I had a flare up of my chronic aches and pains last week. And it took me a few days to realize why. It wasn’t actually anything I had done at work or in my daily exercise. It was instead that my body had become tense, my mind on high alert and unpleasant emotions were bubbling up. The result was that my muscles were getting tighter and gripping. This in turn was causing my trigger areas to become more sensitive and painful. These “past injuries” were not getting the blood flow they wanted and felt like there was more compression and tension. So what was happening?
When we woke up last week on Thursday morning, Dennis told me that a former colleague from Colorado had texted to see if we were ok after we went to bed the previous night. There had been a mass casualty event about 20 miles west of our home. “Wait, what?” was my response. How could this happen in Maine?! The crime rate is so low! And everyone is so nice and welcoming!!!
But our quiet world had been shaken, turned upside down. We were reliving feelings we thought we had put behind us in the weeks following a similar event at our grocery store a 5 min walk from our house in Boulder, CO before we moved to Maine. There was uncertainty, fear and tension.
When I was in my yoga teacher training I developed a new level of sensitivity in my body. The little nuances in the muscles and joints of which I had previously been unaware are often brought to the surface. But yoga has also taught me to listen. What is my body telling me? What is my intuition saying and what are the emotions associated with these sensations?
Please understand I am not suggesting that I go down a rabbit hole of self-pity when my back insists that I pick my activities carefully on any given day. Instead this new awareness and listening to the sensations in my body help me stay true to my heart, and to what will make me happy. Tuning into my intuition is all about navigating through life feeling confident and settled in my values, decisions and actions.
So last week I instinctively created my yoga practices and chose meditations that would build a sense of a stable foundation, a sense of resilience and a sense of calm and focus. It allowed me to remind myself that in that moment I was ok.
Intuitively I chose yoga poses that kept me closer to the ground, turning inward and that required that I activate my deeper core. Poses like child's pose, cat/cow and forearm plank. My yoga practice allowed me to respect how my body was feeling which was tense like a coiled-spring and to offer a reset to my nervous system.
In case you are curious Body in Tune would love to collaborate with you to find your perfect movement practice.
I find it interesting how our brains dictate where and how much pain we feel or do not feel when there is an injury or an increase in nervous tension. Last week my brain instinctively knew to look for my “sensitive” areas and if it found tense muscles that it brought to my attention in the form of stiffness and sometimes pain. When life is flowing easily, my brain seems to focus less on these areas as if there had never been pain there in the past.
So my question to myself became what might I do to redirect my brain? My natural instinct was to assess how my body felt, how I had internalized the emotions and also to think about how I wanted it to feel. My yoga practice focused on quieting the nervous system with extra time spent feeling and listening to the breath. Feeling the breath move to different areas of the body and directing it towards the areas where there was tension. We know that when the nervous system is on alert, it tends to increased the resting tone or level of contraction in all the muscles of the body. If there is an area that was injured in the past, it is more likely to react to this increased tension.
I often tell clients that when we have a joint or muscle that is stiff and sore, it’s like the players on a sports team. When one player is slacking off, the rest of the team can get tired faster. We expect the muscles to create perfect, stress-free motion around the joints. However, when the synergistic muscles are not working efficiently together in both timing and force, then one or two muscles are going to get fatigued more quickly. The result is that areas get sore and stiff.
By reflexively creating a yoga practice that would support these areas, help the muscles breath and let go I had a way to help myself feel better physically and mentally. The beauty of yoga is that by putting breath to movement we are not only acting as our own myofascial release therapist, but we are also massaging and stimulating the rest and digest nervous system while quieting and calming the fight, flight, freeze and fawn portion of the nervous system.
Even though I was able to help my body, mind and spirit reset, I deeply understand that my practice does not change the facts of the situation, that so many lives were affected and will continue to be affected. My thoughts and prayers continue to go out to the community and those impacted in whatever big or small way by the events of last week.
Body in Tune, LLC was born from a belief that quality of life matters; both life and physical balance matters.
I would welcome the opportunity to be part of your support team with regards to your muscles, joints, bones and osteoporosis. It would be an honor to help you feel confident in your body so you can play with your grand children, take that long-dreamed of vacation and get outside and enjoy a walk with friends.
Are you ready?