Penny came today for a lesson - her hips were sore and she felt her old tight lower back had returned. She is wanting to move forwards in life to new things, but as with so many of us, her desires for her, albeit grown, family pull her the other way. She had noticed that her breathing had been very shallow since her young son had got a job abroad and left home in the autumn. I also found her holding on in her lower back, leaning back way beyond vertical, and also very resistant to going forwards in any way…. When standing up from a chair she didn’t want to move forwards from her hips so the action was a struggle; her lower back tightening hugely to heave herself to her feet. When sitting down she dropped like a stone rather than coming forwards from her hips and in her knees in order to lower herself in balance to the chair. And when standing upright and walking, her upper back was falling backwards towards family and her hips were lunging forwards towards her dreams. She said she felt so off balance that she couldn’t move with any freedom.
What I am writing might seem as if I was wanting Penny to ‘stand better’, or ‘move right’, but both those would only be the result of a deeper understanding of what was going on. After talking together about how things were for her right now, I asked her to let herself move forwards from her hips as she stood, to let her head lead and her body follow. So much easier! And sitting down again meant she allowed her head and her knees to move forwards, and she found herself seated again with no sense of an off-balance fall to the chair.
When Penny got up again I had the sense that she was standing as if she had two huge lengths of powerful elastic attached to her bra-strap at the back, and which went down through a big ring in the floor about 2 feet behind her and then back into her hands. It was as if she was pulling on this imaginary elastic, pulling her upper back down towards the floor behind her. So she stopped ‘pulling', and let the elastic lengthen considerably, This let her upper back release forwards and up in space. With the thought of another softer elastic from her head to the ceiling just in front of her, she allowed this one to take up the release of her back. This meant her hips moved backwards under her torso again, and she said she now felt in balance, and that she was also in a place from where she could move away from to stand up, sit down, walk, and then return to.
Penny said she could now see how she could step away from ‘home’ briefly to shop, visit, work, and then return again afterwards. She didn’t have to hold herself ‘at home’ all the time until she could make the big move. Now she could stop trying to be in two places at once - At Home and On her Big Journey all at once. That had been what was pulling her both backwards and forwards at the same time and creating the resistance and pain.
She went away balanced, happy, and easier, having made an important discovery as to where she was in her thinking and her future plans, and how the resulting buried feelings had affected her body.
No comments:
Post a Comment