My Body Had More To Tell Me
I knew my body had more to tell me.
More to process. I’d been sitting in a lot of discomfort, both mentally and physically. Mentally, I was ruminating over a couple of stressful topics—the kind that keep resurfacing in my life. Physically, I was achy. More specifically, my low back.
My low back had been tight and achy for weeks. I was stretching daily. This way and that way. Walking. Doing different hip openers in the evenings after long days of sitting and writing, working with clients, or driving (shuttling) kids around. I had been feeling stretched and maxed out, to be honest. And still, this nagging low-back tightness. And of course, for me, the jaw tension. Always the jaw tension. That’s a place that often holds my stress. I clench during the day and grind at night. The jaw. The low back. Something was up.
I wasn’t feeling supported.
I do a lot in my personal life, and getting my kids to actually help can be a struggle. Often a fight. So I choose daily whether something is worth the struggle or whether I just do it myself. I hire out a lot of help too, when I have to. And while that is support, sometimes it doesn’t feel like personal support. I’d been calling on my higher power, Spirit, God, whatever you want to call it. We each have our own unique way of relating to that, and that’s always helpful for me. But still, we can always use more support.
I’d also been judging myself a lot lately. Judging myself for all the things I’d done wrong as a parent and all the ways my choices in life have affected my kids. Like, really judging myself. I was actually mad at myself. There was a lot of shame in there. Shame’s a killer, isn’t it?
So I took myself through a mini process of my own, something I’ve learned from other coaches over the years. I love to write, so writing is often how I get underneath things. I got really specific with all the nitty-gritty that was frustrating me and holding me captive. I wrote it all down. I laid it alllll out. And surprisingly, it didn’t take that long.
I think sometimes we imagine that if we actually look at whatever “it” is, it’s going to take us down for days. So we avoid it. Meanwhile, I’d already been sitting in the discomfort—the mental anguish and the physical tension—for a couple of weeks. Actually looking at it was easier than carrying it.
I let myself have all the emotions I was feeling.
I wrote them down. I felt them good. And pretty quickly, I could see the themes. Underneath those themes, I could see so clearly how much judgment I was holding against myself. It was kind of brilliant, actually. In probably an hour total of informal work, broken up over a few different times, I got underneath a lot of what I’d been carrying.
On the surface, it looked like my discomfort was about what other people had done, what was happening around me, and how all of it was making me feel. But with a little prodding, I could see another layer. Little old me judging me. I know I’m not unique in this. We can be our own worst critics.
So I began a forgiveness practice.
Over and over: “I forgive myself for judging myself for…” And then I filled in the blank. Again and again and again. All the while, I was still stretching. Still walking. Still breathing. Still tending to my physical body. I wasn’t replacing any of that with emotional work. I was adding another layer.
And I know this may sound daunting to some people, but I’m here to tell you, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. The yucky feeling of not looking at it felt worse. I was also desperate for some relief.
Not long after finishing the forgiveness piece, I started noticing something. Ahhhh. My low back isn’t quite as tight. The next day, oh wow, I’m not so achy back there. And then the next day, I barely remembered noticing my back at all.
Was it the stretching? The walking? The breathing? The emotional release? The forgiveness? All of it together? I don’t know. And I don’t really need to know. What I do know is that I had been tending to my physical body for weeks, and something shifted when I also started tending to what was happening underneath.
We are more than our physical bodies.
And we are more than our minds. There are so many layers and aspects to being human, so it makes sense to me that sometimes we need to tend to more than one. Stretch the back. Take the walk. Breathe. Get the massage. See the doctor when something hurts or doesn’t feel right. And maybe also get curious about what else is there.
For me, layering practices that tend to both my physical body and my mental and emotional experience has become part of the way through. Sometimes my body just needs a stretch. And sometimes, it has more to tell me.
And because sometimes the body also just needs some actual help releasing, here’s one of the simple sacral release techniques I’ve been using lately.
If this resonated, I recorded a video this week with the simple sacral release exercise I've been using for exactly this kind of low back tension. You're always welcome to watch it here.
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