipate.
I’m not ready to talk yet about this pain. Even if I’ve written an entire page about it.
Pain has so many stories to tell.
(What if I told?)
I’m often left without words. The words are buried within the tissue of my body and my soul. Yesterday I spoke of the landfill…and I’m afraid that land is actually my body.
Things ( It’s not “things” and it’s not “nothing.” It’s trauma. Will it kill me to accept it? ) have happened to me on a cellular level. That might be part of why I am inclined to believe that pain and trauma is so woven into me it is deeper than even my breath. It is before breath.
There is an interplay between my body and the release of words, the stories of my life. I just pray to be released from its cycling, a sort of constant repetition compulsion, and to live through the release.
I think this deepness is why I feel such a need on my most real level to “merely” sit together with another human who isn’t going to hurt me in any way. It’s unexplainable the effect that has on me. I have been to many professionals in search of help who have tried to make me jump through hoops for a cure.
Very few people have worked to cultivate the presence of mind and body to do absolutely nothing. I have finally met someone in my life with the courage to do that.
Nothing is working.
Nothing is real.
Nothing is everything.
Nothing is simple and inherently complex.
Maybe it’s time for me to do something toward that effort too.
(Expect more posts about my personal research and investigations as I begin to crack those books and practice the connection/release exercises I’ve known about for a while. )