After posting about sleep deprivation, I wanted to also post about something positive. As many of you know, I have chronic issues with my joints, which acrobatic activity helps (c’mon, trapeze is totally low impact and works your core, for real) but which never really goes away. MANY MANY people in my world have suggested particular psychological causes for my joint pain. I can’t discount any of these things totally, even though some are improbable: You hold your stress in your iliotibial band (for those of you who don’t know, it connects the knee and hip), your right side hurts because you have issues with your father (apparently the right side is masculinity). Others make a lot of sense to me: my doctor’s diagnosis that I have a pain syndrome related to my experiences of stress which causes me to somatize tension into my shoulders and back, causing my wrists to hurt, my own observation that when I get intensely connected to my work my body sort of disappears, meaning I fail to rest it and overstress my typing muscles.
My own specific experiences aside, there are many scientific studies, not to mention faith traditions and personal stories, that attest to a connection between the mind and the body.I’m just not sure that these observations can be extrapolated to explain all types of bodily experiences. For example, we all can agree that if I get food poisoning, it’s not because of emotional issues. Similarly, if I was born with crappy knees and a resulting tendency towards iliotibial band tightness that makes my back hurt, that doesn’t mean that I’m carrying my tension there. I could be wearing bad shoes! Not that tension wouldn’t, say, cause the pain to spread up my back into my shoulders, or make my experience of pain more profound or severe. But biology matters, yes?
So here’s the positive: I’m really stressed out, but my joints are doing well. I feel very in tune with them, aware of what I need to do as I bang away at the report I’m writing, so that they don’t wear out. I attribute that to conscientious effort to do physical therapy, increasing body awareness as a result of my acrobatics practice, and determination to stay active despite being tired and stressed. What are your experiences of the body-mind connection? What particular things do you experience as connecting these two and what operates independently?
