Blog: Conversation with My Body

I am in a blessed course of Physical Therapy for old chronic pain areas which regularly flare into injury, often stopping my ability to move. Though the PT is challenging, I am regaining function I didn’t know I could regain. (Apparently, it is never too late.) But feelings come up…

Journal, Sunday, April 7

Yesterday, after PT, I was sore and strangely melancholy. 

I am changing, or attempting to gently shift with great effort, an ingrained pattern in my body which is deeply familiar. As I was writing this on paper in my journal, I wrote ‘family’, an interesting slip…Because familiarity of sensation whether good or bad, is a sort of internal ‘sensory family’, always there, populating my way of moving and embodying the way interpersonal family patterns are always there populating a way of relating to others. And so, when I go to alter these deep sensorial patterns through physical therapy exercises, it is a bit frightening and sad. Letting go. Also rejecting and pushing away.

I am saying, “Dear Body, for the good of all we must try a new way. In order to feel less pain, in order to find balance, we must alter a few things. Dear Body, it may feel odd, and when the pain, which has been a close companion, goes, we will mourn its departure, even though we feel better…Because we were together long time. We lived through the world together, understood things through this familiar veil of Discomfort. (When I talk to my body it is often in run on sentences…Am I afraid my body is not going to listen? or do I know body is listening, in fact has been waiting for my all-full-of-this-and-that mind to catch up? And where really does the “I” of me truly stand?)

“Dear Body, this alteration may take some time, and faith, and effort, but we can’t go on in the old way. The old marriage. The old snake skin. Dear Body, all will be well. Our deepest heart knows this. But if today you are sad, it is a regal feeling, a treasure of mourning…”