SOME IDEAS TO HELP AT THE DENTIST!

And b-r-e-a-t-h-e!! Please don't run away; this is offered 

with love in order to help!!

Today it was the dentist for a planned filling replacement. Two things filled me with a bit of tension; the cost (I wont go there) and the having my mouth open so wide for so long. Not blessed to be Julia Roberts with her enviable barn-door mouth, and coming from the tight-lipped home counties (damn it), this always causes me more pain than any injection can prevent! 

My lovely Irish dentist always fills me with confidence, so much so that I had even forgotten (yes, genuinely!) that this appointment would mean an injection! But it was done before I even knew it. The difference is that Sean moves around his patients with a quiet compassionate attention, moving slowly with respect and honour around the head, acknowledging that he is doing something quite ‘invasive’ to his patients -  I hope you can find a dentist like that; it makes such difference!

Then the drilling - No! Don’t switch off!!! I have some some really useful tips for being in the dentist’s chair which I hope will help you! 

I was lying back, knowing I could resist the fact I was there or go with the flow, and that I only had to raise my hand and Sean would stop and give me a break. So, what to think first? Let’s make a list for ease...things I found helpful today to go with the flow:

1. Soften my hands that were folded in my lap; there was no need to clasp them as if holding on to a cliff face!
2. Soften my neck - the area around the hair line at the back of my scalp, and imagine a widening space up behind my eyes and up into my brain, like rings on a pond.
3. Breathe!!!
4. Allow my mouth to be open... In fact, when I stopped resisting and let Sean and his assistant keep my mouth open with their instruments to do what they needed to do, it became much easier... I was then not forcing my mouth open beyond where they needed it to be, or fighting them in a futile effort to try and close it.
5. When it became tiring and sore, I remembered the ‘smile behind the eyes’ that unlocks the jaw to enable it to open freely. Try this now for me?... Look miserable and pull your jaw down to open your mouth as wide as you can. And now close your mouth again. Now, think of something pleasurable that creates an inner smile behind your eyes... It can show in your mouth too, but the important bit is the smile in your eyes and up behind your cheeks. Now allow your lower molars to drop away from your upper molars.... Can you tell the difference?! So, even though my mouth was open and below my ears was screaming in discomfort, I thought about letting that smile happen, and I felt a great release and the relief from jaw-sore was fantastic!! :-)
6. Then I let my hands go again, and my legs which had joined in the foray!
7. And breathe..... which showed me something quite interesting; I had stopped breathing on the out-breath. This meant that I was pulling down away from Sean’s hands and instruments...sort of squashing myself down out of the way. As I breathed I came up to meet him again, and the relief was fantastic, again. Far less resistance on my mouth and jaw.
8. So I softened up towards my head, and my body deepened upwards from the ‘chair’,  the distance between my back and my front feeling like it had trebled. Again this stopped my resistance to Sean’s instruments.
9. Smile inside again - more relief from the jaw which had begun to tighten again.
10. And breathe....this time I felt something release in my shoulders; that part directly above the armpits at the front; I had been narrowing across there in an effort to ‘help or hide’...and it was doing neither, of course! Try that?... Lift your shoulders and narrow across your front, and open your mouth wide...? Now release that tension, allow your shoulders to float apart and Just Be, and then open your mouth with that smile. Easier? I found it hugely so. (Perhaps you had to be there, but it’s something for your ‘handbook’ when you next visit your dentist!)
11. Again I felt myself come back up towards Sean; I had pulled back down without noticing! And breathe....and smile....and relief...!
12. This time I let go in my body and let the chair come back in support of me - to cradle me. This stopped the ‘ I am trying to levitate myself out of this place’ tension and again the softening released my jaw and allowed me to be present to the event. It’s far scarier when we ‘run out in our minds’; the body feels abandoned!
13. Each time I needed to rest, I listened to my body, not my ‘I might interupt him’ mind, and he willingly stopped just for a few seconds, enough for me to soften my jaw to closed, smile inwardly to unhinge it and re-open it again. 
14. Softening hands, legs, body, neck, breath, shoulders, jaw, smile, tummy, toes....they all helped hugely. (And I mean soften, release, de-frost, not chillaxed, relaxed, lying on a beach stuff which is a crazy demand in the dentist’s chair!)

And then it was done, all over, and finished. An apt sigh of relief, one final release of the neck as I paid the humungous bill (tension is resisting what is!), and out to dribble over a coffee and write this for you in a beach cafe in the sunshine, spring showing her nose at last, the beach full of laughing, barking happy people and dogs, and all is well in the world! It might well be baby-food tonight, but who cares; ‘tis done!