The Body's Consciousness: Archetype or Sovereign Voice? Pt 1 of 3 ...
Reflecting on the sacred vessel that is the human body, and how I've learned to hear her ...
“Get out of this chair.” I felt the message in the base of my spine. I ignored it.
“I said, get out of this chair.”
“No,” I thought, brushing off the internal voice. I took a breath, shook my head slightly, and settled into the old wood-and-leather chair in front of my laptop.
“Get the FUCK out of this chair.”
“I’ll move when this Zoom call is over,” I said silently, yet vehemently, rolling my eyes, and tuning into the computer screen.
90 minutes later I stood up, and my whole life changed in a split second. I felt - maybe heard? - the tiniest, most minute click, and suddenly there was pain shooting down my leg. I could barely stand. “Walk it off, Evacheska,” I said to myself, “You’ll be fine.”
I wasn’t fine. I spent the next three nights in agony. I’d scream for hours, unable to sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time before the pain would wake me up again. I had no idea what was going on. Had I pulled a muscle? No muscle pain had ever felt like this before. Unable to walk, I’d wait until the very last moment to use the toilet, then pain-stakingly slide out of bed to the floor, and crawl to the bathroom on my hands and knees. I happened to be visiting family on the West Coast, and as I was unable to cook for myself, my 85-year-old father brought meals to me in bed (perhaps more on the poetry of this moment in another piece, one day).
Determined to get better, I went to a chiropractor in the small beach-side town where my father lives in Northern California. Eventually after a few days, I was well enough – or numb enough, not sure which – to drive south, and eventually to fly across the country (though I used wheelchairs in the airport and still could only walk just a few feet at a time).
Two weeks later, I was far worse than I’d been at the start. I couldn’t even stand for two seconds. Not only was I back to not sleeping and spending my nights wide awake, doing my best to breathe through the pain and regulate my nervous system, but now I was starting to wonder if I’d ever walk again.
Not only was I unable to walk, but I couldn’t stand, sit, or do anything but lay on my right side. It was from this position that I was forced to spend hours, days, nights, listening to my body. I had never experienced pain to this degree. First, the listening was only to the excruciating pain: Due to severe pressure on the nerve, my entire left leg and hip, from low back to the tip of my big toe, were sending signals of 10 out of 10 on the pain scale. Even the smallest movement would exacerbate pain, aggravating the nerve and sending me into uncontrollable tears, or worse — visceral screams.
As time wore on, I started into a seemingly futile peripatetic quandary of my future, of my being, of my essence …
Somehow skipping over the simple concept of sitting up straight or walking, I wondered: Would I be able to dance again? To make love again? Would I ever be free of pain again?
And what if the answer to those questions was NO? Could I maintain the embodiment of everything I have integrated over the years? Could I practice what I often counsel my clients to implement in challenging situations? Could I “walk my walk” without the ability to literally walk?
Who was I, without a high-functioning body? Would I still be able to do my life’s work, were I to remain in this state forever?
And furthermore, and perhaps the most important question of all, if my body healed, was I capable of never, ever taking my body for granted again? Was I capable of listening to my body, and heeding its messages? Through immeasurable tears, I prayed and made promises to my body: “Please heal, please heal - I promise I will never take you for granted again. I promise, I promise, I promise.”
It was this last set of questions, prayers, and promises that sent me over the edge. I suddenly found myself experiencing guilt, shame, and disappointment as I recognized how much abuse I’d put this truly miraculous vessel through in my 37 years of this incarnation. How many times had I promised to care for myself, only to roll my eyes when hearing my body’s silent, yet potent, messages? Too many to count. In recognizing this, my tears moved from crying out of physical pain, to crying from heartache. The tears being shed were my own, but they were also the tears of my body - I began to notice that the heartache was both mine, and my body’s. We cried together, unsure of where to go from here.
Eventually I was diagnosed with a severely herniated disc in my L5-S1 vertebrae - essentially where the spine meets the sacrum. Despite the diagnosis, I was resolve in not taking pain killers, as I felt the drugs would only mask my body’s natural cues and messages, and that for me, surgery would be an abdication of my body’s natural healing ability. I felt that engaging in either would be overlooking an opportunity to practice what I preach - to listen to my body, to ask it questions, and to learn from its messages. There was no real acute accident to have caused my injury, and therefore there must be important information to uncover.
What was my body trying to tell me? I knew there must be a root cause, and though I was in almost unbearable pain, I was determined to find it…
Continued in Part 2 of 3 …
If this story resonates, feel free to write me at itsme@evacheska.com