My Solstice Share...
My darkness...In the past year, I have been plagued by a health issue that derailed my vitality, stopped me in my tracks like nothing I'd experienced before. Chronic hip pain in my right sacro-iliac joint arrived out of nowhere and while it has sparked a journey to understand the science of chronic pain and pain relief, it has been debilitating. At times, it has been hard to walk, to empty the dishwasher, to bend over and pick up my dogs' bowls to feed them in the morning, to do certain yoga poses I have done with ease for decades. It has sapped my energy and my capacity to move forward.
I am grateful to an amazing network of awesome mind-body practitioners who are supporting me in unpacking this "symptom"! On this beautiful first day of summer, I am climbing out of the pit of symptomology. Like a good healing journey, it ebbs and flows now, with moments where it is gone and I am 100% back, and other "20 steps backward" moments of recurring pain intensity and debilitation.
I'll share a couple of fascinating insights that the SI pain has revealed, some of my "stories behind the symptoms" of this pain. One session identified: Healing of a strain in the right sacrotuberous ligament (whose ever even heard of this?!?!) of the sacrum, from an injury in an ocean rough water race I swam on my 14th birthday that ended my era of competitive swimming. The vagal nerve innervation of this ligament was holding my terror from this race - the memory of a sea of women competitors pulling on my leg and literally holding me under the water as they swam over the top of me. This memory was up there in my 'worst ever' life experiences but remained forgotten until my right SI revealed it.
Another 'worst ever' mind & body memory from age 29 surfaced and was cleared and repatterned lowering the pain intensity dramatically! At this time of my life, I was reeling from the emotional heartbreak of my first marriage and got vaccinated for typhoid so I could escape my grief and go to the turquoise waters of Indonesian islands with my BFF. If you've ever had typhoid or its vaccine, I'd liken the experience to being beaten up with a baseball bat, and I remember rolling around in physical and emotional agony unable to get out of bed for days (the same area of the brain, the PAG, is involved in both types of pain).
My light....
This hip pain has inspired my new passion - the healing potential of the brain and the neural networks that govern our mood, mindset and vitality. Mapped by the Human Connectome project, researchers around the globe now orient ther fMRIs (functional Magnetic Resonance Instruments) at the brains of living people to see what networks light up when we're intuitive, self-critical, traumatized, or solving a tough sudoko puzzle.
While this has not been a fun journey of pain recovery for me, it has been driven me to soldier through the inaccessible terminology and peer-reviewed literature of of pain science, nociception, to create some new approaches to healing pain. I have some INCREDIBLE pain resolution success stories including of a woman with chronic pain for 20 years that completely resolved in 2 sessions with this new work! I will share them in an upcoming newsletter/blog! Most importantly, my students who have been trained on the Pain and Pain Relief Neural Networks are getting excellent results with pain and headache sufferers.