Decades
ago in my early forties, I was driving on my way home to Bolinas
after dropping the guy I worked for off at a doctor appointment and
where he was staying overnight. I hadn't eaten all day and had just
picked up something to nibble on the way home. Stopped at a long,
level traffic light line of cars at Tam Junction, I had taken my foot
off the brake to kick off my slippers and open the container in the
seat next to me. WHAM! The drunk pulling out of the liquor store
parking lot had assumed that since my brake lights weren't on, my car
was going 30 mph. He pushed my car into the car in front of me,
causing me a whiplash injury.
I'd never been in this situation before. What happens is the insurance company wants to have their chiropractor look at the damage and access it. So I thought I'd stop doing Alexander Technique for three weeks before the assessment. My logic was if there was anything that was going to go wrong, I wanted to get paid for it. Big mistake!
A
day after the appointment came and went, (when I really expected to
get some help, but didn't,) I feel asleep after some circus-sex (I'll
leave you to imagine what that means, OK?) with a towel underneath
half my hip. I woke up with a hip sprain and sciatica. Ouch!
If you know anything about Alexander Technique, we believe that the head and neck relationship is key for every coordinated move in the body. Having a problem there and not using Alexander Technique to stop it, meant something likely to go wrong.
This sort of sprain wasn't the sort of thing you can use rest to recover from, because
resting stiffens it. So every morning you must move to get some
relief from pain. It takes about six to eight weeks minimum to
recover. I wasn't. The way I was twisted when I learned to walk funny
as a baby happened to feed into the likelihood of how the sprain had
happened.
Because
I knew Alexander Technique, I could mitigate staying in pain and move
out of what was hurting me. But it didn't work to prevent the pain
from returning, and I had no idea why. Later I learned that many women
who are in their early forties gain mass in the bones of their hip
area, so that may have been a factor.
Eventually, I did find out why healing wasn't happening. One
thing I did discover is that going to a sauna and cold plunge helped.
I was socializing in a public sauna, and a guy there said I didn't sound
like most people who had chronic pain, so he thought maybe he could
help me. He was a hypnotist counselor. I told him my story, (which
included breaking up from a ten year + relationship, partly because of being injured - good riddance!) He said that he thought I was hanging
onto something; for most people that was a recent breakup. I didn't
think that was the case for me. He gave me some breathing exercises
that I practiced on the long, windy drive home over the
Fairfax-Bolinas back way home form the sauna.
Having
spent about three hours at the sauna, I pulled over to shut my eyes
for a bit on the way home, because it's not good to drive when you're
about to fall asleep. I draped myself over my pile of laundry in the
passenger seat next to me and had a nice snooze. When I woke up, all
of my pain was gone!
I
got out of the car and walked around a bit to think about what had
happened. I felt around in my hip and back area with my hands to see
what was going on that I hadn't been able to feel on the inside. There was some strange pulling on the inside of my pelvic bone that I hadn't noticed before, because of surrounding background tension. It
turned out that many moons previously, I had unknowingly developed uterine
fibroids, which caused my belly to pooch out on one side. Being vain,
I'd trained myself to hold in the side of my abdomen to even out my
appearance that nobody else probably noticed. That's when I put into
place the habit of tensing my hip that was preventing me from recovering from this hip
sprain. Of course, once I figured that out, I used Alexander Technique to quit that. In a little more than a month, (after being in chronic pain for a year and a half) I had an
almost full recovery.
I learned a few things from the experience. From
my past, already I knew what it was like to be limited and hurt and
imagine that it was going to last my entire life with no solution.
But this time many people had a well-meant solution that I could try.
Now I understand how discouraging it will be to try and fail when it
comes to chronic pain. Rather than blaming yourself, you tend to get
stubborn; most of the time this leads to discouragement against
trying anything new. This is why my rescuer said my attitude didn't
resemble most people in chronic pain.
So
- what was it that I was "holding onto" that I had been
thinking about before I fell asleep? The last time I had a
mysterious problem with my coordination, I stumbled on Alexander
Technique...and it was a really amazing ride. Since I had gone
through all that pain, I wanted another benefit on the other end of
it like my roller-coaster ride with learning A.T. dammit!
Later
I realized that I did get a benefit that I could pass onto others
from my experience. It was in the form of a sort of "reset button" that interrupted my hip tension pattern that intermittently caused
sciatic pain. It was based on the ideas of an osteopath named Jones
who originated a technique called "Strain and Counter-strain."
But that's another story...
