When the body speaks, listen

For too long, I ignored my body's pleas to slow down and rest and take care of its needs. This week my body finally stopped me in my tracks. I'm listening now.

Days away from boarding a flight to Lima, Peru en route to a trip-of-a-lifetime visit to Machu Picchu, my body said “Oh no, you don’t.”

On a very ordinary evening while I was doing a very ordinary thing—getting off a couch—my low back went into a yelp-out-loud spasm. That was a week ago and my back has not stopped speaking very loudly to me since.

At first I took typical measures I thought would quickly right this problem: stretching, yoga, and anti-inflammatory meds. I had suffered from sciatica before, and assumed this was a flare-up I could remedy with floor exercises. That was not to be. The problem went from bad to worse until I could not get up off the floor; every twist and turn of my body released sparks of pain until ever so gently my daughter Marielle and her partner Esteban eased me to my side and then to all fours and on my feet. Sitting was agony. Rising to a standing position after sitting and trying to walk was agony. I even fainted briefly from the pain (with Marielle there to catch me); drama-queen points I don’t normally seek to score.

As the day of our departure for our long-planned trip to South America drew close, I sought the help of a chiropractor for a single session. Then when I grew worse, not better that evening, the next morning I went to an ER doctor for pain and anti-inflammatory injections and a prescription for stronger pain meds.

Two days ago, after sitting for just 20 minutes sent me into deep pain, the answer became clear. I turned to Marielle and Esteban and knew for certain what my body had been screaming all week. I would not board that plane for a 12-hour flight to Lima. I would not be seeing Machu Picchu or climbing Wayna Picchu, at least not now, nor would I be continuing on for two weeks of adventure in Chile and meeting Esteban’s family.

No, I would not be adventuring. I would be staying in Barcelona to heal.

The x-rays of my spine show a severe misalignment of the lower vertebrae, possibly a bulging disc, certainly piriformis syndrome. These were problems that had been building for years: the writer at her desk with her sedentary ways and poor ergonomics and posture. Not enough attention to maintaining a strong core. And of course the two years of full-time physically demanding caregiving of my mother at home as dementia made her dependent on me. During all that time, including the long hours at the computer and the care for Mom, which I wanted to do, give her my strength when she had so little, my back whispered its woes, then talked to me incessantly (while I stayed calm and carried on), and finally that evening on the couch, shouted: Enough!

And I wonder, why now? Why, when I have finally landed in Barcelona, exactly where I want to be, ready to begin a new chapter in life at full throttle, with energy and zest—does my body decide to betray me?

Perhaps that is the wrong way to think about it. It is not a betrayal. It is a gift. The gift of a wake-up call. A reminder that I cannot push myself physically, mentally, and emotionally beyond my limits and not expect there to be a cost. My wise friend Louisa Wah who writes

Lily Pond

and knows me so well, noted as we discussed my injury that there was one word I really needed to pay attention to now: Time.

“I’ve noticed that you don’t often leave a buffer of time between big projects or plans or activities. You go right from one thing to the other with barely a pause. I’d like you to consider giving yourself time before launching yourself into the next thing,” she said.

She was absolutely right. I made a major move to a new country this past month. I was about to go on a major trip before I’d even unpacked, while also handling my biggest work project of the year. Oh, and at the same time, I’m working on a new novel, trying to publish another, facilitating a weekly writers workshop, trying to keep up with the wonderful offerings at

Jeannine Ouellette

and her

WITD: The School

, and not least, not ever missing my weekly posts here. From one thing to the next—who needs to breathe?

Now I see that I have been thinking about time in completely the wrong way, as something to be used up, in its minute- and hour intervals, towards completion of a productive activity. Time was not there to give me space for rest and recalibration. Time was there for doing—not being. I had been abusing time and my body was paying the price.

So, yes, why now? Why this injury and need to slow down and heal slowly now? As always Mark Nepo, in The Book of Awakening, illuminates the path:

“Before we live what’s next, it always seems like there is some answer we need to arrive at. But daring to enter, we are humbled to discover, again and again, that the act of living itself unravels both the answer and the question.”

My body did not have my permission to slow down and rest and attend to its aches and pains when I was caring for my mother. Nor did it have my permission when I had deadlines to meet and a transatlantic move to make.

Now the act of living is presenting me with the question: How do I truly change my life so that mind, body and spirit—all three dimensions—can be in harmony?, and the answer: Stop your frantic pace, girl. Or at least slow it down. For the first time in my life I am a woman who lies down on her bed in the middle of the day and says, “You may rest. You must rest.”

My body won’t take “no” for an answer anymore. For that I am grateful. I am making time for healing. I will become quite the regular at a wonderful chiropractic clinic in Badalona, Pura Vida, an eight-minute walk away with an English-speaking chiropractor who spent a decade working in Australia. He is clearly of the same mind-body-spirit connection belief that I am. I knew that from our conversation and from the collection of books on the clinic’s waiting room shelf, including many of my own teachers: Thích Nhất Hạnh’s The Power of Silence, Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness, Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist and Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals.

I will also be rereading Heal.Thy Low-Back by Michelle Andrie, my yoga therapist, teacher and friend who I interviewed here for my subscribers. I have attended two of Michelle’s yoga retreats in Hawaii and believe in her well-founded method for using myofascial release to heal low-back pain. The techniques I have learned from her will complement the chiropractic work—and in time Michelle’s beautiful teachings will be all I need to maintain a healthy back. It is because I have neglected Michelle’s teachings in the past year or so—not getting to my yoga mat regularly enough for myofascial release with massage balls using her practices—that I have found myself today with this level of pain and injury. But it is not too late to heal.

As Michelle explains in this interview, the piriformis muscle, the one that is so inflamed in my low back, “acts as the control center for our body, responding to signals from the brain when we desire a change, either internally or externally. It’s this intricate dance between the brain and the piriformis, facilitated by the fascia, that often leads to the tightness causing lower back pain.”

The piriformis is responding to signals from the brain when we desire a change, either internally or externally. Ah. This is beginning to make sense. I have never desired change as much as I’ve wanted it now. And my body is saying, Slow your roll, honey. It’s coming, but maybe not as fast as you’d like. Take your time.

So, in every healing day going forward, I am going to loosen the control I’ve been holding in those tight butt cheeks, the piriformis muscle beneath my glutes, and remember Michelle’s mantra, to “breathe out fear and breathe in love.” For my aching back. For this sacred aging body. For myself.

“Breathe out fear. Breathe in love.”

LET’S CHAT!

How are you loving your body? Are you treating it in the sacred way it is intended, this precious vessel of bone, blood, muscle, sinew, and tender nerves that sees us through so much of life? I haven’t been as attentive as I should have been, but I am changing my ways. Has your body given you a wake-up call and what changes did you make when you listened?

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