(Re) Embodied

I didn't begin listening to myself until my body almost failed...

A year and a half ago I had sharp stomach pain that grew into a near-ulcer. I managed the condition for a while as I sought medical opinions about its cause. There were disappointingly little insight, and, in fact, for the most part, doctors didn't show much concern or urgency about an extremely healthy 27-year old developing a seemingly spontaneous chronic stomach disease.

I got particularly sick a week ago once I started an antibiotic course for a bacterial infection, related to, but not the source, of my stomach problems--including a mysterious allergic reaction that closed my throat, and required a short visit to the ER. Over the next few days I had "differential" symptoms that pointed toward another infection, or a serious ovary issue, or something else. Admittedly some things got really weird...I'll leave it at that.

I'm better, for now. I couldn't be more grateful for access to excellent healthcare, an attentive and affirming primary care doctor, a deeply knowledgeable acupuncturist/healer, an understanding boss, very reliable friends, concerned parents, among others.

I found myself in a transformative moment during this latest episode...

I've accepted that the source of my physical suffering is the manifestation of neglected parts of my emotional self. A friend on a similar health and healing journey turned me on to a beautifully insightful book, "When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection," by Gabor Mate, M.D. There, I learned that irritable bowel issues is a classic constellation of symptoms stemming from repressed anger and other deep, persistent healing needs. This Western medicine perspective is not too different from my Eastern acupuncturist's observations that if I released not only my present, but past feelings, more easily that my chronic stomach and lung conditions (I spontaneously developed asthma during the end of college) may dissipate. In other words my body is saying "NO" to continuing to hold layers of micro-stresses to which I've grown accustomed to overtime.

Stress so integrated into my life that I take its presence, and my responsibility for it, for granted. This is a fact that I had to own last week, when while relating a chaotic night during high school involving (step)parents' fighting, alcohol, wondering alone late at night, and almost being run over by a car that a parent was driving, to a close friend, she replied "[t]hat sounds traumatic." To which I said, "Oh. I guess it was." There were so many events in my early life like that I had just described it "another crazy thing that actually happened."

This link itself is not new information to me. The important part that I'm yet to fully understand is to soothe the stress that has taken residence in my body, and is integrated in my emotional life, I must reach into my past (again) to release old trauma and welcome new ways of being into my present.

I can offer a powerful example that occurred a few weeks ago. I was having an unusually depressed evening (largely onset by my hormones), finding myself restless in my sleep. I moved from my bed to my futon in the dark. I started to reflect on why my recent, abrupt breakup with my ex-partner of three years felt so traumatic. What did those events trigger? During this meditation, I curled up and transported to my 8-year old self. Suddenly I was experiencing the feelings--the edge of fear and exposed vulnerability--of myself, aware that my environment didn't feel stable, a degree of unsafety, and an enormous weight of responsibility to ignore these feelings, take care of my family, and meet outsiders' expectations of being an overachieving child. I spoke to her for the first time in twenty years. I assured her that her feelings were valid but she would leave the other end of this experience safe and well, that she was cared for in some ways even though she did not know this, and with so much instability around her, and that she ultimately met her and everyone's expectations, which was totally unnecessary for her to do as a child, yet an absolutely incredible feat. It was significant for me to visit her that evening. And most of all, if I want to truly root out my stomach pain I'll have to visit her, and many other versions of her younger and older selves, more regularly.

So, I'm re-claiming this time and space as "re-embodied." I want to live in my stomach and entire mid-section part of my body from which I had dissociated for almost a year. Core exercises will help. Cutting back on "comfort" eating is essential. Self-massages to give my ailing abdomen love (and stimulate digestion) is an imperative. But carefully re-visiting the emotional under-layers that have been under consistent, micro-stress for so long--constant and under-returned care-taking and all of the sacrifice that way of being entails--is where the healing lies. And fortunately I have enough support to identify which wholistic healing methods will help the most at this moment in my life. I need to push through nagging parts of my conscious mind that naively assumed that I had identified most of my childhood trauma during my 2 and a half years of therapy in college, and the week's routine that can lull me out of any sense of urgency to do this intentional work. Otherwise, the Universe will remind me every time--through my body and otherwise--that past says to the future, "there's no full life without a more whole self."