I came back from an amazing, life-changing trip to Belize…
But I feel like I’ve been paying for it for the whole last month. Worth it still, no regrets. But the suffering is getting old. For the last month I’ve gotten sick with respiratory viruses (with all the congestion and coughing and phlegm) not once but *twice*. And I’ve been dealing with some kind of an autoimmune flare, complete with all the joint inflammation, muscle fatigue, digestive issues that comes with that fun in betweenst all that.
I *finally* think/hope that I’m on the road out of that, but this is just when the other fun starts:
….trying to build back all that I’ve lost during my downtime.
It feels like a year’s worth of progress I’d slowly made to my deepest of core and support muscles – waking them back up fiber by fiber…. All collapsed back down on me so quickly. Even the muscles and joints from playing the guitar – the wrist pain, the shoulder pain … Feeling ‘musical’ was very far from what I was feeling as a couch potato, so obviously I wasn’t practicing on my guitar either. It feels like I have to start my body back in conditioning from a year ago.
All the aches and pains and sore spots have returned – and I realized it’s because I’ve stopped doing all the koga and physical therapy exercises that I was doing on a mostly-daily basis.
How could it go away so quickly?
That can’t be right. I feel the resistance to it. Of not wanting to accept my reality. Of calling it ‘not fair’ and giving up. Because building all that back *hurts*. I’ve done it enough times to know now, and this time’s feeling no different – that even though I’m doing the gentlest of exercises that at least feels good *when* I do it, that regardless I pay for it with discomfort and pain half the night and into the morning when I feel like roadkill for using my body the night before.
It’s not fair. And it sucks.
But it is what it is. If I stay stuck in the
…” It should not be this way. “,
…” I should be able to fix this. “,
…” All the things I DO for my health should pay off better than this!”
Then I will stay where I’ve fallen. If that is the dialogue I allow to persist in my head, I will stay there wallowing.
And that is not the energy I want to live in.
It doesn’t feel good. It feels like a victim. And, in some ways, that’s fair – after all, I can’t seem to ‘fix’ and be ‘free from’ the fact that my body inevitably flares back up. But I don’t have to stay and live in that energy. Yes, it happened. But once I accept my new reality, whatever capability that has become to be whilst I was flared, then I can start moving forward again. Because I know now that it works. And the “moving forward” is an energy that feels better to live in, once I’ve dropped the resistance to the measurement and judgement of where I am (OR how *long* I’ve been there).
I will do the work, connect with and wake my body back up. I WILL pay the price, each and every time, because that is my reality. I’d rather do it than to fall apart more. I *know now* that it works. That I get stronger. That my body feels more capable and that it is there for me. That I feel like I can rely on it more. That my life and existence become more expressive, and that it feels really good, and is a source of pleasure.
And with koga I’ve found my way back again and again.
I’d *like* it to KEEP me there – to FIX me so I never break again 😉 But alas, it doesn’t work that way. All we can do is try, try again.
I vow to always accept wherever I AM, physically. Because that is the only place I can ever move forward from. The resistance to the reality is 80% of the block. And through koga I’ve finally found a path *out* from this collapsed state that my body falls into physically and energetically. It is still exhausting the next day, but I accept that. I’ve seen over and over that the benefits are worth it.
So worth it, because my body was strong and capable enough to get me to a breathtaking vista in the Belize rainforest – truly a dream come true. So I’m obviously doing something right, and I’ll do it again, as many times as it takes. To have things like this as a part of my life experience:
If you struggle with exercise and physical embodiment, if you are on the autoimmune spectrum (of which I include all forms of autoimmunity and fibromyalgia and even IBS/chrones-related conditions into that), and you’d like to try a different way to reconnect with your body when it feels exhausted and weak, feel free to check out the movement meditation practice called koga.
The following links are a live workshop series I gave at Amazon over 4 weeks. Maybe it can help someone else the way it has helped me.
hummingbirdhealthsynergy.com 