About that having a body thing…

Old Town Alexandria, August 2023

I recently stumbled across this quote again by A. H. Almaas (I came across it while looking through my Commonplace book for a different quote):

We don’t trust that if we relax we will have the capacities, we will have the intelligence, we will have the strength and we will have the compassion that we need to deal with our lives. We don’t trust that reality as it is, is fundamentally fine and will work for us and support us without any interference on our part.

Basic trust is learning that life is manageable, is workable, that we can relax into it and just let it be. It is that trust that the universe itself supports us and that we have the inner resources to deal with whatever life presents us.

~ A. H. Almaas

What made this quote hit home is that I am currently in the process of working my way out of what ended up being a 5+ week struggle with back/hip issues that, for a time, made it difficult for me to be upright and had me wondering if I was ever going to feel “normal” again. (And no, the irony is not lost on me that I just wrote about Discovering I Have a Body in Midlife).

Beyond the physical issues I was having, what eventually became clear was that once again, I was wrestling with emotional issues, specifically how to trust. I was not trusting myself to “make the right decisions” nor was I trusting myself to know what to do to not hurt myself again. As always, it can be humbling when you see how quickly you revert to old patterns when under stress.

What caused this flare up was a perfect storm—me, trying an exercise at home that I had done in the office with my physical therapist without fully appreciating how much she had been supporting me combined with her then being on vacation which meant not being able to realign things before it became a bigger issue. I was able to hang in there for most of the week until I went to a friend’s house on Friday evening. The next morning my back went completely out (at which point I was just thankful to be able to make it back to my bed.)

In the beginning, I did a fair amount of numbing and white knuckling my way through, assuming that this would be like other episodes with my back when I just needed to take it easy for a little while in order to get back on my feet.

But as time wore on and I did not seem to be bouncing back as quickly as I felt that I should, there were times I felt frantic, like “everything” was riding on what I was doing or not doing when there was no way to know with any certainty what was the “right” thing to do.

Did I simply “need more time” or was I ignoring signs that I needed to be more active in my recovery? (Mostly, I needed more time.) Should I take muscle relaxers? (Yes, twice. Kind of helped, maybe? Definitely knocked me out and made me loopy.) Did I need the prednisone? (No.)

I kept trying to convince myself that I was “turning a corner” and would soon be back to my “normal” self. Only to discover that did not seem to be the case. It took a little while for me to recognize that there were strong parallels between the physical issues I was having with my back and hips and the emotional issues I am more familiar with.

Initially, I thought I was dealing with a purely physical issue until I had a couple of experiences where I could literally feel my back seizing up as a result of anxious thoughts I was having. Seeing this connection was both daunting (I have to control my anxiety!) and freeing (oh, I’ve been here before and have tools I can use.)

I would like to say that once I made the connection, everything started to fall into place, but unfortunately it still was not a straight path. Instead it involved a lot of being whipped around between conflicting feelings—the worry that I was not doing “enough” and the desire to let go and trust that I (and my body) would know what I needed to heal.

Of course, in the middle of working my way through this, it mostly felt incredibly muddled. Looking back, I can see that it was having to sit in this muddled-ness that has led to a deeper understanding of myself which I am still working on unpacking.

I do know that the times when I felt the most relief were the times when I was able to let go of my expectations of what healing was supposed to look and feel like (and how quickly it was supposed to happen.) I learned in real-time how much better I felt when I could stay present rather than worrying about a future that I could not predict. I also had a specific experience that helped me get past a self-compassion wall that I had been experiencing recently.

The truth is that while definitely not ideal, being laid up was not as bad as it could have been. I did not have to figure out how to stay on top of a job. I did not have to parent kids. I was lucky to have Kyle home for the first few weeks when the pain was more acute to help with taking care of the cats and doing household tasks (though I felt guilty and frustrated about being so incapacitated during his last weeks here.)

I also had already been doing a lot to support my body which came in helpful— an existing relationship and weekly appointments with my physical therapist as well as my one-on-one session with my pilates instructor where she was able to customize my workout (if you can call it that) to match what my body could do (which for several weeks was not much).

What is most fascinating to me now, is realizing that I actually had the time and flexibility to pare what I was doing back to the minimum—and the world did not come crashing down. Yes, I had to back out of some things (some personal fun things I had been looking forward to as well as some volunteer activities I had been planning on helping with.) Everyone was more than understanding and supportive. No one actually expected me to “just push through” like I often feel that I should.

Which brings me back to the idea of “trusting that reality as it is, is fundamentally fine” which I don’t think means that bad or challenging things won’t ever happen. They absolutely will. What it means is that it is ok to let go of the resistance I often feel when those challenges arise. That struggling is not a sign that I have done anything wrong; it is merely a natural part of the human condition.

I’ve found that it is so danged easy to resist the reality of a situation I find myself in. But it is this resistance to reality—this idea that I should not be struggling or that there was something that I could have done (or should be doing) to prevent myself from being where I am now—that makes whatever I am struggling with even harder. As the Buddhist saying goes: “pain + resistance = suffering”.

While letting go of the resistance doesn’t necessarily make the pain go away or immediately resolve what I am struggling with, it can, counterintuitively, give me more space and clarity around the situation because I am less overwhelmed by the extra suffering stemming from my resistance (which for me usually manifests as anxiety).

Which comes back around to approaching life from a place of trust. As Almaas puts it: “Basic trust is learning that life is manageable, is workable, that we can relax into it and just let it be.”

This feels right to me (both from my lived experience and at a soul-knowing level). Yet, I still find it so hard to do! Because it means allowing myself to feel the feelings that come up in these situations. The feelings that say I must be “doing it wrong” if I am struggling that feel hard-coded deep in my bones. The feelings that I have done my best to numb protect myself from all these years. And feeling those feelings, of course, is the last thing that I want to do!

So here I am, feeling about 95% back to where I was physically before this episode and being extremely appreciative of that. But also not wanting to move on too quickly from this experience because I can sense that what happened went way deeper than just the physical experience and I don’t want to lose that.