The Change: 15

Un-Do The Twist

(This is an ongoing story. If you want to start at the beginning, click here.)

“In order to get your foot to move, I have to free up the twists throughout your body.” This, like everything else AE tells me, makes perfect sense, even though I don’t understand what on earth she means.

During every session, she makes a point of explaining or demonstrating how pain in one part of the body is directly related to some other part of the body being off-kilter. It reminds me of that song that goes, The leg bone’s connected to the hip bone and the hip bone’s connected to the waist bone.  I used to sing that song to my kids at night because I could go on and on with the connections until they finally fell asleep.

I’ve never been a skeptic about this phenomenon, always buying into the idea that body pain can originate from places unexpected. But even as a believer, I did not expect to experience such crazy shit.

AE would press a point in my abdomen and I would get a sudden and splitting headache.  She would be releasing fascia around my knee and my teeth would ache.  Last week, she was working on my right foot (the bad foot) and I had zinging, stinging pains in my left eye the entire time.

“Where do you feel that?” she asked.

“In my eye!” I said.

“Wow! That’s so great!”

AE becomes especially giddy when there’s a direct connection between the top and bottom of me. She says it’s because things have cleared out enough for me to really experience how the body is not just disparate parts all held together in a skin suit, but a highly organized, completely interdependent system.

“Once we start this process, the body is in a state of unwinding. You don’t have to do anything, it just happens,” says AE.  “Bodies can unwind for years.”

I imagine a yo-yo hanging from a tightly twirled string, spinning and spinning while the string straightens itself.

No one knows how long it will take for their twisted up body to unwind. Or how many obstacles it will encounter along the way. AE says that some people just need a few key areas released and the yo-yo spins out on its own. Other people, like me, take a little longer.

AE has mentioned that ignoring the good stuff and focusing on the bad stuff is probably not the best use of my energy. But moving my attention is as hard for me as moving my foot is for her. Actually, probably harder.

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